The Demand for Engagement The demand for engagement is a demand for intoxicated politics. The medial supercooling of hot phenomena in the 1980's forced this classical connection back into the collective unconscious (or so it was in the Occident at any rate). Ever since the 1970's, the natural urge to collective uproar had been marginalized, privatized and criminalized by the establishment. The idea that you can blow your fuses and call it politics was linked by resurgent antifascist and anti-Stalinist forces to the awkward experiences it resulted in during the first half of the twentieth century. Political awareness might still lead to concern, but should no longer result in fury. Meanwhile, the street as a stage for the thrilling absurdity of public life was being remodeled as the folkloric locale of commerce. Under the influence of the peace movement, demonstrations as a potential public disturbance were neutralized into a dignified affirmation of identity and citizenship. The bourgeois demonstration signaled the end of playful violence and directed destruction. During the eighties, the natural combination of armed resistance and carefree drug use that had given the sixties so much spunk was removed from history by leftist ideologues, to be replaced by a reliable version of their own ten-year uproar. The arrogant assault on the authorities by shiftless longhairs was reprocessed, mirabile dictu, into a responsible contribution to the general public welfare. Thus, the disturbing element was reduced to a sensible phase of emancipation and awareness. The former enemies of humanity were miraculously transformed into protagonists of human rights, to be realized through politically feasible benefits packages. The notion of politics as the moment of destruction in the family of nations had been suppressed to the point where all criticism was forced to be constructive. The crass behavior of destructive idealists was pushed aside as an obstacle to subsidy negotiations. Consequently, rapture retreated from the evil outside world into the circle of private life, where it became fragmented. If before, biological, chemical and technological ecstasy had combined with the ideological high to produce a giant tangle of drives and urges, now they lost all connection. The "stoned in the street" happening gave way to weekend recreational drug use. The variety of drugs were no longer a dangerous concoction, but substances to be independently consumed within the leisure arena, as long as it didn't interfere with performance. The street junkie's public display of discomposure was beyond the limit of intoxicated ethics. Likewise, the abandon with which political dogma had been consumed as a psychedelic drug well into the seventies was erased in a suddenly emerging aversion to the neurotic and repressive character of the political impulse. The ideological institution was deregulated into a political enterprise, while the ritual stylization of the political was soon highlighted in the media as a form of entertainment. In the period between punk and yuppie, passionate social optimism was converted into a game in which the remaining politicians were used to heighten the fun. The urban movements of the 1980's made impossible demands that had to be met immediately. Many a dazed administrator responded by sending in the riot squad. Although the activists succeeded in a temporary revival of bits and pieces of prewar street life, the ideological serum had already evaporated to the extent that it could no longer serve to fuel the action. The very concept of politics became clouded by such Babylonian confusion that even the classic "in for myself and no one else" might be cited as a protest statement. The recipe for debate, argument and explanation had been lost, and with it the love of the hermeneutics of personal action. You don't need ideological hype to get high. By now, the Dionysian aspects of this form of social change were light-years removed from the dominant bureaucratic arts. Whereas radical action still contained a trace of the link between radical negativity and the Red Dawn, the actors were fed up with coming on like the bona fide legators to Western Humiliation. At the end of the day, nobody felt affiliated to a Marx, Bakunin or Sartre. Art had long ago succumbed to good taste, which demands that words or images, though possibly unsettling, never act disruptive. Government, in turn, transforms these artistic strategies into a program of soft deregulation of social relationships. This urge toward disorganization gave politics such speed that there was no more need for would-be artists and actors to keep the government alive through protest and resistance. The shock of pleasure, of the new, the disruptive, and the astonishing traditionally evoked by art, was removed from the order of time in which it could be followed by an explosion of energy transforming indignation into politically significant confrontations. Any artistic attempt at outrage was drowned in the bottomless pit of medial amnesia. The social urge toward metamorphosis was too fixated on the next Mafiose assembly of debutantes to remember the last wave of young talent. The belief in successive trends, generations and decades enabled the cultural planners to discover one cultural or political novelty after another. If there was any conflict at all in the field of small-scale maximality, it was considered nice material for another debate to cover up the dirt. This was all that remained of the good old cutting edge that wounded so easily and made the twentieth century what it was. By the end of the 1980's the public, beginning to understand the workings of entertainment, decided it might amuse itself by becoming interactive. Causing the polls to rise and fall at random was great fun while it lasted, but things really got hilarious once the voters started to use elections as an anti-political action. With each election, a random number of voters gets the urge to show up (or not) in order to vote for the wrong candidate en masse. People who want to have a go at involvement and participation run the risk of being ruthlessly punished for their efforts by the allotment of a position on some congressional committee or in a provincial state. The expansion and collapse of parties every election gives the dilettantes a chance to develop their showmanship on a stage far too long dominated by timeworn vaudeville. The commentators' frantic attempts to discover any meaning in voting behavior are themselves part of the fun. Exit the idea that the public can be won over for any ethical/moral scheme through political manipulation. ??