1. I begin this question with an anecdote that is hopefully not too egregious for the purposes of getting my point across. Recently, I was part of a Union action against the Board of Regents (recent as within the last half-year). It was nothing if not a spectacle but if I am to be honest it felt as though it were solely that. We stormed into a BOR meeting, screaming and shouting in a pastiche of the student protests of yore (I think particularly to the types of movements happening during the 60s and 70s such as the Yippie invasion of Disney), slogan after slogan, chants staggered into increasingly garbled sonic passages. A certain degree of agitation, rightly so, but merely a show of it more than anything. In the clamor of the moment, in the optimism of planning, we had all seemingly forgotten that the BOR always had present the option of just not listening to us which they actively chose when they left the room. Not only did no pointed attack happen (I felt it like throwing eggs at a wall rather than necessarily even beginning to pierce through it) but such a generalized disturbance allowed the BOR to swiftly and effectively undermine us in the media, portraying us as rowdy and ungrateful at the best of times. While it brought some catharsis (I even got into a rather irate speech on the subject where I felt some pleasure in my exacerbated tone), it became only an exercise in catharsis rather than effective political advocacy.
I bring this up because a passage from Hall's "The great moving nowhere show" struck me as Hall detailed that philosophical underpinnings of Thatcherism and that Thatcher herself was quite privy (at least in practice) to the Gramscite notion of the war of position, "Wets v Drys, Us v Them" (Hall 284) and all the like. What I thought before, during this protest, and what I think now are relatively the same; we were quite foolish to walk in that room as we did, they of course knew our moves before we made them. It would be silly for them not to, they saw them back in the preceding decades, the 60s era storm in and chant was defused by January 1st, 1970 at the latest and was always tucked in the mental vault of those in authority. My question then pertains to the issue of tactical newness and wars of position and maneuver. When engaging in this type of analysis (conjunctural, Marxist, etc.) how does one keep in proportion the analysis of the now with the speculative analysis of the soon? We are seemingly in an arms race of novelty, always having to think the unthought as to not be immediately capitulated while still having to ground it in a material analysis which recognizes the contours of this present struggle.
2. My second question is briefer, having to do with a seemingly minor note that I think is interesting nonetheless. In Hall's "The Empire Strikes Back", he makes a note on the presentation of death statistics coming back to Britain from the Falklands War, "'Public opinion is fickle. Wait until the casualty lists start rolling in.' They will have to be British names, for Argentinian dead don't rank" (Hall 202). I think of two ways to analyze the nature of the casualty numbers as it relates to nationality and state authority, one that is wrapped up in nationalism, the second (and inextricably tied to the first) dealing with issues of biopower. In regards to nationalism, I think the exclusive focus on British causalities is the most succinct distillation of nationalistic exclusion from representation one can cite as the lack of recognizing the Argentinian dead on a symbolic level is to implicate that they are of a lesser (if not just generally lacking) importance in the eyes of the British public which implicitly brings to light the ever-present cultural fear and vilification of death being necessarily influenced and determined by nationalistic ideologies and rhetoric (the idea that death is generally horrible but it is only horrible when it is our dead). The biopower issue, tying into the first, in some sense is a project of both gaining conceptual mastery over death and abstracting it by making it statistical, but also it is a mechanism of manufacturing consent. It is the idea that death as a biological force is brought to submission under statistical imperatives of the state, the idea that it is okay for this many people to die for the interests of the state and we have yet to cross the threshold into an unacceptable number (a threshold they construct themselves). My question then, like my first, is in relation to methodological and analytic praxis. We recognize that it is simultaneously important to do macro and micro-political analyses, however, how does one maneuver an oscillation between the molecular and molar instances of political activity and struggle (molar being a more general analysis and molecular being smaller such as analyzing the symbolic importance of casualty statistics)?
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