Forum Post: The War Of The Airwaves On Wall Street

The war against subjectivity is the violence of pressure Amercian corporatocracy exerts through multiformed campaigns into reality. The logic of a corporate ethos ordained as the leading social standard of a community automatically establishes the primary economic goal as an intent to conquer the community, then saturate it for profit. Profit, an abstraction unconcerned with the human, unconcerned with human subjectivty, encourages its citizens to achieve total normalcy. Normalcy both reduces the targeted scope and delegitimizes its opposite.

Open-ended thought, the sanctuary of experimental culture, has endured thousands of battles for centuries but its endurance has been erdoded and belief in the cultural importance of subjectivity has seen its existence nearly lost to sameness advertised as life.

Corporatocracy haunts ambiguity to its death; haunts the avant-garde to its death; haunts indifference towards shopping to its death; haunts revolution, resistance, to its death.

The war against subjectivity could only remain covert within a national consciousness dissmissive, numb, blind to resistance. Resistance was advertised as futile and began to believe its own death.

One problem with American resistance since the 1960s was its specificity. Granting specificity to a combatant, crusading for broad homogenization easily communicated with a veneer of sensibility, professionalized resistance and silenced its message by packaging its dissent and burying the poetry, the drama, of previous dissent. Rational institutionalized protest for clinically articulated issues incorporated its own “development” into the form “organization”. Real chaotic left wing progress within an arc appealling to the historical roots of the avant-garde was exchanged for “development”.

In America, after the 1960s, chaos was exchanged for a corporate ethos. Corporatocracy secured media and as a result placed security against our dreams. We lived within this limited media stream. In our container every aspect of reality was infused by the ethic of the dominant force around us. We could not help behaving to order. American corporatocracy secured the press and defined the perimiter of our collective conversations. Protest was organized to appeal to this controlled atmosphere and was led to slaughter in the stream.

The appeal of the Occupy movement in September, in its infancy, is its irrational first act of claiming a zone and using the zone to establish a base for subjectivity. This is an act of resistance to establish a democratic space in a nation under a corporatocracy willing to declare dissent equals terror.

Revolution has its own electric stream for now. This stream, the internet, is surviving. Although it is not immune to tampering or censorship by effective arms of power, it is threatening the order of reality that once seemed beyond threat. An important note towards revolution in the present tense is the directive of capturing as many digital points as possible to interject a cohesive narrative into revolution’s own stream capable of instant dissemination.

By pressing the point with an event of resistance broadcast across this new stream, mainstream media is at first forced to show its collusion with oppressive social manipulation by governing a blackout and then is forced by the will of a sustained event to slowly allow the empirical to crawl from a vault built for damage control. When the story of a revolution is allowed to crawl out of its vault and speak to the people collectively through its mainstream media, the war against subjectivity becomes visible.