The alt doesn’t solve the case and causes backlash & transition wars

The theories of social change that dominated American Communication Studies at the close of the twentieth century echoed those of the Western humanities. These theories spurred extensive thought about the performances of individual identity and the relationship of identity to mass media and culture, and they probably had some laudable influence on the broader culture. They are, however, inadequate to the evolving contexts I have described. One can sum up the most widely circulating theories of social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth century in the following, admittedly simplified, statement: There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the blank with one or more: patriarchy, whites, the West, the U.S., neo-liberalism, global capitalism) that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution. We don't know the shape of what will come after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that comes after will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love, Courage, Violence, etc.). For an example, read Slavoj Žižek's attack on the evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/49), which requires the “excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p. 81), to eliminate “democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined “new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The resilience of this social theory identifies it as a rhetorical attractor; a predispositional symbolic set that readily transmits emotive potency. To appropriate Kenneth Burke's terms, the bio-symbolics of human political relationships readily create a “grammar” and “rhetoric” in the form of a unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle, after which, things in “our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest that it may not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but rather that it arises from an intersection of the structural characteristics of language systems and the nature of human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social cooperation and inter-tribal competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems, this fantasy theme is avoidable, even if it is powerfully attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are material, however, specific kinds of work are necessary in order to avoid the lure of that predisposition. This point is crucial, because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist) approaches to social change, which envisioned a single (violent) leap away from the social as sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible.