Politics as an Image and the Issue of Subjectivity

by Dimitris Halatsis and Christos Moudouris

Translation from Greek: Diana Al Hilaly

The aesthetic aspect of political organisations - the image

Their internal structure

Their rituals - customs and procedures

The penetration of bourgeois ideology in left-wing parties

Origins of the word “hierarchy”

Politics as a “spectacle”

Why should an organisation of any form and especially a party identify itself with the necessity of the existence of a hierarchy?

There are, indeed, many kinds of hierarchies-some absolute, others more democratic. Nevertheless, the question pertains to all.

The different ways of participating and the various roles members have do not establish different “rights” in a party or an organisation per se. Differences are evident when an organisation is identified with its hierarchy. More than often, before a split in left-wing parties takes place, one can detect the problem of an inflexible vertical hierarchy.

Politics, which condense all contradictions within a society, are a field where the unpredictable rules (not ignorance, however).

On the other hand, the hierarchical structure of political parties generates an image of a predictable course, since it treats politics through prescriptions.

Instead of parties of the Left manifesting a collective subjectivity-due mainly to the way politics are perceived as a predictable outcome of a collective effort-they ultimately reach a subjective collectiveness, sustaining within all the ideological fixations of a subject. Thus, parties appear in the political scene as acting beings, embodiments of a hierarchy and not as collective entities that encounter one another at any given moment within the realm of politics. This acknowledgment- misinterpretation of reality by the political subject (hierarchy) projects a polarized “effort and result” image of politics, clandestine on the one hand since it constitutes a contradiction, while offering at the same time the prerequisite argument to reproduce the hierarchical structure.

Suggestion: instead of left-wing parties concealing the contradictions they carry deeming from hierarchy which acts as a cohesive subject or by declarations of a common front, they should highlight these contradictions and produce politics by mainstreaming them.

- The image offers an illusion of “clarity”, i.e. the absence of contradictions.
In final analysis, the image addresses only individuality and never collectiveness.
The image conceals the integration of contradictions that reality is, reproducing thus the subjectivity of the individual.
In conclusion, the role of the image is to impede the contact of the subject with contradicting reality.
The image always exploits the collective time and space, addressing however and always, individuality.

- Secrecy. (The best secret is the publicized secret ).

Secrecy always hides a party guideline forced upon the members or that desires to impose itself through a totalitarian mechanism and in the name of political effectiveness. In final analysis, it’s a controlling mechanism, which in issues of political practice uses “flexibility” as its alibi in order to impose a party guideline on its members.

A good example is the Greek Communist Party (��): from the 70’s until today it evolved into a nationalistic party after surviving many splits, witnessing at the same time a decline in its electoral power remaining, nevertheless, trapped in a party discipline.

This controlling mechanism, constitutes an integral element of the party which led-along with other political circumstances- not only to the deterioration of its electoral power, but first and foremost of its ideological and theoretical positions.

The anti-state character and the horizontal structure that revolutionist left wing organisations ought to have is not an alternative “trend” contrasting the bourgeois parties, but a substantial defense mechanism fighting against the penetration of mainstream bourgeois ideology into left wing organisations and parties.

In a horizontal structure of left-wing parties, each member is subscribed in the interior political process, first within the organization itself and afterwards in a wider frame. On the contrary, the vertical structure of bourgeois parties creates armies of voters that find themselves excluded or with limited access to the party’s internal structure. Thus, the party mechanism becomes the only “legitimate” voice to express the political and ideological supremacy of the bourgeois mentality, transforming the parties from representatives of the citizens towards the state to representatives of the state addressing the citizens.

It’s a commonplace even for an article to place the headline in its beginning in order to state the proof and provide the practical evidence later. Thus, it reverses the time sequence in order to create an uninterrupted consistency-an integral element of the subject’s structure. One could say that the subject is a reversed order of practice.

What does a headline stand for?
It reproduces subjectivity.
It conceals the contradiction and projects it as substantial.

Politics as an Image and the Issue of Subjectivity

D. Halatsis - Ch. Moudouris