This entry is a short follow-up to the bit about dealing with bureaucrats and the bureaucratic system of logic. I sat down with some of the leaders and members of RUSA (Rutgers University Student Association) to get a feel for what they’re doing around the university, and what they’d like to do in the future (the interview is going to be posted tomorrow morning). But my meeting with them has got me thinking about the kinds of political friendships are necessary and possible in the current political climate.
It all boils down to tactics and ethics; yes, I should thank Lukacs for the title. (But if one were to thank Lukacs for everything he ever did then this entry would never happen.) As I sat on the porch with the RUSA folks and later with some of the sitters in from the Rutgers occupation, I realized that there is a fundamentally crucial relationship between the tactics of groups/associations and autonomous critical inquiry. But all the gobbley gook aside for a minute… I’ll just spell it out.
One question that someone asked me during the evening was, why do I pay so much attention to the individual?
And I think that this question led me to think about political friends and critical engagement in ways that I hadn’t before. What I said at first was that I was convinced that individual critical engagement is the starting point of political empowerment. There is almost nothing to say about this it’s so widely accepted. But there’s another element that I wan’t willing to consider until Matt Cordeiro voiced his concern earlier in the evening in a passing remark about the RUSA elections, which was “we need to get students to care.”
Yeah, that’s the question. The question is how to break the apathy; at least, apathy is the word that RUSA treasurer Scott Seigel used on air on 90.3 the Core, the Rutgers University alternative radio station. The “A” word came up when it was stated that only about one percent of the Rutgers undergraduate population came out to vote. One of the inniatives that RUSA leadership has for the 2011-12 year is to make students feel like RUSA is a body that is out to protect and further student interests.
But that word is a trigger word for me, and it’s one that I’m not willing to accept. I don’t think that students are politically apathetic. I think that there are two major reasons why we shouldn’t frame students as being such, as well as ways that we can overcome that gap toward social empowerment.
The first reason why I think apathy is the wrong word is because popular political discourse is obviously and purposefully hackneyed to the average person. From within the confines of acceptable social action, there are three major outlets: Dem, Rep, or community service. And while the Rutgers student body may not have come out for the elections, one certainly couldn’t say that they don’t show their faces for charity events, fundraising, volunteering, activities, and community service work. Thus, for those people who are already involved in groups and events, it seems that the tactical duty of student government is precisely to show the dominant relationships that determine their actions and social lives in order to get those existing group members to work in a coalition with those students in RUSA who wish to transform RU student government into a vehicle for representation and advocacy.
Secondly, there’s the fact that apathy is the misused name for what is really social alienation. There are thousands of people whose systemic senses have been blunted by inverted individualism. How do we get people to care? or realize that they have always cared? For this, there is an ethical commitment to writing.
The project of writing might seem more like a meta-activity than something in and of itself. But I would make the case that critical writing (just like the kind we humanities… “useless” humanities majors) learned in college, is the very thing that can empower the isolated kid in the back of the Starkeys.
Critical engagement with the self means critical engagement with the world around the self. To do this, one has to read the billboards, watch the television, watch students on the bus, notice the traffic and pedestrian patterns (maybe even the cop-coverage) all around, all the time, and in a new way. Instead of seeing, the critical engagement means looking at the world with eyes that shatter what they thought they saw, and remember what is really happening before them. Critical “did you ever notice” begins with the word and ends with social action. And it’s my vaguely written-up hypothesis that if we can get the most isolated segment of university society to engage themselves and think about the ways in which we live our lives, then we can start writing about it. Once we start writing about it, we start linking up. We start having conversations.
Writing a few lines everyday about the “usefulness” and the “implications” of our college educations is a good place to start. We always want to talk about who we are and what we do in this lovely land of Identity Politick. And in this negative criticism we can start to see the ways in which we are obliged to destroy the illusions that pollute us and build movements, coalitions, and bodies, anew. So, what I’m getting at is that the alienated individual must be empowered and exercise the political autonomy in order to pinpoint just where what we need to knock over and build again… or maybe just leave a pile of rubble. Either way, to talk over the pile of rubble, just as to build a house, you need a tactical vision for political bodies in bureaucratic paradigms… something that I’ll be posting shortly.
“Tactics doesn’t exclude Ethics!”
