Here it is, folks.

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

proper postings

Just what is a proper piece of writing? I won’t go in to the whole thing, diagnosing nonsense criteria in an attempt to flesh out what it means to live ethically in theory. To treat theory as a way of life.

But this question, the question that links ethics and theory, has me wondering. Is it at all right to think about everyday life as something that should be ethical? What I mean is, does the category of ethics bar one from reaching and contemplating more extensive sets of problems and questions? I suppose it depends on what one would call ethics, doesn’t it? There are a lot of different conceptions about the term: in a specifically Marxian-Hegelian line of thought, ethical modes of living from day-to-day are tenuous to say the least. I say that they’re tenuous because “everyday” connotes a certain type of banality, repetition, and in some ways it might slide into a practice of dogmatic theory. But then, this idea doesn’t hold any weight if the terms of “everyday practice” are necessities of a rigorous program to live revolutionarily. This seems to open up even more trap-doors into the netherworld of dogma.

There’s a rise and fall, the moon is dead but it is never really dead in language. Language; it’s the thing that I always come back to. Language itself is not revolutionary, it is political, for sure. But it’s political nature is rooted in its employment and not in any in-itself property. More than language, I would suggest that writing is a fundamental element to this everyday ethical practice of emancipation. A lot of people tell me not to conflate emancipation with truth: this is a really hard thing for me to do, but that’s another entry.

Rather a ramble, but I’m now I’m thinking.

Love is a qualified term

Love is a qualified term. There are lots of adjectives that go in front of it: agape, amorous, fraternal, paternal, maternal, familial, platonic. But what if, underneath (and perhaps excluding) these different demarcations and evocations of love, there was one fundamental meaning and significance of love?

This is where we switch gears. What if love can’t have a modifier? That modifier really suggests something else, something apart from love, or something that wishes to attach itself as an appendage to it. Here’s where I say that love is writing.

Writing, of course, is also a qualified term. In the course of this exercise (my senior thesis) I still haven’t come down all the possible paths. I still haven’t explored the implications of Love as Writing. So, to begin, let’s talk about love in terms of Badiou’s essay “What is Love?”. In that essay, I think that it’s safe to say that love is in direct relation to sextuation, that is, real physical and social relations between human bodies. There are several imperatives that Badiou invokes: these philosophical procedures are labeled as “truth procedures”. They are the processes and methods by which we find truth. These processes are: Art, Politics, Science, or Love. These various processes are true to the extent that they instantiate ‘humanity,’ which is to say that these processes legitimate communities, life, and the utopian concept of human togetherness.

Already, it’s easy to see that I’ve chosen three legitimating factors that color themselves within the lines of Art (utopia), Politics (community), and Science (life). And then, there is the fourth term, Love. Badiou goes into an analysis of love in both male and female sextuations: in the male variation, love legitimates the other realms concurrently within itself (it is equal to an extent, its role and priveledge are vital to the process, but only insofar as it is just a tad less equal to politics and art because it is only true if they are true). The female position on this is very different: we see that love is the surrounding factor, the procedure that totalizes and legitimates all of the others. It is the truth that is the most true. What does this mean?

Writing is dialectical, it is for the utopian, and it speaks the political.

In the introduction to this essay, Badiou launches into his main argument with a note on philosophy and novelistic prose, something that “women” have excelled at. Here, I believe that it’s crucial to let go of the generic and physical implications of women and consider the possibility that women is a qualifier for his later conception of love. If women is a type of code name for his female model of love. What is philosophy in all of this? And why is it that novelistic prose merely “thinks the thought of love?” Here, I believe that the quantum leap is made in terms of love as writing–specifically the discursive relationship between the following:

Philosophy and the novel (literature): If the novel thinks the thought of love, it can be said that love itself is philosophy. Philosophy is the truth procedure that legitimates humanity in toto: that is to say, it legitimates art, politics, and science. The novel is the animation of this truth procedure: it is the narration that does not interpret at a glance; the thought but not the interpretation. Philosophy, on the other hand, is the explication of the thought, the procedure behind narration: the imperative and the truth.

The singular and the universal: The reader and the world (humanity) that it accesses through this truth procedure (this procedure of love is played out on a number of different valences, which I’m still trying to illuminate thoroughly, but I’ve listed them below).

The producer and the “consumer” who is transformed: Through writing (and the reading of writing) love does not allow for passive members of humanity. Love instantiates the reality of art, of science, and of politics. It transforms dismantled into dialectical.

 

The philosophical incarnations of love:

Aesthetic (the utopian): the aesthetics of love as production. The imperatives of writing for a utopia; the needs for an aesthetic imperative. Works I’m using: Schiller, young Lukacs, young Geothe, Hegel.

Political (writing as Real, as phantasm): the image of “thoughts”; the dialectically legitimate (material) image (work) and the phantasmagorial. This last word means something like a method of translating and conflating reality into merely an image. A mythology, a process. A mythology as a mode of conflating reality and the political via translation (a note on ontology as a political hermeneutic). Works: Schelling, Adorno, Brecht, Lukacs.

Scientific (dialectical): what are the direct demands of philosophy and humanity’s animation if indeed it is literature? What is realism? and how are these goal accomplished? How do we break out of the images (ideologically binding utopias, mythological phantasms, and the like), to reach a legitimate and ultimately emancipatory type of love? Works used: Hegel, Marx, Badiou.

 

 

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.

 

We no longer live in an era that is backlight by institutional ideology. Instead, we live in a world that has been mythologized with images that conceal the ideological implications of reality vis-à-vis experiential desires and categories. The essential point is to employ the dialectical line of thought produced between Marx and Hegel (located around Hegel’s theses on the State)  in order to reinstate a mode of realism that is predicated on following dialectical procedures that liberate the utopian  impulses from their veiled suspension within ideology so that they can confront reality. This is not a merely negative operation of destruction, but one that disperses the conflated images of “the everyday” so that life is possible.

 

We can always pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but are our feet in the shoes?

I keep thinking about the opening pages of Aesthetics and Politics and Lukacs’ subsequent response. There’s something fundamentally missing from his response because he fails to fully see what Bloch is saying. Subjects and impulses come up and re-index themselves at seemingly random moments: Lukacs’ response seems to say “and what does it matter if the topic of conversation isn’t grounded in the Realist Tradition?” But just the opposite is true. At the very moment when fascism was on the rise in the thirties, a renewed interest and reemergence of the Expressionists makes the most sense. It was a movement, in so many words and over-simplifications, of a desire to break out of a social reality and a condition that was intolerable for the subjective participant. And yet, this artistic experience is only possible authentic (in the imagistic sense) for that singularity. What Bloch’s use of the Expressionists signals, is that utopian impulses exist in the most oppressive ideological conditions and enterprises. Whether or not Bloch, himself, had this unspecific appreciation for the Expressionists, I highly doubt, since he frequently queued up the need for greater material integration of specific works into his critique. But then I think that this might have only been one way of addressing a critique whose sole purpose was to show Realism on the first valence.

The recurrence of a “utopian” image, or rather, the image that carries the latent desires of utopia within a full veil of ideological and social constraints that it cannot see, is a theme that Adorno’s letters to Benjamin picks up. He says of the collective image, that it was always a commodity fabrication and that the real objective point of reality for the collective is in its systematic subjective alienation (Aesthetics and Politics p.119). And on this point, I was reminded exactly of the Expressionists, for their systematic alienation from the authentic core of their own aesthetic production. Whether or not Expressionist art is conscious of this, is secondary…less than secondary, it seems to be necessary in order to produce a meaningful “Real” conception of the movement. Additionally, 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 image. But the its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history.

For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation/comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, I think that 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 Either/Or, both and neither. As my professor once said, it really is the limit of the Kantian argument (insofar as Practical reason is concerned).

But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgement. 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.

Red moon, blue sea, empty house

the hopeless and interminable feeling of artistic surges over in an expressive force, like the desire to speak to the boy who was left alone too long. left alone far too long and without a letter. the impression that stifles every refined word that i could drum up but haven’t learned, any project or open-road is closed-off by my idea of tomorrow’s hours, all-accounted and necessary, obligations and seasonal rifts. i wonder if tonight, the copper moon will cast a crooked shadow on a buckled sidewalk crack and let me see the trees and tiny snow flakes, burning against the full highland sky, heath freezing over like a weaving of icicles. and i could see stones moving in ghostly shapes, and what would it mean if i saw a face? a human face? this heavy and blunt despair falls away into the absurd gray hues of this computer screen and the wall opposite me and the person across the room, even shadows have lost their mystery–they wear the weight of bored and hunched shoulders.

i can only think by what i cannot say, i have no words that are mine and i don’t have the practice or precision to form them against the uniformity of a shaping knife. blind, surging spirit and feeling have spilled me out somewhere from first high, and now i spin a rabble of trash into glass, inviting others inside.

i still swell up like a bloated fish against the pitfalls of a well conditioned routine. everyday commonality is a phrase that means banality and my community has poisoned itself with false, fleeting dreams that are always smoking off glowing embers somewhere over the horizon–the romantic volcano would burn us in the street if we came too close to it. and oh, how we love our feet and fingers.

we see that we are on the land above the sea. we walk on water not by faith but by stones, pavement poured over and into the water like shell mounds that will not die.

and i am polluted by agreeing to regurgitate words before i’ve understood them. i stand choking above a toilet just after the second course– gagging and nauseated but i signed up for more, more, more, for the promise of more.

it’s clear to me, the politics of continuing the meal: we fall away from praxis and push it further still by force, pointing out until we have become masters of self-deception, of proving lacksis. we reaffirm just what we tell ourselves we patiently wait to fight against. we sit weak and sick on our own acids, at the grand meal of tastefully selected paradise in the dumps of New Jersey, where even the tomatoes are grown in cement.

more, more, more;

it was perhaps the worst slogan–
“WE WANT EVERYTHING,”

of course you do.

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.

 

nichol avenue

I walk down the street. I can’t say that this November’s storminess hasn’t excited some hope for the gothic romance. But this is my first season of maturity, and so I hope for nothing, and resist that warm ache in my arms exacted by the cooling wind. I see a tree next to my old building. It’s an ugly building. It was an ugly time, there. But this tree had every manifest shade of red. I said to myself as I walked past it, that it was too red, held too much in its shaded depths to be real, and that it was just like all the best pictures of a tree that I had ever seen. I stopped, and remembered suddenly that this was not a moving picture. And that I was walking under this slowly ebbing sky which refused to relegate its heavy blueness to a pallid gray. I thought not that this tree in the falling moments of autumn was made for me. And that, like this tree, I might really shade over from the drab brick wall into real life. I walked toward someplace and the side streets cascaded down to the lower reaches of town. Leaves, rich with the color of dying, blotted the sky, one by one, until they hit the dirty street, the hedged grass of an old city. And it was in this promise of hard winter, when I was still afraid of only ever rotting away in the green of June, when I looked at the dirt in my fingernails and dove into that blue withering mist and thought perhaps I really was made in and for this world.

 

A love letter

In life, longing has to remain love: that is its happiness and its tragedy. Great love is always ascetic, whether it raises the object of love to supreme heights and by so doing alienates it from itself and from the lover, or whether it merely uses that object as a springboard; whereas petty love abases love and causes mutilation, which is another form of asceticism. Great love is the natural, the real, the normal kind of love, but among living human beings it is the other kind that has become normal: love as silence and repose, love which cannot and will not lead to anything else… In life, longing has become love, and now love is struggling to be independent from longing, its lord and begetter.

Longing and Form, 115

No secret messages. Love is soul that is excited through human form, but this human form kills it. Longing is a bridge. The bridge that connects the two that cannot become the one. And these bridges, these are the constructions of madness, the forms that stretch out not to realized souls but merely towards their attempts. Longing was the very bridge destroyed for the lived life. One without the other is nothing. Love as silence and repose always gives something away. The self that has no divides cannot share secrets, it cannot play games or live externally. The innards are external. Love is teeth upon the ice-block, the excitement and the pleasure of immanent numbness: the realization of love is always the refusal to allow that silent, lying body to feel its own truth in another form, a reflection carved from the novice’s hand, an arbitrary use of pieces and parts.

“It is that feeling of being both near and far which comes with great understanding, that profound sense of union which yet is eternally a being-separate, a standing-outside,” (112). In life, that which takes human form, love cannot but be actualized as that aside from longing. Love is the unity and understanding, the acknowledged life that remains unwhole. Its unwholeness is not due to a non-realization. In fact, love and longing are most purely felt as the sublated unity in human isolation. In this life, they are felt in isolation but this conference of unity in difference is based on the dream of some great and true infinity. And how painfully that silent death, that maskless death must be. The soul evacuating its formal actualization- the final act of love.

For the kernel of love is an unbearable sentiment to life–in silence, in hardened, dusty soils, the body of what is or even what could ever be realized is the unbearable truth of humanity: that which predicates actualization is at its core the blistering and glittering beauty of the inexpressible.

I wonder if longing in life is yet another imagined duality which provokes man to discover true love–the cruel knife-twist in the heart from l’autre that reaches out, builds bridges, no matter how tentative, to the manifold sky yet without shape. There can never be love of the two–there is desire for the other and longing for the one. And this longing in its earthly shape has already foreclosed itself in our best interests so that we no longer desire, but ache.

Great love is the soul, the utopian heart of the matter, and is only realized insofar as it is located within earthly matter, or form. The question is of which form and for what end will this heart beat?

A heart that hardens
on the ice-block had better let its red
life-ribbons melt it;
unity of difference,
blood and water, better than
a frozen soul,
a shattered life.

soy amor intellectualis: that warm feelin’ ain’t your super-ego, that’s your space-heater.

In the intellectual conscience possessed of it, the social moment is no less present than the moral super-ego. Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and its citizens. if this conception dims–and who could still trust blindly in it–the downward urge of the intellect loses its inhibitions and all the detritus dumped in the individual by by barbarous culture– half-learning, slackness, heavy familiarity, coarseness–comes to light. Usually it is rationalized as humanity, desire to be understood by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline comes much too easily to its maker for us to believe his assurance that it is one.

-Minima Moralia “If knaves should tempt you”

It’s hard to imagine, as I have often thought, that we are really engaged in any sort of project, at all. So comfortable in the always contingent moment upon our success, that magic rupture that we are all patiently waiting for–I have said it before, we wait for it behind a shower of mass music. I’m not talking about the rhetorical “us” of the American public college student, nor even the quasi-intellectual. I’m talking to you–who call yourself a communist, who were once horrified by the history and the present and every word you heard over dinner. What horrifies you now but the prospect of your own failure for admission? Of your program that all our most successful teachers tell us to adopt? Deep down, we know what we’re doing isn’t a project, that it isn’t radical, or legitimate.

To be legitimate, what if we had to leave the context that might breed our distinction? Yes, that painful sacrifice to be disconnected from the soul of life that we fight so dearly for in our readings and writings and fervent meetings late at night no longer is a sacrifice if what we desire is that warmish solace for the teaching-post. It seems to me that we have plenty of teachers who are engaged in the discourse and not enough who are engaged in imagination.

A caveat: the radical imagination already exposes itself as anti-radical, as that which privileges the current cushy-ness that even the most glamorous theorists have admitted in a self-denying fashion. The utopian imagination is only radical insofar as it has already foreclosed the possibilities of life, of unity, of legitimate production towards a personal and political ethic that transcends this silly climate. This intellectual sphere that, like the private, I mean public, has been completely sealed off and radiated with the worst kind of paraben containing plastic wrap–and the microwave has been turned on full blast. Oh we are in a hothouse of trends and cynicism, where dreamers are only dreamers after they have formally addressed reality in their compatriots’ eyes’. “Radical” compatriots, who define themselves as such because they themselves are full of secret cancer cells of egoism.

Oh that ego: what would you do if the university system were eradicated? Perhaps the dirty little secret is that organization, material, and leadership are in no way contingent on the formal boundaries of this place. And at best, maybe all we can say is that this hide-out is the easiest way for us to cling to some soulful dream of nerve-scrubbing study-time. And it’s just too damn bad that we have to teach expository writing, wear tweed jackets, and write performative statements…

Reject this logic. Reject the fear. Reject the ego and its messages: no, no, it might be best to listen to it instead of following its sensuous frivolity, whose sensuousness is rooted in the consumption of the other, whose frivolity is the real confession of the project’s subordination in the margins of your mind. We didn’t get into this to get famous, or to get good jobs. Or even to get laid.

The only thing I could say we have a right to confer upon, and for, is love.

Everyone snarls at the idea that we could organize outside the institution. What if our worldly-wise responsibility is to shirk this “responsibility” in search of the jack-hammer against the imaginary bunkers we’ve built ourselves into?

Would you still have a dream?

so, the bridge is destroyed: unity cares nothing for ravines.

An episode in the lives of a few human beings, of no more than episodic significance for the world at large. Everywhere the earth resounds with battles, whole worlds are collapsing, but here, in a small German town, a few young people come together for the purpose of create a new, harmonious, all-embracing culture out of this chaos. They rush at it with that inconceivable, reckless naivety that is given only to people whose degree of consciousness is morbidly high, and to these only for a single cause in their lives and then again only for a few moments. It was a dance on a glowing volcano, it was a radiantly improbable dream; after many years the memory of it still lives on the observer’s soul as something bewilderingly paradoxical. For despite all the wealth of what they dreamed and scattered, “still there was something unhealthy about the whole thing.” A spiritual tower of Babel was to be erected, with nothing but air for its infrastructure; it had to collapse, but when it did this, its builders broke down too.

Gyorgy Lukacs, “On the Romantic Philosophy of Life”

Words that come to bear on the heart of a mind that cannot help but see transparency. And that these words conferred among something towards a real soul–a real soul of breaking; the form of faith which finds strength in petty whims, in shallow loves that cannot suffer. In the moment does soul dwell in the slow ebb of contingency. With every shake away from this contingency, such naive passion that was not love nor conference nor even friendship at its core. The word contingency itself reflects the absence of form, or of unity–it is the gentle shattering of this  shadow away from the heart of love. I’m wondering what’s the wandering arbitrariness of everything, of wanting all soul and an empty liife, a life that dreams of living. And where are the empty ravines in precious time, precious time for rambling, for madness and youth. The air, build a tower and break down, if you must, lose naivety, what’s all this for youth? But if, but if, the Romantics for love might have also let the rubble pile up into a new mountain, maybe not a city but still a whole.

And yet, perhaps this discussion is better served with the final word on fools versus the naive. For fools, love is a choice, a commitment–brilliance is sacrificed for comfort, sweet contingency. For the naive, oh how well we see shapes in that stillest wind.

the forms of sorrow

I talked yesterday of suffering. Yes, I think that much of what I said was true. Suffering is that which dominates the lived life. But it is this life of suffering that kills us; it threatens the form and content of life if it is not put to some other use. Goethe wishes to find strength enough to break outside the content of his sorrows, find fortitude to work in that other form of writing, ostensibly the essay, to reflect in language, God’s imprint on his soul. Sorrows cannot do this. Sorrows are mere reflection, mere existence. There is a Brecht snippet I’m thinking of in the Me-ti parables “How One Helps Oneself,” when Tu-su, broken from his lovers, bored of his soul, wishes to escape himself. All that time he traveled he was miserable, without a dream and without a purpose. Rather, if he had a dream or a purpose, it hung about the trees, forgotten in human wandering.

Yes, I think that he was leading the lived life. He fell ill from his heart and soul’s discontent, and lay to die, when a fire caused him to take part in the civil war raging around him. The final line of this parable goes “If, during this time, he was never heard to say that he felt emotionally well, that can only have been because nobody asked him about his feelings.”

We must not forget about life–its limits and its implications–in order that we might wallow in reflection of our soul. Lukacs’ forms of life on the bridges of existence, yes those must be burned. But always? The form of life is what maintains us, constricts our suffering and demands something more than feeling, although our sublated action might well be tainted, plagued, with melancholy. The point is that it is not merely melancholy.

So it is not enough to say one thing or the other; it is not merely suffering, nor can there be genuinely political existence without this lived suffering, for it reminds us that it is not our soul and only our soul that aches, but our bodies that ache in common, in human form.

He looked at my hand as he held it, as I held his arm. I turned and he held me in his arms. I saw his face and kissed him. He felt so thin. “You have to eat more. Please, you have to take care of yourself.” The wear on his face from exhaustion. The relief of being in his arms. I put my hand on his face, felt his soft beard. As I said I love you I thought of Badiou—and that here we were, trying to cross a bridge of our own. It was imaginary; our love is bigger than us. It was the rain and every tempered pulse, it was still knowing. “Love is more than me or you. We cannot change it or make it go anywhere. It is; and I’m not afraid. We have to do this,” I said. And he knew. He rested his head on my arm; I combed his wet hair with my hand. I looked out across the pond and the leaves on the trees stung out vibrantly against the heavy rain and the gray sky. I looked up at him; splotches of water hit our faces. We laughed. I took off his glasses and held his face close to mine. I held him. We must have been looking at each other, my eyes and his eyes. I felt his soul around me. The wind blew and leaves scattered through the air, haplessly to the water’s surface.

today’s edition of “is this normal?”

Goodness is madness, it is not mild, not refined, not quietistic; it is wild, terrible, blind, adventurous. The soul of the good man has become empty of all psychological content, of grounds and consequences; it has become a pure white slate upon which fate writes its absurd command, and this command will be followed blindly, rashly, and fiercely to the end. That this impossibility becomes fact, this blindness becomes clear-sightedness, this fierceness becomes Goodness–that is the miracle, the grace.

Gyorgy Lukacs “On Poverty of Spirit”

The psychological content of goodness is it’s divinity, but that is to say nothing of the real feeling of pain and torture that the soul feels as it does Good. Goodness, yes, is the breaking of everyday forms, it jumps from the bridges of formal postulations into what–? And that the soul might jump, might break away from form, is the first and strongest moment, precisely because it is not felt, but rather understood. The formally ethical, formally moral, inhuman constraints by which we attempt to define the human are in fact what deny its existence. It’s almost not worth mentioning the tattered constellation of the psychological soul that falls away into the unknown, other than the pain is uncontrollable.

But what was I thinking in the first place? The formal logic of love made it impossible–it foreclosed itself from me. And what does it mean that Goodness, for its divine incarnation in an utterly formal world fractures the tenderly aching soul? Has the soul been foreclosed from life, even if that life is unlived? Lukacs says that this is all psychology. No, no, not all, but merely psychological. But the human is marked for its ability to be good regardless of its psychology, it can touch the rashness of Goodness, the transhistorical reality of it. Oh that these forms might be broken, if at first they were the real life, or were they always forms? Can goodness be anything but usurped by form? If the life cannot be lived in them, in morality and duty, might goodness ever really be fulfilled? And at the end of this, are my arms only stretching into the blistering whiteness of it all, for some rope dangling?