Capital, a reading project for the last year of civilization

Well, it’s officially 2012 now, and starting at the beginning of the week. That smells like a delicious opportunity to begin a sizable reading/blogging project. For the first few months of this year (January-April, with God‘s help), I’ll be reading Marx‘s Das Kapital along side David Harvey‘s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. 

My goal is to read a given portion each week, which I’ll name as the week comes. I will write general reflections and issues on the blog, and post an out-line of my notes for those people interested.

This is meant to be an exercise in close reading at the end of the world. After all, the planets are aligned… isn’t it a good time?

Here it is, folks.

Am I supposed to see how many holes there are in this? My senior thesis: Thesis_full_text

images and sounds

The images and sounds of grass. The power that doesn’t rush up over an under but that rejects anything but the spontaneous organization. Non -organization and non-being. Non-objective being; the sight of God. What is the sight of God, linguistically? and doesn’t this linguistic sight, after all, blind us from what we really mean to say? The sight of God–the subject, perhaps the only subject, without anything else around it, surrounding it… it cannot be an object. God is not an object; God isn’t a problem for Deuleuze and Guattari. But it is a problem for me. And they are a problem for me.

The sight of God: that which comes into God’s field of vision (God’s breath of life, materiality even,) that isn’t solid or static. Always moving and without a core. Without a root. A floating network of off-shoots. Can we say that it’s floating? Surrounded by non-matter. The non-objective being cannot even take into account it’s outside; it is shell. There is no language of language–there is an enumeration of language. Multiplicities, submerge and emerge.

I’m looking at too many access points. I’m not God. The work talks about…

What is the work? These questions… the images and sounds, arresting me. Arresting me. Nothing can be said to the non-being, to the being, to the mind; all out of time. My footsteps are hitting the stairs. Out of time. Arresting me and the world that I want to change. In crude terms, “change,” not a slogan but a promise. A big “fuck you” to access points. Little wars waged on the premise of language without wanting to say it. A war on words, we can have those now on equal footing with a war on poverty. Images images images. All access, no command. A line of flight, an abstract machine, a line of thought. The images and sounds, displacing m–, displacing God.

The leaves of grass are rats. The rats of grass. The rats, not the thought of love but the core of hatred. Of gray and black, of swarming. Swarming displacement–an abandonment of something that cannot be named, that denies naming, the non-being. The unnamed non-being. Us, we, not alive or dead but awash in machinery. Images and sounds, sentiments in the key of F: flight for F. Find the mystery and do not take it ashore. There is no shore, no outside.

The death of trees. The death of root, and ground. The ground; do branches reach out to one another? The different trees, the picture, the image, the sound. Meaning, meaning, meaning, schizophrenia and capitalism. The trick of the book.

The self that isn’t washed away, not an image or a sound at least in first belief. It is belief that kills. Kills and in so doing supposes an image, a life. The real: the hope, the work. The trick of the book, production without a referent, the inside of the machine. The lie of the machine that is not a belief but the negation of belief. It’s a string of dots, the mesh of music, the mesh of dots on a line. A graph, a heart on a graph. Two-dimensional. The swarming of rats. Fear, the fear of fear. The clever smile on a teacher’s face. The face that you wake up to: the non-being. Non-objective being. Be precise, even in your imprecision. You, you. Images and sounds, walk over and around, reread. Take it with a grain of salt. The rhizome; the figment of the morning. The figment of the afternoon, time slipping, emerging later on as something you’d need to tell yourself. Enumeration, immanence. Immanence, the fear of fear. The slippery slope, the head-aches, the broken eyes that do not close. The eyes sowed open. The toxins that can’t be flushed away. The becoming. The becoming. The becoming. The becoming. My too objective subjectivity. Fixed in a flux of over-spell. Disillusion.

Becoming unto disillusion, and all the while we search for, underwater of,

the images

and sounds

the images

and sounds

in flight from winter birds and frozen in the ice.

paper birds, launch away-

you were always just a sad boy, a sad boy living out a dream

Bloch’s instance on the Expressionists’ desire to spontaneously break out of the material confines of capital (surely not a notion that Adorno would encourage) is itself indicative of the mythological implications of the political use of the image in aesthetics. But its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history. The political meaning of the aesthetic image is manifest in the content and creation of art, whose political connotations might be either latent or nested within the work, but whose implications cannot be denied in any dialectical analysis. For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation and comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, there is even a case to be made for the Kantian-idealist status of art in mythologies, since they can never be anything better than an “either/or” impossibility: both and neither. But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgment from the critical perspective that regards aesthetic production as an event in the material reality, as well as an aesthetic event that is trans-historical because of dialectical critique. This is not to say that all works can be validated through a dialectical method of critique. As Adorno points out, phantasmagoria is not useful in criticism. To this we value the fact that dialectics strip away phantasmagoric material from aesthetic production in order to define key political relationships. Keeping this in mind, the political aesthetician as well as the aesthetic politician must not confuse the phantasmagorical with the mythological: for the phantasmagorical is the image that ideology conflates against its own material reality, whereas the mythological image is the implanted utopian impulse trapped within an ideological rendering. The relationship between the two is easily confused: the key in determining the phantasmagoric and the mythological is to ask what the image does and what it wishes to convey. In the case of the former, the phantasmagorical image will merely provide an animated face of consumption, of products and of accumulation. The latter, on the other hand, is that supporting impulse and desire that undergirds the animation of consumption and accumulation—in the last instance, the two readings are connected only through ideology: the phantasmagorical image is mechanic and the mythological image bears the imprint of capitalism’s ideals that have already been half dismantled into its own system. We all want to make sure our loved ones won’t suffer after we die, we wish that we would not stop existing after death, but in the end, all we can do is take out a life insurance policy. And in the case of the mythical image’s insistence on its status in the ideological: in fact, it is the greatest key to the ideological. Considering Bloch’s short opening piece, it is theoretically sound that he would choose such a topic for “debate.” This debate launches into the core of the utopian desires in an impossible ideological climate: and whatever the implications of the conversations, they were neither submerged into a quasi-historical narrative on good and bad art, but had everything to do with the modes of historical excavation and interpretation of a given impulse.

 

please someone tell me yes no maybe…. rough thoughts

The missing subject

Hegel’s explication of the concept of the individual in the Preface to his essay Philosophy of Right correctively refocuses the Kantian position of the subject in relation to the concrete world. He says,

I leave out of account every particularity such s my character, my temperament, knowledge, and age. ‘I’ is totally empty; it is merely a point—simple yet active in this simplicity. The colourful canvas of the world is before me; I stand opposed to it and in this [theoretical] attitude I overcome its opposition and make its content my own. (PR, 328)

Here, Hegel effectively outlines the compressed Kantian point of subjectivity as a self-referential framework that works to exclude exterior objects and concepts in exchange for a self-fulfilling prophesy of interchangeable subjectivity. The movement is as follows: the transcendental subject is only capable of marrying the otherwise incommensurable categories of existence (the natural and the moral) only through imprinting his already-existing interior framework necessitated in a narrative myth of à priori wholeness from which the individual has emerged, but can only access from this point of inwardness. Hegel exposes the missing subject of ‘I’ that is ultimately responsible for overcoming these categories as the very ideology from which Kant attempted to free the individual. Essentially, the Kantian ‘I’ is the use and metaphysical belief in the à priori. The tentative state of the absolutely individual Transcendental Subject can only posses its infinite subjectivity against the hidden embers of a mass web and a denied sensuousness. Karl Marx puts it best in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach, when he explains that the soul of humanity is paved over by a dumb generality; the genus of humanity retroactively reunites the individual though a type of imagined origin. On myth that American schoolchildren and high school students learn about are those primordial scenes of brutish society in Hobbes and Locke. The viciousness of the purely natural life is taken as the horrible root—or true soul—of humanity lives within each individual, and was managed and preempted through the formal relegations of the united (self-destructive) sprit into the mechanistic whole that is only manifest as a herd of individuals. Here, it is more important to contemplate the significance of this narrative as a narrative, rather than excavate its architecture. If this core is the Essence of man that must not only be comprehended, but also, dumb after its comprehension, there is only one conclusion to make from Marx’s thesis. This myth has been impressed upon the real collective spirit only after it was arbitrarily splintered through social machinations whose reproduction is only possible through inherent and unbridgeable social agitations. Thus, the narrative of the silent and violent whole manifested in the individual is true insofar as this violent kernel is the entirety that feels inherent alienation between its spirit and its outward functions. In a diversion from material and class-based conflicts, the static individual might only believe himself to be absolutely transcendental if he believes in the closed-categories of his historical existence.

The subject seems to be evacuated of its particular qualities and cannot be put in relation to other subjects except in that relation the self paints on the other. It is simple yet active in its banality in that there are not direct any direct challenges to this individual in its universal incarnations because of its “simple” overwriting of the exterior world. Hegel’s corrective uses for Kant lie in his treatment and contextualization of the subject to the objects that surround him. The relationships that objects colorfully animate are only apprehended through the concrete, itself—but that this concrete meaning is not in for itself; rather, it is the concept which illuminates the form of the object, and in turn illuminates the subject who perceives this relation. So, where Kant’s framework (inadvertently) calls for a static revision of the concrete world through the self-referential category of ‘I’ (that comprises anything and everything it cares to, abandoning all the rest without consequence), Hegel instead shows the contextual relationship that the subject has with both subjects and objects. For Kant, the point of origin for the transcendental subject is rooted in an impossible transference of Absolute knowledge from a subjective perspective, a situation where the subject functions situationally as his own god. This situation is a practical impossibility once à priori categories are dissolved in the sense that the cohesiveness of the subject’s overwriting his surrounding objects exposes its tautological roots. This is the fatal error of Kant’s critique—its theoretical postulations are completely destroyed in the face of the concrete.

In Kant, the very mode by which the realm of the metaphysic is left behind is the very thing that instantiates it as a metaphysic in the last instance. Kant’s à priori categorization is conceptually seen in the lack of definite context—that is, the objective and the concrete. Kant’s model of the individual is only viable insofar as it does not come under attack of the determinate concrete sphere. For example, a modern subject lives in a nation-state and takes part in commercial processes. He does his business in the public, votes his piece in the elections, and holds property. In normal economic, social, and domestic circumstances, the subject can function at least nominally within the Kantian framework of the transcendental subject. In isolated, minor issues of business, he is able to rationally identify the proper components of his decision, and extract a seemingly legitimate result, for which he advances upon a “moral” framework. However, in the face of a systemic economic, political, or moral crisis, the subject is unable to advance any decision in a coherently rational way, since it has been severed à priori from the concrete, that is, the contextual. This is all to say that the transcendental nature of Kant’s theory of the subject is in a static state, and that Kant’s critiques are valid insofar as they occur within the normative bounds of the ideal, itself. The logic of the individual, then, is really thinking the thoughts of the normative order: in economics, it will follow the law of capital, in politics, it will follow the tide towards a democratic republic, and in morality it will do its best to place the crown of infinite rationality on its head. But in the non-normative, (the real) systemic problems of every kind throw this fragile framework into disarray because of the subject’s fundamental inability to situate himself concretely, or to situate the categories of his existence in concrete relations with each other.

In terms of the individual’s mythic narrative, the very moment that a high school student learns about their silent and violent origins in the tangled mass of human nature, is precisely the moment that highlights the fallibility of this myth. The contemporary individual cannot function as an isolated individual because is relation to others has been proven time and time again, the most recent and obvious example being the global financial crash that surfaced in October of 2008. And yet, the very most devastating possibility for the imaginary individual subject and the system in which he lives would be to discover a. the genuine unity of social humanity, b. its constituent antagonisms, and finally, c. that his “individual” identity is really a specific class situation at the basis of his own permanent suffering.  In contrast, the real self that emerges through this disintegration turn out to be closer to the individual’s spirit that transform his everyday life because those false forms of reality are shed in exchange for a larger identity that historically reaffirms not only his singularity, but also his singularity’s reality in a universal sense. This position of self-awareness has many valences that extend beyond the binary of singular and universal of the human and spiritual corpus, and into the historical and utopian incarnations of the real Mass and Spirit. Today’s “leftist” political discourse is fragmented along many of the twentieth century’s hangnails, each progressively cutting a deeper rift between the historical and the utopian. This rift is also understood between the political and the aesthetic: today, there are dogmatic Leninists who write in the old high-rhetoric of the Vanguard Party, composing thoughts that are based on a polemical mode of thought. The problem with this, most obviously, is that between the utopian truth and possibility that the Leninist position spoke to circa 1917, but also the impossibilities for a reoccurrence of those social conditions that led to it. In short, one on hand, there is a devastating inversion of theory and practice in today’s Left, where the rhetoric and historical unfolding of Marx-Leninism are taken for the universal theory of the revolutionary spirit. This misstep is easy enough to make, since the lines between historical fact and significance are easily trodden over without so much as a passing glance. But the real cause for this retroversion toward dogmatic Leninism is paralleled in the same type of contemporary hauntological cultural formations that conjure up the 1960’s as a radical origin of social change. These two moments are evidently and indisputably important moments in revolutionary theory and practice; but something happened to them. There is some imaginary scar that we suffer from; some invisible cross that we bear from both of these moments, and it is here that we should remember Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

This line is so often quoted from Marx’s corpus that it verges along the border of reified philosophy. Nevertheless, this phrase is the key to understanding the invisible trauma of our times and its significance as the imaginary genus of post-modernity. The cultural moment of the sixties is sometimes called the moment of rupture, that instant that history opened up and provided history with its own (and last) exit strategy for emancipation from formalized limits of human relationships. Likewise, there are certain factions of the Left that are organized around the political and economic anachronism of the Russian Revolution. These two groups point to a moment of legitimate social and political truth and trauma that have affected common political and social discourse to this day. But, I would suggest that these two moments in particular have stuck in our radical cultural memory as the genus to our own impossible identity. The contemporary imagination and project is scattered and weakly coordinated in political discourse precisely because it is a genus that we have adopted after-the-event, perhaps without even knowing it. These images, symbols, and lines of change have been flooded by the very apparatus in which it was to effect change. The Russian Revolution and subsequent political theory distilled in Lenin’s corpus highlight the (nominal) realization of the utopian imagination. It is a philosophical body that legitimates the communist project in the dominant and modern world’s own terms. It was the premier moment of political praxis, in which centuries of subaltern voices and resistance was recognized in the same sphere as the dominant capital discourse of hegemony. But, in every shining moment of the universal, there is also its contingent counterpart of the contextual: there is no one line to summarize the entire political, economic, and ideological history of the U.S.S.R. as a governing body. There is no need. What is important to recognize is the critical importance and meaning of the Russian Revolution as an event, both political and intellectual, that speaks to the spirit of possibility. In addition to universal potentiality, it is crucial to delineate the measure marks between political and theoretical manifestation and the point at which it was washed out by the waves of happenstance. Thus, we move from utopian event to the gray shores of the everyday. The only way that we might overcome the politically, economically, and socially impossibility of reincarnating the Soviet Revolt of 1917, is through a re-examination of the universal spirit of the revolution and its face.  We must name the real narrative myth in which radical politics has allowed itself to become an individual enterprise, as just one other choice in a world of limitless options. In order to do this, the other valence must re-emerge, that universal consciousness of the utopian.

The question of delineating a coherent line of thought between the spirit and form of the radical body and its imagination is complicated further when the possibilities of social engagement—both personal and formal—exists largely within the sphere of the sixties aesthetic determinations and social coincidence. For many contemporary activists and leftists, the everyday ethic, or lived relation to the revolutionary imagination, the sixties are regarded as the cloudy origin and missed exit of our epoch. Here, we must use the intellectual blue-print of the dialectic to free ourselves from our imaginary relationships to an imagined past, to an origin that does not exist in the utopian imagination save in the universal. Yet, this relationship is only viable and reachable in a concrete and achievable program of everyday living if we rigorously examine our deep cultural predication from a Marxist perspective. This is to say, in order to free the radical imagination and actualize its everyday appearance in this historical moment, we must break free of the happenstance of the twentieth century events.

This cannot be reached through a pseudo-science of exhaustive and extensive reading of the philosophical and political canon, but through an understanding of the “static” contemporary moment, full of contingencies and a thousand invisible shards of glass in relation to its trans-historical context. In short, we must return to Hegelian dialectics, and retrace our own contemporary “leftist” identity in a relentless exercise against the present. Too long has empancipatory discourse been designated by the faded possibility of the communist state. Perhaps it is time to announce that all hitherto existing incarnations of communism have “failed” insofar as the radical imagination has failed to see them as moments in a trans-historical project rather than the political state. In a word, the radical imagination has forgotten itself in the infinite negativity of self, without a care for its contextual and trans-historical meaning and relationships.

 

writing as event: absent ghost of ontology

We will continue fantasize over our own ghosts until we learn how to remember them without shaking with desire to be dominated by them, or to become them once again. In Bruno Bosteels’ essay “Thinking, Being, Acting, or, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Ontology for Politics,” sketches out the basic issues that a modern leftist ontology would and must speak to in order to constitute itself as a legitimate and emancipatory entity. Bosteels by no means proffers a one-line “solution”  to the “ubiquitous return to the question of being in the field of political thought,” at either end of the essay, let alone in its body. Instead, Bosteels navigates around the demands that an ontology would have to recognize (if not reconcile) the present need for it as such, while navigating its various deployments from the Enlightenment to the present. The first task of a legitimate meditation on the question of being is to zero in on its constitutive demands. This need for a contemplation of contemplation is illuminating. That is to say, when faced with the question of constitution, it is certainly not more acceptable now than at any time in the past to employ a strictly auto-spontaneous Kantian model precisely because it presupposes the question of being as metaphysic. Bosteels continues down the dialectical path, and offers ontology “described as spectral, nonidentical, and postfoundational. It tries to come to terms, not with present being but with ghosts and phantasms; not with entities or things but with events” (2).  This consideration is essential—a consideration embodied and addressed in the writing, itself. In this passage, it is clear that the imagining of ontology cannot be conducted as anything other than a rigorous critique of its history which is only positively considered through the act of writing removed by the second degree from its properly political diagnostic engagements.

A postfoundational, spectral notion of ontology is specifically useful when considering the overall trajectory of his essay and its subjects, regardless of whether or not Bosteels decides to take them on for good. Our political nightmare haunted by ghosts and specters is most successively recognized, remembered, and integrated into memory through the project of writing. The arch of Bosteels’ essay speaks to this necessity incorporates that first demand of a leftist ontology—through the long and arduous tasks of naming the various historical figures and their employment of ontology within their historical contexts. The process of unearthing these ghosts and specters in “A Leftist Ontology” exhumes the ghosts of a half-dead political project and transforms them into a properly dialectical event as writing. Writing, then, is seen as the ontology of the present; the essay shows itself to be A Leftist Ontology.

Writing as a production of truth functions in this capacity as ontological, but its forms are not limited to that of the essay, or even of the political variety. In all cases, literature not only “thinks the thought of love” insofar as love is understood as a mode of approaching truth, but as a method of elevating the most tragic, painful, and important ghosts of our epoch and upholding them without sublating or foreclosing their real implications from the Left’s memory.

The first half of On Interpretation-

Jameson’s first chapter On Interpretation begins with a lengthy introduction and repudiation of previous modes of interpretation. He begins with Althusserian Marxist variant of structural causality, which is embedded in that thinker’s structural approach. Structuralism is very important to Jameson’s conception of the dialectic of Utopia and ideology as manifested in modern literature, but not without considerable qualification. To begin with, Jameson argues that structural causality as it was fought in various encoded political battles (namely the French Communist Party against Stalin) used the concept of (semi) autonomy was used as a reductive term to quantify the various levels of economy and society. The debate was that Stalin’s use of causality allowed his particular brand of ideology to cross cut and flatten the various levels of culture and society in order to maintain a direct (and alienated) network to subjects. This, Jameson argues, is a syllogistic approach to a structuralism whose causality is rather situated within mediation between these structures, and not the levels, themselves. The difference between autonomous levels in structuralism, versus a structursl relationship of mediation is that, synchronically, the relationship from one level to the next to the next, are inextricably inter-woven and show a kind of origin within the “base;” that is, the relationships lose their autonomy insofar as they express the homology of relations themselves. (Which, as a side note, clearly also counteracts post-structural critiques that quantify the levels as autonomous and interchangeable into a situation that is not only undialectical, but also un-Marxist.) All of these qualifications serve to suggest that Althusserian Marxism must be understood as a (modern) modification of the Marxist mode of interpretation, rather than a break with it. Indeed, earlier in the chapter, Jameson brackets Althusserian Marxism as a type of local law, presumably the local laws of modernism, and therefore cannot be abandoned or washed away in the critique of modern literature.

Jameson goes on to dismantle the “alternate” side of the debate, which is the Lukacian analysis of modern literature, which the author says is reductive of the modernist problematic and completely ignores the Utopian vocation of reification. So, while Lukacs is not wrong in his historical identification of reification as an oppressive ideological force, his essentially un-dialectical mode of interpretation is not useful in conducting a genuine literary analysis of modernism. Althusserian structuralism in the highly qualified and historically corrected sense, is still applicable on a level of modern history, though structuralist Marxism as a master-code approach must be limited or qualified within a properly dialectical hermeneutic that is trans-historically valid. So, the first chapter of The Political Unconscious introduces the dialectical relations as embodied in the form of the novel as the mediatory force between modern structural levels of reality in late capitalism (late modifying the recentness of events, not a suggestion of impending capital failure).

Jameson also engages with other allegorical lexicons of interpretation, namely Freud’s schematic. Here, he works to qualify the structure of Freud’s interpretive apparatus by freeing it from the essentially private sphere of individualized libidinal desire. Freud maps the unconscious impulses of desire, which relates to wish-fulfillment, not as a personal libidinization of private desires, but a filtering of history and Utopian impulse along axes in order to free dialectical bearing to an otherwise ideologically bound system of individual impulse. (Jameson also validates Freud’s lexicon from the Freudians as its own mode of interpretation in exposing that the only group who is invested in making sense of the Freudian lexicon within its own context are themselves, and that symbolism in its direct/contextual sense has long been outmoded approach to the unconscious, specifically because it does not gesture towards the political without extensive qualification.) This moment in the text is a direct pre-cursor to his analysis of Conrad, whose literature contains a dialectical relationship to (desired) value as it was discussed in terms of that author’s contemporaries, Nietzsche and Weber. Jameson completes this lexical liberation by transferring the Freudian interpretative mode from the individual onto the allegorical organization of modeling society as presented by Northrop Frye. Frye’s mythical allegory of social relations, while imbued in religious imagery, is useful with the infused terminology of Freud’s lexicon, a mode of interpretation for social relationships as a unifying ideological process that provides surface cohesion for an otherwise conflicting formation (i.e. ideology as religion). Freud’s interpretive code is explicitly useful in terms of Frye’s allegorical level of the Myth/Archetypal, but when this interpretive function is expressed, it passes into the anagogical mode of “meaning” that always re-invests itself as a contained ideological impulse.

In this sense, the reader can quickly branch out the book’s Conclusion, wherein the dialectical mode of ideology is also clearly Utopian, but forever re-invested in its own ideological code (in late capitalism, the dream of eternal life or bliss is always folded into an insistence of consumption). Returning to Frye’s allegorical mode of social interpretation, Jameson is in fact drawing out a doubled critique of the Lukacian critique—while the Anagogic impulse does contain the Utopian content within ideology, it is always reinvested in ideology because it does not explicitly realize the imminence and necessity of the Utopian; that is to say, Frye’s conception resolves the dialect by functionally leaving it within the unconscious of the Anagogical desire, itself.

Sunny Laundry

Right now, there’s a “Renuzit Sunny Laundry” air freshener sitting next to my tap tap tapping fingers. I can’t smell a damned thing. It’s one of those deals that is supposed to whither away as the effectiveness of the air freshness diminishes, blah blah. Originally, it sat on our bathroom window sill, freshening both the great dehors and our cat’s litter box.  I have been reading and rereading Jameson’s Political Unconscious, for form and content because I don’t think I understood how amazingly brilliant his writing is. Anyway, there’s a bit that I was reading that said “the tree had fallen whether or not anyone was in the forrest,” and I didn’t get it at first.

But of course, now I do, after sitting in my bathroom, watching the Sunny Laundry Adjustable disintegrate into the outer world of New Brunswick trees. If I really plug my nose up to the damn thing, very much like a shoe gelatin in feeling.

I can’t smell it, and I certainly don’t need it. I  just think that I need it, rather, it is empirically presented as a necessary item that does an quantifiable service with a measurable effect because it is a fallen tree, that is wilted away. Whether or not I (the subject) was present or even qualitatively effected by the Event, the fallen tree (or “objective” happening) is proved to me, the otherwise disparate spectator, by the physical “objective” proof of the whithering.

I retract the plastic top (my house-mate thought that she might be able to save the scent for longer): tree, penis, air-freshener, many things in one.

Just one of many objects that float around me, proving their usefulness by quantifiable results that I never experienced because of my silly inability to smell, my silly inability to know my body, my silly inability to engage with the true essence of the universe, which, of course, needs 7.5 oz pick me up.

On Jameson’s preface to The Political Unconscious

This post marks the beginning of my free reading of Jameson. And already, the preface says so much more than I thought it might. For my first attempt at understanding it, I will try to close read some passages.

The Political Unconscious accordingly turns on the dynamics of the act of interpreation and presupposes, as its organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the alway-already-read; we apprehend them though sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or–if the text is brand new–through the sedimented reading habits and vategories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. (FJ 9)

What this points to, in unaffected language, is a way of reading, a way of interpreting literature. Much like the world we live in, literature is not directly experienced because of two forces (that FJ later expands): history and literary criticism (or modes of criticisms). These might be considered two opposing things, but I have more than a feeling that they are a part of the same dialectical (Marxian) truth. In the case of the old text: it is easy enough to imagine how we do not really read a text, directly. The tradition of the text, the cultural assignments, the quick and dirty indexes on a work’s author, its secondary and reified use in popular (contemporary) culture, etc, are exhausting. Not to mention the historicist lens that we don every time we attempt to read a work outside our own epoch (as an aside, I wonder if “our epoch” or season of epochs, each pass away more and more frantically, as we are outmoded not at century’s intervals, nor even decades, but now by the week, the day, the minute…). Until we, as historical readers, or readers blinded and harnessed by our inaccessibility to history, or even time itself, cannot read any text without a mode; this brings us to the second type of reading: literary criticism.

The inaccessibility of the reader to his own epoch, while also isolating him from any other, might be temporarily overcome with a manner of reading. FJ lists the many en vogue in the following pages, and points out that in the end, these kinds of literary understandings, like any given feuding mysticism, competes soulessly with all the others with all the same words and stifled promises. Of course, FJ makes no bones about his premise: to show that the Marxist mode of reading is not just another type of reading on the “intellectual marketplace,” but that it eradicates the need for such a dogmatist view and allows the reader to come into the closest type of contact with any given text because it accounts for the historically real material context of the work as well as our own. Thus, it unites us with the text. There is much more to be said about this text. And I will post on more quotes in the preface during all my spare moments this week, though they appear to be few.

Back to reading Oscar Wilde; as I was reading the two in concurrence (not to mention Whitman for a third) I have overcome my hatred of the former and the latter. FJ reminds that Marx’s favorite author was Balzac–

it’s really just too bad that Wilde falls so hideously into his own traps. Brilliant imagery helps this. Onward!

signing off.

Endless Means (from i.s. draft)

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Russian Revolution occurred before it was won. The very idea that a revolution has to “win” is a tragedy. Power and the mass population are moving in polarized antithesis: the government of the One (capital and nations that ultimately submerge under their crushing power) against the isolation of the many. But the very mechanisms that alienate people further and further from one another (on a large-scale we might call this globalization, on a more accessible one, the Internet) are also those which ultimately empower the many against the One.

Capital destroys the vestiges of history that came before it—racism, sexism, ethnic hatred—the iron-clad boundaries that upheld one sphere of separation from the other have been asymptotically attenuated since the Industrial Revolution. And while these differences rapidly erode, the culture industry standardizes experience to an ever-lower common denominator of the public opinion. But these mechanisms of standardization are the very mechanisms that foster decentralized leadership and communication.

The world spins out and seeds back into itself, and stretches farther from its oblong origins—but because we were forgotten, because we were ignored, we can reemerge.

A quick note before the configuration of bullshit

Excerpt from my journal-

But why do we write this way? [The new blogging format...] What is it about short segments–is it the way large cause that we can’t name or even match all of the faces to all the names that are spun out over each other, again and again? The essay format– the essay writing asserts something in its form that can’t be resolved in its content. The form of the political essay, of the theoretical book, or even the cardboard undergraduate expository essay.

Aside from an end and a beginning, the essay demands an alternative (a positive alternative) that is connected, fluid, and a reflection of the totality. What a modernist lie. Closure. This moment (that we never can catch up with) is a moment of flux, a moment of sporadic recapitulation and reformation. [When I say reformation, I mean a new formation, from something that was completely isolated; this is not some kind of call to write to your Sentaor. Please.] We are in a moment that strains for a sense of fragmented direction–to contain a stupid structuralist analysis of displacement is ridiculous.

Unless of course you’re actually an idiot and only address questions from within an isolated discourse of maniac ideology.

Art as an old and rusty cliched term must locate all the half-alive bits, all of the words or methods that haven’t burned away or caused their last loyalists to commit suicide; it must merge with the old idea of unity. A new idea of unity. Ask me, “why doesn’t anyone care about poetry? it’s so good, there’s good content, there…” Isn’t it long gone because it line length hasn’t captured the post 20th century trauma?

[The 21st century trauma sinks into itself again and again--because we can't explain away this always empty, already fucked up abyss of cynicism or structure or defragmented reality.  Because we can't explain away this trauma that we were born with, into-who can tell the difference? And we don't pay attention to the line length of any old poem, even though we write them anywhere and everywhere, because we don't have the attention span to read them over. We can't pay attention to line length and see "deconstruction" because we were born deconstructed--it doesn't mean anything! you can split it up at the level of a syllable or a level of a paragraph--that trick only really works against the perfect spheres in your eyeballs. Even if we're good at it, we're pretending. And that's why you should be afraid of us.]

It’s a trick that our cynical socialization has doubled back onto us. Forget Shakespeare and Ezra Pound. The former contains a ‘beauty’ that we can’t appreciate because it has been proved to be your god, some result that was. Did you catch that: it. Even if it could have been real–it’s completely false and your reasons for loving it to pieces were wrong. And for the latter–Jesus Christ! how can we read about this? This fragmentation, when our trauma has not been the trauma of inflicted violence, but the bludgeoning of a generation since before the air’d hit our lungs, how can we thread this back together for you?

That bludgeoning that disallows us to process, let alone our capacity to think deeply.

What is it that you mean to say in a book? or in a poem? Isn’t it the truth: a form that staggered out, a bullet wounded cowboy from the bloody sandbox into this moment. That’s never this moment, but a few seconds before it, an asymptotic function in the philosophy of defeat.

And is this still a mystery, the reason for our cynicism?

Semester Independent Study Wrap Up Outline–

So; the semester’s coming to a close… sad sad. In some ways, it feels like it never really started. But of course, that’s only the surface reflection of course it started. What a tremendous and dialectical pitfall knowledge is: Miller was right. We fall, get up again, only to fall even further in the foolish elation of our wisdom. The endless Quaker Oats can (that’s my personal favorite)…

How strange is a thing like learning, a thing like knowledge? Unless you’re really paying attention to each and every step, you’re libel to forget that you ever had to learn it at all–

for me at least, this semester seems to have proven one thing (in terms of academia): most things seem to be an articulation of deeply paranoid suspicions. But to avoid any Kafkaisms, I will get to the punch.

Briefly, a working outline–

-A Debordian critique/account of Fall 2009; borrowing his style, obviously.

-My readings and assumptions

-The third wave: intellectual life of the multitude for the common [this is a huge topic, and something I'd like to work on for a senior thesis... here are it's parts that I'd like to account for this semester with my limited understanding and cursory knowledge:]

1. de-reification of everyday life (democracy, subjectivity, individual, love, etc)

2. love as an expression of the multitude

3. what is the multitude…

4. an expression of the common

5. the common as an intellectual (and not political) expression of the many for the many

6. many against the one: how globalization ushers in the new era…

-continued thoughts, concerns, questions

-further reading

-end notes and subjectivity at its best

*hope to get this all done (and done well) in exactly one week from today.

Hello all! It’s final-season!

And there isn’t much pity out there to be had. Eh, I’m over *being stressed.* I don’t really feel stressed anymore. But, to keep myself in the loop, I’m here to write out my plans for the next two weeks;

Writing a seminar paper on Diderot’s “The Nun.” Am addressing issues of singularity and collectivity (ugh, here comes that wretched term “the Other”). I think D’s use of the collective subject ‘we’ allows Suzanne’s narrative to overcome the otherwise brilliant rhetorical strategy of seductive writing. When this ‘we’ is used, it launches the narrative into a broader meta-comment on the implications of cloistered life in the era of French Enlightenment.

I really wish I could remember a certain quote whose ‘gist’ was something like: freedom is based on the oppression of many (I think it was a comment on the Greek notion of democracy… maybe it was Negri… damned my lousy reading and recounting!)

And after that, I am working on a longer piece for Professor Bronner’s class. Rooting my paper to Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” I’m exploring the implications of ideology for itself and debunking the myth of Stalin’s “communism.” Foremost, I want to make it clear that Koestler’s novel should not be understood as anti-communist, because it surely promotes every communist value; it is, however, staunchly anti-reaction (anti-totalitarian). Supplementary texts are: Lenin (essays on Imperialism and essays on philosophy), Debord (society of the spectacle, etc) and Negri (In Praise of the Common)…

And then of course, what I really care about. (Which is not to say I don’t really care about the rest…) The concept of the common. It might be better to say that some things last a long time, some thoughts, and I think I have embarked on the beginning of a very long path.

Notes on Lenin’s Imperialism;

1. Concentration of Production of Monopolies

The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises are one of the  most characteristic features of capitalism.

Lenin shows through empirical data the epoch of capitalist monopoly. He outlines the history of monopolies in three parts: a. 1860:  free market competition is at a climax (but the monopoly is barely detectable); b. post 1873 crisis: cartels are an exception, but are developing; c. “the boom” 1900-1903, cartels become the foundation (or one of the major foundations in economic life).

>Concentration within the monopoly has reached the point of making totalizing assessments of aggregate estimates of raw materials; the span of these areas surveyable are generally whole nations, but can often include general regions of the globe.

> “Socialization of production;” (production becomes social, but appropriation remains private.)

2. The Banks and Their New Role

As banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments, the baks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries. This transformation of numerous modest middlemen into a handful of monopolists is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism;

[Isn't that how we got started in the first place?]

> With the power of the banks, come the weakened importance of the Stock Exchange; “Every bank is a Stock Exchange, and the bigger the bank, and the more successful the concentration of banking, the truer does this modern aphormism ting.”

>The industrial capitalist becomes more completely dependent on the bank.
-the banks and he largest industrial firms merge with one another through the acquisition of shares…

The result is, on the one hand, the ever-growing merger, or, as N.I. Bukharin aptly calls it, coalescence, of bank and industrial capital and, on the other hand, the growth of the banks into institutions of a truly “universal character.”

>Free competition and monopolies cannot be reconciled; [obvious enough... there was never a free market to begin with...]

This shift, or turning point, is located in the turn of the 20th century- hurrah Russian Dogmatism, of course it does…

[Will write 3 and 4 shortly]

When I woke up it was Wednesday

Will I always have a professor (might be a person, but will most likely always be a professor) who insists on mucking up my papers with personal ideas and tangents? Ugh. Finals season; the semester has flown by. I can’t tell if I’ve learned a lot but I know that I have. I’m working with Diderot for my final paper in my seminar but am tripping over my first steps. This always happens. Maybe one day I won’t have to scrap nearly every project five pages in and begin again. But then again, maybe that’s what will ultimately save my writing.

One thing to remember: at any given time, I know enough to write.

That’s advice enough to call it a day.