On “Science as a Vocation”

I read this lecture delivered by Max Weber last night, which was delivered on November 7, 1917. There is so much that I want to say, but do not pretend to know, to understand, to have thought through thoroughly enough. Today, I will limit myself to a few elements of his lecture that were most striking and which are outlines for another project.

As I had written in an earlier entry, I am also reading my way through Capital, a task entirely different and even subsuming Weber’s lecture. In chapter one, section two of Capital, Marx goes in depth about the division of labor in capitalist society. In some modes of production, the weaver is also the tailor, but in capitalism, they are different. These distinctions are not naturally made, since even the tailor must vary and distinguish various types of labor that he is to undertake from day to day, hour to hour. Weber’s lecture outlines two component parts of “Science” (also understood as Knowledge”) as a vocation, proper: scholarship and teaching. He offers no illusions about the coincidence these strengths have in determining what kind of teacher and scholar one might make. Neither does he offer any justification of the university as something other than an aristocratic regime. At the same time that he invokes this strange division of one’s intellectual labor, he also compares the German and the American academy. In this way, Weber points out the obvious capitalization of the university. But aside from talking about apprenticeships and positions as a professor, he largely turns away from the question of the actual state of affairs in order to talk about another vision of the vocation.

Before I continue on to those points, I imagine that Weber’s own conception is a bit blind as to the motor of history (he says that we live in an age of intellectualization and of science, but he does not tie the withering away of the vocation as such with any historical development. Indeed, I found myself thinking that the division of the scientist-professor is sort of an arbitrary relic. For today, at least in the state-run universities that I have studied a little, I don’t know that teaching and scholarship are necessarily as bound into professorship or the university as they once appeared to be. I imagine that the changing environment of the university yields a sous-assistant who is not even able to research, who cannot even teach because he has not the time to be a scholar in search of income. It seems to me that this underclass of graduate and adjunct labor proves that the vocation as it is interconnected and dependent on the university is outdated and only feebly survives in its institutionalized form for older professors because of the exploited intellects a generation below them. I am not sure whether one might say that this is a bona fide division between the categories that Weber himself insists on, but rather that such categories are mistakenly bound up in the university institution as a permanent, or at least self-replicating, structure.

Anyhow, I will continue, assuming for a moment that such a thing as a vocation still exists when it comes to Knowledge. I was struck by the resistance of Weber’s thoughts to his own actions. It seems that only placing them side-by-side offers a complete reading. It seems that teaching is done for its own sake, and it cannot be confused with all of the other work and research carried out as a scholar. I think then, about the teacher who I have had. Weber inconveniently mentions that teachers are often viewed by young people as a sort of host-savior in the modern age. While I cannot understand much of Weber’s framework, I do think that this element of teaching and apprenticeship is valid, for it is not contingent on the university, while I must admit that I was taught in the university and had my most profound learning experiences there.

Weber differentiates between a teacher and a leader. How many times had I wanted a supernatural leader to confirm knowledge to me! It is the most childish of all the steps in education. The great teachers always insist on the incompleteness of their knowledge and of their capability to answer or effect the implications of their questions. It is unfortunate and even embarrassing that it had to be said. This is at the heart of what I took from Weber as a lesson. Teachers consciously operate in a realm that is neither knowledge nor failure when they are teaching. It is so hard for fledgling students not to think that our teachers are not goading us on to definite truth. Very often, teachers push us further than we’d like to go ourselves, knowing that they cannot save us, that it was never in their power to save us.

And I, who do believe in knowledge, not for choices to be made between a multitude of choices, but in that unfashionable word “truth,” thank my teachers who taught me early that a broken spirit is an illusion. That I have already been carried out far beyond their reach, that I must work for a lifetime to understand their questions in response to my own, and even more alarmingly, what forces droves us to speak.

I reject youthfulness

Youthfulness is an object inattention to real conditions, to consequences, to that actual state of affairs. Its elixir is romantic notions in gentle orange light, heightened drama that finds its articulation on the brilliant idea only half understood, and therefore, mystical. In youth we are supposed to “live a little,” if living means experience as if it were authentic and as if time did not exist and as if we might always be this way.

If in the process of being young we are instead fighting for our freedom we must be acutely aware of the freedom we wish to seek. Do we wish for sexual freedom and at what cost have we won it? At the cost of being merely sexual, or what is worse, being fully sexual to the most mutilated degree possible in our society? If we fight for democracy, are we fighting for the whole sale opportunity for selection?

What power do young people have other than to ignore the consequences because they have not come to terms with the hstorical contingency of their era, which amounts to little more than the mindless replication of shortsighted, mystical, and unscientific narratives about “human experience” that will spoil another generation of the soil, spill blood in spite of our ambitions, against our natural inclinations for leisure. The impulses by and for which we fight are little more than romantic dreams meant to fail without that unfortunate task of work.

Our power is to demand everything. But how do we know everything? What is the nature of everything? Do we wish merely for the unlimited accumulation of products, including the accumulation of rights?

I reject youth and its disinclination for working, for its demand on me to praise it, to name it as the time in which life was most possible when it was precisely the moment when the conditions that determine existence were least understood, before I had the time to study it carefully. Recently, I saw a ridiculous little sign hanging in the home of a notoriously delusional family.

It read:

Recipe for Success
1 cup of good ideas
1.5 cups positivity
2 tablespoons of luck
1 tsp.  smiles
4 cups perseverance

The one thing that was missing from it was the one thing that is actually attributable to any sort of achievement, which is, of course, good work. In fact, by buying the sign, perhaps the commodity that listed the ingredients for success evacuated the need for work, as if work itself could be purchased for us. The reason why I mention this example is because all things that are to be achieved, all things that were previously considered to be the product of knowledge are now excommunicated to the arcane, the boring, the esoteric product of hegemony if they are not made immediately accessible to us and to our “impulses.”

I reject moments of inspiration. I reject notions of ephemeral beauty. I reject the historical nature of what I am perceived to be.

#N17: The problems and discontents with non-violent action in the United States

In theUnited Statesthe default position of protestors in the Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of non-violence. This position is not viable and is the micro-chip of implosion for the movement. Non-violence is less about actual violence on the streets on this particular day or protest, and more about potential and political impotence. If knowledge and power are viewed as co-foundational tenets of revolutionary potential, then a brief excursus into each is necessary in the current horizon of political action.

Knowledge and power have been terms co-opted from their inception into language. The relationship between knowledge and power is filtered through the process of articulation. Articulation toward knowledge as the kernel of power is the first division between the political subject and himself. This division can be understood as the original contradiction of the political body, individual and social.

This contradiction is the foundation of the political self that is inescapable. Violence and intersection with the idea of violence is an idea that plagues the burgeoning American Left. As I write this, there are thousands of occupiers in lowerManhattanflooding the streets. Several sitters occupy the intersection ofNassauand Pine, and there are reports of police brutality, even before the tentative opening bell. Hegemonic authority rests in the police not because of their legitimacy, but in their potential in violence.

The police, in New York as much as anywhere else in theUnited States, are part of a fragmented body of violent potential. The police, and hence authoritative power, cannot be adequately matched or have its power wrested from it until the political body of dissent comes to grips with the nature and knowledge of violence.

“Reclaiming democracy” and the anti-foundational myth of the American people:

It is five minutes past nine and the Occupy Wall Street protestors have kept Wall Street from opening. This movement is indicative of the supreme skill and ability of the movement to come into symbolic contact with economic power. As traders are turned away from the floor and police mount an assemblage of barricades along the old narrow streets, it is unclear who is being held away from what. In a protest that seems to have all of the ear-markings of a nascent riot, who authorized the caveat of “peaceful protest”? As it turned out, the opening bell still rung and trading continued. Pedestrian traffic closed, and we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be political in a world where direct action is contingent on the pacifism of power?

The pacifism of power is a concept of underestimation on the part of the hegemon (the “1%” as the Occupy movement has popularized, but I will say the actants of capital and its derivative forces i.e. the police). On the live feed there are comments on the sidebar saying “come on protestors, look at people in other countries: start throwing rocks already.” In response there was comment that said “we don’t want a riot.”

This is the question of the movement: why not talk about violence, why not make the 99% the 92%, why are we so resistant to rioting? In the recent eviction of ZucottiParkon November 15^th, the mayor and the police demonstrated their body was couched in overt control over the occupation. It is difficult to conceive how we might determine ourselves as directly confronting the bodies of power when we are determined by police barricades and court rulings. Only after the movement comes to grips with the nature and importance of mobilization can it comprehend the logic of the “other side.” In short, dancing has gone on long enough; distinctions must be made between friends and enemies. We’re either within the bounds of current American power structure or we reject them. If we reject them then we are not subject to its ruling, and we radically reclaim the narrative of the American people for the people rather than submitting to a retroactively mythical conception of it.

Throwing guns over our shoulders is not at all what violence means in this context. Coming to grips with American force means coming to grips with the actual state of affairs instead of tossing around a lot of pre-determined rhetoric about “the people” and “our rights”. If we want to see our rights then we must realize that they have been systematically revised and condensed as political development has

In spite of ourselves, we are still American. As we sing the National Anthem in the streets of lowerManhattan, an electronic current flows before us in a rush that we the people cannot catch up with in time. We tell ourselves and each other that we are making history, and what an American thing to do. To take an historical example: during the constitution of the American political body in the 1760’s through unanimous consent to claim independence, the American people were conceived as manifest in sprite of concrete concerns. The American people were “actually” American even thgouh they were externally British citizens… it was the purported duty and right to claim oneself as an American by defying the external powers. In this way, the Occupy Wall Street protestors have tapped into a legacy of pre-figurative determination in much the same way although only in symbolic measures thus far.

As noon approaches, there is an increasing tension between advocates for riot and those who wish to remain peaceful. AsZucottiParkis opened, protestors have removed barricades and faced violent reactions from the police who have reportedly lunged and hit members of the press. Brookfield Security has reportedly left the vicinity, and about half of the people are chanting “No riot here, take off your riot gear,” although the police are not in fact wearing riot gear, only helmets.ZucottiParkis closed off on the north side and they continue to be torn down. What will the fate of a non-violent protest be? How can we look at the 99% the same? There are people who will “riot” and there are people who will not.

Ignorance of violent submission

The distinction between rioting and protesting is a liberal notion, and the use of the word liberal is not meant to be pejorative but perhaps in the future we will come to think of “peaceful protests” as a foolish concept and an impossible position. On the fliers for #N17 posted last night the tagline said “Resist austerity. Rebuild our economy. Reclaim democracy.” This slogan was taken down in lieu of “Resist Austerity. Reclaim the Economy. Recreate our Democracy.” Perhaps we are learning that to peacefully demonstrate does not require a terminal obedience to an authority who is not so determined to keep things bruise-free.

Perhaps we won’t always submit ourselves to slavery in the name of freedom dripping from the faucet.

my sister’s birdcage

There are minds who wander effortlessly to the outer helm of the winter walk, to the undercut of an ancient ruddy bridge, packed with soft blue slate and clay whose every exposure to the void, the terrifying and cold apartment complexes, only strengthen the deep and rolling snow clouds that muffle all the screaming. Soothing thunder strikes the bedrock of the universe. The little girl in the grass, on the sand, the water crashing far above her head of light-tube hair …Foot steps fall over one another in supple carelessness and these worlds, these dreams and outer pathways spin around a tiny silver sphere. Each valence is a pathway, a rotation around a silver bell; the tingling hum of metals bent and whistling to each other pulses underneath the eyelids, and then shakes the fingers. If after everything you can hear me, learn first how to be silent, how to be still. For now, my eyes are always open, and the pulse of time—my days and months and webs of time—are gone before I have them. Sit quietly for the wind. Adventure in the mind is suicide. I remain with my eyes open, slipping in a dirty city, offering a crooked celebration to moments counting down to work time, to my false lives, my hated hours, living as a slave to them. No master of my dreams, no sunburned afternoon in August rest, no day gone by well and truly, but as planned. The hours are murdered by the minute marker and all goes according to the minutes, the tasks. And even the sister in my dreams, or my loved one, or those friends who I have lost in the thousandth winter of my short life, look on as if pained, doing little to unbend their sympathetic grimace. Doing little in their cages.

I love you.

I love you.

little girl who’s never heard my voice, I love you with all the sorrow of my every word, and I wish I could love you with ideas, but you’ll see that’d just kill you faster than your hoped-for 80 years.

Good luck tomorrow. Silently, I love you.

A body with a lot of organs and a mic

Today was Occupy Wall Street Day of Action. There were thousands of people in Times Square. It was crowded and barricaded early on, which made it difficult to discern who was a protester, a spectator, and a befuddled tourist. At five o’clock, there was intermittent dancing and chanting. The streets were operational, and the northbound side of Broadway and 44th was closed off. Time passed, the streets filled. The barricades were opened up and the street was closed. A college kid with a jacket that said “KILL ME” on it climbed up a traffic post and held up his sign: “Bail out college loans.” Another protester held up a sign that said “NOT ANTI-CAPITAL JUST ANTI-THEFT,” a third “CAPITALISM IS ORGANIZED CRIME.”

There were a few mic-checks. (Mic checks are when a person/group wants to communicate a message and establishes rings of echoers around him/it.) The mic-checking man said that we were a peaceful protest, and I walked up to him to repeat himself. (No one really knew how the mic-check worked.) He reiterated that it was a peaceful protest. I started to wonder how horizontal this really is. I have never had any stars in my eyes about #occupywallstreet, but horizontalism seemed to be one of the admirably coherent and consistent characters of the protest. How can one member determine what is spontaneously the will of the body? Why were the dissenting members who were willing to support “violent” action somehow made exterior to the protest? Who is speaking?

Mounted police came up the rear and cops were preparing to make mass arrests.

The noises in the crowd quelled. A mic was established. We were asked to sit. Most people sat. I wanted to call out that sitting meant making oneself arrestable. There was no question. I stood up and smoked on the barricade. There was a march to Washington Square Park. No one knew why or where to go. We started walking. “Cops are the 99%” was chanted.

Cops are not the 99%. Cops are the class enemy and they are class traitors. Who is speaking?

After walking 32 blocks, we got to WSP. There were a lot of people. At ten o’clock there was a general assembly. People here knew how to mic better and there were three generations (echoes) established. The people in the middle asked for us all the break up into groups to discuss whether or not we should occupy Washington Square Park (which, unlike Zucotti Park, is public and closes at 12am.) Lots of people made the “wrap-it-up” sign after a lot of emphasis on the “need to use this beautiful moment with all these beautiful people.” Overwhelmingly, people said no. Twelve people stayed until midnight. It made me wonder what the intent-call was for. Who is speaking? How are they speaking?

Anarcho-capitalists were overwhelmed by communists and black (and red) flag anarchists. A good communist started drinking after one of his friends and comrades showed an insurrectionist streak and opened up his bag with flares in it. A washed up anarcho-punk turned waiter felt alive again, revitalized.

Who is speaking?

the summertime patriot

I find myself thinking of time differently, as if a fog has lifted that began as a mysterious haze in the morning and grown through the day in storm, only to be swept away by clearer and more powerful winds. What are these winds that cannot settle; they are those that braise upon my skin as any brick building, not knocking for acknowledgement, but drawing gazes eternally, there for discovery? I find myself not feeling so far from the grains my own nation, or the seeds of this nation in spirit that I had only had misfortune to think of as its dilapidated state of actuality rather than the germ of the possible and the living letter that even legends must be burned.

What the nation is and may be (and certainly is) enfolds itself carefully into the subjects, passions, and labyrinth of happened events. Time: the hours and months of my newborn stupidity somehow connect me to the Falling of the Wall merely because it occurred in the hours of my life’s expelling, while It had up to now torn me away from the fields and battles passing earlier on. For the hapless few, history is hidden and faught over in images and sounds across the radio, is painted carefully into the corner of a painting on the television screen… no, it is woven in the light spun clothes the cover and choke the eyes. And I am standing here in the no-man’s-land of my young life without patience for this variety of myth.

Where does this painting unearth itself but in actions and events that I could not decipher but through the whims and collisions of the story-makers? The vast and weary story-makers who too have forgotten what was time and what was power. In shattering the words and images of common things, in unraveling everyday words and habits, the colors in the dye expose themselves to me. For the churning mills of ecclesiastical fervor, of production and action whose power remained misunderstood, mythologized, and wilted unawares against the grain of that great beast “The Twentieth Century,” I have no patience or pride in what they are as stories. I must search for legend beyond time, beyond my years and demarcations of place for spirit of the infinite.

There is no great spirit that does not first require some untangling, disillusion that makes way for dissolution, as even the Declaration of Independence breathes out in coded gasps. Borders and causeways need not stop the revolutionary. And history as well as precedent can only carry us so far. It is from the shrouded and time-worn cloaks of history and of familiarity that I must (not destroy) but unravel carefully, as a spider spins a web in order to survive, the time, the letter, the action, must be taken in and cased in silks in order to digest the rotting flags of history exchanged for a perfected freedom.

a man of one’s own time.

It is hard to imagine that it is possible to be a man that is fully himself and of his time. To be “of time” is to exist and persist in spite of the climates and attitudes that shape the course of politics and thus of daily life and action. Most men are of time as a matter of happenstance; some show a great effort in spite of the inimical Current of Events, though most have up to now submitted themselves to it before they were ever aware of it.

It is difficult to speak of these men, even the valorous example, without falling into the despair of loosing count, of the overwhelming forgetfulness of history, and without searching and compacting all being in time into a vacuum-pack story of comfort, of violence, of apathy. There is, I think, a possibility of transcendence. There is a manner of emerging from the back-breaking agony and constraint of effort against time to the divested fullness of experience.

There have been many men of their own time and we think of them often, perhaps without recognizing how it is or why we do it. These figures are emblematic–living fully in their epoch and engaging firmly with the politics and problems that bear down upon them. These figures grapple and shift the mire of their own circumstance and build (not only direct) their masts into the ocean-scape of history. The man of his own time, in effect, replaces conceptions of time and we in turn remember him as the marker, rather than periodizing him from the opposite direction.

How often we think of the great revolutionaries of the American and French variety, the writers and policy makers in collusion with the grander tides of Enlightenment thinking. There are men who also articulate, confront, and govern the vicissitudes of their own era without succumbing to its blustering trends; there are eternal men of politics and of thought and of action. The men of politics speak against the tyranny of context with the fury of their lives; the men of thought think eternally of ought in plain defiance of is; men of action die in an instant with the power of forgotten yesterdays and never-promised tomorrows as if to prove that time existed. And for every founding man, or Great Man of Philosophy, there are men whose names are unknown to us, as if barred to us as we would be sinners against them. The revolutionaries without faces, without organs, these men whose affirmation of history and living might slip through the comprehension of our minds if we did not find a flag for them, or placard  the rubble of a blockade wall, or a read a mythic novel that reinvigorates a wilting legend.

The men with names, the authors and thinkers and political men, these are men for whom the searching man would exchange with history. Perhaps the searching man finds himself transported out of himself believing instead that his place is among the appellations of 18th century fraternity, of republican severity. There are those of us in search of history and in search of ourselves who delve freely into the great myths of time and perhaps do not ever truly reclaim ourselves from fables. Myths of history are often seductive: they isolate space from space, and color the clouds and grass and cities with a more austere pallet than we grant the present weather capable.

The man of his own moment is a lover of myths and of eras, but does not attempt to paint the world around him, but for the essential and eternal (if not persistent valuations) of humanity. The man of his own time is he who is he who might see the fullness of what could be instead of the dismal and disparate collisions of time. What possibility remains for him is all that might be written, done, dreamed of, without bending to circumstance. Circumstance is the illusion of continuity. In a word, the man of his own time is an author who is for what ought in search to marry the possibilities of the future to the dross and destitution of is; this man is an author of the present.

In the shadows between eyelids, there may be another thousand worlds of cities. Cities of memory for the writer and for he who can see immense, rich things that wind and twist around each other into diaphanous spires. They are filled with an expansive rush of sky and laced into form with slender grace. Then, there are minds who wander effortlessly to the outer helm of the winter walk, to the undercut of an ancient ruddy bridge, packed with soft blue slate and clay. Whose every exposure to the void, the terrifying and cold apartment complexes, only strengthen the deep and rolling snow clouds that muffle all the screaming. Soothing thunder strikes the bedrock of the universe. I am just stuck on the bus with kids and gummy worms. I am falling away from myself…Foot steps fall over one another in supple carelessness and these worlds, these dreams and outer pathways spin around a tiny silver sphere. Each valence is a pathway, a rotation around a silver bell; the tingling hum of metals bent and whistling to each other pulses underneath the eyelids, and then shakes the fingers. But my eyes are always open, and the pulse of time—my days and months and webs of time—are gone before I have them. Adventure in the mind is suicide. I remain with my eyes open, slipping in a dirty city, offering a crooked celebration to moments counting down to work time, to my false lives, my hated hours, living as a slave to them. No master of my dreams, no sunburned afternoon in August rest, no day gone by well and truly, but as planned. And even the brother in my dreams, or my loved one, or those friends who I have lost in the thousandth winter of my short life, look on as if pained, doing little to unbend their sympathetic grimace. Doing little in their cages.

In the honor of the crisis

..and my GRE exam that takes place in about two hours and 20 minutes, I have decided to lift a paragraph from the New York Times’ coverage of the political split between Cameron and the Labour Party Opposition. The article was a brief survey of the battle for ‘moral high ground,’ which basically amounts to the struggle for rhetorical dominance since both groups are ill-equipped to meaningfully engage in  what the riots mean. Anywhoo, I’m just going to try to do a quick “argument analysis:”

“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism — it’s not going to cut it any more,” Mr. Cameron said. “In large parts of the country this was just pure criminality. These riots were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian. These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament. And these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.”

The conclusion: moral neutrality isn’t going to cut it anymore.

This conclusion is substantiated with the statement that in large parts of the country, the riots were pure criminality. The next statements say that the riots were not about race or about government or  about poverty. The logical gap in this argument is made in the assumptions that a. one’s own race is indicative of the race-position that one is capable of taking, b. that the only result of government cuts is a riot at Parilament (i.e. the assumption that actors in a given scenario are self-consciously aware and rational in all situations), and c. that poverty is an ideological state that dictates the actions and moral fores of people who actually live in penury.

Thus, not only is the conclusion of the statement completely illegitimate in terms of its relation to the premises, it is also illegitimate on its own terms, since it fails to provide any authentic alternative to the current state of affairs. There are not specific vanguards appointed to execute the tightening of belts, and there is no explicit link between moral neutrality and the riots, either; the author has failed to make a clear and necessary relationship between morality and the other possible causes (in addition, he has not exhausted the possible sources of unrest).

 

Sometimes, it’s not just a spin game: why we’re not talking critically about the riots

The paucity of leftist (or even meaningful conservative) critical analysis of the London riots is striking. It seems at first glance that even the left, when faced with a concrete challenge of responding to bodies without limbs, is reluctant to say what it knows to be true. This is not just about the looters: the looters are a symptom. The looters are a socially unacceptable symptom, and it’s just god-damned unfortunate for those who’d like to write a natty speech about jobs and bonuses and the like. This goes beyond that. This isn’t just about dollars, or even “morals” whatever the hell those are supposed to mean for kids who’ve never seen real conditions in which they live.

Of course, it’s about both. It’s about the failure of sovereign power to actually make its own exception in order to protect its population, and its about a rupture in history. This is about the body politik that has no face, no form; this is the body politik that has been rejected by all. Its movements and its meaning are unintelligible and un-absorbable without radical re-definition of what it means to be engaged in any horizontal politics. To make myself clear, I’ll just say this: to reject outright the classic turning-of-the-tables-and-thinking-of-the-rich-folk.

It’s obvious that that rhetoric has not served us well. Maybe you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that the boss sucks. But maybe you have to be something more than a Marxist to see that ugly and vagrant destruction has been the outcome of the Left’s weak-water cries. We’ve moaned and groaned and shuddered in the corner while rifts in the universe have opened up and made underworlds of miserable boors with holes-for-eyes while we were busy arguing over Whodunit.

Worse, were we even really arguing, or were we just spinning verbal filigree at our desks?

The Left has a massive opportunity to reclaim what is ours without relying on static images of State, parliamentary politics, interests, business, and class. No, we can’t support looting or riots without political bite that’s in-and-for-itself. No, we cannot countenance the piss-poor chain of command, and put ourselves off in the margins as we always do.

The looters may very well be poured into a crack that goes down a mountain side, and while they were sliding, we were writing book reviews.

your friendly Sunday morning post

As an update: I have raised my GRE scores. I am still reading Strauss, and I am still getting used to living in this city; I never knew where to look for interesting things on the web or in town. I have always had a bit of a block up against trends and have therefore forfeited many beautiful and insightful things. Why is it that I remain convinced that true (authentically beautiful and insightful) life does not need a search engine or a destination? If anything, I would have it be the path and pattern on which strokes of keys and paint collide and deteriorate; I would have beauty be the twisted braid of light behind a glass that shines out again, showing us all that light does bend.

role playing in history

Is the city in speech clouded by the city of dross? The slag, baggy, and generally irksome trash of esoteric terms and phrases. An erasure of words might do us all a favor, and thoughts might all be expounded in a generally refreshing tone and singing letter. One grows to hate one’s own voice–even the inner voice of words and phrases–as one grows to hate the monotonous pattern of being with oneself. Day in and day out perfectly decent ideas and thoughts are marred in the faux-nexus of expression. Intuitions are crushed to pulp under the current of emotions, meaningless emotions, and the current of time spills over and against us. And the cold river pulls out of us what is most unseen until we ourselves run frail along the wind trodden grass. I often paint a deep blue cloud among all the gray ones, and find a deep green shadow along the sandy path.

 

On the down slope of a hill, with a view of a city far off, I watch the sun twist itself between the knots of wood. I do not want to move from where I wonder if I could wash the fragrant memory of nature into the city when I go home. I do not want to go home. There, the clouds and buildings rise up. And I, who have never longed for monuments, am made to shiver on the empty sidewalks filled with the living dead; monuments have been eaten. All that’s left are the insects that are trivial, arbitrary selves. Selves that multiply and divide around the clock-strikes. I can find no place to breathe near them, but neither can I fly to the country. In the cold lashes of the dirty city’s broom is where Socrates still speaks to me.

 

In this old dark alley, in a part of town that no one on the waterfront has heard of, houses stand in unbearable mediocrity and I in the long maze of them. I read and wonder from how deep in the muds of history my dreams have shaken me. Ideas cannot become, they are. Assuming that this is true, from where do Ideas emerge? Is it so foolish of me to contemplate questions that necessitate an outside? The outside of time and becoming is the idea. But are ideas truly and merely the apprehension of something exterior? And, are the ideas actually secondary to the truth that is “good” or knowledge, as in, an applied becoming in light of the Idea?

 

All of that sounds like trash. The good thought, or process, results in knowledge, which remains the essentially negative knowledge. The idea remains without, and justice is one such idea that can only be understood or in-itself and executed justly by the philosopher king. But in the end, I do not know whether or not I can accept that such a city should exist, if there is a fractured “communism” of the guards that upholds the oppression of the multitude. If the king and only the (philosopher) king must know what justice truly is, justice seems to me to be the most baleful of all sovereign rights.

The soporific inducements of standardized testing

Betcher impressed, huh? SOP_or_iffic: causing sleepiness. This blog post comes at the beginning of what promises to be a long day and after what was a very short night’s sleep. The GRE’s are a little under two weeks away. This is the second time that I have taken them, although the format has changed.

Having graduated, and finding myself compelled to make some cash, somehow, the pattern of my life has been a little mind numbing. I can’t say that I shouldn’t have tried harder. I should have, and will, of course. There comes a point at which the ringing in one’s ears and the flaming heart to do what is right is damped by the pressing and nonsensical concerns of the everyday. A few months ago in the spring, I wrote a post about the revolutionary quality of scrubbing one’s floors. It reads to me, like an interested piece of propaganda. Of course I was in the position to talk about revolutionary qualities of life when I was so comfortably maintained by federal and state education grants.

Of course, I do maintain that the ethical structures we carve out and enact in accordance with or against history are extremely important; I just think it all gets very tiring. I started reading Raoul Vaneigem’s “The Revolution of Everyday Life,” a few days ago. (I have been starting and dropping too many things at once, but that’s for another inquiry…) I saw the first strands of my own coherent thoughts in the preface and the introduction, even in the first chapter. But I remain disenchanted. I sit bleary-eyed and dismayed at the childishness of the style and of its demands. I remain hardened against the meretriciousness of fragmented sentences that wish to express the crushing reality of mundane things, whose punch feels more like a drug-induced coma.

“People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long as each isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of liberation, however weak and clumsy it may be,  always bears an authentic communication, an adequate personal message,” (40 TREL).

This is the kind of statements that rouses dilettantes from their beds and ushers revolutionaries to their graves because it is based on a paradoxical ethical tenet. From the position of the gesturer, the adequate personal message has yet to have been digested or consecrated both in ethical and in historical terms. There is a seemingly unclosed patch of time and space for which the melancholy actor must maintain a sense of hope, or even faith. Faith in terms of revolutionary act for the good of “people” generally, and the revolutionary in particular cannot be made aware of the reality or “truth” of action or gesture from within-himself. So, I’m thinking that RV does what a lot of writers (like myself) are tempted to do: he dons himself with the superiority of knowing both event and ethic without situating himself within it. He is the creator of worlds and the third person intelligence who signifies meaning. As far as I can tell, this one phrase is too much like god-making and not enough of subject-for-himself.

This reminds me of a friend who showed up at the tail end of a sit-in and started judging what the sitters in should do and say, and then started addressing all of the protestors outside as “YOU” as if we were all one united group. That’s fine, perhaps a little bit of unity couldn’t hurt, but he elevated himself outside the context, outside the boring, slogging, and slow process of learning how to rebel. He wished to take on the role of sage master, of the wise philosopher, but that position is not tenable precisely because it denies the quotidian element of philosophy.

So what does all this mean? I don’t know what it all means, but to me, if has to do with the call for a real alternative. Real is always a bad word, and my professor who surely have underlined or circled the word on my paper, asking me to define or even oppose the concept. But that is precisely what the task is, and for me, a lot of situationist writing misses the mark (perhaps it’s just a generational thing, and it was truly legit 50 years ago…). To me, the real is lacking and it must be recovered. The revolutionary must be somewhere between washing my floors and finding a coherent way to talk to my fellow tutors, waitresses, or booksellers about healthcare, about the IDEA of communism, or the idea of anything. Because so far, we have been deadened into a world of familiar shapes and patterns, but we have forgotten that we too are 3D.

under the siege of placeless and hapless poses

I have hurt and been hurt so recklessly, and have blighted hearts and sunny memories with the silent tides of changing passions without any clarity. Without any fairness to myself or onlookers or sufferers of fateful pain it has struck us all. It has struck us all in the rape of our illusions and our shadow-evening’s dreams; gone with it was the idle consolation of childhoods. A pearling husk in high July’s day hides the rotten kernels of young life, wilting and falling away implacably with the hours of the day. From inside out, it is not the myths we might embroider into our housework that can save our own hands from hurtling us through the windows. It is the painful patchwork of becoming ourselves; the solitary grafting up of ripped wounds we slashed into our wintertime enemies in selfish despair. We must now repair these wounds in washing under their clotted surfaces. We dare to gasp out words rather than scream in feckless tones against the long monotony of train rides and of mindless things, in indifference without a name. We call these things the flow of things, and face ourselves in the distention of our bloated frames bending out of agony on the fetid streets for sweet action that  will right us and the time that has since forgotten all our hollow houses.

aversion to diversion

I graduated college last week. I started working. Now that structure has largely evaporated from my life, I am left with political sentiments, goals, and fields of critical inquiry without much a mode of organizing them. Not to mention, I confront all new possibilities of reading, studying, technical refinement with an increased apprehension for plunging into diversions. I have too many choices, as it is. And one might as well highlight that methodology, clarity, and ubiquitous engagement are not my strong suits. I must learn to learn when there is no seeming end to it. All that is well and good, perhaps it is a mere trifle of this “transitional period.” I have not written seriously in about a month. I have serious grammatical issues to work out, I must learn and refine methods of critical analysis in my interpretations of books and in my responses to critical works. I must learn my own language of critical engagement, and am determined to let go of all the gratuitous and vapid sign-posts that I used for so long. Borrowed language is a fraud.

Perhaps language has no original–I imagine words and letters blowing softly on the ground in yellow sunlight, ruffled gently under trees and in intersections on the edges of cities, rolling over one another with intangible delicacy, and crushing all hope for reflection in the spectator. I do imagine the endless sorrow with which Werther walked in the rolling valleys and quivered with the leaves, and feel my arms tighten under the pressure of the empty word. Left only with the phrase; I must abandon Werther for Geothe.

There is so much that I need to do, and so much of it must happen, as always, very slowly, and better than I have had occasion to execute in the past. I must become a better writer. I must learn how to research properly; I cannot make broad and sweeping claims as I was so anxious to do. I must re-take standardized tests that I used to be good at, but have since lost the patience to interpret. I must remind myself of the political struggle that is almost always buried beneath the “ostensible goal.” So much reading, and responding, and preparing.

I imagine my life, from time to time, and wish that there could be periods of isolated inquiry. I would learn about music and history and philosophy with all of my being. I might forget about time. I would perfect my French, rub-out the little marred tendencies in my English writing. I might even run a half-marathon instead of huffing through three miles of hap-hazard exercise. But time–that consciousness of passing time–forces me under the waves of self-conscious reflection. And my fear of failure pulls me into the muddy waters of indecision.

And I am reminded of Frederic in L’education sentimentale, and become tolerably disgusted with myself, flitting from drawing to writing, to oration. The education of sentiments, the sentimental education is not an education but the wanting of it, and I must persevere in spite of threatening storms.