Press Action ::: The Rabbit and the Duck

Monday, October 04, 2004

The Rabbit and the Duck

By Jordy Cummings

Enthusiasm. Dejection. Hope. Sardonicism. Depression. Enthusiasm, etc. verbatim ... An overwhelming desensitization to violence and death worldwide to a degree that even lifelong world-watchers are weary. It does keep coming back to enthusiasm, but enthusiasm about what? Electing John Kerry? Defeating John Kerry on behalf of his lack of purity? Proving a conspiracy that is superfluous?

In many ways, talking to activist friends and thinking of my own psyche, this describes the (anti) capital “L” Left cognition these past few months. While I don’t know if there was a conspiracy of some sort, Alexander Cockburn is right on when he recently asserted that “the left” – meaning, I would assume, the few Americans who retain their radicalism without the temptation of liberal kool-aid—“is in a funk.” One recalls with a laugh Cockburn’s early 90s statement, apropos JFK, something to the effect of that it didn’t matter whether JFK was killed by a vast conspiracy or if he tripped over Carolyn’s doll. It doesn’t matter either whether Don Rumsfeld knew about 911 or ignored warnings and was busy with Bill “Bell Fruit” Bennett cruising the rough trade scene in downtown D.C.

The Left is in a funk indeed. I hate to over-intellectualize things, but I do think that it is a lack of a theoretical perspective, beyond Chomsky and Zinn. Most Americans who move from liberal to left do so reading Chomsky and Zinn, Parenti, Arundhati Roy, etc. All of whom provide nothing more than information, and where some of their affiliates provide some (Albert), it lacks a broad frame of reference, not to mention is heavily flawed. I am not at all trying to suggest dialectical materialism, straussian esotericism or any single school of thought. I am merely saying that people’s perspectives are often a mix of the classic American “immediate gratification” and a very liberal-puritan—even among Marxists—point of view in regards to life’s complexities.

I hope I do not take flak for knocking Roy, but what is missing from her beautiful, eloquent and literary anti-war and anti-imperialist talks, interviews and articles is that she is speaking as if the United States is strong, an “empire.” Actually, the United States is very weak, isolated, rationally, by the rest of the world except its spoils from “winning the cold war,” something that is continuing to displeasure Putin and China, and given reality, will probably be abandoned within the decade. To be sure, American capitalism is powerful, in its transnational form, but it plays every side and as Carol Brightman points out in her excellent new book Total Insecurity, one should look at the state as a branch of industry, not industry as a branch of state. In capitalism, the house always wins, and the house is not the state. Even the NSA, Brightman points out, is being privatized.

I recall my first year at a “progressive” American liberal arts college (which I left after a semester) where I was accused of promoting rape because I listened to hip-hop. I’m glad I transferred to a mainstream institution (Concordia), which we all know sewed a more revolutionary atmosphere than any since Berkeley in the 60s. Though this was in the PC years, the attitude has transferred itself to create a fractured left in which people are either fundamentally sure they have a handle on all of life’s little complexities, or are, if they’re smart, damned confused, and wondering why say, they have two distinctly different responses to any given political phenomena.

Malcolm Bull, a decidedly arcane dialectical and semiotic philosopher gives the famous visual experiment of drawing, using one line, a rabbit and a duck.

Do we see a rabbit or a duck? In most modes of seeing—visual cognition—one cannot possibly see the rabbit and the duck at the same time. This is the true contradiction. Even if one is trying to see the rabbit and the duck at the same time, she cannot possibly actually do so because part of her cognition is forced towards taking in that knowledge so she sees a simulacrum. More likely she will simply see rabbit/duck rabbit/duck rabbit/duck until her eyes flutter.

It is when we can see both the rabbit and the duck—literally and metaphorically—that we can become aware of the viscitudes of the really-existing multitude of struggles. As an old film noir is called “its all true.” Instead of looking at the various left formulations who disagree with one another as separate forces, an act of what Marxists once called “ideology,” we move from seeing perspectivally to aspectivally. This is when coincidences no longer seem synchronous but rather normalcy. This is also when the liberal ethic of justice and morality is not the animating force, but rather, simple, as Chomsky puts it “truism.”

It is a truism (duck) that Kerry is a warmonger that doesn’t deserve our votes, a man who helped write the USA PATRIOT Act. It is a truism (rabbit) that a victory against warmonger Bush will in a very real way feel like a symbolic victory to millions of Americans, billions around the world. It is a truism that liberal corporatists and mainstream centrists are trying to co-opt the radical energy that has come from the opposition to Bush (duck). It is a truism (rabbit) that it is an ultimately healthy thing that this energy can attempt to be co-opted, showing a real sign that a large degree of people oppose “the system” and “the system” in turn sees how powerful what the Times calls “the second superpower” and Hardt/Negri call the multitude happens to be.

It is a truism (duck) that Pinochet should be joined by Kissinger, Rumsfeld and Sharon. It is a truism (rabbit) that the pebble of justice for Pinochet may turn into a boulder of global justice. It is a truism (duck) that the Israeli left does not go far enough toward being able to seize power. It is a truism (rabbit) that with global support, it is a fine thing that the Israeli left even now exists again, and must be allowed to grow. It is a truism (rabbit) that in terms of mobility, life is better in fascist America than socialist Cuba, it is a truism (duck) that the lack of mobility in Cuba produces a more moral society.

It is a truism that the left is in a funk (rabbit). It is a truism (duck) that the funk exists because of lack of aspective views, showing the truths that have been shown by the broad left over the last few years are now held by a healthy degree of the population. So where does this leave us? With the truism (rabbit) that Bush may as—per Kolko and Pilger—be a lesser evil in terms of geopolitics and the truism (duck) that to advocate defeat of warmonger Kerry shows a reckless disregard for domestic life in the United States. The worse the better, the better the worse and so forth.

The trick is to see both the rabbit and the duck. One’s own position is of far less importance than seeing both the rabbit and the duck.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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