Hot response or rebirth of the cool?

April 22, 2013

Mark Fisher makes some really important points in this interesting blog post, The Happiness of Margaret Thatcher. The stuff about ‘outrage’ – and the important role papers like the Daily Mail play in creating it – seems particularly relevant. As he says, ‘Outrage is not merely impotent, it is actively counterproductive, feeding the very enemy we claim to want to defeat.’ It engenders weariness (‘we wake up in the morning … [and ask] what are we supposed to be outraged about today?’) – and I’d say this is part of a more general class war weariness.

It’s also an example of the way we (the Left, most broadly understood) have been drawn onto enemy terrain. Not only the discourse of ‘welfare’ (‘faring well’ is now bad, is it?), but also that of the economy and growth. Just think of the furore amongst the Left – and I admit it’s captivated me as well, but then I’m a professional economist as well as a communist, so that’s my excuse – over the ‘spreadsheet scandal’. It’s not just a furore: some liberal-left commentators have expressed jubilation that Reinhart and Rogoff’s results have been shown to be flawed. As Fisher says, it’s a ‘liberal leftist compulsion – rife in social media – to point to superficial contradictions in conservative ideology. “‘They believe in small government… until it comes time to control women’s bodies!’ Zing!”’

The question, as ever, is what should we do then? Fisher’s conclusion I think complements George Caffentzis’s argument that ‘speed is not is enough for political effect, momentum (mass times velocity) is necessary as well’ – an argument we repeat in our ‘On shock and organisation’ chapter in this book – and our interest in subjectivities and the affect of winning:

We must engage, just not on its terms. Instead of the ‘hot’ response of outrage (with its immediate nugget of satisfaction, achieved at the cost of a long-term political impotence), we need a cooler stance of appraising the enemy’s weapons and strategies, and thinking about how to counter, overcome and ultimately outwit them. Is a left-wing version of the Mail possible? If not, how could we construct a discursive hub that is as successful for the left as the Mail is for the right? This needs to be part of a broader strategy of devoting our energy and resources to goals and projects that will deliver change in the long term, breaking us out of the short-termism that has become endemic in the age of Twitter. What we need to overturn is something that has been the case since before Thatcher’s rise to power – the tendency for reactionary political forces to be pro-active, and for progressives to be reactive.

2 Comments

Keir April 22, 2013 at 5:43 pm

One of the refreshing things about Thatcher’s death week was the way the genuinely spontaneous celebrations wrong footed the right-wing press. Their long planned yet desperate desire for the unopposed deification of Thatcher made the press vulnerable to just the trap of moral outrage that they usually lay for the Left. The Mail and the Telegraph demanded totalitarian piety. Yet by doing so they simply ensured we had a ding dong over the morality of songs in the records charts. Their display of political correctness gone mad meant that the lack of unanimity over Thatcher dominated the headlines. For once we were the ones causing the outrage and the press couldn’t help but move on to territory that undermined their whole position.
Of course much about the week seemed anachronistic. The level of antagonism we summoned up from the 80s was much purer and unambiguous than we’d long been used to. In the 90s and early 00s antagonism wasn’t a contention between two potential equivalent sides. To oppose neoliberalism at that point was to seemingly to oppose the future, to oppose modernization. Antagonism wasn’t a legitimate political position but a psychological failing; simply the echoes of Fukuyama’s last man. Now that neoliberalism’s modernity and future has collapsed we are unsure of the role that antagonism could or should play. This was the second trap the press fell into, portraying rejection of Thatcher as the preserve of extremists and anarchists. But with at least half the country rejecting the desired sanctification anarchism became legitimised and previously ‘extremist’ positions were made to seem normal. That the right wing press played a terrible hand should tip us off to vulnerable state of dominant ideology and remind us that a forthright and confident Left could plan to win for a change.
brian April 25, 2013 at 9:41 am

I’m not too sure about the hot/cold thing: without stretching the analogy too far, I think it’s obvious that we need hot stuff in order to get things moving. With the best will in the world, people generally don’t take to the streets in support of a measured programme or long-term perspective. And the hot things that bring us out on the street might not be the most obvious points of struggle (a battle over piece rates for typesetters – including payment for commas and full stops – famously fed into the 1905 Russian Revolution). The key thing then is how we keep some relation between the hotter moments of battle and the cooler spaces of analysis, debate and growth. Or, to really mangle metaphors, how we let things thicken without congealing and solidifying (insert any number of cooking jokes here – Anton Pancake, “every cook must govern” etc).

Of course, Mark Fisher is right about the use of orchestrated outrages by the likes of the Daily Mail. It’s hard not to respond (and sometimes we should), but every time we engage, we legitimise the terms of debate. Perhaps we should remember that the internet has not spawned a single subjectivity, that of the militant liberal leftist, forever exposing the contradictions within neoliberal ideology and practice. Far more central is the cynical subject: “look at all the fucks I give”. If we can get that “meh” to move, then we might really be on to something.