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.

What to write, what to write

The thing is, I do love to read. If we take the real percentages of my time, I spend most of it reading, followed by writing. But for all my posting, for everything I find myself most concerned about, the majority of it has nothing to do with literature. Isn’t that a bit odd for an English major? Maybe it isn’t… I’m thinking that I need to read contemporary literature (not that I don’t love other kinds, of course) but it doesn’t fit all with what I spend most of my time thinking about (if it’s not current). But this might be sort of bullshit, and a lame excuse for not trying hard enough to avoid the most obvious types of reading, problem-raising, and cultural exposure.

The thing is, although I do like reading, I agree with Jameson when he points out that we (and here I am *generously* clustering myself with real thinkers) spend most of our time exposed to the base, crude churnings-out of the cultural apparatus. Instead of calling it whatever it might be called, or purposefully avoiding its presence (its unavoidable presence) even in the most elevated of intellectual lives, maybe that is what should really be confronted. I don’t think it’s enough to just think about the media or literature or “politics” (in its function as culture and entertainment) as anything bracketed off from each other, or from the realm of philosophy. Do I want to read more contemporary novels? Definitely.

I just don’t feel guilty that I’m not, right now. I’d rather read theory, “philosophy” as they call it. And I couldn’t tell you why.

Something to let stew, chew over, swallow or spit.

In the second place, this fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject. consequence of the rationalisation of th e work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient; it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his   less and less activity and more and more contemplative. The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world; it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.

-Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness

I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one who thinks that’s amazing.

Getting back to the point that I had tried to ignore

…but I couldn’t. There is a little snippet in Lukacs’ essay that sort of… well… to say the very least, made me double-take. After all, there is so much in these so few pages that it’s hard not to get quite excited over the material. (Like, for instance, the disarmingly concise visualization of modernism on page 23:

The more conscientiously the facts are explored–in their isolation, i.e. in their unmediated relations–the less compellingly will they point in any one direction. It is self-evident that a merely subjective decision will be shattered by the pressure of uncomprehended facts acting automatically ‘according to laws.’

I must remember to pull-out Mrs. Dalloway and excerpt the plane scene before the royal gates. But this is just me rambling on and pretending I understand all this.) But it is important to scrutinize the discrepancies in the learning process. I am hoping (and fairly certain) that it is a discrepancy in my own understanding of the material.

So here it is, my conundrum. Lukacs is going on and on about the purpose of Orthodox Marxism, right? And that’s important, but in order to fully explicate the importance of Marxism, Lukacs has to prove the relationship between man and society… or consciousness and society in relation to the proletariat’s self-knowledge as the subject and object of history. He states:

Marx urged us to understand ‘the sensuous world’, the object, reality, as human sensuous activity. this means that man must become conscious of himself as a social being, as simultaneously the subject and the object of the socio-historical process. In feudal society man could not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were still mainly natural. Society was far too unorganized and had far too little control over the totality of relations between men for it to appear to consciousness as the reality of man. (The question of the structure and unity of feudal society cannot be considered in any detail here.) Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society. Capitalism destroyed both the spatio-temporal barriers between different lands and territories and also the legal partitions between the ‘estates.’

I am thinking that his minor parenthetical concession statement is the key to my misunderstanding. But even so, this one paragraph, seemingly so full of eye-opening material, fills me with doubt. When Lukacs says “[i]n feudal society, man could not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were still mainly natural,” it hits a sour chord in my thought-processes.

I can’t help but postulate that perhaps man did not see himself as a social being within the constraints of feudalism because he was not a social being to the extent that humanity ‘recognizes’ itself to be today. In fact, the argument presented in this essay i.e. that consciousness is a product of society and not vice versa, seems to support the idea that consciousness and society are changing, and that it would be expecting too much from poor little history to lead to the over-determined belief in the social system of capitalism as a means (after nearly 7 thousand years of written and political history) of FINALLY discovering that man is an intrinsically social being.

Although (I’m hoping) that this is an instance of my ignorance, I wonder why Lukacs doesn’t cover his bases (sorry, I hate sports) and go into a little bit more detail about it. Just wondering. Does anyone have anything for me?