Spirit of a Culture

My society polices its boundaries with more and more self-destructive Manichean violence now that its boundaries are exposed not as naturally or supernaturally ordained but as organized through various sorts of coercion by some members of the society to benefit themselves and disadvantage others.
You feared Fanon, that winning a war of independence in Algeria, no matter how protracted and bloody the struggle, would be less difficult than maintaining a clear vision of the goals that had made declaring war against France a necessity for colonized Algerians and eventually for you. You realized that oppressed people could be convinced to sacrifice their lives for the promise of freedom,dignity and self –determination, and also that its easier to die for such ideals than it is to live them, live with them embedded, uncompromised, in place day by day, choice by choice, in the institutions of society, in the consciousness of individuals and the spirit of a culture.

John Edgar Wideman, from his novel Fanon



"A shift in the structure of experience" is a quote I cannot source but it sits on my humming refrigerator and perfectly encompasses a notion swarming my brain lately, a notion about process and building a democratic culture infused with radical spirit. This notion of "easier to die" is also important because almost daily we see how easy the martyr or hero role is played in this fools paradise. Annie GetYour Gun!



In a rare moment of harmonic convergence I followed my reading of Mouffe with Hardt and Negri's Multitude and found these affirmations of what I have been struggling to convey, all in the same spirit of the amazing project that calls out for our immediate attention.


"…immaterial labor tends to move out of the limited realm of the strictly economic domain and engage in the general production and reproduction of society as a whole. Immaterial labor is biopolitical in that it is oriented toward the creation of forms of social life; such labor then tends no longer to be limited to the economic but also becomes immediately a social, cultural and political force. This is the creation of new subjectivities in society.

The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity- different cultures, races ,ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences.

The primary forces that have guided the history of modern resistance struggles and liberation movements,along with the most productive resistance movements of today, we will argue , are driven at base not only by the struggle against misery and poverty but also for a profound desire for democracy-a real democracy of the rule of all by all based on relationships of equality and freedom. Today, the new characteristics of the multitude and it’s biopolitical productivity give powerful new avenues for pursuing that dream."



Once we can explain democracy and learn to live it we can begin the practical building of structures, institutions, forms. We can usher in that "change in the structure of experience".