Overcoming shame as part of OWS

Deleuze and Guattari say in A Thousand Plateaus: "Ideology is a most execrable concept concealing all of the effectively operating social machines." I take that to mean that we have to thematize political affect to understand "effectively operating social machines." From this perspective, the real "German Ideology" is that ideas are where it's at, rather than affect. It's political affect that "makes men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation."

Why won't "ideology" cut it? It doesn't work because it conceives of the problem in terms of "false consciousness," where that means "wrong ideas," and where "ideas" are individual and personal mental states whose semantic content has an existential posit as its core, with emotional content founded on that core, so that the same object could receive different emotional content if you were in a different mood. (There are lots of ways of thinking about cognition and emotion, without even bringing in the relations of this "analytic" vocabulary with that of the Husserlian noesis / noema scheme. Still, I hope this will suffice just to get some traction on the problem.)

Thus to take up the great poster, "Shit is fucked up and bullshit," the core act posits the existence of shit, and then we express our emotional state by predicating "fucked up and bullshit" of it, whereas we could have predicated "great and wonderful" if we were in a different mood.

But that is "execrable" for Deleuze and Guattari, because it's far too cognitivist and subjectivist.

It's too cognitivist because it founds emotion on a core existence-positing act, and too subjectivist by taking emotion to be an "expression," something individual that is pushed outward, something centrifugal. For them, emotion is centripetal rather than centrifugal, or even better, emotion is for them the subjectivation, the crystallization, of affect. Now DG do have a coporeal / Spinozist notion of affect involved with the encounter of bodies, but they also have what we could call a "milieu," or "environmental" sense of affect. Here affect is "in the air," something like the mood of a party, which is not the mere aggregate of the subjective states of the party-goers. In this sense, affect is not emergent from pre-existing subjectivities; emotional subjectivities are crystallizations or residues of a collective affect. 

To take a concrete example: what counts in the effective social machine demonizing welfare in the USA is the shame attached to receiving public aid without contributing to society with your tax dollars. It's shameful to have lost your job or your home; you're stupid, a loser to have been in a position to lose it, and you're a lazy, stupid loser if you haven't found another one, or if you never had one in the first place. You arrive at this American shame by aggregating individualized, subectivized, packets of shame; you get shamed subjects as crystallization of the collective affect of shame in the American air.

And so you don't combat this shame by trying to change individual people's ideas, one by one, with information about unemployment trends; you combat it by showing your face, by embodying your lack of shame, by putting a face on unemployment or homelessness. You thus counteract the existing collective affect by creating a positive affect of, shall we say, joyful solidarity. Shame isolates (you hide your face); joyful solidarity comes from people coming together. It's joy released from the bondage of shame, to follow up on the Spinozist references. 

What's especially heartbreaking, then, about the We Are The 99% Tumblr site, is that so many people still have some shame, as they only peak out from behind their messages. Hence the importance of the Occupy meetings; shared physical presence, showing your whole face: these create the positive affect, the shamelessly joyful solidarity needed to overcome shame fully.* 

Fighting the residual shame, the half-faces of private pictures sent to a website: that's what makes the collective occupation of space so important: bodies together, faces revealed, joyously.**

*To make a link to another important aspect of shame and political affect, Shelley Tremain discusses disability and shame here.

**Many thanks to the New APPS Borg for help!