°The vulgar masses
The commentariat’s recourse to themes of ‘a distance between politicians and citizens’ seems strangely familiar. Is the euro still falling?
{addendum}
I can’t quite leave this alone. As I said elsewhere, my fascination here is like watching a train wreck - but it’s also, I have to admit, a kind of grieving. The Situationists once published the names of those who had gone over to the other side, as it were, and announce it as a list of suicides. I’m feeling a little like that about Negri - because no matter that I know this ostensible ‘turn’ has been apparent for some time and that Negri has always had been an updated Leninism (in form, if not content) - no matter those differences, I never thought he so lacked political nous as he has displayed on this occassion. Not least because while many of us were well aware that the so-called ‘anti-globalisation movement’ was riddled with economic nationalist rubbish, it was approached as a long, hard slog to both marginalise those politics while making connections between migration and so-called anti-neoliberalism. Never was it a question of denouncing the ‘vulgar masses’ from on high. Unfortunately, Negri’s position betrays a perspective which would do so, far less than it indicates a committment to political content, say: how one might actually accomplish various aims, like abolishing - or even minimising - migration controls.
On this, I’d hurriedly typed up a response to some discussion on nettime, a little annoyed at the easy resort to the pretense that the ‘yes’ vote was not, in fact, driven by those who have been the architects of a ‘tougher’ approach to immigrants in the EU. But Rozalinda Borcila’s post made the similar point with sharp illustration. Go read it all, but some here:
“I have been watching Romanian TV coverage of the OUI and NON campaigns, as well as media commentary on the result of the vote. Predictably, the non campaign is consistently portrayed as reactionary and conservative. Aside of the semantic strategies, the VISUAL representation of the campaigns on TV insisted upon close-ups of young, hip and smiling faces with OUI t-hirts on one side and old, reptilean, grupmy faces with NON T-shirts on the other. […] One of the major requirements for Romania’s bid is a rapid tranformation of immigration laws and practices. As the potential future eastern-most border of Europe, Romania is rehearsing becoming a buffer zone — not entirely a new role here, historically speaking — the first line of european defense against the flood of undesirables from *even* farther east. not only have immigration statutes changed, what seems most remarkable to me is the palpable change in the attitude of ordinary Romanians towards asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. until only a few years ago there was still a certain level of sympathy or even empathy, given our recent history. there is now an often hostile and violent reaction to non-western foreigners, and there is much new language in place to categorically differentiate oneself from ‘them’. here, too, one cannnot escape fear and resentment of the (relative) east.”
Well put. And a really excellent project by Borcila here.
