Like everyone else, coping badly with the Bush victory. But at least a defining 21st-century political quote came out of the middle of it. And in terms of the deepest implications of a playful view of the world, it's scarily relevant.
The unattributed quote - and I'll bet there's a hunt on right now to find out exactly who said it - comes from Ron Suskind's article on religion and the Bush regime, in the
New York Times:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
This extraordinary statement is framed by Suskind as an example of how religious faith, not political science, underpins the actions of the Bush presidency. But I think that's not necessarily the case. Indeed, if you're sensitive to the full range of play rhetorics - as my book urges - you see here a powerful, indeed lethal fusion of play-as-power, play-as-imagination, and play-as-freedom (or at least, the freedom to act in an unfettered way). This is more like Machievelli Reloaded, than theocratic hubris. The imperial power literally 'takes reality lightly' - ie, presumes that its force can define what we accept as true.
Yet do progressives need to stand our ground in the 'reality-based community', as many bloggers have started to do? Or do they, also, need to 'act to create their own realities'? I'm reminded of Negri's phrase from Empire, 'there is no outside' - meaning, there is nowhere in the network society that isn't amenable to influence or effect from any other part, however unpredictably. And one of those influences might well be on the level of values and ethics and way of life [play ethic?], as well as sheer brute force and intimidation. Our imaginings of a better world have never had so much potency: this is what it really means to live in a world of 'spiritual' politics, where the 'breath of life' animates all fixed positions.
So rather than wilting in the face of Bushite imperialism, what's clearly needed is a third demonstration that there is 'another reality' - what George Monbiot calls a 'metaphysical mutation' - than that of the clash of fundamentalisms between Georgism and Jihad. I'm encouraged by the response of netaphysicians like Rushkoff and Barlow to the election - that dualism and oppositionalism itself might be the problem. And that the best thing the 'left' could do would be to act and embody its vision of a different world, rather than agonise about those who live in their different world. An expressive democracy, in the Negrian sense, might mean just that.
A players' response to Bush, primally, has to be the generation of a variety of political possibilities - activism and creativity, rather than passivism and negativity. None of us should be confined to the 'reality-based community'. In being so explicit about the virtuality and rhetorical nature of their authority, the Bush regime may do us all some good.
