AHORANOW NO. 1 (1996): STRATEGY CENTER PUBLICATIONS

Left Culture in the Age of the Right

“Utopia is at one end of town. Maybe not. At the other end is Fashion. They slowly approach one another. It is high noon and their guns are loaded. In the four minutes in which they have been facing one another, weapons raised, Fashion has changed outfits eight times. He is threatening Utopia, telling her he has promises to keep and moments to guarantee. He says that he wants her and must deliver her to his followers by sundown....”

—Barbara Kruger, Remote Control, 1993

Fascist ideology moves once again from veiled menace to bold contender throughout a newly re-capitalized Europe and across the United States. Mafia henchmen rule the streets of Moscow. The People’s Republic of China offers neither democracy nor socialism. In this historical context, a reexamination of the role of culture in Left political organizing seems appropriate.  In a sea of ideological disorientation, three points guide AhoraNow’s engagement of the relationship between art and politics.

1. Culture is not entertainment, a mere sideshow to politics. Culture is the ideological mechanism through which lived experience becomes consciousness.  “Social being creates social consciousness” the old man Marx said in so many words. Culture stakes out the battleground on which we fight for sanity as individuals and collective identity as different peoples.

2. Bourgeois society’s culture industry has achieved global hegemony, that is, the colonization of the unconscious, domination by consent. Pop culture is the second largest export in US international trade. This industry’s representation of class race, gender, and every “story” that constitutes history seeks to determine the very bounds of popular thought the world over. Yet people in struggle continue to represent themselves, to fight for fresh air in all variety of strategies of resistance.

3. Left culture production must, and can, now be guided by a strategy of critical construction: the critical aspect incorporates all variety of lessons drawn from the critique of both bourgeois and state socialist culture industries while the constructive aspect realizes the inevitable productive nature of all human activity and, further, plans to act. Therefore, a practice of critical construction harnesses both knowledge of the dangers of naive “affirmative” culture as well as the utopian impulse to produce affirmation of an international people’s cry for freedom, a cry that only intensifies as global hegemony brings MTV to the outback of New Zealand, GAP jeans to the villages of Maylasia, and CocaCola to the starving children of Africa.

To counter this hegemony, the Left requires a coalition culture capable of generating its own critical constructions. AhoraNow is itself an experiment in culture production. Thus, AhoraNow will couple current popular criticism of the tendency toward “false totalities” and bourgeois cultural hegemony with a dialectical historical mandate to produce new representations of the social system and anticipations of voluntary unity. Such a coalition culture can evolve among those whose particular life experience teaches them that there is a direct relationship between the confusing simultaneous bourgeois messages that a fragmented world culture is manageable through cultural hegemony. AhoraNow will attempt to reveal the relationship between, one the one hand, the fundamental fragmentation and contradiction that actually constitute the false representations of “whole” (bourgeois culture) which the world embraces as entertainment, and, on the other hand, the appearance or style of “fragmentation” and “difference” that appropriates oppositional works in order to mask the totality of concrete material differences and contradictions that constitute history at any moment in its making.In this light it is critical yet constructive cultural activity that can fuse the artistic avant-garde with Left political movements.