Put It All Together and What Do Ya Got?

From over the last few days, a few passages to make us think:

But I think we also can consider alternative paradigms of activism that are not based on self-interest. Myself, I realise, am involved in social activism not primarily because I’m fighting for my rights and I want this and I want that, but because I feel an obligation to my ancestors and my descendants. And that’s, I think, a profoundly non-Western approach. It’s not because I want something for me or I think that everybody should have this or that but because I feel that I owe it to my great grandchildren and I owe it to my great grandparents that I fight for social justice, that I fight for gender justice and I fight against heterosexism and the destruction of the environment. And I don’t know if that’s a common sort of motivation for white people. I get the impression from my context that it isn’t. That it’s motivated more by self-interests and I think that was a problem in the white feminist movement, you know, white middle-class women wanting better pay, better working conditions, better health care access etc, rather than seeing their fate in common with working-class women, women of colour and non-heterosexual women.
- Victor Lewis

From an old interview with Zizek,

BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think there’s something furtively authoritarian about such apparently freewheeling structures?

Zizek: Absolutely. And I’m not bluffing here; I’m talking from personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it’s not limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of affairs couldn’t be articulated. Which is why I’m deeply distrustful of this “let’s just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion.” I’m more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.

From our favorite, I Cite,

Interpassivity [is] the way that an object does something for us, enabling us to remain passive…For the past several months, 24/7 news media has repeated that the American people are outraged (imagine typical Jon Stewart mash up of relevant samples).

My hypothesis: blame Glen Beck and Keith Oberman. Blame Counterpunch and whatever right wing net-based publication you want. These folks are outraged for us. They are outraged in our stead, enabling us to retain our general passivity. Extreme media, in other words, doesn’t stir us up: it stirs for us.

Of course, I posted this way back in September, but isn’t it funny/heartbreaking to watch it all over again?  Like wine, the romanticism of cinema becomes so much more pungent given just a little age.