If you leave me alone for long enough I start writing in my notebook

And then when I come on here there’s no choice but to call it blargh-ing. I can’t tell you how excited I am for the Agamben, et al book Democracy in What State?. I think that there were parts written in French and new bits added in English (trans by William McCuaig). I rifled through CUP’s computer and printed it out weeks ago. I want that hard copy so I can write forever about it. Also waiting for Marxism and Form to come in the mail to I can start reading that.

I’m turning 21 tomorrow.

and then spring break next week. I sincerely promise to read and do real work on here, less blarg-ing. And less poetry–it’s getting to me.

apologies

I’ve mostly recovered. I have had some whiny blog entries, but that one was great: it was not only whiny but also self-righteous. my favorites. moving on,

I’m not too sure what the policy on this one is, so I won’t give a title or anything, but I’ve just read a *fantastic* manuscript on democracy. I think it’s due out in May, I’ll keep you posted. I will be bold and list the contributors in order: Agamben, Badiou, Bensaid, Brown, Nancy, Ranciere, Ross, Zizek.

Probably one of my favorites, ever. I wish I could blog about it but I don’t want to get yelled at. Soon enough, soon enough.

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.

i have a gridded themememememememe

Today is the first day of classes; I reread some Badiou this morning. I was thinking over “Thinking the Event,” and as apparent as the title of the talk, I only just understood what it meant. The book in which this talk appears alongside Zizek’s talk “Philosophy is not a dialogue” (Philosophy in the present, polity books, 2005, trans. 2009) centers itself on the question of philosophy and living philosophically. For Badiou, not everything is a philosophical thing, not everything *has philosophical potential*.

But what I can understand from this talk in addition to my current thoughts (I might be transposing) is that the “event” of philosophy is not a unique kind of situation that pops up in front of the philosopher as an already occurring process. Thinking the event implies that philosophy is a kind of gridded intersection of philosopher and everyday day events–and the relation between the thinker and the everyday event (I suppose a quick index name for this would be watching an advertisement for a mop or a run-in with a policeman) that freezes both the thinker and the thing/moment just before the imagined “crossroads.” The philosopher, who is thinking the event, is the only thing that allows philosophy to occur in that moment because of his refusal to make sense of the everyday occurrence, i.e. he refuses to vote in his elections nor is he silent about why.

Not everything has philosophical content from within the designed mechanism, from within the given array of “choices”–that is why it is accurate to say that there is no legitimate kind of philosophy in American government, because the options, debates, language, are all pre-determined and cannot be fundamentally or radically altered in their perspective or delivery.

So I would argue that by thinking the event, as Badiou says, one lives philosophically in the rift between the possibility for truth (i.e. the real possibility for healthcare) versus the toy-like apparition of choice (the Massachusetts elections as something to be sad over, to be considered a “real” opportunity). The matter of finding a philosophical situation depends mostly on the thinker and only marginally on the everyday event.

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?

Marx through Zizek tibit-

“In his Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize: every social, religious, and cultural form is historical, contingent, relative–every form except its own. There was history once, but now there is no longer any history:

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations–the relations of bourgeois production–are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity  with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institution of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

What does Zizek mean when he says “philosophy is not a conversation?”

Philosophy might not be a conversation in the sense that it is not up for discussion; better yet, that the philosophy as truth is not up for discussion. I hate to use terms that I’m not sure of, but here I think of philosophy (or a philosophical moment) as a moment that is more than individual that speaks of the universal (as B/Z remember as something like “god”). Philosophy, or truth, is not up for debate in the conventional means. Philosophy as “god” characterizes exactly the foreignness that proves it to be always applicable and always apart from the event.

But then, in the middle of Zizek’s portion of the book, foreignness becomes a matter of human rights, or reclaiming an aspect of “the human” without being confined to the silly limits of cultural relativism (I am thinking here of his essay “Against Human Rights” that appeared in the New Left Review, though I forget the specific publication date.)

Because what I think Zizek is saying when he writes “Against Human Rights” is that the liberal notion of the term in the United States depends on the fundamental division of people into hierarchies, and the people at the bottom (and it is a very big bottom) are actually so far from the normal ideals of first world dignity (that is always immediately protected) that it must be remembered and forcefully cloaked onto the second and third worlds.

We must condescend to remind them of their origins as human (of the rights that we grant them but do not protect) in order to play-out the primitive Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau rigmarole of before civilization.

Here is an example from the History Channel: on a program called “Strange Rituals,” the episode transitioned from the ancient Celtic agrarian sacrifices to revenge killings. During the revenge killing segment, there were two plots, one narrative, and the first enveloped the second.  The first plot-indigenous group (Yanomami Tribe) in the Amazon that practices stringent “reciprocity” tactics in warfare, followed by the Danny Greene story in 1976 Cleveland. The Amazon tribe is treated as the “before civilization” anchor for the Danny Greene bit, which is to say “the Danny Greene story speaks of some pre-historic urge for reciprocal living as demonstrated by our pre-historic contemporaries, the barbaric, the most basic kind of human beings, the Yanomami.”

The narrative was “human nature” and the first plot defined the precondition of barbarism and the second made sure to invoke this pre-historic barbarism as more than an isolated incident in post-war America. The parallel insinuates that organized crime and its effects are not products of real economic and social disparity, but that one man’s isolated actions depicted an eruption of primal violence that break through the otherwise benign processes of society. This is a negative example of human rights– here there is no discussion of the rights of the Yanomami, only of the individuals in Cleveland. But it exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of the liberal notion of human rights.

It exposes the assumption that people other than first world people must be reminded of their status as human, and we must be reminded, ourselves (although we would never admit this). Human rights, in the liberal sense, are granted on the basis of potential-being-human (we grant them humanity before they figure out what it is and how to get it,  just as we eventually figured it all out) and this status absolutely undermines any possibility that they ever really were humans. [Along with this comes pity and the all too obvious solution that we must each found/support NGO's to help the others transition and cross over into humanity. Their human rights are placeholders for what will become a private life and their "choice" to make money, develop, etc.]

When Zizek says that philosophy is not a conversation, I think he means that philosophy is not up for debate. Truth is not up for debate or refutation. One can tap into it, follow its legacy and its challenges without refuting its existence.

I might not know the truth, but that certainly doesn’t change that it exists.

What I love about redundancy is that it always means something different-

This little turn about the timeworn path of new year’s is worthwhile, in spite of itself. Not because it is really a new year or that it really is a fresh chance, but because it is something I might do every once in a while, anyway. Some things that I would like to work on this year-

Blogging; this doesn’t appear to be *too* difficult to manage at first. But I think I should take my writing in this blog to a new place. Being a self-conscious thinker usually leads to my being a bad thinker. In a sense, all of my writing, specifically my blogging, will not be as concerned with being “right” (or as it really turns out to be) an exercise in not appearing to be a sycophant. Perhaps all along I really was more concerned with fitting myself into a long line of history and philosophy that could be discussed normally. This is a tricky place to be in at my level of reading and maturity: for a more advanced person, the difference between posing new problems in a new way and posing problems in an unrigorous way is a danger. [I think it might be, at least for me, but I will have to muddle through this for now. i.e. the top of the ramble.] In short, blogging this year will be more concentrated on particular pieces of writing or ideas or events without my accidental self-conscious attempts to make everything fit before I speak. But this is a process.

Stories; it’s been over a year and there are still huge gaps in the story I am writing. I don’t know whether or not it’s any good but I do enjoy writing it. What can I do? Attempting to iron out the end of the plot by the end of the year. Also, writing new short stories might be a good idea.

Self-consciousness; I’ve mentioned it several times before. It’s my biggest problem. I don’t know if it is because I didn’t receive an organized, standardized education or because I wonder if I am always fatally flawed in my thinking and ultimately have nothing to offer. That would be very bad, but we can’t all be philosophers and if I am not a very good thinker, perhaps I’ll learn something else to do with my time. Most likely, though, I should drop the self-consciousness in spite of being a little dull because I don’t really think I would ever give it up.

Public Conversations; there is such a thing as truth. That doesn’t mean I know what it is, but it also doesn’t mean that it ceases to exist when someone doesn’t agree with my general point of view. I’m sure that almost no one agrees with me and not because I’m so great. Learning when to not argue with people–i.e. when politics and philosophy are fundamentally confused (can’t you tell I’ve been meditating on Badiou and Zizek?) and reduced to the level of “taste”. Learning when to laugh at a very bad and confused joke, learning not to enter into a conversation with the latent intent to undermine the other’s point of view.

Thinking; without forcing it into the confines of history and a historically “whole” conception without slipping into nothing deconstruction. Not everyone can do/be everything- Badiou really puts this into perspective for me in Philosophy in the Present. Fighting with everyone for a world-view is rather stupid because it’s all just caught up in itself.

Future; big, scary word. I can’t ease my way out of this one.

Commitment; Next semester is going to be a douzy. I’m interning two days a week in the city at a mainstream publishing house, taking two upper level French courses and two upper level English courses in addition to a science course. Oh, and somehow finding money to eat. But after all that, it still leaves out my primary passion and concerns. (Of course the English and French courses will be great, but those are not nearly sufficient.) And so I’ve got to get creative. I’m not 100% on the second French course yet, but I think I should do it because I need to step up to the next level, anyway. But there is still the problem of commitment; I can’t say it’s a problem of time or anything else. It’s a matter of personal endeavor and dedication- for instance, I never really liked television anyway but now it’s necessary to give it up, entirely. I’m a bit too easy on myself and give myself too many breaks (that’s what happens when you listen to people around you…) Because for me this isn’t work to get into a good graduate program. Of course that would be lovely and I would learn a lot but that possibility is a. a bit stifled and b. highly unlikely for me. This is what I consider “real life” and it would be a shame to live without it.

I had a thought but I’m not convinced

I’m reading Badiou and Zizek’s Philosophy in the Present and in Zizek’s section of the book, he describes the disconnect between philosophy in concrete and creative practice. Well I don’t know if that’s really the right way to put it. But basically, here’s what he writes:

Instead, we find [philosophy] in cultural studies, in English, in French and German departments. If you want to read Hegel and Badiou, you must paradoxically choose comparative literature with majors in French and German. If, on the other hand, you do research on the brains of rats and perform experiments on animals, you go to the philosophical faculties. But is is not uncommon that philosophy occupies the place of another subject: when, for example, communism fell apart, philosophy was the first place in which the resistance was formulated. It was more political than ever at this point in time. However, here you might like to object that great German philosophy was nothing but philosophy. Absolutely not! Already with Heine, not just with Marx, we know that philosophy was the German substitute for the revolution. That is the dilemma: you can’t have both. It is false to claim that the French could have had philosophy if only they had been clever enough. Conversely, the non-appearance of the revolution was the condition for German philosophy. My idea is the following: perhaps we have to break with the idea that there is a normal philosophy.

Now that’s a lot to handle. But what I want to talk about is the survival of philosophy in English- leaving aside the idea of a normal philosophy, perhaps philosophy (in the B/Z sense) survives in “creative” writing and more specifically in fiction because it can survive the particular and the universal. Individual characters or narratives that would otherwise be bogged down by the concept of the individual circumstance manage to highlight and diagnose social symptoms of the moment. I don’t think that I can go much further without being much more specific, since there are many different types of literatures (and I don’t think all fiction can be considered literature…). It was just a thought and I will write more on this, I’m sure.

Oh,

And reading of Foreign Affairs’ “The Russia File’ to come.