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.

Wondering

In writing fiction, should the author present concepts or problems in a way that is as overtly thought-out as in theoretical essays? That is to say something a little different than what I wrote: while a book like Ziziek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce unwinds the implications of the real-life narratives in politics, economics, and television, should a work of fictive narration strive to structure its own future debates? I tend to answer these questions too simply (right now I am afraid that I would say something like “well even if one tried to do that, inevitably there are always other kinds of processes available in any text…”

But still, I wonder if writing fiction demands less of  a stance. Now that I’m thinking of it, this question might be stupid, because it doesn’t really matter what the intention of an author is. In other words, literature as fiction seems to be  symptomatic and maybe requires a positive, theoretical (no, no a realistic!) tether (from either within the book or via an outside writer) to move it into meaning. Yes? No?

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.