Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 18:15:34 +0000
From: Arianna <ari-AT-copernic.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: AUT: Fwd: [G_O] The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England and the


From: "Erik" <erikempson-AT-wanadoo.fr>
To: <generation_online-AT-kein.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 18:07:08 -0000
Subject: [G_O] The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England and the Fourth Estate

The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England and the Fourth Estate


It is a rare thing that oppositional movements gain as much airtime as has
been afforded to the recent protests against the war. Indeed, whereas
before, hundreds of thousands of people could march through the capital
without the slightest whimper of recognition from the established media, now
it seems television can not get enough of the drama. The shift is not that
easy to fathom. But a number of different trends have come together here.



The first most obvious reason is the internal divisions within the camp of
the western establishment; the geopolitical significance of a Europe
potentially pitted against an over-zealous American administration, and here
the increasingly tenuous position of a prime minister whose prominence
derives largely from the struggle to continue to play the role of
intermediary to American interests in Europe. At the same time, the USA
attempts to circumvent the power of 'old Europe' by building wider alliances
in the newer eastern European countries, which threaten to destabilise the
emergence of a new economic bloc with its own economic power base that would
potentially decentre US economic might. Within 'Old Europe' there is a new
Europe, one with its sense of purpose, and a significant section of
established power for whom the exercise of unilateral political might is
directly an affront to the new and evolving mechanisms of social and
political law. Yet as much as they might seem apart, both regimes are
different responses to a very similar problem, this is ongoing struggle of
maintaining institutional coherence and political authority. Both suffer the
problem of accountability for what is. All have a problem of responsibility.
The more advanced sections, the power brokers that are in it for the long
haul, think in terms of consequences - they are the levers of the reluctant
state. The state in its normalcy that is so well attuned to responding to
events by getting things bogged down. How appropriate then that its the
French with their bureaucratique fixations, that have set in motion the
auxiliary mechanisms of establishing proper 'justification' - which the
papers call 'just cause'.



Over a million people converge on London. The majority of these people are
not affiliated, nor actively engaged in 'politics'. They think Saddam
Hussein is an evil dictator who should be punished, on the whole they
believe that with a UN resolution the war would be just and on the whole
they believe that on a demonstration it is 'best to do what the police say'
because 'there must be good reason for it'. The rhetoric of this anti-war
feeling draws equivalences between western sponsored terror and the crimes
of the regimes it targets. It calls for the King's head. But insofar as it
does that it sees itself as in the dominions of an American Lord. 'Tony' is
seen as a wayward friend, local councillor turned bad or as the ombudsman
destined to deliver on various money back guarantees. In Britain this is how
we think of justice: as what is due.



Two more important factors can enter the picture here and they are closely
related. The commercial media and the 'leadership' of the anti-war movement.
The media establishments have changed nothing in their underlying support
for the right of our government to intervene abroad, this would never
provoke the slightest prevarication. But they do vacillate over particular
interventions. Much to the chagrin of the professional revolutionaries in
the Stop The War Coalition, the Daily Mirror has moved into to try and
occupy an apparently empty space of representation. "At least the Mirror is
doing something" run the quotes under pictures of celebrity signings.
Financial pressure exaggerating its own illusions as to being the check on
government and the voice of the people it is able to publish 'Stop War'
headlines on a patriotic ticket.



Meanwhile, the institutional left is getting more airtime than ever before.
Its pandering for recognition has, un- noticed, resulted in serious populist
modifications of demands. At the same time, its increasingly technical,
conservative and traditional approach to political organisation is
exhausting itself. But the long honed techniques of representative
saturation, stewardship, of giving grandeur and respectability to its
conventions of marches, rallies and speakers simply bottoms out when the
commercial publicity resources of the Mirror Group and one and a half
million people come to town. It became impossible to engineer a media
semblance of the old organisational frame of left politics. Not enough
placards and paper sellers. And so we had a glimpse of what a protest
without banners and placards would be like, without the kind of exposures of
self- identity and affiliation that obstruct communication so much. By
tearing off the Socialist Worker, or The Mirror advertisement at the head of
the placards, the multitude was acting in tension with 'the people'.



The sound bites stolen from the breathless and exasperated representatives
of the anti-war movement are invariably those that refer to the deficit of
the political. Warnings are issued to government that this popular dissent
exhibits the breakdown of the conventional relationship between state and
individual. What is put into the mouth of radical left, or what they are
allowed to say.or perhaps simply what they have now come to believe: is that
war will threaten the legitimacy of our state. Far from the project of
accelerating that breakdown, they are now given airtime as the voices of
this malaise, curiously locked into a discourse that at least at one time
they didn't accept. For a while it was puzzling why the London anti-war
marches were never attacked by the police, as has been the norm for large
scale assemblies. It is becoming more clear why this is the case. It is more
than the comforts found in sharing the same techniques of power, those
stewards in fluorescent jackets that were a little too cosy with their
helmeted buddies. It is more than the organisers' desire to be respectable
and responsible. It is because the demonstration serves to tacitly re-embody
the underlying authority of control society. By responding to the
spectacular machination of the state i.e. the very semblance of direction
and authority the war is designed to achieve - the state resussitates its
coherence and direction it is so to speak, re-centred. (and of course many
elements of the establishment are delighted that the particular causality of
this overall victory will be Blair).



The anti-war protests are about trying to clamber back a political authority
tacitly and complacently given up. The problem seems to be that the 'people'
are trying to convince the 'multitude' to farm off this power to another
body to defer it one more time. This is destabilising a struggling Blair for
sure, but it fails to address that the imperatives for this war emerge out
of this dialectic of authority and responsibility and the incapacity of a
state to convince its subjects that it is acting in the general interest. In
current times it seems it is only here that mass oppositional movements can
arise, in the context of a dissatisfaction with a state, because only here
can other bodies that think in terms of states move in to fill the
representational deficit. The truth of this is found by the poor
demonstration turnouts in France.



At the end of the demonstration a representative of CND demands of our group
that we put some change in her bucket. We must reimburse her for a service,
she needs recognition, and she is doing this for us. The speakers on the
podium thanked us for coming. The left and the media are competing to be the
space of mediation between ordinary aspirations and the reconciliation of
political authority. But the multitude responds with mutual distrust. The
multitude is seen as an apolitical mass that needs to be involved and
organised in the 'political', but the multitude exists as subject precisely
by refusing to be subject, it makes a show of strength and withdraws.



This withdrawl is crucial to understanding the enigmatic processes of
transition from imperialist control regimes to the bio-political
topographies of Empire. To all of those that seek to act under the
appearance of the representational guise, this withdrawal is the worst
possible thing. However for those of us breathing the same air as these
dissenters, and opposed to the manufacture of the war from start to finish,
it is something of a liberation it is a step outside of the control
paradigm, it is a step outside the liberal politics of consent - whilst
consituted political agencies rush to fill out the exposed but now vacated
spaces- the multitude, whose activity far outreaches the boundaries of
political terrain, continues to evolve its own multifarious dimensions of
affective activity. No doubt the organs of detached power will continue to
hurry after it and recuperate a language of consent. Let them. So long as
they fear anti-political and a- political behaviour they will fail to be
part of its enormous creative potential and socially manifest expressions of
and desires for non-separated social being.



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