Flowers and their hair

Political radicals and activists are often stereotyped as people who've got something wrong with their lives - it's just displacement, his Mummy wouldn't buy him a pony... This is mostly wrong, of course, but I think it's also partly right - and for the same reason that it's mostly wrong. After all, everybody - with the possible exception of the young Buddha - has something wrong with their life; everybody knows the experience of loss, rejection, loneliness, helpless anger, despair. (If Melanie Klein was right we've already known a lot of this by the time we start saying mama.) The question is, as always, what you do with it. Your knowledge of what it's like to be down there may fire you with empathy for all the people who are down there in real, physical terms, every day of their lives - or it may fire you with the determination to ensure that you're never, ever going there again. And it's not always obvious which set of eyes you're looking through. Cue the Bill Hicks quote. (No, not the one about people who work in advertising, the other one.)

So that gives us two ways of looking at the relationship between personal sources of unhappiness and radical rage: it may be empathetic engagement (your wound, my wound, the bastards!); rather more sneakily, it may be fearful narcissism (they've got you, they may get me next, the bastards!) Another angle is offered by Jean-Pierre Voyer's attempted fusion of Wilhelm Reich and the situationists. Voyer is one of those radical-left French intellectuals who went a bit weird in the 1980s and is now best approached with bargepole in hand (see also: Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion). But he wrote some useful stuff in his time, notably Reich: How to use. From which this, slightly modified, quote stands out:

Whether the subject sinks into madness, practises theory or participates in an uprising ... the two poles of daily life — contact with a narrow and separate reality on one hand and spectacular contact with the totality on the other — are simultaneously abolished, opening the way for the unity of individual life

To engage in a coherent critique of power relations in contemporary society, according to Voyer, was necessarily to think differently and live differently. Your own life would be the prism through which you would see the crushing, distorting, disempowering might of the totality - and one result of a sustained, active critique of the totality (a.k.a. practising theory) would be that things would get a bit strange for a while. (Have I actually read this stuff? I hear you cry. Well, I know I've read Reich: how to use at least once and found it worthwhile, but glancing at it now the vines of Voyer's grandiloquent self-regard seem to be trailing rather heavily across the path of his argument. Knabb's eccentric-seeming case study, on the other hand, is as lucid, thought-provoking and unsparing as most of what he writes, which is to say, very.)

Where does this leave the angry political blogger? Not, I think, engaging in the practice of theory, and not really looking through the eyes of love. More and more, I feel that when I post angry I'm posting, in part, to sustain and relish my own anger. It's a bridge between personal and political (anger is always personal), but it's a bridge in the form of a knot - all I'm doing is feeding myself reasons why I can go on feeling angry.

And - returning to the Rorschach analogy in the previous post - those reasons aren't necessarily there. Does Charlie Falconer hate poor people? It would certainly suit my personal distempered vision of New Labour to suppose that he does, but I know that in reality he almost certainly doesn't; he probably thinks the working class is perfectly sweet, when he happens to bump into it. My guess is that when he commends policies which seem to incarnate contempt for Labour's historic constituency, he's doing it not because he feels that contempt himself but because he hasn't thought about it. Which doesn't make him any less dangerous, but makes him harder to fulminate against. I think that's a gain, in an odd way.

Another example is the case of Blair's 'idealism'. The other day I attended a seminar addressed by Giancarlo Aragona (the Italian Ambassador) and Steven Haines - an interesting speaker who was on particularly good form. Haines' answer to one question from the floor struck me. An International Relations lecturer asked him where he'd place Bush and Blair on the classic idealist/realist spectrum: I mean, they may like to present themselves as idealists, but can they be really? (We could hear the footfall of Chomskyan dietrologia on the stairs - idealism? Halliburton, Iraqi oil, Paul Bremer's missing millions, and you talk about idealism?) Haines was having none of it: the Foreign Office and the MoD were mostly staffed by realists, he said, and they certainly didn't think Blair was a realist. I think this is exactly right: sometimes what you see is what you get. We may not share Blair's ideals or his view of the appropriate ways to act on them, but the idea that he doesn't have ideals or that he's not acting on them is unsustainable. Which makes him rather less evil and rather more strange. I think that's a gain, too.

So do me a favour, gentle readers (apparently there are seven of you now, which is nice). From now on, if you see me doing the blog equivalent of shouting at the TV or trying to set the world to rights over one pint too many (you know what's wrong with the world? I'll tell you what's wrong with the world!)... don't encourage me.

(And if you recognise the howlingly obscure quote in the post title, give yourself a Shinylet me know in the Comments. I'll give you a clue - there's a connection with my last post but two.)