by aletheia » Fri Nov 18, 2011 7:35 pm
Nice topic Pezer, I am glad to see you putting Guattari to good use.
Systems as large and complex as national ideologico-politico-economic sphere/s are prone to instability from "butterfly effects" of unpredictable variables. These systems, in order to exist, must contain certain embedded mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty, and part of this is subverting revolutionary potential. It is always a back and forth. Eventually something will rupture vitally in the clockworks of the system's necessary functionings, and it will suffer significant collapse as societal organs are re-appropriated under new images or simply vanish and are sublimated entirely. This is inevitable, no social construct is immune to growing pressures from both internal and external threats to its systemic coherency and equilibrium.
Protests, unfortunately, often only serve, as you say, to redirect and diffuse otherwise perhaps more radically potent revolutionary potential. I say "unfortunately" from the perspective of those from where this potential springs, of course. Now, there are different methods with which this marginalizing of radical potential takes place, and perhaps we might begin investigating them here. However it also bears noting that even where systems successfully co-opt and diffuse radical energies the total effects of these otherwise now impotent energies are still essentially unpredictable in nature. No marginalization is ever total, and small effects otherwise marginalized nonetheless still serve several potentially subversive and destabilizing ends - they may lead to subtle ideological shifts in the cultural zeitgeist, they may reveal otherwise hidden cracks in the system, they may force the powers that be to overextend their legitimacy of force, they may lead to snowball effects or to the emergence of new leaders of political movements which may gain traction somewhere down the road.
So I think it is fair to say that no protest movement is ever entirely useless or impotent, no matter the degree to which it serves the cathartic ends of the system itself. In fact maintaining an active and open fidelity to radical potentiality itself is very crucial regardless of the setbacks or losses we suffer - the simple fact of conceding this fidelity in the face of hopelessness, apathy or resignation is the only true murderer of revolutionary possibility. See my signature here for a nice example statement of this. We simply cannot ever give up hope - even if we lose hope in everything else, we must never lose our hope in hope itself, our faith in faith, in the inherent and often unknowable and unpredictable powers which lurk ready to burst forth from the smallest beginnings and proceed to go on and change the world, giving birth to a new future/s. Every great world-changing movement began small.
'The daemonic genius is the only thing capable of surviving the odds of existence versus no existence... because of what it empirically tolerates though fundamentally defying it, the deepest existence is satyrical. The grin on a primordial sailor, grim to all things human, his enjoyment in the uncertainty. He knows himself by this very factor. Valuing the uncertainty of the universe as an extension of oneself - this sailor is the primordial being.'
[Source]Before The Light philosophy forum
