My father having been an occasional fim critic, the first time I saw Star Wars it was as a guest at a screening. The six or seven times after that were all me. Not to say that I went by myself—usually with my sister—but I went for my own reasons, and more or less with my own money. We were stranded in a valley town for the summer, and weekend after weekend we would head down to the mall until we could recite the whole movie to each other. Wonder and escape and diversion. We certainly didn't head for the theater so as to be part of a singular historic event cycle. The legion of casual and obsessive Star Wars fans were not a strategic coalition; they were a huge, distributed mass of individuals, with desires and needs that were their own, and were also shaped by all kinds of social and cultural forces. At the level of the kid heading to the movie, we were in it for the relatively cheap thrill; we didn't have any dream of participating in some campaign that would historically reshape not just an industry but the structure of popular culture itself.
But we were part of it anyway, and I guess that's the point. It's not either/or. No one's motives changed the meaning of what we all did. The mass event was our personal desires; they were one and the same.
When someone finds the French rioters non-revolutionary because each lacks the personal agenda to act as a strategic participant in a mass political action—when a critic separates these kids out from political meaning because they are indeed, on scale of the individual, "adolescent boys" with whatever local desires that description means to delegitimate—said critic has failed, at the most basic level, to understand the operation of history. Political change, just like political stability, is driven by the actions of people who don't experience themselves as leaving the house to make revolution, or to maintain the staus quo. The hypostatizing of individual motive, and the refusal of political legitimacy to those who don't perform your model of politics (which always seems to require promising not to hurt you), is standard-issue counter-revolutionary liberalism, bourgeois consciounsess in its purest form. Whether you intend it that way or not.
Posted by jane at November 13, 2005 12:55 PM | TrackBack