Interesting… imagining the idea

I’ve had a few interesting this weekend’s Left Forum. The state of the left is indeed quite precarious. There seems to be an interesting paradox: students and others who are interested and imperatively *wish* for a new formation of the communist/leftist idea are largely absent from the kinds of events that foster a hit/miss institutionalized forum. The first thoughts about something like LF seem to shape out to something like: there are a few obscure politicians, aging hippies who still think that a social formation of the left looks the same as a 20th century march, and a few theorists who begrudgingly (or, with much reservation and with little hope) attend out of a faithfulness. And in the younger generation there are fascinating developments: there are strains that treat LF and “a different way of life” as a social convention, another place to radically break out of the moment in a march (or a party). [In this sense, we see the worse concept of the hipster mapping onto the ghost-like hope of Revolution Now Hippies who either don't know they're dead, or are truly bourgeois and don't give a good god-damn about moving cultural relativism.]

The committed and until recently underground intellectuals and scholars are there but not with much pleasure and certainly with a guarded sense of duty. Now in this group I really should admit that I especially esteem something like Groys’s agreement to break with the letter in order to keep faith with the tradition… indeed, Bosteels said something very similar when he called for a new and unified left that was able to achieve something more than self-criticism. And it is in this second formation that there is room for the new left, for students and for a careful construction of an everyday ethic of living as a communist, living as a Marxist…

Neither one of the speakers I mentioned directly agree, totally support all of Badiou’s communist hypothesis; but both do seem to appreciate the possibility for this new opening. Likewise, to return to the presence of politicians at the forum, I think that this group breaks down along the lines of old schools of political/social formation with the new concept of beginning-again and unity for Idea through History and not history as idea. I met a representative of the Finnish Left Forum, Ruurik Holm, whose message was astoundingly similar (although in a different panel from the Badiou talk), but one that located itself in the formation of a new left political formation. [As many people already know, recent years have given way to a whole new formation of European political parties who really do find ways to work in autonomous cohesion against the reactionary right populist movements.] And yet, all I really saw on the American political party front were a group of three quibbling, fat fifty-somethings talking about NYC boro elections.

So for all of my talk about the young and the old, the committed and the non, the political and the theoretical, what I really mean to get at is something that Boris Groys’s gestured to with much precision in yesterday’s panel. Faithfulness to:

1. the letter

2. the  spirit

It seems to me that this new emerging possibility of the communist idea, the left heading into a new decade, seems to confront the old problems of formation (often understood by more dated groups as “marching” or similarly Fordist types of organization) with a new appreciation for the basics of fragmented “formation” that has manifold political and social capacity to defeat the binaries in culture. I wonder if this is relevant because it can combat finance capital, or a capitally-driven mode of being that allows for categories which the “lettered” (2nd wave) formation didn’t allow for; we are a multiplicity but we must realize that subtle theoretical runs and criticisms in and between each other cannot block us from realizing the blatantly obvious and by-and-largely political stances that we must take in order to effectively combat the monsters of global capital and its new bride, the Western nation.

A new formation for students and workers (in a factory or an undocumented worker on a suburban roof or an office employee) should all realize that we are all workers and students to the degree that we are all in “precarious” work environments. The new student formations run on two tracks: we organize new modes of education, of writing, of meeting, but we should not reject the undergraduate degree. We should not seek to merely “reform” or “spontaneously break out of;” we should be always working in these two registers together.

Perhaps if what we used to know as anarchy and what we used to call communism are worthwhile ways to think about the missing place of ethics/individual in the communist Idea. Perhaps an ethics on an individuals level and a space for fragmented theory can come to terms with the real political environment we work in. Instead of two binary American political categories and four gigantic tax brackets, and an intellectual population that is just now emerging, maybe we can hold… maybe, maybe, maybe!

? thoughts? I’m just talking here… but it’s better than the alternative

Elliott Smith smiled at me from the corner of the lawn-chair concert in the tornado

The more I resemble the cream-painted cinder blocks the more my dreams reach up to me like weird trees growing out my brain, like that man’s lung in Russia. The commitments don’t die, just the desire to reduce everything. When I was younger I made everything simpler than it was; I couldn’t make sense of silence when there was so much to be said. I couldn’t make much sense of music theory or where to break a line of poetry. I’ve only felt things– what is it that talks in a poem? What is it that reaches out from the deepest part of me and graces just the touch of music. Me and my ipod, out under the starshine, the only time when I can synthesize and not-be; my imagination is my not-be. My dreams, like I said, they’re crawling from my day life, they’re looking for me.

Not-be, making terrible up-hills all covered over in dead grass and an emu like the ones in Canton, Ohio– “acclivity,” I say to myself in my dreams. GRE vocabulary drills. In my dreams fifty stories of a glass building are only twenty feet and we all fit because we’re all only six feet, not ten. The rain seeps in through the girders in the subway and we yell “occupy,” but some girl stops us all because we don’t mean it enough. I burn my fingers on incense and little pine needles grow out of my thumbs. Everyone leaves.

I wake up. Do my French work, read, eat, live for the future. Everyone’s collecting in a language without numbers.

I wake up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking loosely, get over it.

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

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

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

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

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

grr.

Check out new student pamphlet at Rutgers;