the postsituational ontology of emptiness

I used to think something, feel something, hope for something when I listened. Now I only feel the despair; I feel the inherent need for an “ontology” but I reject that it must be so. I say it is a weak mind, a weak revolution, a weak generation. an identity that is too far off the charts to be seen anywhere around these parts, but just a petty bourgeois in the other. you want to talk movement,

fuck movement, fuck mobilization.

our dreams are post situational, that its beings and events are all locked
across the river
in some thanatoid dream.
but we don’t know it and we can’t remember why.

an ontology of the permanently fucked.
talk to me about praxis on the couch; don’t expect it to be a remedy for bliss
–a writing project that soothes the blisters of forgotten history.

art is supposed to hurt
everything hurts
everything hurts

i don’t deliver anything. the post-evental sanglots des violins,
a solitary chest heaving,
but always empty of the wind that had transported it,
foolish with the thought that it might ever be more than a dead leaf.

Sunny Laundry

Right now, there’s a “Renuzit Sunny Laundry” air freshener sitting next to my tap tap tapping fingers. I can’t smell a damned thing. It’s one of those deals that is supposed to whither away as the effectiveness of the air freshness diminishes, blah blah. Originally, it sat on our bathroom window sill, freshening both the great dehors and our cat’s litter box.  I have been reading and rereading Jameson’s Political Unconscious, for form and content because I don’t think I understood how amazingly brilliant his writing is. Anyway, there’s a bit that I was reading that said “the tree had fallen whether or not anyone was in the forrest,” and I didn’t get it at first.

But of course, now I do, after sitting in my bathroom, watching the Sunny Laundry Adjustable disintegrate into the outer world of New Brunswick trees. If I really plug my nose up to the damn thing, very much like a shoe gelatin in feeling.

I can’t smell it, and I certainly don’t need it. I  just think that I need it, rather, it is empirically presented as a necessary item that does an quantifiable service with a measurable effect because it is a fallen tree, that is wilted away. Whether or not I (the subject) was present or even qualitatively effected by the Event, the fallen tree (or “objective” happening) is proved to me, the otherwise disparate spectator, by the physical “objective” proof of the whithering.

I retract the plastic top (my house-mate thought that she might be able to save the scent for longer): tree, penis, air-freshener, many things in one.

Just one of many objects that float around me, proving their usefulness by quantifiable results that I never experienced because of my silly inability to smell, my silly inability to know my body, my silly inability to engage with the true essence of the universe, which, of course, needs 7.5 oz pick me up.

You might have a clue but it’s a hieroglyphic mystery

At a party on Richardson, or catching some real life music somewhere else. The dream is alive, and what is the dream? To be awake? To imagine the others, dreaming over you. And there’s more than that. There’s more than dancing and all that other stuff: believe it or not, there’s more than you. You want to talk about Isawyourutgers, you want to talk about singing songs and remembering anything. But you can’t remember anything until after you’ve tuned in… the flow, the flow. And you’re broken hearted because the hideous truth is that you’re untalented… that you’re … ___ nothing, it’s a mystery to you and you can’t figure out why. Then you think for a moment about the “real” life, which lurks beneath a life of understanding grammar and all the rest that only wishes for approval. And believe me, there are theme songs you wouldn’t believe. Costs are goin up, and so are all the rest, so you’d better take what you can and move on, right?

No, I just can’t agree. There’s another way to be had. It isn’t popular, but god damned, maybe people are ready to hear each others’ voice every now and again. Go on a splurge. Think about April 21st.

-csothbeg144

[addresseeunknown.wordpress.com

...come]

Left Forum: student as student, student as reader, writer, one-day intellectual

So also in Sartre, for whom it must be said, in spite of his emphasis on our pro-jection forward in time, that the future remains imaginary in the most morbid sense: nothing, indeed, draws down the whole corrosive force of Sartean irony more surely than the mere wish to change in the future, or, what amounts to the same thing, the wish to have changed in the past: idle daydreams, or remorse. Such wishes in reality have their function in the present alone: one wants to change (think of the horror of Electra when her bloody daydreams are–as though through some terrible misunderstanding–actually realized) in order to feel oneself superior to an intolerable present, only to dissociate oneself mentally from a present reality one does not care to see. (Marxism and Form, page 139. Fredric Jameson.)

Left Forum is officially over. So it’s Sunday night. We started out at six AM yesterday. My last moments on the top floor of Pace University after staring out the window to the Brooklyn Bridge, the old buildings of New Amsterdam, and the reappearance of warm-weather haze, I stared out the window. This is the left of 2010.

Being young during a financial, social, educational crisis is lonely. The left is lonely for a student who wrote for the Idea and maybe only for the intended reader. I wrote because I read The Coming Insurrection, I wrote because I read about California, Rachel Smith. Today, I was around some people who were stuck in “orthodoxy” and people who were in full engagement with the Communist Hypothesis.

Bruno Bosteels opened up the Badiou panel (quoting with the highest attempts to faithfulness from my notes:

Should we have confidence in the old masters? … What is it like to be a young communist? … Shouldn’t we start with active forgetfulness? Can we really ignore the longer history? … What do we do in search of the “everyday” communism; what happens in a communism that is everywhere and no where? Badiou displaces the possible to the impossible. … Politics as Idea… Idea with a capital I and History with a capital H.

and Boris Groys (not directly quoting b/c of scattered notes):

What does it mean to be faithful to the communist idea? It is possible to be faithful the communist idea by faithfully returning to point zero, and there is faithfulness in following communism to the letter. In the former, there is a constant returning and erasure. To be faithful, one must be willing to break with the project. … How can we be faithful to Marxism? the Revolution? … [Being committed to the communist] Spirit means going further and further. … The withering of the state is a problematic program.

[I heard the last sentence many times and in many different groups.]

Groys also said that he is ambiguous to Badiou’s writing; it touches on the main impulses of society but his selection of arguments and facts are problematic. [Badiou] always looks at the bright side of things, nothing bad ever really happens…

But I am thinking that perhaps there is a reason why Badiou might be so hopelessly bright; in a very bad version of a similar Badiou panel I responded to Revolution Books or who-the-fuck-ever they were that you couldn’t “apply” Badiou’s conception of the “event” onto (what have become) stogy examples of second-wave Maoist examples and 1917 directions. In his speech “Thinking the Event” it is most clear that the event is precisely at a distance from political power because it is a philosophical project of incommensurabilty that can’t be translated or quantified onto older movements, or any political formation, directly.

the Idea; the idea is everywhere–the possibility and the Idea and a few writers who don’t even know my name, a few mentors, and even fewer friends. And me–and books and me. And the man on the corner that I can see looking up at the sky-scraper in construction. Lonely work for students, these days. Lonely work because I’ve already broken with the rhetoric of Revolution Books but the thinkers who I most look up to are in company with each other. It is getting better: maybe just because I’m here now and that makes a difference. But labor panels still talk about Greek labor unions and “flexible,” “irregular” labor forces without mentioning students. Without mentioning Communique or The Coming Insurrection or immigration or social security…

And at lunch today during a good conversation I realized that writing is the act that allows the reader (well, the reader and the writer who’s like me) to follow the tradition of other pieces that influence it. The pieces speak to each other from time to time–the beginning of epochs and the ends of them and the beginnings, again. There was a good chunk of time that I thought the handing-out of writings, the immediate and “responding” audience should care the way I was invested in writing as a thought-process. I mean… this might be old news to you, but writing might have just changed my life again. The Idea is bright, such is the nature of beginning again.

If you leave me alone for long enough I start writing in my notebook

And then when I come on here there’s no choice but to call it blargh-ing. I can’t tell you how excited I am for the Agamben, et al book Democracy in What State?. I think that there were parts written in French and new bits added in English (trans by William McCuaig). I rifled through CUP’s computer and printed it out weeks ago. I want that hard copy so I can write forever about it. Also waiting for Marxism and Form to come in the mail to I can start reading that.

I’m turning 21 tomorrow.

and then spring break next week. I sincerely promise to read and do real work on here, less blarg-ing. And less poetry–it’s getting to me.

apologies

I’ve mostly recovered. I have had some whiny blog entries, but that one was great: it was not only whiny but also self-righteous. my favorites. moving on,

I’m not too sure what the policy on this one is, so I won’t give a title or anything, but I’ve just read a *fantastic* manuscript on democracy. I think it’s due out in May, I’ll keep you posted. I will be bold and list the contributors in order: Agamben, Badiou, Bensaid, Brown, Nancy, Ranciere, Ross, Zizek.

Probably one of my favorites, ever. I wish I could blog about it but I don’t want to get yelled at. Soon enough, soon enough.

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.

i have a gridded themememememememe

Today is the first day of classes; I reread some Badiou this morning. I was thinking over “Thinking the Event,” and as apparent as the title of the talk, I only just understood what it meant. The book in which this talk appears alongside Zizek’s talk “Philosophy is not a dialogue” (Philosophy in the present, polity books, 2005, trans. 2009) centers itself on the question of philosophy and living philosophically. For Badiou, not everything is a philosophical thing, not everything *has philosophical potential*.

But what I can understand from this talk in addition to my current thoughts (I might be transposing) is that the “event” of philosophy is not a unique kind of situation that pops up in front of the philosopher as an already occurring process. Thinking the event implies that philosophy is a kind of gridded intersection of philosopher and everyday day events–and the relation between the thinker and the everyday event (I suppose a quick index name for this would be watching an advertisement for a mop or a run-in with a policeman) that freezes both the thinker and the thing/moment just before the imagined “crossroads.” The philosopher, who is thinking the event, is the only thing that allows philosophy to occur in that moment because of his refusal to make sense of the everyday occurrence, i.e. he refuses to vote in his elections nor is he silent about why.

Not everything has philosophical content from within the designed mechanism, from within the given array of “choices”–that is why it is accurate to say that there is no legitimate kind of philosophy in American government, because the options, debates, language, are all pre-determined and cannot be fundamentally or radically altered in their perspective or delivery.

So I would argue that by thinking the event, as Badiou says, one lives philosophically in the rift between the possibility for truth (i.e. the real possibility for healthcare) versus the toy-like apparition of choice (the Massachusetts elections as something to be sad over, to be considered a “real” opportunity). The matter of finding a philosophical situation depends mostly on the thinker and only marginally on the everyday event.

What does Zizek mean when he says “philosophy is not a conversation?”

Philosophy might not be a conversation in the sense that it is not up for discussion; better yet, that the philosophy as truth is not up for discussion. I hate to use terms that I’m not sure of, but here I think of philosophy (or a philosophical moment) as a moment that is more than individual that speaks of the universal (as B/Z remember as something like “god”). Philosophy, or truth, is not up for debate in the conventional means. Philosophy as “god” characterizes exactly the foreignness that proves it to be always applicable and always apart from the event.

But then, in the middle of Zizek’s portion of the book, foreignness becomes a matter of human rights, or reclaiming an aspect of “the human” without being confined to the silly limits of cultural relativism (I am thinking here of his essay “Against Human Rights” that appeared in the New Left Review, though I forget the specific publication date.)

Because what I think Zizek is saying when he writes “Against Human Rights” is that the liberal notion of the term in the United States depends on the fundamental division of people into hierarchies, and the people at the bottom (and it is a very big bottom) are actually so far from the normal ideals of first world dignity (that is always immediately protected) that it must be remembered and forcefully cloaked onto the second and third worlds.

We must condescend to remind them of their origins as human (of the rights that we grant them but do not protect) in order to play-out the primitive Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau rigmarole of before civilization.

Here is an example from the History Channel: on a program called “Strange Rituals,” the episode transitioned from the ancient Celtic agrarian sacrifices to revenge killings. During the revenge killing segment, there were two plots, one narrative, and the first enveloped the second.  The first plot-indigenous group (Yanomami Tribe) in the Amazon that practices stringent “reciprocity” tactics in warfare, followed by the Danny Greene story in 1976 Cleveland. The Amazon tribe is treated as the “before civilization” anchor for the Danny Greene bit, which is to say “the Danny Greene story speaks of some pre-historic urge for reciprocal living as demonstrated by our pre-historic contemporaries, the barbaric, the most basic kind of human beings, the Yanomami.”

The narrative was “human nature” and the first plot defined the precondition of barbarism and the second made sure to invoke this pre-historic barbarism as more than an isolated incident in post-war America. The parallel insinuates that organized crime and its effects are not products of real economic and social disparity, but that one man’s isolated actions depicted an eruption of primal violence that break through the otherwise benign processes of society. This is a negative example of human rights– here there is no discussion of the rights of the Yanomami, only of the individuals in Cleveland. But it exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of the liberal notion of human rights.

It exposes the assumption that people other than first world people must be reminded of their status as human, and we must be reminded, ourselves (although we would never admit this). Human rights, in the liberal sense, are granted on the basis of potential-being-human (we grant them humanity before they figure out what it is and how to get it,  just as we eventually figured it all out) and this status absolutely undermines any possibility that they ever really were humans. [Along with this comes pity and the all too obvious solution that we must each found/support NGO's to help the others transition and cross over into humanity. Their human rights are placeholders for what will become a private life and their "choice" to make money, develop, etc.]

When Zizek says that philosophy is not a conversation, I think he means that philosophy is not up for debate. Truth is not up for debate or refutation. One can tap into it, follow its legacy and its challenges without refuting its existence.

I might not know the truth, but that certainly doesn’t change that it exists.

What I love about redundancy is that it always means something different-

This little turn about the timeworn path of new year’s is worthwhile, in spite of itself. Not because it is really a new year or that it really is a fresh chance, but because it is something I might do every once in a while, anyway. Some things that I would like to work on this year-

Blogging; this doesn’t appear to be *too* difficult to manage at first. But I think I should take my writing in this blog to a new place. Being a self-conscious thinker usually leads to my being a bad thinker. In a sense, all of my writing, specifically my blogging, will not be as concerned with being “right” (or as it really turns out to be) an exercise in not appearing to be a sycophant. Perhaps all along I really was more concerned with fitting myself into a long line of history and philosophy that could be discussed normally. This is a tricky place to be in at my level of reading and maturity: for a more advanced person, the difference between posing new problems in a new way and posing problems in an unrigorous way is a danger. [I think it might be, at least for me, but I will have to muddle through this for now. i.e. the top of the ramble.] In short, blogging this year will be more concentrated on particular pieces of writing or ideas or events without my accidental self-conscious attempts to make everything fit before I speak. But this is a process.

Stories; it’s been over a year and there are still huge gaps in the story I am writing. I don’t know whether or not it’s any good but I do enjoy writing it. What can I do? Attempting to iron out the end of the plot by the end of the year. Also, writing new short stories might be a good idea.

Self-consciousness; I’ve mentioned it several times before. It’s my biggest problem. I don’t know if it is because I didn’t receive an organized, standardized education or because I wonder if I am always fatally flawed in my thinking and ultimately have nothing to offer. That would be very bad, but we can’t all be philosophers and if I am not a very good thinker, perhaps I’ll learn something else to do with my time. Most likely, though, I should drop the self-consciousness in spite of being a little dull because I don’t really think I would ever give it up.

Public Conversations; there is such a thing as truth. That doesn’t mean I know what it is, but it also doesn’t mean that it ceases to exist when someone doesn’t agree with my general point of view. I’m sure that almost no one agrees with me and not because I’m so great. Learning when to not argue with people–i.e. when politics and philosophy are fundamentally confused (can’t you tell I’ve been meditating on Badiou and Zizek?) and reduced to the level of “taste”. Learning when to laugh at a very bad and confused joke, learning not to enter into a conversation with the latent intent to undermine the other’s point of view.

Thinking; without forcing it into the confines of history and a historically “whole” conception without slipping into nothing deconstruction. Not everyone can do/be everything- Badiou really puts this into perspective for me in Philosophy in the Present. Fighting with everyone for a world-view is rather stupid because it’s all just caught up in itself.

Future; big, scary word. I can’t ease my way out of this one.

Commitment; Next semester is going to be a douzy. I’m interning two days a week in the city at a mainstream publishing house, taking two upper level French courses and two upper level English courses in addition to a science course. Oh, and somehow finding money to eat. But after all that, it still leaves out my primary passion and concerns. (Of course the English and French courses will be great, but those are not nearly sufficient.) And so I’ve got to get creative. I’m not 100% on the second French course yet, but I think I should do it because I need to step up to the next level, anyway. But there is still the problem of commitment; I can’t say it’s a problem of time or anything else. It’s a matter of personal endeavor and dedication- for instance, I never really liked television anyway but now it’s necessary to give it up, entirely. I’m a bit too easy on myself and give myself too many breaks (that’s what happens when you listen to people around you…) Because for me this isn’t work to get into a good graduate program. Of course that would be lovely and I would learn a lot but that possibility is a. a bit stifled and b. highly unlikely for me. This is what I consider “real life” and it would be a shame to live without it.

I had a thought but I’m not convinced

I’m reading Badiou and Zizek’s Philosophy in the Present and in Zizek’s section of the book, he describes the disconnect between philosophy in concrete and creative practice. Well I don’t know if that’s really the right way to put it. But basically, here’s what he writes:

Instead, we find [philosophy] in cultural studies, in English, in French and German departments. If you want to read Hegel and Badiou, you must paradoxically choose comparative literature with majors in French and German. If, on the other hand, you do research on the brains of rats and perform experiments on animals, you go to the philosophical faculties. But is is not uncommon that philosophy occupies the place of another subject: when, for example, communism fell apart, philosophy was the first place in which the resistance was formulated. It was more political than ever at this point in time. However, here you might like to object that great German philosophy was nothing but philosophy. Absolutely not! Already with Heine, not just with Marx, we know that philosophy was the German substitute for the revolution. That is the dilemma: you can’t have both. It is false to claim that the French could have had philosophy if only they had been clever enough. Conversely, the non-appearance of the revolution was the condition for German philosophy. My idea is the following: perhaps we have to break with the idea that there is a normal philosophy.

Now that’s a lot to handle. But what I want to talk about is the survival of philosophy in English- leaving aside the idea of a normal philosophy, perhaps philosophy (in the B/Z sense) survives in “creative” writing and more specifically in fiction because it can survive the particular and the universal. Individual characters or narratives that would otherwise be bogged down by the concept of the individual circumstance manage to highlight and diagnose social symptoms of the moment. I don’t think that I can go much further without being much more specific, since there are many different types of literatures (and I don’t think all fiction can be considered literature…). It was just a thought and I will write more on this, I’m sure.

On “The Communist Hypothesis”

In the final lines of Badiou’s essay he says:

This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes–always global, or universal, in character–and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.

Big words. Badiou leaves the reader with something more to ponder than his self-prescribed answer to the challenge of a new Communist Hypothesis; instead, it is left out like a cold drink on a swollen wooden table to condense. What Badiou does in the middle of this essay that is so important is located in The Spectre. In this sense, I think ‘the spectre’ argues itself for the omnipotent salience of communism by mark of its ghost-ish existence. “It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different pattern” (35).

This kind of communist hypothesis, far from the old vestige of party-line political currents that are too large to transcend the individual/mass movement boundary. But, does Badiou mean to say that the boundary has disappeared? Is there only the individual communist hypothesis?

I think that the mass social procedure of “consciousness” and its “movements” have receded from view; this makes them necessarily absent from our conversations of communist ideals, but not defunct. If there’s one thing I’m beginning to see, it’s that there are no absolutes (if there are, they don’t matter) only momentary traces and bleedings of history. For now, as so much else of today’s everyday life, the communist hypothesis concentrates itself in the mind.

It can’t be dead; its haunting is not an after-life, but a precondition of something more that exists at all times below the surface of every public moment;

as the intellectual rivers overflow the isolated mind, they will pour over onto the banks of the city. Rethinking communist hypothesis, for me, is finding a way to live with the same ideals and hopes for the future. More on this…

WHAT?!

I don’t know if I will actually have time to finish this post before my dear old friend Sarah shows up… but I will certainly try. This sort of thing doesn’t normally take too long, anyway.

Alain Badiou’s piece The Adventure of French Philosophy was… interesting. It began in a whirlwind of explanation of the backward reflection of the “French philosophical moment” that took place from (roughly) 1940 to the 1990′s (and*today* if you’re Badiou and feel like including yourself).

[Now, let me just say, I know, I know. I have not read enough of him to say one thing or the other about him as a theorist. But let's practice some bad philosophy (chuckle) and look at what was in front of my face as it appears in front of yours...]

Simply put, it was unbelievable. In the entirety of the eleven-page article, Marx was never mentioned apart from the vague gesture towards him; in Badiou’s words “a French movement upon German thought.”

Really?

Apart from the *way too convenient* totalization of dominant (French) theorists of the time , the article really didn’t have much to say beyond “there was/is a movement and it was French because they were French and I am French and we are trying to win. Using Marx’s stuff. And maybe Freud’s… not definitely Freud’s.”

…Sounds like some crazy granfallooning to me.

But there is something to this Badiou. I just don’t know what.