Friday, October 13, 2006
seeking conscious subjects
Kipnis states that a left popular culture would have the task of refunctioning already existing antagonistic discursive moments into moments that are unassimilable into the ruling bloc. However, in the current climate of raging capitalist hegemony, I wonder if anything can remain unassimible. I believe that every moment of a populist intervention must be provisional, creating conscious subjects (provisionally), for eventually it will become commodified and distance from the moment will occur. Ultimately, the point of a left popular culture is change, and in order for this to occur, individuals must be interpellated into not only the dominant discourse, but also into a left populist discourse. Kipnis uses Laclau’s version of populism in which one (dominant) class cannot completely absorb ‘the people’, hence the more radical the rearticulation of the antagonistic moment, the harder for a hegemonic discourse to survive without populism. I keep wondering if these provisional left pop culture interventions must be done consciously and intentionally, or if they could occur accidentally. Does Kipnis intend to make all people conscious subjects, or does it take a conscious subject to take part in a left popular culture? Baudrillard would interject here and say that we are not conscious subjects, for due to continuous bombardment of images we ‘the mass’ has decelerated and become a giant apathetic body of matter incapable of being moved. Or, he may criticize a populist intervention as simply more simulacra, further perpetuating our hyper-reality. Personally, I would like to believe that all are capable of being conscious subjects, even if it is merely a temporary moment of as Benjamin would say, tactile shock.
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I’m not sure I understand your argument about the conscious subject. Is a conscious subject only conscious within its admitted ideology or is consciousness simply conscious experience whatsoever? I thought that Mimi White said that we are all subjects in multiple and contradictory ideologies, some of which we are conscious, some of which we are not. However, after outlining the enabling limits and structure of the post-modern project, Kipnis says that postmodernism opens up a “field of possibility” that appropriates and reappropriates meaning of “representations” in different and even contradictory ways. Therefore, there must be some kind of consciousness inherent in appropriating and reappropriating representation, for without consciousness, the meaning of the representation, if it can be said to have had one, doesn’t really change does it? I think Kipnis is saying that to be a part of postmodern theory (and practice!) of popular culture, one must be a conscious subject both in experience and in assuming ideologies. Or does she even separate the former from the latter? I think I just went full circle...oh boy.
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