Waning Sentimental

Less than a half an hour ago, I walked out of my French final. I am a free woman; goodbye Fall 2009. But I’m not at all happy about it. This semester was by the far the best experience I have ever had in my life. I learned how to read, how to think, how to write, how to teach.

But I know someone who would tell me that I already knew what I thought, I was already who I am, but I must take one small divergence from accepting that and say thank you to everyone in my life that assisted my education. Made my education what it is;

perhaps I shouldn’t address this entry in the second person informal–my teachers span continents, decades, often miss each other by whole lifetimes. The books they write were sometimes written for their times, but more often than not, they were written for this moment. Then there are my physically present teachers, I should call them my mentors, and without them, one in particular, I think I would have shut down and forgotten the whole bit completely.

To my friend, my housemate and person-I-can-always-convince-to-break-stupid-laws, thank you for writing with me and thank you for letting me be “cosmic” most of the time.

At the end of every Tuesday meeting for my independent study, I walked down the street, the same vacant, dirty, loud street–

There were the buildings, but they did not matter. The puddles on the side of the road, growing deeper. The way that I could walk in and out of sunshine. The frigid clouds billowing in the distance. The strip of sky above the avenue that could not, would not let itself be touched except by a spindling branch. And all the while, the new freeze washed over with the wind. Always brushing across my face, my hair on my cheek, guiding the fraying bits of daylight softly into my eyes. On the sidewalk I was triumphant.

The prospectus for the common

There is a better word for reifcation. Something a little less verbose, arrogant… but I will let it stay. Because in thinking about the common, there is a tremendous call for such a word, such a ‘being-called’ for new and real social life, out of the dead appendage of the present.

If we follow this line of thought, there are some fundamental things that we must leave behind of Debord’s. Instead of accepting that the last 40 years have ever-increasingly killed social life, perhaps we must ask if instead it has been displaced, scattered out to some other place, some other dimension. It is necessary to ask how, where, and if it might be consolidated, or if it really matters to consolidate such a thing.

I think, though, that it doesn’t have to be consolidated. It’s very power (the power of the common, but in this very specific and humble reading, I will say the power of the conversation) resides in its scatteredness; it’s ability to spring up again and again, readily out of love.

[See my older post on Adorno's concept of love for a more detailed understanding of what I'm thinking when I use the term. I think that idea is highly useful and pertinent, because it *too* depends on a kind of de-reification, to say the very least. I think it's More on 44, but I'll check.]

No doubt, this concept of the conversation (as a small component of the common, of the coming multitude, for the creation or realization of love) is very cloudy. But in these not hard but empty times, we must begin slowly, and without misconceptions of structuralist–maybe even Leninist–ideals of revolution. We must look around, to one another. A formation of the One is dead; religion is not dead it has disintegrated;

and all the little being-gods are forced to reconcile this, not as individuals, or Americans, not even as *believers in human rights*. But as something else-

We cannot think that social life is dead, and if it is accessible to the very few, it cannot be accessed alone.

[I am not in any way advocating a new type of humanism in the face of real economic and political disaster. But Marxist thought, indeed leftist thought, has long forgotten the ethical/human elements of such social being-togetherness. Perhaps it was always a mistake to enforce the political of the ONE and employ an economic policy of the Most in order to defend against the Rest. Keeping in mind that this should not be understood as a *structuralist* approach means leaving being the old-fashioned critique and desire for any one thought to contain all of the answers.

As I said before, religion has disintegrated and we must accept this.]

Globalization deteriorates these old starting lines, these old brackets. But I can’t pretend that there aren’t any new ones forming; but now there is a possibility. A new possibility of conversation of commonality in this flux does exist and we must explore it, before capital and its puppet governments attempt to blunt our noses, once again, with some new policy, some new lie.

What is the Common?

What is the Common; the common? Is it the expression of freedom, the expression of democracy (in the most profound and, therefore, unheard of way)? If the common is not something like a programme, is it political? Or is it a way of life?

In Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri’s book  In Praise of the Common the term isn’t defined in many positive terms. In most of the book, there are little skermishes around the edges of the concept–of the term–but what is most striking is the incredibly apparent presence of its foes.

Structuralism is the biggest and baddest of them all. Followed by dialectics and totalization, to a degree. Now, as I’m writing this, I’m thinking to myself: “hm, this seems like rather a structuralist way of charting out the barricades.” I will let it stay, however;

If the common is something like the transfer of knowledge, like the conversation between friends and colleagues that grows out of love (and just what love is, remains to be seen…) it makes sense that the common is a fragmented unit. I’m not sure that fragmented is the right way to look at it, either. The common seems to refer to something like the social process in itself; the common is produced from the multitude.

This term, too, is very ambiguous. So far, I’m constructing my understanding of the multitude on AN/CC’s work as well as on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘Whatever Singularity.’

Whatever Singularity is the aspect of the common, I think, as a property of the multitude. The multitude, which is fundamentally against the powers consolidated into the One, will make its formation in the commonality of whatever singularity.

…I don’t think I said much just now; I’m going to reread Agamben and get back to this concept more explicitly.