The narrator’s fiery trial: A note on Flaubert’s mise-en-scene

“The Fiery Trial”

And Antony sees in front of him animmense basilica. The light projects itselffrom the lower end with the magical effectof a many-coloured sun. It lights up theinnumerable heads of the multitude whichfills the nave and surges between thecolumns towards the side-aisles, whereone can distinguish in the woodencompartments altars, beds, chainlets oflittle blue stones, and constellations painted on the walls.In the midst of the crowd groups arestationed here and there; men standing onstools are discoursing with lifted fingers;others are praying with arms crossed, orlying down on the ground, or singinghymns, or drinking wine. Around a tablethe faithful are carrying on the love-feasts;martyrs are unswathing their limbs to showtheir wounds; old men, leaning on their staffs, are relating their travels.Amongst them are people from the countryof the Germans, from Thrace, Gaul, Scythiaand the Indies–with snow on their beards,feathers in their hair, thorns in the fringesof their garments, sandals covered withdust, and skins burnt by the sun. Allcostumes are mingled–mantles of purpleand robes of linen, embroidereddalmatics, woollen jackets, sailors’ capsand bishops’ mitres. Their eyes gleamstrangely. They have the appearance ofexecutioners or of eunuchs.Hilarion advances among them.

Like a play if it were all stage direction: Flaubert is painting a picture. There is no movement in the outset of the chapter. Even when men are discussing things, they have their fingers up-pointed in a state of continuous motionlessness, as if they are being portrayed as talking; we are not able to see that they really are. In place of free indirect discourse there is a thick layer of lacquer over the movement and description in this book. Flaubert seems desperate to capture immensely full temporality and can only do it at the cost of prolonged periods of lifelessness. The scene begins without a subject in spite of the narrator’s attempts to put Antony at the fore.

Antony is incapable of fully recognizing what is truly in front of him. All that we are sure Antony “sees” is the immensity of the basilica; all the rest slips into description that is clearly the construction and acute “perception” of the narrator. The enormity of the building is set out. Then, there is a jerky introduction to the crowds. Then we move closer and see a select group of men, who are doing other things, and will be the actors in the next scene. Then we are introduced to Hilarion, who enters the scene. Instead of merely introducing Hilarion and having a character whose narrative voice is able to express or recognize his environment, Flaubert relegates characters to the absurd. It is only the narrator who can recognize, describe, and maintain consciousness. The story is never as interesting as the movements. The ability for characters to “recognize” is the central theme in chapter four. When Manes explains the essence of the soul, of heaven and of hell, as well as the earth, Antony is unable to trace meaning from the aesthetic form of Manes’ description:Then Manes makes hisglobe revolve, and, attuning his words tothe music of a lyre, from which bursts forthcrystalline sounds, he says:

“The celestial earth is at the upperextremity, the mortal earth at the lower. Itis supported by two angels, theSplenditenens and the Omophorus, withsix faces.”At the summit of Heaven, the Impassible Divinity occupies the highest seat;underneath, face to face, are the Son ofGod and the Prince of Darkness.”The darkness having made its way intoHis kingdom, God extracted from Hisessence a virtue which produced the firstman; and He surrounded him with fiveelements. But the demons of darknessdeprived him of one part, and that part isthe soul.”There is but one soul, spread through theuniverse, like the water of a streamdivided into many channels. This it is thatsighs in the wind, grinds in the marblewhich is sawn, howls in the voice of the sea; and it sheds milky tears when theleaves are torn off the fig-tree.”The souls that leave this world emigratetowards the stars, which are animatedbeings.”Antony begins to laugh:”Ah! ah! what an absurd hallucination!”

The scene is constructed as a meta-critical moment on the subject of representation and critical recognition from its outset when Manes holds the globe under his arm. His entire explanation of good and evil and of souls in unity (although the soul-channels are ostensibly unaware of their unity until they meet again in the vast spirit-sea) is a concept that is the foundation of Christian belief in the after-life. To qualify this, the disparate souls are legitimated as being one with Being (external God) and validated as a whole only after recognizing that they are other than whole. This conception slides away from what Manes says, which is that the rivers are in-themselves animated beings who validate the Being, and who compose the Being. Manes aesthetic and metaphorical approach to conceptualizing the soul as well as soul-unity (geist, or what you will) is an explanation of the soul and self that does not approach unity from the Being-out in a mystical way, but seeks to highlight the ways in which the soul and unity is a concrete operation (of rivers flowing into seas, and stars animating themselves…). This, Antony outright rejects.More than reject it, Antony calls it an “hallucination”. The very fact that he is unable to see that Manes merely describes the concrete events for what they are, instead of externalizing them, demonstrates his incapability to recognize the real, to notice the world around him. For Antony, everything is a hallucination and it is only from the narrator’s point of view that we can see the ironic turn in this chapter. Since most every episode that we watch is the total illumination of an hallucination, the fact that Antony is shown truth in the midst of a fantasy and rejects it as an impossibility, shows his distrust in characters, especially religious ones. And in the place of religion, one might also say that Flaubert distrusts characters in general to function as the mimetic device precisely because he has plastered them under such a heavy  mise-en-scene from which they cannot escape, but merely fold under the letter-turrets that Flaubert himself created.

The Fool’s Time Slip

On what does the foolish axis of the world turn? Fair enough at all to call a thing foolish if it speaks the truth, and better still if truth is said in such a self-same language as fairy tales that we might never see the root. In the political project of over-writing traditional images and systems into a new system towards new ends (or perhaps if they are believed to spring from some original core) there is a need for mysticism. The nature of this mysticism, whether it lie on the part of the over-writer, or of the denier, is a hard line to uncoil.

I’m reading two things right now that seem to uncover each other simultaneously, aside from my readings and reflections on Novalis’ Political Writings I’m thinking about King Lear and Marx’s Commodity Fetish and Its Secret. The former is extremely dense, and like the latter, I would argue that the twists and systematic political underpinnings are equally rooted in the play between raw materiality and mystified social life.

In 3.3.86, the Fool says:

This is a brave night to cool a courtesan. I”ll
speak a prophecy ere I go:
When priests are more in word than matter,
When brewers mar their malt with water,
When nobles are their tailors’ tutors,

No heretics burned but wenches’ suitors,
When every case in law is right,
Now squire in debt, nor no poor knight;
When slanders do no live in tongues,
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs,

When usurers tell their gold i’ th’ field,
And bawds and whores do churches build,
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion;
Then comes the time, who lives to see ‘t,
That going shall be used with feet.
This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.

The Fool here is laying out the real state of political affairs, although he is bracketing their fruition in a “prophecy” that Merlin will make in the future. Seeing that Merlin ages backwards, it makes sense that Merlin’s prophecy is actually located in the past, i.e. the moment that the Fool traverses. Here, the Fool locates himself and his critique of actuality and mystical return in an ambiguous time-slip. There are several moments in this speech that highlight the oppression that the mystical realm of belief and foreclosure from time itself allow the motor of tragedy to propel itself forward without a thought for political reality or Lear (man)’s power in-himself. Priests are little more than words in this play, since those forecasters of stars are in matter the villains of the play. I am thinking here first of Edmund in the first Act, whose accumulation of power relies on the priestly manipulation of the almanac. In him, the forecast in the almanac turns about his villainy: the heart of the matter (son against father and bloodshed) is both legitimated and obfuscated by Edmund. He is the real axis of tragedy in the secondary plot (the undermining of Gloucester and Edgar’s exile) because he holds the place of the space-time slip.

Similarly, when the Fool locates himself conspicuously back into his own moment by narrativizing it, he exposes the role of prophecy in the play to be the locus of truth in myth if only by degrees of imagined separation. The slip itself is an imagined one that is forced to function as the “foolish” or fictional cap on the relations of real events to their moment. What would it mean to think about the priestly turn and the fool’s prophecy as the motor by which material reality is expressed in the most shockingly self-evident way, under the guise of fiction. In some ways, I wonder if material truth is best embedded and submerged in the impossibly fictitious and can only be entered through the realm of criticism that locates its moment-in-happening. The fool here, then, offers a moment of meta-critique on the role of performance (and here I’ll include literature as well) to uncover and hide the existing political forces and schemas.

Marx after this.

out with a vile and a shaking hand–

FAUST: To understand- and how is that defined?
Who dares to give that child its proper name?
THe few of understanding, vision rare,
Who veiled not from the herd their hearts, but tried,
Poor generous fools, to lay their feelings bare,
Them have men always burnt and crucified.
Excuse me, friend, it grows deep into night,
And now it is time to think about adjourning.

WAGNER: I could have stayed up longer with delight,
To join in discourse with your lofty learning.
But, Sir, to-morrow comes our Easter Day,
When I shall ask more questions, if I may.
I’ve learnt a deal, made books my drink and meat,
But cannot rest till knowledge is complete.

FAUST: How strange, that he who cleaves to shallow things
Can keep his hopes alive on empty terms,
And dig with greed for precious plunderings,
And find his happiness unearthing worms!

-(Faust, “Night”)

“Understanding” is a word akin to “know” and distant cousin of the term “real.” It haunts the logic of our feeling and disperses with secret effects whose intentions and consequences manifest themselves accordingly to our ignorance. The misery of feeling one’s self cast out over the street as a fog. Wagner is the newly converted man, the man who still has time–illusion!– to pray and the need for sleep. When will his dreams fall away from him? And what is his time wandering around the ruins of his sacred hovel? I imagine him waking up, tripping over a floor board and imagining the implications of his Easter Day with the uncertain fate that is most certainly shattered from its promise of good effort and plentiful return.

Worms burrowing everywhere, even in the brain. Faust has poured water over his floor boards so that he cannot trip, he has frozen them over. He skates over the ground with such precision. The burrowing continues; the ice worms have found him and eat away at his foundation until it is a paper-moss. There is no safe maxim.

But poor Wagner, poor Wagner if he ever sees what he cannot be. If he is freed from his illusion. Will he be made to see the fog and find all in it a new kind of mysticism? Would there ever come a rest from running through the pieces of tattered faith, I hope he should not always find himself sewing up the patches of joy from learning. His understanding–

May he be free from a life of appreciation. Give me Faust’s misery! Give me an authentic misery, and not the task of collecting fog at midnight. Break my brittle vile and my shaking hand! And in that, I should forget (all the better to remember) the shape of things and instead see the dead-hearts falling as the snow.

images and sounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the images

and sounds

the images

and sounds

in flight from winter birds and frozen in the ice.

paper birds, launch away-

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.

Spirit, Actual, Ethic (Aesthetics and Politics): Part One.

I figured that is time for a proper entry. I’ve gotten through the first three bits of this book: “Bloch against Lukacs,” “Lukacs against Bloch,” “Brecht against Lukacs.” There is a fourth part that I’m about halfway through now, and that section is a series of diaristic entries by Benjamin on Brecht. I should comment on the form and organization of these writings, first.

After the Presentation, Bloch’s “Discussing Expressionism” is so slight an entry in the book that it is hard to believe that it opens the door to nearly two hundred pages more of inquiry, analysis, and debate. The entry is only twelve pages, and it denies its ostensible form as a polemic. First, it seems to know that it is a piece about renewed interest, the picking-up of a thread, more than a “for or against” operation. I wonder if picking up such a discussion-thread has to incite a type of debate along its course, to get the momentum of debate going. After all, there are plenty of entries and essays that do discuss a topic, but are libel to be left static and “interpreted” in an endless array of citations, before a genuine discussion is brought about. But I think here, that Bloch ultimately asks for more, even only if in the title of his work, than a polemic. [That's why I like seeing it in this volume, where that request is met...]

Bloch is concerned with the spirit of Expressionism, the ways in which it permeates time and politics of a given instant. I think this is crucial for the beginning of this book. Where Lukacs would like to dismantle the whole project of Expressionism from the start based on its ideological flaws that are awakened in technical difficulties, Bloch highlights the mere insistence of existence. It seems, more than engage in a direct polemical debate with Lukacs, the man and philosopher, Bloch is more interested in dismantling the more material and categorical implications of such a debate. He insists that there is something to be learned and valued from the persisting spirit of the Expressionists, who placed importance on the immediacy of experience. Whether or not these experiences were materially or ideologically sound, has an import of lesser degree.

In a sense, the spirit of creation and of experience, Bloch points out, has the ability to permeate time and space, and therefore is the kernel of the human desire to experience something outside of the ideological and the categorical. He dismisses, correctly, the attack that the Expressionists were in any way tied with the Decadence movement, or any other movement. This is a qualified claim, and precisely the moment where, I think, Bloch goes down the wrong ally-way.  The spirit of Expressionism is to find that which is not totally consumed by ideology, which is not weighed down with systemic organization and categorization. It refutes the possibility of being categorized by being “incomprehensible” to the system outside of the system of primary experience. This is a negative characteristic, and one that undermines the entire project. Because if the only imperative of a system like Expressionism is to “express” there is no objective (or even subjective) referent to the revolutionary aesthetic that is claims to hold so dear. For if the Expressionsts have been unparalleled, yes, it would be in the spirit of ‘a-political’ experience that they themselves might call ‘trans-historical’ experience. And, of course a-political engagement is short-hand for engagement that is consumed in dominant ideology, and trans-historical aesthetic experience might enter into the realm of the eternel, but only once it has leaped from the platform of its particular economic and ideological enjambments. What I’m saying is, art must always know the terms of its own position in context to its present incarnation, or else it is subject to subsumption in another dominant form. Which, is what happened to the Expressionists, who were unable to Express anything more than their experience in capital.

This, leads me to take up the Lukacsian line of critique. He responds to Bloch in “Realism in the Balance.” I think that, first, he shows that the Expressionists are not Realists because they are not real, insofar as they have been cut off from the kernel referent which would allow them to adequately express a true reality or possibility outside of ideology and economy, since they lack the demarcations of those categories in the first place.

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.

 

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.

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.

We must all read young Marx.

Nature herself has determined the sphere of activity in which the animal should move, andit peacefully moves within that sphere, without attempting to go beyond it, without even aninkling of any other. To man, too, the Deity gave a general aim, that of ennobling mankindand himself, but he left it to man to seek the means by which this aim can be achieved; heleft it to him to choose the position in society most suited to him, from which he can bestuplift himself and society.

This choice is a great privilege of man over the rest of creation, but at the same time it is anact which can destroy his whole life, frustrate all his plans, and make him unhappy. Seriousconsideration of this choice, therefore, is certainly the first duty of a young man who isbeginning his career and does not want to leave his most important affairs to chance.

-Karl Marx, “Reflections of a young man on he choice of profession,” 1835

writing as event: absent ghost of ontology

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

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

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

the answer is without

It’s all the rage, going inward. It makes sense to go inward. It seems to be the only direction that gives. There’s lots of good material, there. Lots of pliability, possibility, even ultimate responsibility; for the failure that comes later on. But the banal lyrics that say “the answer is within you” are still right, even if they don’t mean to be, considering Ray Lamontagne’s song “Be Here Now,” for example. There are many more of these examples that fit into popular musical mechanisms to exercise palaces to college courses, not to mention the entertainment industry that is just about to sell its katrillionth Breathing Easy DVD. Everything seems to point towards the inner power, the neutral nexus, the triumphant wisdom that we all possess (somehow).

But every time we hear the message to “listen within ourselves,” what are the real contingency factors that we need checked off before we give it a go? What I’m saying is, what are we really searching for in that $12.99 disc other than the tools to drone out the mind’s refusal to fully participate with this seriously fucked up planet? If we don’t want to contemplate the real causes of our unhappiness (which we are all-too familiar with on the individual level but “blocked” from recognizing in the communal sense,) don’t we really want to achieve inner peace about our methodical descent into droid-life? And isn’t any quest that doesn’t explicitly refuse our image and stuff-saturated lives really just a quest to make whatever human bit we have left into a droid, as well? What is so often passed off as a genuine way of achieving harmony is the attempt to keep working, but not too hard, eat, but not too much, moderate one’s life, enjoy “what is good” (like we know what the fuck that is) and let-go of what is unsavory. Simply put: retraining us to think like the middle.

What [Buddhism], more particularly zazen, is really all about, is about going without in more than one sense. On one hand, it  marks a clear renunciation of all material possessions and conceptions of “happiness” (in fact, it rejects all consumables, including the promise of emotion). It also clearly demonstrates the inevitable failure of the “inner” and demands a universal, communal, approach of “tapping into” the ebbs and flows. If there’s anything that we don’t have, it’s an ebb for a flow. Funnily enough, that seems to be what those communists are rambling on about, too.