işgal kültürü

"To begin with the problematic side of #Occupy, I would first of all point to this uncritical reenactment of the old, largely outmoded forms of protest from the past fifty years.  For all my criticisms of the New Left of the 1960s, at least its members had the courage to critique their predecessors in the Old Left.  Perhaps it was the intergenerational animus that existed at that time, but one of things that has disappointed me about this latest movement is that it hasn’t had that Oedipal moment, when they finally kill the New Left.  Only David Graeber seems to gesture in this direction, with his admonition against the “obnoxious, self-aggrandizing macho leadership styles of the ’60s New Left.”

In leveling this criticism, I have in mind the more “carnivalesque” elements of the movement — the puppets, the “Zombie march,” the harlequinism, and the emphasis on spectacle.  While I admit that these have some utility and even some precedent within the practice of revolutionary politics (going back several centuries), these tactics have limited effect.  The quasi-Situationist method adopted by some of the protestors strikes me as being quite prone to narcissism and exhibitionism.  Even with earlier iterations of this festival mentalité, such as the great celebrations of the French Revolution, writers as different as Hippolyte Taine and Petr Kropotkin both considered these displays excessive.  Kropotkin, who regarded Taine as a vulgar bourgeois historian, had to agree that these festivals had their limitations.  “Taine disparages the festivals of the Revolution,” he observed, “and it is true that those of 1793 and 1794 were often too theatrical.”

The theatrical routines I witnessed down at Liberty Plaza prior to the November 15th eviction often seemed to me politically empty.  As I see it, the crucial difference between the subversive potential that thinkers like Bakhtin saw in the carnivalesque elements in the novels of Rabelais and the largely apolitical celebratory atmosphere of modern demonstrations has to do with objective sociological developments that have taken place in the interim.  For the folk essence of political carnivals staged in societies where agrarian peasant culture still predominated has been lost, along with its freshness and ingenuous naïveté.  With the disintegration of the “organic community” described by Tönnies under modern times, the immediate connection such festive practices held with cultural conventions has disappeared.  It has instead been replaced by the contrived political carnival of hypermediated youth culture.  I hate to be a buzzkill, but this atmosphere provokes my polemical temperament."

Interview with Ross Wolfe, http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/interviews/interview-with-ross-wolfe-conducted-by-c-derick-varn/

bizdeki occupy etkisini retrospektif düşünmek için güzel başlangıç noktaları. Türkiye'de bence Ödipal moment hiç olmadı 60'ların 70'lerin solunu öldüren...Starbucks işgalinde Foti Benlisoy geldiğinde 90'ların hep 60-70'ler gölgesinde geçtiğini, bir önceki kuşağı öldürme (simgesel olarak herşeyden önce) cüretinin eksik kaldığını söylemişti....2000'lerde belki de bu gölge iyice çöktü ve bir de Ergenekon dolambaçlarıyla tam bir trajediye dönüştü..."Eski solcunun" bir komedi nesnesi yapılması aslında eskinin yeni bir hakikat ile ikame edilememesinden ötürü. Genelde hep - biraz da hafıza fetişizmine kapılıp - eskiyi unutmak, hatırlamak ile takılı klaınca bu ikame hep erteleniyor. Zizek'in TS Eliot'a referansla dedigi gibi bazen bir gelenege bagli kalmanin tek yolu inancsizlik ile sapkınlık arasında bir tercihtir. Bu tercihi yapmaktan fazlasıyla çekinmek, bence yeni nesildeki tıkanıklık, eskiyi unutmak veya yeterince bilmemek değil. Süreklilik (continuity) arzusu kopma arzusuna ağır basıyor. Belki de modernist bir moment eksikliği bu. Ki modernizm eleştirisi "organik cemaat" sahnelemeleriyle pek güzel uyuşuyor. Hakikatin tarihsel süreklilik ile ilişkisine dair de şu alıntı:

"a truth is the bearer of theoretical movements that form among themselves a historicity both profound and discontinuous. This is why an event always produces, in the minds of those who decide to be faithful to it, a retrospective genealogy of precursors. A precursor, as we know, is something of which we know only later that it came before. There is thus no novelty that does not try to forge a previously unknown historical depth, by bringing together a series of ideas previously dispersed in common consciousness, in order to herald a new lineage of the present. There is no truth, as new as it may be, which does not claim to be realizing an idea that was not already germinal in a largely unknown, or misinterpreted past. A revolution, as Marx already knew, cannot be produced without cloaking itself in the tatters of the past—politics being one of the major places where the new is revived along with the defeated ancestors of their time, whose torch shines again in the present configuration." (History and Event in Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux)