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

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...come]

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.

Just came back from the Gerald Edward show in Princeton

CD release party; it was a pretty good time. If you’re looking for your jazz-blues-pop thing, it’s nice in half hour intervals. I read William Blake for most of the hour-set and bounced with Calico’s front man and lead guitarist. But not before I picked up a sweet CD– must support local art. Right? Anyway, I think he (GE) said something about the Iron Monkey next weekend so maybe I’ll look into that.

Still working on the writings but I am a terrible writer on the computer, which is really bad since that’s where it’s got to go. I was seriously considering scanning in my hand-written notes and disseminating in that form. But it’s a bad idea: no one can tell the difference between my f’s and my l’s.

After making that silly thing below, I feel much better. I’m caring less and less when people disagree with me–can’t let it stop me. Blind leading the blind (only danger being that we’re walking in circles).

!!! it happens.

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.

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?