Updates, updates

Hope to have something posted up here on MH’s Basic Writings soon. Currently wading through more Lenin for group, maybe a note on pedagogies of reading groups…

I’ll briefly outline an interesting situation from last week: there were two of us leading the discussion of “What is to be done,” and at the end of the session I asked what people would like to read for next week. (More Luxemburg, “State and Revolution,” and Imperialism”) At first, someone said that they wanted more Rosa; the other group leader said that “just Rosa” was too light to follow up Lenin, then someone said Imperialism… long story short, the whole conflict of reading assignments for this week was only solved after we (the discussion leaders) stepped in and said that State and Revolution would expand the core themes in WITBD and that we could follow up with Imperialism the following week.

This situation was uncanny: we had just spent an hour discussing the role of the revolutionary party whose primary basis for the seizure of state power was predicated on the idea that leadership, growth, and determination is based on a select group who safeguards those goals until everyone else is able to participate. But it was strange: what do you do when you can’t act as a soviet counsel? When it’s ten people sitting around a table, what does it mean when we can’t organize critically?

Maybe all of these questions are funneling into my looming fear that reading groups and university learning-sites necessarily run by institutionalized Leninists (wittingly or not). (Fear is because it’s predicated on the “party” i.e. the teacher.) I prefer soviet-style, I don’t mind a few thematic blunderings here and there. But, alas, we are reading on-schedule and following thematic wake.

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.

 

 

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.

The empirically aesthetic fiction of politics

so  many more things can go wrong on a computer than on a type-writer. and yet the typewriter has me stumped. The ribbon is twisted. It’s making me completely angry… not at the typewriter. It’s a different kind of technical problem. I think if I tried to survey all of the different kinds of “technical problems”, or the estrangement that I have with italicizing something, it makes me very uneasy.

I didn’t realize it until a little while ago. Here I am, staring out my window, but I’m writing, with as much confidence and fluidity as if I were laboring over the lines. And if I make an error, something will highlight it for me. If I need to imprint the words or shift a letter, all I have to do is push a button. It’s not about the typewriter, either. That is just the thing that came before this… they are made of the same sentiments. What I feel, though, is the separation of my thoughts and their production. Is this real? Cloud data somewhere, and as long as we have this, it will be around well after my youngest sister has her last grandchild. Of what I made in a cloud, it will be seen in the numbers that make the image of the cloud, and the final product is a virtual list, fluidity, production.

I was talking last night with some friends. One said that he feels pure theory is self-indulgent crap, and that there has to be some empirical use for it. I had a hard time understanding his comment. Of course, I see that theory can be self-indulgent, like that presenter at Cornell a few months ago who said that his theory only worked in theory. (He was talking about some post neo anti fascist babble about the blood and the earth relating to the Hobbsean myth of humanity. For this I can submit Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach.) But his own argument seemed to preclude itself from theory, full stop. If something only works in theory, it seems to me that it is a mere fiction. And that something is a fiction, it must be understood both empirically and theoretically. Which leads me to my second critique of my friend’s statement, that the aesthetic may or may not really be an empirical use of theory. But theory is not to be used empirically. At least, not in any pedestrian sort of way. Like the man who said that his theory works only in theory, I would say to him that he was writing fiction, and that it would best be left to the theorists to make sense of his fiction. And to determine that his fiction was in fact a fiction and not a theory, one must inhabit the uses and abuses of imagined theories and sorts of other fictions from the empirically theoretical, and not the theoretically empirical, which is always a fiction.

And so it seems that theory is not a theory unless it is used in such a way that allows us to see the “empirical” (which is a fiction, as well, for various reasons, not the least of which is the very need to “find” the empirical).

I wonder, though, about the uses of a theoretical standpoint in the empirical production of aesthetics (forgive me if I start to sound cute). In the last day of the Idealist Tradition, we were having a stupid man’s discussion of the intersection between aesthetics and ethics. I should say that my understanding of the whole thing is a little stupid, but all in all, I think that the class was useful, even if only negatively. Okay, so we were ending the Idealist Tradition on a bit of sour note with Nietzsche. I really do need to spend time finding out just why I hate him so much…

The Idealist tradition “dies” but for me, it only dies insofar as it is ignored. I can’t go much deeper into my analysis of N right now, aside from the fact that he can neither be an anarchist nor a fascist. His fascism is impossible because it demands a rejection of all structure, and he cannot function as an anarchist because his anarchism depends upon the hierarchical construction of a united society. So, forgive all of my childish antics and my trite tone and lack of style when I say that Nietzsche seems to me like the crystallization of modern hysteria. This idea is malformed though, and I’m sure that someone has already written on it.

Here, I’m pulling myself back in to the discussion of the aesthetic and the ethical. I do see that the Fascists could have been great modern artists, insofar as they have precluded themselves from the real implications of being a fascist. In short, they were never really fascists, and if they were fascists in the way that people love to categorize them as Nietzschians, they were just scaley-eyed followers from the get-go. They did not know or posses the theoretical knowledge of their own aesthetic kernel. They might as well have made boots in Berlin.

I don’t know if I’m saying what I mean to say, and that’s because I am really undecided about the matter. No, I am not saying that Nolde was not Nolde, rather that he did not posses the means, empirically, that made him great. In a sense, i do understand that the aesthetic seems to be subsumed in the political, since it best operates (on an empirically functional level) when the actant is not aware of his situation. At best, he is only partially aware. In literature, I am thinking of Flaubert.

So, if aesthetics are not the mediatory device, and are instead understood as the kernel within the political, at the very worst, as something half dismantled from the political, what can I have to say about the production of art?

The way we move beyond both the “aesthetic” and “the political” to the first degree, is t borrow Fredric Jameson’s mathematical metaphor and kick it to the next power: we enter the realm of theory to deal with the empirical realities of imagined theories and politics.

From the merely aesthetic, just as the merely political, it is impossible to see which one is the empirical application of what, and at what time. It is also impossible to see the break between artistic greatness and technical skill, whose inspiration lies elsewhere. Theory, then, is the positing of these competing “first valence” phenomena, and placing them against not only themselves but against history and their contingent places in “empirical” reality. If you would like to call the theoretical a vacant category of metaphysics, you’ve got to be kidding yourself.

For an entry on the proper designation of theory and its production as “aesthetic,” I might need to eat some lunch, first.

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.

 

flower chains

Is it really that much more difficult to refrain from feeling petty things? Is it a matter of soul or of situation that meetings, friendships, projects, take on the look of an a-political social club? At the fuzzy locus point, is the real belief and hope to get laid, get friends, get together, all masquerading under the equivocated “education of peers?” Or do we know why we’re here. Perhaps there has been some confusion. I used to think that feeling this way (which is less of a feeling than a confrontation), wanting things to be different in the world, and seeing them differently from others obliged me to make decisions that didn’t all together “register” in the liminal world. It was okay to break this or that “friendship;” I knew when to work and when something was performative and should be left behind. But slowly, and fearfully–and I should say–with regret enough to pass it by–that the world of thinking differently and writing and even of “being radical” has slipped under a twilight.

Projects written alone in an attic reached fewer people, were still the practice of a novice, sure. But it was there. And now, writing cover letters and personal statements and finding this or that writer “totally unintelligible” has become the norm. I can’t pretend to say that these more, oh I don’t know, middle class woes have highlighted the failing inability to really discuss politics, philosophy, ethic, spirit. Yes, on a very real level, I am behaving like a foolish child: but really, I can’t bear the thought of working this hard for entry into some tight-lipped institution with a bunch of self-loving hypocrites whose political affiliations from the get-go have already been dismantled. There is something to say for education; there’s quite a lot to say about it. On the other hand, real education is often held in the least aesthetically-appealing bits of town, on the back streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey; it’s drinking the dirty water and swimming in it, letting hair turn hard from the polluted swirl.

In spite of everyone’s (radical) best intentions, are we not living in the brain-dead day-to-day? We’re just boying this or that shirt for this or that event, driving late at night, mixing our contemplations of love and production within our veritable “inboxes.” If we–and here, I mean I–look deeply enough, it is perfectly legitimate to note the movement of the contemporary young person in search of radical vocation as:

1. Shocked, radicalized, bare, completely rejecting the opportunities and categories of this world
2. A slow concrete shadow, a fear of the tradition, a period of groping, of constant thought, isolation (in university context)
3. Friendships, company, respite from the depression of it all
4. An imagined agility; acceptance of context, of performance, of “system navigation”

But like those who say “you can be radical on facebook, it’s all about the system,” isn’t it high time we let ourselves in on the bad joke? That we have allowed ourselves, our impulses, our power, to be contained in the ideological? Perhaps this isn’t just facebook; it’s graduate school and the Friday night party, drinks after class… we have turned our company into a cycle of repeating consumption. Because what are we changing, versus what are we allowing to change us?

Marx said

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

I see lots of chains, lots of ironical statements from people who know better. And I feel them. We know what we’re looking at. We know that there’s “no radical break available.” But what are we moving towards? And how might we even say we know what we long for, anymore? To never feel that sparkling pain blazing in the skies above us as truth and not as a bleeding heart! We wear our commitments like good little boys and girls, writing the pamphlets, passing the papers, organizing the events. But our lives, and everything we see for ourselves, must once again reject this long-term melancholy of retreat. Love must be seen as a matter of course and not a highway exit (else we might miss it, forever!) in the way we live our lives, with the hope, clarity, and grit conferred upon our every day existence.

We have decorated our homes and hearts in a garland, and admire our great courage to bear it all in the face of such dismantled beauty. But we are still in our homes , as the fields of flowers outside our windows are paved away in gridded squares, our hearts closing in on themselves.

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.

Production is love;

Badiou’s essay on love focuses on the dialectical procedure of love. It is not sharable or experienced by the members (lovers) who create it, for it would not be love. The thing, the love production is not based on a consumption or an experience, rather the production of it. So what is thought of (viewed as) a action of consumption, true “love” is really a creation. Likewise, in Adorno’s Me-Ti teaching that concerns itself with the ethics of revolution, or living revolutionarily, there are more than a few integral parables. The first says that there is no purpose in fighting without learning the best way to live. The second is that there are not many “you should” statements, but one is “you should produce,” and the third follows two lovers who build their love “as if they expected to write history.” The first points to an issue of revolutionary/analytical ethic in varying contexts: there is a way to live in the “everyday” that is revolutionary, that is political; and that this striving should not be in direct opposition to the present context necessarily, but that attention should always fall primarily on the “universal” or always-utopian perspective otherwise the revolutionary impulse falls prey to becoming a reactionary ritual because its physical (contextual) manifestation is repeated and not the over-arching drive. The second statement directly incites production. In the context of late capitalism, it is easy enough to disregard this kind of phrase, or to misinterpret it: after all, isn’t there a sort of over abundance of production? No, this statement is really a variation on the first; it is a question of means versus ends (creation versus consumption). Mass production is really shown to be a direct consumption, only consumption, and this massive production of material items never truly makes anything that is made for itself—it is a binding one-way relationship instead of the dialectical production of love, that will be explained in greater detail below. So, what we think of as mass production really harnesses and re-harnesses people back into the wheel of consumption, which is not genuine. What is genuine does not have any direct tie into the material realm (of course it does have ties, but it is not directly visible in the material schema that capital markets have created), thus to understand what truly “ethical” (this term is highly problematic, see note below) revolution/utopian living, is production for production’s sake. Living with endless means. This follows to the third parable that which highlights what two lovers had made for themselves. Their love was not an experience, ready-made with embroidered towels, because they were not accepting a readymade narrative or idea (see introduction to Marxism and Form), but living for the method by which they lived. Turning to Badiou’s essay, one recalls that love is not an experience but only what it is imagined to be, imagined in an ideology that does not yield to utopian productions but only to the repeated trials and disasters of “experience.” Love as a truly revolutionary and emancipatory force is only visible when the lenses of material existence are stripped away: it is the manifestation of ethics in everyday life, the utopian drive that does not demand a return aside from the method by which it is produced. Production that yields its own fruit and whose “work” is never just experienced or watched or replayed, but always integrated into the analytical fabric of production. Love, or production that is love, is written by the lovers as if they were to write history because there was a close attention to the construction and not the polished surface, because history refused to end itself or expose some impossible root. Where can we see love? In what forms do the ends of production fold themselves back into a distinctly “ethically revolutionary” capacity more than in literary production? What is sold (on the surface) as just another artifact from a broken life of consumption and finance drags the reader into the very context that he is otherwise unable to view. This is not to say that buying and even reading a book is the ethically revolutionary move that allows people to live with endless means, ie emancipate them. Nor does this suggest that all literature is emancipatory, merely that its content and readership take part in a type of “peering” in all cases, whether or not the reader or the work is aware.

What literature (perhaps this might be extended to other modes of creation…) does foster is an interpretation, an analytical extension of the “work” or product, into the intimate life, the lived life, while something like a video game is a refutation of lived experience (incommensurable) [necessary day-to-day items that are created and consumed in the larger web of mass production have other issues that clearly refute their being a tool of endless production; what I am talking about encloses narrative/ideological productions]. Production, then is not only a type of construction but also an ability to analyze, contextualize and reinvision the world in which we live. Production then, in its largest sense, has everything to do with the purpose for which we live.

forgotten not-fathers, fallen sons of ghosts. two and three years before they were at play in no one’s hands, no one’s tragedy. in the hidden clutches of a force field that let them think that they were just men, that they would live. and so long after, never meeting them we stand under our shower heads in the late morning grayness mumbling the same stories to ourselves. the Future still dormant in a shiny knot of history; all we see is possibility but for all we dream there are only tangles of jackets and crushed fingers under what we thought of as our Right.

The anagogic impulse in Jameson

Okay, I’m getting really burnt out here, so I’m going to give this one last cursory shot for the night. In the first chapter of tpu, Jameson engages with the “scholastic” exercise of Althusser’s antiinterpretive current in Marxism. (I’ve made note of his footnote on page 23 about skipping over this particular bit of the book on my “Jameson Form” note page and want to go deeper into his form in theory later.) I’ve got to admit that Althusser is still a really huge challenge for me, even on the level of reader-comprehension; but generally, Jameson’s interpretation of Althusser’s Darstellung or expressive causality (also historicism) is relatable to periodization in that it inevitably privileges one component of that particular epoch as a master-code in interpreting that given period. (Here, self-referentiality is blatant): Althusser’s mode of expressive causality is also envisioned as a type of allegorical code for the individual subject” insofar as he or she can imagine herself in direct/lived relation to otherwise transpersonal realties and the social collective logic of history” (30). Jameson then goes on to discuss the four levels of allegorical access to reality through a biblical type of formation of the four levels of allegorical placement, the fourth level ending in the anagogical.

Here, I’m going to switch from within the very specific situation of this analysis within the text and move to Jameson’s conclusion, which begins, with much ado (please see my last entry, if confused) about the need for the displaced individual subject and a remastering of even individual subject-oriented overdetermination (always within and causally absent somewhere within the structure) into a genuine subject-of-History-as-collectivity. In this sense, the displaced individual whose Althusserian (and ostensibly Derridian) variants are lost in a network of structural and therefore post-structural nonsenses, the only way “out” of this particular structural causality is through a collective identity. The term anagogical is very clearly oriented towards a type of pre-cursor to the dialectic of ideology and Utopia, because within the anagogic mode of interpretation (in an Althusserian sense) there is arrested the unmanageable Utopian impulses of a historicist/individual-based approach to Utopia. The discussion of the individual, in very crass terms, that I’ve been so worked up over, must essentially be re-considered and re-worked, even on the conceptual level of the Intellectual, which is not a disparate set of minds but a collective historical body [I have to back away even from this kind of mental leap, however, without a lot of serious contemplation]. But the anagogic mode of interpretation in a Jamesonian sense is also the pivotal moment in considering the dialectic of ideology and Utopia.

The veritable “after life” of the imagined relationship to the concrete is wholly ideological in its formal grasp (the advertisement sign that arrests the water-cooler worker into another set of false events) and the mis-managed Utopian impulse that it awakens and profits from. But, at the heart of this anagogic relationship is the essential crux of the mis-management, which can’t be “resolved” (rather, I’m not engaging in that sort of discussion here) but where the essential truth of Marxist historical materialism is present, that is, the Utopian impulse itself is the dialectical counter to ideology. Namely that, although the ideological can misappropriate desire (understood as the Utopian impulse) is invalid as a content-worthy amelioration to that original impulse and this is verifiable in the very re-creation of the event, the return to cultural management. So, while the allegorical relationship to the real does in fact appropriate reality, its very success (has ensured consumption, for example, which fails the consumer, and in-turn ensures further consumption) is in fact exposing its own weakness against the Utopian impulse that refuses reification on a social level, even if the individual is inextricably lost in a mine-sweep of causal relations.

It’s what I can’t talk about

Seven people in a mini-van, driving in and around the bowels of the Greater New York Area. “That looks nice, in a weird way,” he said, pointing to the petrochemical refineries awash in glowing orange light bulbs.

Before, at the house, the drummer goes into the attic while I’m still getting ready. It’s always too loud. These guys are some of my best friends. He comes down, ten books in hand– “Lennin and Philosophy, The German Ideology, The Lenin Reader, The Communist Manifesto, Spectres of Marx,” he says. He had been sent on a task.

They all take a book “one, two, three, go,” says the guitarist. They read in stereo, each his own chapter of a book that none of them cared to understand. They hate to seem contrived.

I laugh. You’ve got to laugh. But you also just get a little sad. My best friends.

We get the bassist. The fucking gps isn’t working. I’m trying to read in the back, the bassist wants a “straight answer” about political theory, about radical politics, about what I’m studying, and what it is.

I don’t say much. I can’t talk about it, not because I don’t care… I mean, I can’t say anything because I don’t know. I say “it’s just difficult to have a conversation about this stuff on a general scale because there’s no common framework for it. There are a million little separations and distinctions as it is, and I’m only a novice.”

“You don’t seem to make a good case for yourself,” he says.

I’m not trying to make a case. I try to be polite. I get self conscious, I’ve been told they make fun of me when I’m not there. I’m not embarrassed. I just wish they could understand something I’m talking about. But the worst part is that I realize I don’t even know…

To look at this another way, perhaps it is good that I find myself unable to engage or (pretend to) mediate between to incommensurable discourses.

“Isn’t the theory kind of bullshit?” he says.
“What theory?” I say.
“Political theory,” he says
“Which one, or you mean in general?” I say.

I think he’s talking about what he believes to be Leninism, or maybe just a capitalist view of the USSR. I have no idea. I side step the question and distinguish between politics and philosophy.

“But isn’t that kind of bullshit,” the pianist says under his breath.

I shrug and say it’s very difficult to talk about with someone who isn’t familiar with the same references points, perhaps if we had a piece to talk about, that would be better. Then I feel like I’m being a snob, and cross my arms in a “T” and briefly engage in a bite-size morsel of diachronic v. synchronic time. “A book, a movie… anything really, is more than a relic in periodization; it is also manifest of other times,” I’m a fucking fool, a smarter person, a better communicator could have engaged this in a better way. I’m just trying to learn these things myself. I can’t convince people with the shallow straight-line arguments that we’re all used to.

I stop talking, I shrug.

“It’s different when someone asks,” he says. He feels insulted.
“I didn’t mean you,” I say.

We go into a tunnel. I don’t fucking know, I want to say. I don’t fucking know.

a closed circuit failure in american mythology

[T]he key value in the Laozi is that of organic harmony. By organic harmony I mean that kind of harmony that arises out of spontaneous mutual adjustment among many elements and forces in a given system, in contrast to that kind of order that is imposed by some dominant force or goal outside the system or that kind of order resulting from subordination of all elements and forces to one dominant center. Organic harmony refers to a stable, homeostatic order that arises out of the mutual adjustment of parts, in contrast to a random, disorderly, and unstable situation that might also sometimes be produced  when different parts develop according to their own spontaneous (competitive and individualistic) impulses.   (Girardo, N.J. ed. Taoism and Ecology, 52)

Two competing and inherently opposed modes of being Buddhist are dramatized in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Kerouac suggests that both are legitimate, indeed, he may not even see them as separate. But they are. One way is to live Buddhism (from the inside); the other is to understand or proclaim it (from the “outside”). Japhy and Ray are both very much engaged with the question how to live?But they have radically different understandings of the path to and practice of enlightenment. Japhy’s active application of Buddhism in every piece of his life constitutes a kind of voidal vitalism: in the void, there is no law and no transgression (but there is attention and compassion); there is no primacy of identity and no willing disavowal of the world around him. There is study but it is without a dogmatic obsession to ‘make sense’ of anything or anyone in relation to himself—there is an impersonal practice of truth and exuberance but it is anonymous and floats up like the thinning air in the Oregon mountains.  But if Japhy finds a way to occupy the void, Ray attempts to harness the void through language in order to control it. He wades through its wake in search of its borders, of his definite limits, and Japhy’s. Ray approaches the void from the outside of it and attempts to enclose it—philosophy, Buddhism, Japhy’s, life—in his own closed-circuit creation of the universe. Kerouac’s novel incorporates two dramatic visions of a vitalist project but only Japhy succeeds, while Ray is left to trail after the bits of identity and story imbedded in first-person narration. These two modes of “being Buddhist” suggests that it may be impossible to capture the experience of a vitalistic Buddhism (life in the void) by way of a first-person narrative, which paradoxically situates the speaker on the outside of this experience. But only from a mode of narrative that would, somehow, situate the narrator and reader within the void itself.

The novel would crumble from the inside out if the reader were able to access Japhy’s conscience: the first-person narrative that is The Dharma Bums is predicated definite shapes and forms of identity, even when it speaks against them. From its outset, Ray’s first-person narrative depends on his failure to reach the Zen state, since the form would not function if there were no boundaries between the narrator and the other characters. While there are moments of closeness and almost-union between Ray and his environment, there is always an unbridgeable gap between the world around him and his experience in it. “I know I’m empty, awake, and that there’s no difference between me and anything else… St. Raymond of the Dogs is who I was that year, if no one or nothing else” (145). This sentence is itself the heart of separation: what Ray (in the temporal moment of the story) thinks he is saying about practicing Zen really marks his fatal flaw. Instead of expanding beyond the self, letting it sublimate into the universal void, Ray carves himself out of the existing space. He is an empty form among a vast array of other energies and forms, but unlike a Laozi conception of organic harmony, Ray attempts to fill the space between the world full of objects and energies with his own identity in an attempt to master it. There is no difference between me and anything else echoes this division and attempt to master his environment. He insists in the primary category of “me” and tries to marry it to “any”thing else in the sentence, but both words uphold a separation between the narrator and all things, as well as an inter separation of things, separation at the language level is also present in the word “difference,” which is the binary opposite of void. This gets to the heart of Ray’s anti-vitalism in that his narration attempts to contain and understand the void instead of occupy it. To contain something and understand it as a clinical observer treats the void as just one more isolated system in a web of systems, subordinate to individual discernment and intellect. This problem manifests itself on a narrative level that insists that all objects and characters are disparate from one another. Ray’s first-person narration that draws an essential divide between himself and everything else.

Ray’s spoken language in the text most always necessitates this primary dominance over the world and energies around him. His constant philosophizing in the face of the void exposes his aversion to it. “‘Ah, it’s just a lot of words,’ [Japhy] said, sadly, surprising me. ‘I don’t wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions’” (169).Words versus enlightenment: Ray’s words spread out through the separate parts and tries to become to space and master them all. Words words words are the manifestation of the “self” in opposition to the universe. Instead of existing in constantly adjusting harmony with the universe’s parts Ray attempts to consume them and make sense of them from his oscillating, subjective perspective. And after a season of solitude and reasoning through the pain of reality, Japhy delivers the horrible truth: Ray made up his truths. Another rich example where being is privileged above naming occurs in the beginning of the text when Japhy and Ray hike up Mount Matterhorn:

“‘They’re so silent!’ I said.”
“‘Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.’” (67)

Japhy’s image of the Buddha as a mountain condenses the vital relationship between action and the void. The mountain is not static: silence is the primary category of action because it is does not attempt to fill in the cracks of reality and dominate all living creatures with its enumeration of reality. Ray’s version of making serenity is just that—an artificial creation. In fact, he attempts to infiltrate the Zen state from “frettin and foolin” around his own denial. The story of Japhy and Ray highlights the narrator’s own failure to inhabit the void of the universe and the dichotomy between vital silence and nervous iteration has deep implications on the narrative level for both Buddhist and vitalist possibilities.

First-person narration is a major factor in determining his status in the vitalist project.  If Ray’s fatal flaw within the temporal moment of the story is his incessant speech, first person delivery is the systemic narrative manifestation of the same failing. At every moment in the text, the primacy of individual intellect and experience is asserted as the defining feature in the text. Much like Ray’s attempt to “achieve” Zen by repeating its form over and over again, first-person narration seeps through the voidal spaces between all the parts of the universe in order to make sense. Instead of unifying the forms of the novel through a voidal approach to narration, The Dharma Bums cuts imaginary shapes and hangs them in disparate mobiles so that characters like “Japhy,” “Mount Matterhorn,” and “Lunatic” are forced to appear. The final sequence of the book follows Ray’s summer of solitude on Desolation Peak. The narrator recounts his summer in the mountain top shack as a glorious period of meditation and self-discovery, and the reader finds that Ray’s vitalism is not much more than the strained efforts to encapsulate everything around him. The reader sees that Ray’s summer on Desolation Peak has much in common with the suburban families¹ planted in front of the television, each one locked in a closed-circuit of reality—when Ray exclaims that all of the mountains in sight belonged to him, he says two things at once that both contradict the truth of Buddhist vitalism that Japhy embodies. “And it was all mine, not another human pair of eyes in the world were looking at this immense cycloramic universe of matter” (235). Ray wants to encapsulate reality and hold on to it (which corresponds to the fundamental evil of clinging in Buddhism) while simultaneously admitting that there are more mountains, more beauty in sight, but he is not concerned with them because he cannot see them. This corresponds to another of the cardinal violations of Buddhism, aversion. But more important than both his clinging and aversion to the totality “this immense cycloramic universe of matter” is the fundamental grasp at the universe that fundamentally separates him from it.

On Desolation Peak, Ray is not at one in the immensity, he is never a part of the landscape but its onlooker. The mountains, the creaming ridge of clouds, the trash pit, and the valleys, each with their own imaginary names that Ray gives them, are rendered separate from him by the very mechanisms of language with which he attempts to bridge the gap. The next line on page 235 says “I had a tremendous sensation of its dreamlikeness which never left me all that summer and in fact grew and grew.” This is the antithesis of voidal vitalist Buddhism, and a violation of the union between soul and body. Ray’s separation takes place on the dividing scape of narration. On one side, there is outer reality, the mountains, the universe, everything; on the other side, there is Ray, who struggles to fit everything into his understanding, his own lens of reality. Ray’s first-person description pace that he attempts overwrite through the narrative scope of the novel. The abject lesson that Kerouac offers at the conclusion of The Dharma Bums is the failure of first-person narration whose forced self-recognition that disconnects us from the real of the universe. Thinking of the middle-class families depicted on page 104, they too hook into a reality that begins and ends with the idea of the self. It, like Ray’s narration, is a failed vitalism conception because it mediates between the inner and outer world. Both Ray’s scene on the top of Desolation Peak and the suburban families watching television depict misdirection of vitalist energies because of their necessity to mediate the world—to follow a life-narrative—which prevents them from directly experiencing it. Vitalism as a first-person project cannot adjust itself to other energies: it appreciates a mountain ridge at the expense of continents, it tunes in to a net of programmed forces at the expense of all worlds beyond it. Individual vitalisms—in Buddhist terms, dualist mindsets—are a million one-track roads that crashing and crumbling into each other, ignoring the greater forces of existence. But the failures manifested in The Dharma Bums ultimately teach the reader more about overcoming the brace of individual vitalism than trapping the reader within it.

The discrepancies between Japhy and Ray’s practice and conception of vitalism are marked from start to finish in the text. That is to say, Japhy’s practice and Ray’s conception: that the novel’s conclusion, the bitter residue on Desolation Peak is from Ray’s inability to experience a space outside of his narrative plane; for instance, Japhy’s disappearance from the text once he is not clearly in sight. The instability of first-person narration—that it would explode from the inside out Japhy were to “narrate” proves that there is an energy force larger than Ray’s obsessive self-return and narrative adjustment to his own conception of reality. The alternative mode of “being Buddhist” is the practice of Buddhism, embodied by Japhy’s character, leads to a very different conception of a novel, something more like a third-person omniscient narrator (or lack of narrator). In this alternative to the confused and cut-off first-person narrator, the third-person omniscient novel experiences the novel from within the void of reality, allowing characters and forms to develop in collusion with each other at one moment and watch them fall away at another, all without the demands of tying them up to each other. Japhy’s disappearance, then, emerges as a final note on the possibility to live vitally from within an individual world-view.  Like the disappearance of continents for the view of a mountain, Ray’s forgetful narration shows itself as neither Buddhist nor vitalistic but rather an individual’s re-mastering of the universe into a comprehensible universe: indeed, individualism is predicated on forgetting all the rest. And while Kerouac’s novel leads the reader through the path of first-person failure, he leaves one eye open for Japhy, for vitalism, for philosophy, to explode it from the void

Hi there- vitalisms, wilde, handing things out on the street

“It is always easier to do a thing than to talk about it.” -Oscar Wilde

Yes, it is easier to do a thing than to talk about it. It is easier to sit behind the socialist vanguard table at the Cornel West talk and scream rhetoric and sell shitty newspapers than not. It’s easier to pretend that we live in the 20th century and to chant party drivel at a tv screen.

This is a different kind of blog post. I might as well come out with it: I went to the West talk today to help the writers of addressee unknown… blindly walking up to people is *not* my style, but that’s what needed to be done. Then I ran into the socialist vanguard table: it was bad. A friend told me the woman behind the table started speaking over the television (overflow room), speaking against West’s position to support Obama. Said friend also signed us up to receive SV papers before we realized that… surprise! they didn’t know who Slavoj Zizek or Marcuse or Debord were. No idea. But they wanted to grill our knowledge of Lenin’s canon. So… we promptly got the fuck out of there.

I am terribly tempted to say (out of habit, or cultural habit) that I “just” want this, or that. “I just want to meet people around me who feel the same way. I just wish that I understood how to proceed.”

But those answers aren’t apparent. And I don’t just want anything. But I am frustrated by groups (they usually call themselves _____ vanguards or workers _____ movement). Get over it!

Speaking loosely, get over it.

a. workers’ movements? okay, drop the time-worn dogma and rhetorical language and figure out what you really mean. and if you mean workers, then you’d best find a new way of thinking about what we used to call “the proletariat.” If you haven’t been conscious for the last forty years, that term is just about as useless as democracy (or communism, for that matter). read some stuff that was published in your own lifetime please, and don’t forget the folks around the water cooler.

b. learn how to write, or find someone who can. terrible. just terrible, all content aside, work on syntax. Marx isn’t exactly the best of writing models (German grammar…).

c. party line? I should really write a longer piece on the idiocy (no, no, I shouldn’t say *idiocy*) of the “Party.” But I will. Tonight Vanguard lady tried to shout over West’s voice beaming through the syndicated screen… “don’t support Obama… he’s just a Wall Street” something, or a cash cow or pig or whipping boy. I don’t know. She said something: nuance. 2010 is not the time for binaries–not that there ever is a time for binaries. One can’t go all over the place shouting crack-pot terms, one can’t go around sloganeering all day long. Half of the time, one can’t even say the word class– no, no. Everything is coded, not reactionary. Speaking of which…

d. party? Yeah, no. Politics: like my favorite new word, democracy, it means nothing. Especially in the American context–well I shouldn’t say that. But I will: it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not already sold on some other ideology, unless your working within a specific code-language. If you want to talk about anything in 2010, you’ve got to talk about culture. You’ve got to find brand new ways of saying what you mean, embedding ideas that almost everyone believes because it mirrors the standard rhetoric of mainstream discourse (“mainstream,” you like that?). You hand out bread that looks like all the other bread, but it’s cake: the idea is, CNN will pop on and suddenly a whale attack won’t seem like news anymore. You abandon ideas that no one cares about and you treat politics for what it is–a sublimation.

e. wait, wait…. you want to talk about alienation? I’ve really nothing more to say. I left shortly after and felt embarrassed for myself, for them… well, mostly for them. To depend on rhetoric of any sort without real training, without a cursory training, without an understanding of history and our warped relationship to it (as if it weren’t really mapping out our disjunction to the present), is a joke. Inverted Republicans, please get out of my town and go back to your Trotsky reading group.

grr.

Check out new student pamphlet at Rutgers;

The hidden truth of the fame ball tour

When we say “I want to be famous,” what are we really saying? Are we saying that we’d like to be remembered? Are we saying we’d like to change something, be a part of something? Maybe pop-fame, in everything it touches/creates/animates shows how interchangeable and utterly communal this disconnection is. I’m thinking here of P. Diddy: no one really cares about him and yet he and anyone he offers a label contract with chant about how untouchable he is. Behind him in stature are hundreds, if not thousands of rappers who all rap about the same thirty-five products, all claiming a throne that is only on loan to them at considerable interest.

When we say “I want to be famous,” what are we saying? Maybe we’re looking to change history. Maybe we’re looking to live the right way, the next big way.

Next time Lady GaGa “invites everyday people” to live the celebrity life, maybe she’s saying that we ought to riot against it.