antipopper

Some abstract notes:

I’ve been thinking about ignorance. When it surfaces in a narrative, it can mark a thrilling moment of crisis where structures of knowledge are simultaneously dissolved and presented to stretch to infinity. In fiction, keeping one’s characters ignorant is often seen as poor storytelling technique, but that’s not strictly true. An emphasis on ignorance can signify when a narrative turns epic, in a good way. Dramatic irony rests on ignorance — we have some inkling of the hidden structure of the universe, but the characters might not.

The key is a limited form of “identification”; without it, the irony is lost and becomes smugness. On the other hand, if we lived out a total, mindless identification with our characters, knowing only what they know, we’d be left with the dramatic equivalent of what Walter Benjamin calls the bland, “additive” methodology of traditional historiography. We need an arrangement in which the tension between knowledge and ignorance feels productive — as Benjamin puts it, the “constructive” approach of historical materialism. Perhaps it’s not so much “identification” with the characters that steers that course of friction, but genuine (non-sentimental) sympathy.

What if we approach political discourse in a similar way? For instance, in this period leading up to the US Presidential election, there’s been much disdainful liberal rhetoric in the blogosphere about the stunning ignorance of “the masses” about the real situation in both the US and Iraq. Indignant liberals know better than the masses of apathetic dupes who maintain the status quo, etcetera. Here’s a clear case in which the chance for the productivity of dramatic or tragic irony has been lost, and decomposed into smugness. Yes, ignorance exists. But in this case, our real ignorance of what the fuck is really going on, and what we can do about it — which cuts far deeper than knowing juicy bits of gossip about George Bush — is refashioned by liberal discourse into something that can be answered with “vote for John Kerry, you idiots”. The “ignorant” deserve another four years of George Bush, etcetera.

As I wrote a year ago, the long-running liberal attempt to create a populist scandalography of “the Fahrenheit 911 situation” fetishistically transforms the systemic functioning of the world into a limited series of individual failures and complicities, and the indifference of people at large to such an obviously inaccurate proposition is interpreted as “ignorant people getting what they deserve”. For radical change, we need real drama, and thus a productive appreciation of the dramatic irony of our current situation. For that to happen, we need to radically sympathise, without fetishistic identification, with the real ignorance — what the fuck is really going on, and what can we do about it? — that the protagonist of this story constantly grapples with. Because the dramatic setup for the story is that our hero has always had the power to win.