Report on Meeting at Mayday Rooms, 20th March 2023

Readings: 

* Lisa Jeschke, Anarcho-Boys vs. Anachro-Cavalry

* Photographs by Chris Killip 

* Emile P Torres, 'Against Longtermism' 

What’s changed for us during/since the pandemic & lockdowns, our experiences, lack of connection and dialogue:

- Unevidenced vs conspiracy theory RE COVID-19 – grand theories proliferating in the absence of public spaces and forums – feeling exceeded

- Friends & comrades thinking opposite things about what’s to be done (Brexit, the pandemic/lockdowns, the war in Ukraine) – atomisation and polarisation becoming more acute with each crisis.

- Impressions/memories of that time:

o   Walks, parks, neighbours, preppers; the desire to find news; the inability to think socially & politically; a lesson that everyone depends on everyone, a widespread sense that things are wrong and need to change, and that lesson so quickly snuffed; accusations of social murder and the summer of insurrections; the pandemic shifted our sense of what the left is, its project; discussions defined (constricted) by a binary of For/Against; log-jammed in an abstract contradiction and an event that changes everything; feelings of confusion à confusion-ism as state strategy of control; national differences, for example, in the UK a government that didn’t want to do lockdowns really, in Greece a government who did… anti-NATO or anti-Russian cultural attitudes; essential workers revealed as the bones of the economy or the state, the bones of the state laid bare & undoing some bourgeois hierarchies about which work matters (and connecting this to the cost of living crisis, the many ongoing strikes); to whom were these bones laid bare, made visible?

o   Increased rapacity, undisguised visions of fascism, solidarities failed to manifest – between whom? Didn’t they manifest? Increased use of digital services/delivery economies à also, there are labour shortages, people refusing to go back to work. Anger amongst health workers, many of whom died at the start – a desire to hear from them.

o   Humanism, universals, dissonance in the left; universalism of rights destroyed (rights not intrinsically bourgeois); states are weak, the government edicts came after people were choosing to stay at home (i.e., not “obeyed”); the left pining for a strong state to oppose, one that enforces or lifts a lockdown; people in the UK may have a tendency to “trust” the state more in a crisis (the history here) à the extent to which state provision can happen at all in different nation-states as a factor in national differences/cultural attitudes; nostalgia for lives unregimented by having to go to work (now); vaccine and public health equated with the state, but capital conglomerates around them (cronyism, development/distribution/hoarding), hedge funds moving into health systems across Europe and North America – all health systems labelled as fascistic, an unfortunate repercussion (“hippy fascism”), discussing the vaccine (alongside the rush to be vaccinated and anti-vax discourses) maybe stallsed certain discussions about the meat industry, deforestation, agricultural concerns; people don’t get to choose allies because wider culture only admits polarity – e.g., critics of state as benevolent / its so-called civil liberties are equated with fascists.

o   Or anarchists forced into alliances with the state (mutual aid, encouraging vaccines, etc.).

o   Alliance vs agreement – as if everything can be stacked up in columns and you can’t say “no” and “no”, or “yes, and/but”… People with Y/N positions boiling down to fascism or conspiracy thinking – state’s co-option of health experts, should we believe experts, or is that elitist (a possible position) – constant slides down and back.

o   Nothing straightforward, simple, clear – not even the notion of wearing a mask as an act of solidarity (in Athens, a slogan along the lines of “buy a mask, and get a tank free”, i.e., shadows of military dictatorship loom). Pandemic used to get rid of cash in the UK, a serious failing, to be resisted. Cashless means more social control.

o   Anti-vaxxers & TERFs, alliances against public health and trans healthcare

o    Rob Wallace becoming a member of (or advocate for) Zero Covid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-COVID) – China and New Zealand as “good” examples – but these movements can’t contain the complexities, maximalist positions that allow a certain degree of satisfaction in disagreeing with the state.

- Desire for an immediate political position; concern about eugenicist strands at the start of the pandemic & official responses, notions of collateral damage; geopolitics decomplexifies, polarises, one-size-fits-all politics; a need for humility, flexibility, making mistakes, we can’t know what’s going on as it’s happening & as we’re in it. A politics that doesn’t require a position on everything à quasi-religious or mystical attitude about what’s going on (ignorance, tranquillity). Positions make us legible to one another, and then one position indicates another (or is assumed to, and we’re back to allegiances false and true).

Turning to the reading, Lisa Jeschke, ‘Anarcho-Boys* vs. Anachro-Cavalry’ and Émile P Torres, ‘Against Longtermism’:

·    - The Closet – a metaphor for enforced privacy (bedroom, bed tricks)

·    - Inner public space – dialogue, not position, multiplicity, and relation to the outside; there can be concealed public spaces, concealment in crowds.

·    - Groups with unified identity of positions, sticky masses, cavalry and the boys (countable) – linking to the article’s descriptions of humans and humanity.

·    - Is it a play? An academic article (see ‘Abstract’)?

·    - Borrowing of language from the right – lacerates the poets, the readers; cutting, but not mean-spirited. Closets, camps, disintegration of interiority and internalisation of poles. Everyone is welcome – into the closet – because we can’t breathe the fresh air (masks, no parks) (beginning and ending with farting in the closet, in the open field?).

·    - Statistics, men who cite numbers and graphs, and believe in their own correctness (emasculation as progressive).

·    - Longtermism – I have the insight, have seen the light (now buy my books – making a career as a former zealot turned critic, which relies on the movement being real, being really powerful).

·    - [This piece as a lead into discussions of AI.]

·    - Wealthy white people reinvesting in themselves (e.g., more money invested in these institutes than in malaria prevention). Futurity as extraction in the present. Risk is profit in capital. E.g., when sea levels rise people speculate more wildly; financial interests already discount destruction/loss. In that sense, this is ordinary and easy to refute (in principle). The aesthetics of bourgeois philanthropy – fucking revolting. An orienting towards a thought-world that’s eugenicist if not genocidal. Utilitarianism rebranded. Extreme force of empathy, death, pathological. Winning back our share of entropy from a universe that will eventually disintegrate.

·     - Hyper-rational – the appeal/allure in its aesthetics, fantasy of light cones and unconceivable numbers of people. Eugenic roots of transhumanism, and of “intelligence” (deeply racist); scaremongering about AI and technology, useful for certain groups.

      - Aesthetics – Jeff Bezos funding The Foundation (tv series). Desire for a future without flesh – most efficient way to spread into the galaxy, as pure streams of information (intergalactic intelli-ejaculate).

·    - Transcendence – submission to capital requires transcendence of some kind.

·    - Who’d heard of longtermism before reading this article? (Hardly any of us?)

·    - General tendencies to displace decision making away from humans, to avoid being sued… Interchangeability of AI and technology – “computer says no” – police defence of killing someone based on an algorithm identifying a POI based on their license plate (?).

·     - How to understand relationships between street and elite fascisms?

Suggested readings for subsequent meet:

·         Tobi Haslett, ‘Magical Actions’: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/politics/magic-actions-2/

·         Chuǎng, ‘Social Contagion’: https://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/  

·         Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man 

early march, illegal migration bill

so it's a sunday night and i'm at a poetry reading in london. the floor is sticky with beer and i can feel its residue on the backs of my jeans. i'm here on my own even though i'm surrounded by people who i've known for as long as I've been reading poetry -- 'twenty years older, with the skulls plainer in their faces', as per the one line that sticks with me from orwell's book about the second world war (the one about unicorns and shopkeepers). one of them's on stage now; he's asking himself what it would be like to be a fish feeding on a dead moroccan in the mediterranean. ('I had been wondering', a friend wrote to me three years ago, 'why would I want to bother thinking about, or writing about, or impersonating, a cop, or the Home Office'.) the reading is a total dirge, all black depression and astronomic hopelessness. i hate this right now. the moment it's over I leave and cycle away, i have a headache, i get home, M. has a headache, i feel angry and stamp the anger down, i read a few pages of a scholarly but despairing text about the recent history of Yemen, give up and fall asleep, M. falls asleep, I dream of a desert, of watching a woman give birth, i get up, a Facebook post by my friend R. shows a demo of thousands of Italians on a Calabrian beach, clouds piled up thickly on a metallic blue sky. 'We can win', R. writes: 70 people like this. 'the sea does not want to be infected with leprosy and pus. not yet'. writes B Traven, the pseudonymous author of furious disabused novels for anonymous abused people. 

***

there is a massive flare up of seborrheic dermatitis on the right hand side of my face. it's the evening of the next day. i'm writing in the historical present tense out of convenience: you'll get used to it. 'i go to' parliament square for the emergency demonstration against the illegal migration bill. the escalator at westminster tube station has a banner ad for a new fighter aircraft designed by BAE: 'delivering investment and creating high skilled jobs across the UK's regions'. the banner was up when i was last here too. when was that? it must have been when i went to the much smaller solidarity vigil for alaa abd el-fattah. today it's 'Commonwealth Day': the flags of Britain's neo-colonial big happy family have been raised around the square, 56 of them running along every side, filtering the bright yellow lights from the church windows, the building of the supreme court, of westminster abbey. that light falls on the thin mud of the 'garden' and makes it look yellow too, like the dirty wet sand on a beach near where the tide is withdrawing. i never noticed before how much this place is enemy territory: i've been here dozens of times but it is always the *event* that i have experienced, never the setting. not deeply. in fact i didn't even realise while i was there that the flags aren't always raised, that they were raised *today*, that 'Commonwealth Day' is *today*, that someone is actually paid to spend their whole working day executing this attempt by state power to carry out a landgrab on calendrical time. i never gave all these symbols any credence, why should i, in a fake socialist regime the flags could be for 'socialist republics' and the statue of winston churchill could be substituted for a big worker in concrete, it would hardly make a difference; and the reason I'm paying attention *now* is just that there's nothing else to pay attention *to*, the defeated MPs of the Labour left are standing outside the building talking about racism, and the victorious MPs of the Labour right are inside talking about 'inefficiency' and 'incompetence', and i am here half-listening to the first group and reading live updates from the speeches of the second on my phone. & this is how the power structure reasserts itself: the spectacle taking place on top of the fire engine in the designated zone of democratic dissent is anticipated and allowed, the few hundred people who have come out to consume it are tolerated, their language of rote though largely sincere moral outrage has been relegated to its proper place, is being articulated and embodied by the people who are professionally expected to articulate it (the head of the fbu is reminding us of the slogans of the International Workingmen's Association -- the state has its form of nostalgia, and we have ours), and meanwhile *inside* the building the primary disagreement has become just what it ought to be, a purely formal exchange of opinion about who are the agents most able to implement a programme of national border security *that is itself in no way up for debate*. in circumstances like these, the demo seems to flicker and slide out of focus, i see it as if i'm looking at some kind of bleached diagram, the event and the setting change places, and it is the *constant* thing that i want to describe and not the delusional 'novelty' of the occasion (the 'demo') to which it contributes and gives shape. i wait to cross the road behind richard burgon and diane abbott, wearing their casual suits, going home at the end of another day's work spent opposing the incremental collapse of the system that requires them to do exactly that. i can see burgon's lightweight running shoes. and the air has the first coolness of spring, who cares about this, everyone's played their role, and everyone is waiting for the moment when things really blow up again and no-one's able to act anymore as if this is just how it is. 

... i walked out of that poetry reading because the state of depression that it dramatised felt to me like something totally superficial and unreal, like an intoxication, like a pretence. we *want* the destruction of the bridges that connect us to reality, intention to reality, self to world. we want this because once the bridges have been obliterated then no one can object if we go on to indulge ourselves in wild expressions of pain and personal abandonment, which we find comforting. but those connections *aren't* *bridges*, that's such a shitty ready-to-hand metaphor (it's been bludgeoned into me by the news), they're so much finer and subtler than that, even if I find myself walking through a rote demonstration in which everyone is just dutifully playing out their pre-scripted roles (& **obviously** I've played them too) I still have the ability to articulate that reality and to sense it and to reach out to other people who feel the same way: and the haste with which certain people seek to rip through those threads of everyday world-relation and declare them to be phantoms and illusions of the mind is *either* an expression of extreme narcissism or self-loathing or both, and in a way it doesn't matter which, because in the end the result is the same: hubristic declarative unhappiness, backed up by the organs of official reality (it's inevitable uh huh), leading more or less inexorably to actual misery and isolation. i just don't believe in that shit anymore. even the weird angry rash that has spread across my face feels like a kind of relationship to reality as i see and perceive it, and i am bored by the practical respectability attributed by people with more or less the correct socially sanctioned opinions to their own acts of grandstanding demonstrative self-nullification, however much disguised as recognition of the #objective situation#. there is no such thing. and the thought ricochets into the question of what 'accomplishment' in poetry/music etc means, as well as in the 'space' of our politics. the world is *already* designed to rip through the threads of our own meaningful connection to it, and so it is purposeless to go at these threads pre-emptively ourselves. for so long as i am able to talk to people and understand them and make them understand me, i am not going to get depressed about what 'poetry' (also 'politics' etc.) can 'do', or about the supposed fact that too few people are listening to me. poetry and conversation exist on the same level; and everyone who wants more from the former than the latter is as ridiculous as the person who wants a revolution to come to humanity out of the ('objective') world and thinks that the only agency they have is to eradicate the last traces of their own agency. it's day two of commonwealth week: the designated theme is 'Forging a sustainable and peaceful common future’. the worse things get, the more committed i am to defend the threads of my own connection to things and to people. there are bridges that are so thin and so fine that no enemy can follow you across them; and so why flee across them and blow them up? this is all i can manage for today. 'my aim is to express, to the best of my ability, what i feel as an ordinary person'.    

Paris: energy prices, suicide, demo music, montage (RL)

In November (?) when I got back from seeing you all in London there was the beginning of some kind of movement already underway and then it didn't happen. It felt kind of apocalyptic and then petered out, like everything has felt since the pandemic. Again, I had the strange feeling of not being able to keep up with the news. There was a week without petrol. Refinery workers were on strike for a wage increase, in view of the bonuses TOTAL energies direction were attributing themselves, in view of the cost of living crisis, energy crisis, war on Ukraine, price of gas, all that. The country was completely stalled and there were queues for petrol for several weekends in petrol stations in the North of Paris. A couple of weeks later, there were still intermittent shortages, and people going to the Sainte Soline bassine struggled to find petrol. Someone I know in the south of France cycled three hours to go to a birthday party. Mélenchon, who is now, since standing down after the election – kind of no one and also merely someone – called some demonstrations at the time, trying to mobilise around inflation and the la vie cher. And moreover, trying to make some kind of extra-union movement. So when I came back there was a big first demonstration in Paris, which was strange in its demographic, almost complete absence of any union affiliated cortege, and had the recently nobel prized Annie Ernaux travelling around on a float like a Madonna in a parade making speeches that no one could really hear. 

There were a few of these Melenchon-called but not at all melenchonist demos, around the question of the cost of living, the bonuses TOTAL were receiving, the obscenity of the wealth gap, over October and November. There were banners, there were pink smoke flares, there were not many chants, there were tracts distributed. There were most of the things you would expect of a protest. There were Melenchonist student supporters who had come up from Poitiers. But there were barely any police. There was a new chief of police in Paris and the strategy pretty hands off. On one demonstration there was a crush, there were many people, but it was still possible to carry a banner and be right next to the line of police. So these were surprisingly unviolent protests. 
 

There were some ‘autonome’ General Assemblies in the North of Paris which grew smaller and smaller in number. At first, these assemblies tried to grasp a potential 'situation'. Everyone talked about the situation. The situation seemed to be that younger people were extremely depressed. Another situation seemed to be that a postal worker, who had been going on strike for years, was also extremely depressed and could no longer understand where any possible leverage could be. Another situation seemed to be that the pandemic had been a common experience. According to friends of mine the real situation was that people had been depoliticised and lost a grasp on language. Very quickly the conversation became about how different everyone was and how nobody could therefore ‘understand each other’s experience’. Inflation had failed as a unifying banner. People wanted to talk about the fundamental impossibility of ‘the situation’. It was almost as if they wanted to say that there was actually no situation. The assembly could only grasp what it identified as past failures. Some others set up an inflation reading group. 

 
In any case, this strange, not street movement petered out because these refinery strikes did not continue because it became clear that Macron was drafting yet another pension reform, and that energy must be saved for that. In late October, PhD students of Italian Marxism stood on the steps of the history of art library saying how much they agreed with Martinez’s idea: a union fight couldn’t be waged over inflation, and only over the question of salaries. Occasionally someone would intervene to wonder if a union struggle could tackle inflation in the form of real wages. In view of the fact a pension reform would be announced in January, the unions would cool off for now. 
 

All winter, it felt hard to grasp any of the elements of whatever people were calling ‘the crisis’ or the situation. On the one hand, there was the energy crisis, which seemed to slip between meaning that petrol was expensive, because of the war on Ukraine. Other people used it as short-hand for the nuclear crisis specific to France. Unlike its neighboring states, energy was not going up as wildly in price in France, and had been subventioné by Macron. The nuclear power stations needed repairs, and the moment of them needing repairs had unfortunately coincided with the European wide energy crisis, which meant that France could not buy extra energy from its neighbors (ie. Germany – doing very badly indeed – see electric radiator crisis). Therefore, the government strategy had been to perform this nationwide ‘lack’ of resources, and encourage an initiative to lower the energy output of France by a kilowatt, a degree, or whatever measure would do it. However, just as with the gas tax that sparked the gilets jaunes, Macron’s ‘ecological transition’ only involved a redistribution or outsourcing of the burden. There were posters all over Paris from various banks, encouraging the idea of 'sobriété' [i.e. a kind of piousness]. Homeworking was encouraged, so that workers would take on cost of heating themselves and so that workplaces wouldn’t go bankrupt. Bars were no longer heated, and the heaters on terrasses had anyway been banned for ecological reasons. So when people talked about the energy crisis it was hard to know whether it was just that it was cold.

I have the impression of seeing things through a filter, being unable to grasp the significance of things or of how to put things together. There's a weirdness to the way I feel I'm discussing things with friends in which the stakes are invisible to us. It feels like the lightness of words hides something altogether much darker, and there's a sense in which people are constantly asking how bad it will get. 

***

***

Last night in the 18ème arrondissement of Paris un mec a sauté, as they say. For days there have been increased police in the neighbourhood, often plain clothes. They hang around in little groups of five and they are often in the way. In Aldi everyone has to leave their bags at the door and people take items off their shopping when they find they don’t have enough cash on them to pay. The cashier is not annoyed at all, she patiently takes things off: chocolate, biscuits, things that are less necessary. The girls ahead of me have exactly thirty four euros between them but I think there are things in their pockets. The vigil doesn't do anything. At the Square Léon, there they were again, the police. They are always here but there are more of them in the last few days and it’s impossible to figure out exactly why but it feels like a cleaning-up mission. Two nights ago there was an ambulance. Yesterday they were in front of my door but I realised too late that it was them. A young woman was surrounded by them. I couldn't really tell what was going on and I was already on the other side of the door. In that kind of way where everyone is keeping the fiction, no-one is letting on they’re being arrested, no-one is letting on they’re cops, except for the red armband. I saw it after I had said excuse me. But there they are again at the Square Léon, arresting two young black men for no reason except that they are there in a discreet fashion, calling for back up for no reason at all. About a month ago the shop across from my house was dismantled in only a day because the old man running it died. The three brothers inheriting it will sell it leasehold. During the dismantlement yuppie joggers (never before seen in these ends!) were running past. Above it is the exact apartment where Eugene Poitier wrote the Internationale. The shop was a kind of ecosystem; a mess of suitcases which the dealers would kind of hide in. Now there is a clean grill. There is nowhere to hide. It was dismantled in only a day. I will miss it because it was one of the many signs I like to read. I get no direct sunlight but the shop was called MAGREBIN SOLEIL. So last night, cops everywhere and a cordon barring off where rue Poissoniers and rue Myrha cross. Lots of cops. So I ask one of them what is happening. 'Pourquoi?' Says the Police National. I say because I live here, although I feel like a traitor and a spy even speaking to them, and he says 'Ce n’est rien de grave, Madame'. A man coming out of the boulangerie says 'Les gens vont mal, hein? quel’qu’un a sauté de le 3ème étage. On n’en peux plus, hein? Et encore une autre dans one grande surface mardi'. He doesn't say from which shopping mall the person last week has jumped, or maybe he does. I take it in slowly -- me who thought there had been a violent murder, or a raid, (it's quite commonplace in my neighborhood to see heavily armored police doing a house raid, skulking around) or -- what did I even bother thinking -- it is the millionth time this year that I hear a voice that isn't just my own saying the phrase les gens vont mal -- people are doing badly, or people aren't doing so well. People are gathering outside the boulangerie or coming out of the fabric shop. It must have happened only just now because the area is not completely clear, there's just a cordon. 'Une autre personne qui a sauté?' I say. 'Oui. La vie est belle, hein? Ca ne va pas du tout les gens vont mal', he says. He isn't nonchalant about it at all. He is concerned in a deeply spiritual way. It contrasts very bluntly with what the policeman has told me -- what? to protect me? -- that what has happened was rien de grave. Or maybe he said that because he decided that it was a private matter. Someone else is asking me what has happened, and I say, but instead of saying someone has jumped, I say, 'another suicide'. I don't know why I say that. This autumn was full of broadcasts about the increasing rate of young people peeling themselves off the planet, about the fragility of youth, and how les gens vont mal. All over the bourgeois media the broadcasters cared to put this down to the 'fragility' of a 'particularly woke' generation, who suddenly have 'the means of expressing themselves' but can't cope 'with real life'. After each of these broadcasts in the same breath there would often be features about how students in Paris are queuing at food banks, about the cold, and the energy crisis. But all of these were images; they were never connected. Just facts. The dots didn't join up. This morning I couldn't particularly detect anything on that corner, and I didn't go in to the cafe to ask. I just looked through the window and waved and was glad it wasn't him. The butcher with the blue glasses told me my eyes were beautiful, as is our morning routine, and there were stacks of ribs on the street, ready to be loaded. But some pink pigment -- from where I don't know, maybe from the houses currently being renovated -- had exploded everywhere and my friend from the beauty shop was washing down the pavement, but there were traces of it all over the street, nearly at the corner where the man must have jumped. People were in good humour. It's beautifully sunny et la vie est belle et les gents vont mal. 

***

***

thursday  a crowd sat on a rock facing off to the police, preening feathers, hoping to be their elders, only late style remains and gone are the days of rap, this isn’t a lament, but they stayed in hoodies, cagoules, picking up the edge of an eyebrow piercing, there was a moment when it was really a bit intense, we nearly did something, they say, nod their heads, they are born in 2004, where was I then, to look ten years younger these days you’d have to look ten years older than you actually are and I do, I do try, you are perhaps the oldest person here they say as the young ones bop and get hip to the sex pistols, and some 120bpm stuff older than I am, all that’s retained is style, all that’s transmitted is thru videos, it’s not for lack of trying, this one was arrested for taking a knife to a lycée demo I lament the aging of the MiLi, the dinosaurs wont be resurrected again for years now, too much spectatorship but this is the point isn’t it, you can’t do anything exactly on your own, we are alone, we are never really alone, we are cosmologies, our friends are constellations exploding in our mouths, no one I know is here, I miss when cars would burn and we’d run into the streets and secretly, mainly because it meant 'something' 'happening', being somewhere and with people, the warmth of dying together on dreams, I despair at the passing, what is real life and when did it get this way and what does it mean to live in a place?

***

***

I’m trying so hard to write you something that wouldn’t be a lie. My interlocuter keeps melting in front of me and I in turn melt. Dust, molten, scum on the carpet. How can I have the bravery to keep cutting it up, place one cut up after another, when in between the images everything gets totally erased and we have to start always a nouveau anyway. Like, all glass gets cleared away in between. I’m thinking of why there’s no material to write about and about when I thought there was but how even then my involvement was the same, fucking disgusting, spectral. I can’t write because there’s no form. There’s nothing that presents itself to me right now as a form. What I write feels like a lie pusique there’s no social form. All the writing is horrible, little snarky notes on the edge. I would like to keep going for several days, I try like ritual to believe in it. But I am unconvinced by the pallor of my words. I wanted to write it in montage. I want there to at least be something to pick over – the face of the actor in Sicilia saying 'da vero' one million times as Straub and Huillet dig for the beginnings of a smile (have u seen this film, Pedro Costa -- it's a film of Straub and Huillet re-cutting Sicilia) -- I don’t want all the dreadful sentences that burn and melt our skins into a smooth surface, shiny and wrapped over the holes of our eyes. Can u even throw a hole? Why I can’t write endings. Why we can’t share experiences. I want to give away my experiences.

(RL)

Report on Paris / anti-pension reform demos (LR)

In Paris for the past few weeks against the retirement reforms, I’ve gotten the impression of this shared sense of collective powerlessness. Usually the normal and depressing individual sense of being powerless disappears for a while in the big demo. But for this cycle of demos, I’ve felt this individual sense just reflected from all sides. Everyone I’m around has been talking about this problem. There’s nothing new here, but the experience was still strange.

The first march in mid-January was the biggest in Paris for more than 20 years, and there were literally too many people to start the demo, so the parcours ended up splitting in two directions. At first we had this amazing sense of really taking over part of the city, but after a while we lost track of where the different corteges were. We made it to a big roundabout, where thousands of people were standing around, cold, waiting quietly for the union processions to catch up from several directions. The silence at this roundabout was striking after the loud confusion on the boulevards. But all of it really was confused. I think everyone was just as surprised as everyone else about the silence, a kind of strange mutual or general recognition of how inadequate the situation was. It was understandable, there was none of the fun of other demos, and it was really cold. It was as if we were all there just out of a somber responsibility, to be counted, or to be witness to something. I thought later of Benjamin and Baudelaire and big cities and how we are often spared experiences instead of properly denied them. The city spared us a fun demo, and even a fleeting sense of effectiveness that day and since. The sad thing is that the city and this world have rarely felt more permanent to me than that first demo when they were partly interrupted by this massive crowd that was too big to imagine what it could do with itself. A friend has been telling me about entropy and disorder since then. 

When I think of that mass too big for itself, I waver between the two silly and tired positions of thinking about what I did, what I could do, and about “organization” (not too much though). I don’t want to think of this! I want the mass to disappear my sense of powerlessness for a while. It’s been a bit demoralizing to go through every week with everyone a new proof of collective unimaginativeness, and it does make everyone turn inward a bit. Enthusiasm and energy are always pushed back, to the date of an unlimited strike, or when the government will invoke some special procedures to force through the law. 

(LR)

Crises of language (WR)

What the Ukrainian writer Maria Tumarkin says here feels right to me, including the disjuncture it reveals between the daily suffering of people within a territory and the language in which states account for their relations between each other. If that includes polities which have been denied statehood—in this case Palestinians but there are others—then the ground of disjuncture is even more resistant to communist internationalism. But Tumarkin is also addressing a crisis of language, a crisis that envelopes and permeates us so thoroughly that it’s all but impossible to define its limits. I would like to compare this current crisis of language with the one that took place during and after the First World War, but I’m not sure that thinking of, say, Benjamin or Artaud actually helps. I only have some questions. Is it useful, for the current situation, to speak of narcissism and its falsifying of the wound that it claims, or of a new level of ideological saturation, or of the end (now, really) of Enlightenment or the end of the logos that was supposed (Freud) to take the place of the illusion that is religion. Why do these questions sound rhetorical? I guess because all of this may be true but it has already happened. Maybe what’s more of the present is the lack of any power capable of underwriting a sense of reality which is synonymous with our survival. ‘Gaslighting’ was, according to one newspaper, the word of the year 2022. Is there now a pain that’s irremediable by any available type of practice, including violence (see Sean Bonney’s Our Death)? Are digital technologies of language, though obviously new in various respects, nevertheless expressions of what is happening at the level of productive forces, i.e. of human capabilities constrained by capitalist social relations? Sorry, I know that last question doesn’t, as it stands, help much.

(WR)