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.

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

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.