In the first week or so of OWS, Naomi Klein called it "the most important thing in the world." Since those initial weeks, many of us have noted that it has broken through the hopelessness on the left, that it's created a sense that the game has changed, that anything is possible. Thousands of people in the US eat, drink, discuss, and live Occupy every day now. Some do this by living in tents; others do it as active supporters and working group members; others do it as organizers. A year ago, these same thousands would have said that they were too busy, studying or working, taking care of family members, looking for a job. When it's the most important thing in the world, though, we make time. Everything else matters a little less, moves further down the to-do list.

The movement gives meaning to our lives. It explains what's wrong with the current system--capitalism. Why people are unemployed--capitalism. Why they are in debt--capitalism. Why they have no future--capitalism. And it tells us how we are strong--together. It tells us how to struggle--together. It tells us how we will win--together. Where contemporary capitalism has been separating us into demographic groups, pop cultural tribes, zip codes, and figures uniform in their cultivation of a sense of unique personal identity, Occupy reminds us that we are the ninety-nine percent: the rich really are different from you and me.

And so I wonder sometimes in our discussions and exchanges, especially ones that endure and require endurance, why is it that some feel the need to talk about personal feelings, individual feelings, and feelings in the abstract? Why do some find this talk of feelings disconnected from their settings in the affective networks of communicative capitalism helpful, interesting, necessary? It seems to me that this talk takes two forms.

On the one hand, it separates the emotional world from the political in order to prioritize the emotional. Rather than allowing political convictions to remain imbued with the intensity of their connection to the Real of antagonism, of class struggle and the tasks of building collectivity, the affective turn (in some of the exchanges I have in mind) valorizes affect for its own sake. The move, then, is highly abstract, even as those who make it seem to do so with an intent that is precisely the opposite (it's no wonder, then, that political scientists think they can measure affect in large populations). Are those who try to turn political discussions into discussions of emotions actually fearful of the intensity of politics and so wish to cut intensity off from the struggle that makes it matter? Is the effort, whether conscious or not, to diminish and redirect intensity so that the stakes are not quite so high, not quite so urgent?

On the other hand, turning discussions toward feeling separates individuals from groups. When feeling is introduced as a topic of discussion, particularly in the setting of a contentious debate, the introducer tends to take on either the role of therapist or the role of victim. A problem is perceived--a bad vibe--and either the therapist or the victim (or victim's defender) now wants to focus on the feelings around this problem. Therapeutization--the means to turn class conflict into personal conflict, or to hide class conflict underneath an ideology of individualism. It's like the opposite of consciousness-raising. Instead of connecting people to the world, the world is reduced to the interior life of one or two people.

The intensity is the politics, what informs commitment, solidarity, and courage: our coming together to build a movement and arguing over how to do it, where it's going, what it means. It's possible that a generation that has grown up under neoliberalism has no other political vocabulary--they think that the intensity of politics is the same as, identical to, how an individual feels. It's a generation educated with a diminished sense of Marxism, a stunted view of communism, and an overall loss of the vocabulary of collective struggle. For many, fortunately for us not all, politics is about having enough "information" to be "aware" and make a "choice."

What is best in Occupy is that it has reshaped the contemporary discussion away from the capitalist mindset that told everyone that her or his success or failure was strictly an individual matter, that everyone was on her or his own. By focusing on Wall Street, the movement has created a new context, one that explains what had appeared as either failure or bad luck as actually the reality of capitalist domination and exploitation. The more we connect this capitalist reality to class struggle and the history of organized opposition, the more we can give to a generation of people who have lost a connection to the larger world a sense of meaning and purpose.

I just finished reading Vivian Gornick's, The Romance of American Communism (thank you, Jonathan Flanders). She describes the hunger for a life with meaning. Gornick writes:

The motive force is the dread fear that life is without meaning. This fear-hunger speaks to a need not of the flesh but of the spirit, a need having to do with the deepest definitions o what it is to be human . . . Once encountered, in the compelling persona of the Communist Party, the ideology set in motion the most intense longings buried in the unknowing self, longings that pierced to the mysterious, vulnerable heart at the center of that incoherent life within us, longings that had to do with the need to live a life of meaning.

The book is filled with the testimonies of men and women who were members of the Party from the late twenties into the sixties:

Imagine being that poor with nothing to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe that it wouldn't always be this way. That's what our politics was to us. It literally negated our deprivation. It was rich, warm, energetic, and exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves. It was as if I'd just found speech. You see, I understood things. I knew what was happening. That saved me. Not only that, I was working for the revolution. I could take anything, knowing I was working for the revolution. Anything.

Some socialist critics of OWS see it as petite bourgeois entreprenuerial wanna-be's and disappointed bourgeois college graduates disconnected from the poor and working classes and acting out an affective politics suited best for social media. Cloaked in a rhetoric of autonomy and horizonality is the actuality of a self-indulgent individualism resistant to the kind of discipline real political struggle requires. I don't think this is a true--and I think that we insure that it does not become true by identifying and fighting against the effects of neoliberalism on our political subjectivity. What do neoliberalism and communicative capitalism encourage us to be? What do they thrive on and what are the practices and processes through which we can eliminate those tendencies and become people who can see clearly, who can understand?

This post is connected with the argument I make here.