Author of DREAM - Stephen Duncombe - on Politics, Vision and Alexander McQueen!

The Design Studio for Social Intervention is pleased and proud to post it’s first interview. And who would be better to be our first interviewee than Stephen Duncombe, the Author of DREAM” Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Check it out.

 

In Dream you say that progressives are too invested in rational explanation.  Do you think this contributes to what we at the Studio describe as a "crisis of imagination" with progressives? If so how?

 

If you over invest in ideals of rationality you preclude all other ideals in thinking about politics.

 

Progressives have slipped into a sort of Enlightenment fetishism. I think that thinking things through is good. But politics is also about desires. You have to be able to connect with desires -- yours and those of others -- if you want to be effective in politics.

 

The Democrats for example are playing out of safe programmatic ideas. Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” in health care reform turns out to be a pragmatic compromise. The Conservatives are the ones that are dreaming now!

 

Interesting… what is that about?

 

What happened to the progressive dream? You look at the 1930s it’s there; in the 50s and the 60s it’s still there, but why has this atrophied in the last 30 years?

 

It’s a tough question with a complicated answer. Some of the roots of progressive politics come out of Enlightenment thinking: the ideal of a politics purged of irrationality. But liberals also just got lazy. They stopped feeling that they had to appeal to people. You got the Democratic Party thinking, “We aren’t as racist as conservatives so we’ll get the black vote; we aren’t ideologically opposed to unions like the Republican party is, so we’ll get the union vote; we don’t want to outlaw abortion, so we can count on women,” etc.  That is: we don’t really need to appeal to African-Americans or the working classes or women -- we just have to exist and hold on. And we all know how that’s worked out.

 

From the 1920s to the 80s the conservatives were out of power in the government and in the Republican Party, and so they were forced to dream. They were out, as Karl Rove described, “wandering in the desert”, and they did a lot of necessary hallucination. You couldn’t have imagined an open preemptive military strike and a dismantled welfare state then. But they did, and right now that politics is on the table.

 

The Democrats might be congratulating themselves for coming back into power now, but it had nothing to do with them, their skill or strategy. It's not them winning but the Conservatives losing due to their bankrupt dream.

 

The implications?

 

The Democrats aren’t going to be able to mobilize anyone to get anything done. Democrats put together some pretty good programs, but until they put together a vision of what being a Democrat means they won’t get the popular support you need in a democracy. The New Deal, for example, was a guide and a purpose. The Democrats don’t have this now.

 

Dreaming gives your own politics a certain coherence and it allows other people to get in on it and imagine themselves within your future. This is something that any advertiser knows.

 

One of the assertions we make here at the Studio is that we (progressives) are also in a state of malaise? How would you characterize progressives affectively?

 

Malaise is an apt description. You put your finger on it. There was some excitement in the activisty Left during the globalization protests, but 9/11 really killed that. Now we’re back to a reactionary politics: stop the war!  But that’s not enough. Politics is about motivation: Why do I wake up in the morning? Why am I doing these little things, like stuffing envelopes? What are we moving towards?

 

We are good at a politics of negation – but that’s not good enough.

 

There’s a billboard near my apartment for the clothing designer Alexander McQueen. It’s an image from May 68 in Paris. A street scene. To the left is a row of young women holding red flags, behind them are two young men in leather jackets speaking through megaphones. There’s something about their faces. Something in their faces that says they believe; they have hope. They were probably mouthing silliness: Maoist slogans and whatnot. But what’s in their face is hope and belief and it’s attractive. (Which is why the clothing designer used this as his advertisement.) The left doesn’t have this anymore. The other side does: they have fundamentalism, but we don’t.  If we are ever going to break out of this malaise we need it.

 

Now the question is: what separates a progressive dream from other dumb dreams, whether they be those religious fundamentalists or juvenile Maoists? The answer is that our dreams and our beliefs need to be transparent. That is: we know them to be what they are: dreams not reality.

 

Why is this important? To know your dream is a dream?

 

It’s an ethical stance: I’m enough of a child of the Enlightenment to believe that reality still matters. But it’s also a practical point. When you build on fantasy exclusively it tends to implode or explode. Look at the Right today: they took their dreams for reality and led us into a disastrous war in Iraq.  Dreams and hope is necessary for political motivation, to break you out of the malaise -- the danger is when you start to believe your own hype.

 

How do you get the motivation of the dream without believing that it is reality? Look at the architecture of Las Vegas, look at professional wrestling: both of these are obvious fantasies but they are also highly enjoyable…and popular. We need to employ the same sort of technique in our politics.

 

What do you have to say about Clinton and Bush?

 

Vast majorities of people believe that they were lied to about Iraq by George Bush.  But where is the outrage? Why does this betrayal result in malaise and not mobilization? It’s because there’s no counter narrative! You can’t believe the Republicans and their ideals….but nothing else is being offered up by the other side to believe in either. Just negation.

 

When Bill Clinton lied about his affair, people were outraged (and amused). The Right was able to mobilize this and exploit it because they offered up a counter-dream. The Right asserted, not only that “this guy Bill Clinton is a liar and a cheat” but also “side with us and we will give you a moral universe!”

 

What are liberals offering today other than ‘we’re not-Bush”?

 

Do you see there being a relationship between malaise and imagination, in general and with progressives in particular?

 

Malaise is the absence of imagination and imagination is the thing that moves you out of malaise.  It offers up something else than the present reality….something to move toward. Something to get you out of bed in the morning and out in the street in the day.

 

What is ethical spectacle?

 

An ethical spectacle simply means a spectacle that is ethical according to progressive values, things like:  democracy, diversity, community, reality, and progress. All spectacles are, technically, ethical. They can adhere to the values of consumerism and advertising or authority and fascism. In fact, most do. I’m interested in a different sort of spectacle.

 

So what’s an ethical spectacle? One that’s…

 

1) Participatory, that is: where there aren’t creators and spectators, but those who watch also are those who build.

 

2) Open: when you invite participation you have to be open to a certain amount of flexibility in the outcome.

 

3) Transparent: A spectacle which never pretends to be real, but always reveals itself as exactly what it is: a spectacle.

 

4) It has to be real: most spectacles cover over reality, an ethical spectacle performs, dramatizes and amplifies reality.

 

5) It has to be a dream, phantasmagorical – so far out that we might never get there, but something that gives us direction.

 

Your ideas for amplifying ethical spectacle in the case of:

 

A)  Jena 6

 

It was a perverse spectacle to begin with: nooses in trees, an all-white jury. It is something straight out of the past – the nightmares of the 1950s that we thought we left behind with the Civil Rights Movement. So really all that had to be done here was to reveal and amplify the perverse drama that was already being acted out in reality.

 

B)  ICE Raids and immigration

 

This is a bit harder – how do you reveal people who work in the back of the restaurant, or show up to vacuum the office carpets late at night? They are invisible. I’m not a fan of the big marches even though I’ve helped to organize them. They always seem to be some sort of knee jerk reaction – a throwback to the 1960s. But the same sort of mass march done by immigrants was very effective. The tactic resonated with the message because seeing all those thousands of immigrants on the streets effectively said “We are not invisible.” 

 

How do we employ ethical spectacle where there is little to no media coverage - like the major floods going on in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa?

 

It’s not always about grabbing TV cameras. Sometimes we don’t get the media, and we shouldn’t get into the game of just playing to them. Sometimes it has to be for yourself. Think of Critical Mass, the mass bike rides that take over city streets.  These spectacles are not done for media coverage; they’re done because the experience for the participants is transformative.  After you take over a street you look at space differently, asking yourself: why isn’t this space used differently? You also look at politics differently: why shouldn’t politics be exhilarating and joyful? Sometimes spectacle is not meant to be seen but instead to be participated in.

 

How do we get more academics, activists, and artists thinking and imagining together?

 

Academics and artists have to be called on their shit. If you call yourself a political thinker or a political artist, then what are you really doing to change to world? The assumption that a clever critique or a well crafted piece of art changes the world is bankrupt. Ideas by themselves change nothing – they can easily be reabsorbed back into the system as plurality. The real question is how do you make ideas and art matter politically. Antonio Gramsci once wrote that real genius isn’t coming up with new ideas but figuring out how to operationalize and spread the ones we already have. That is: make those things have real political effect. I think anyone who calls themselves a political intellectual or a political artist has to first and foremost be concerned with this question, honestly, what effect does my expression have in the world?

 

For more about Stephen Duncombe and his politics of dreams see http://www.dreampolitik.org