Citing a crisis in radical thought, George Mason University English professor Paul Smith in 1988 seems to have embarked on a reconnaissance mission of sorts in his search for a consumable site of consumer resistance, one that could be named and affirmed. Smith, who served as Carnegie Mellon professor at the time, called for a theoretically coherent explication of just how the post-industrial capitalist subject would meet the present moment of ideological struggle to which traditional Marxist discourse had abandoned them.
Then, in an astonishing aporetic performance, Smith appears to have made vanish into the past the project of Western capitalist territorial imperialism, effectively declaring this as no longer a thing. He instead interpellates the reader to help take stock of more “relevant” changes in Western capitalism, given “the rise of consumerism, industrial and economic technologization and multi-national cultural imperialism replacing territorial imperialism, and so on” (Discerning the Subject, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 55, Godzich and Schulte-Sasse, eds., p. 43).
“And so on.” It’s a subtle way of brushing off the very real territorial imperialism taking place then as much as now. It also seems to mark the site of a contradiction, a foundational faultline that waves away the very ground justifying resistance. Yet it is Smith’s framing of territorial imperialism as anachronistic that informs his thesis and occasions his wish to know what an unrepresentable site of resistance looks like “in theory.”
Subsequently, a group of Palestinian activists in 2005 directed attention to matters very much about the ground (incidentally incorporating Smith’s “relevant” categories of economics, consumerism, and multi-nationals). The BDS movement called for the boycotting of Israeli products and businesses in occupied territories. It called for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and properties per UN Resolution 194 (“Shrinking Space and the BDS Movement,” 13 November 2018, Transnational Institute, Frank Barat, ed.).
Another brand of “resistance literature” imagines neoliberal fascism as “disimagination machines” – “cultural apparatuses” that “depoliticize by colonizing justifiable forms of mass anger…” while presenting the fascistic worldview as all there is – normal, natural, and inevitable-seeming (Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd ed., Bloomsbury Academic, p. 237). In the chapter, “Let’s Shut Down the Authoritarian Machine,” Giroux specifies neoliberal fascist policies of “austerity, militarism, xenophobia, social and economic discrimination, racial hatred, and the impoverishment of civic life and culture” (236).
Giroux’s text can be read as a stitching together of familiar refrains – Althusser’s ideological state apparatus, Benjamin’s politicization of art to counter the fascistic aestheticization of politics, the automated bureaucracy of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and even Stevens’ silent rat whose passive imagination itself had to be imagined.
It’s not that Giroux’s text is not an enjoyable read. I found it way more accessible than Smith’s Discerning the Subject. For the many, Giroux’s diagnosis and treatment is no doubt recognizable, therefore it should be likeable. The problem is that it’s likeable in the Kantian sense (Critique of Judgement). Words and phrases seem to attract each other effortlessly in Giroux’s presentation, adding to the sense of “accelerationism” he attributes to a familiar cast of villains. Giroux’s Trump features as “Jackal-in-Chief” in an “Age of Jackals.” His Trump’s “false cries of ‘fake news’” ‘accelerates and normalizes’ “an endless stream of actual fake news and misrepresentations (234).” Now, either Trump is a magician or he is superfluous, or he is both, in which case he is instrumental to a plotline of substantivity as such within the “profound sense of emptiness” Giroux attributes as at the heart of his subject matter.