[This letter responds to the earlier blog post 'On Denial']
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Dear Danny,
I address this to you as open dialogue. I want to reply to your recent piece in Reports. The title you give it is ‘On Denial’, a word with strong resonance in current time. I mean that denial has become that kind of word for me, and I will try to say why.
There’s a subjective satisfaction in the act of denial. The one who says ‘it never happened’ invokes a certain power—like saying X didn’t happen, or not in the way ‘you say it happened’—the X could be Grenfell Tower, the event of it covered by a mass of legal procedure that wraps itself around justice; the ‘you’ being those who were burnt to death, or the voice that has to speak for them. That’s a case of implicit denial, the subjects being the companies that issued the cladding materials, the local council, the government, the majority of the media.
Inside the self, we know that denial manages to put something else in the place of damage suffered, something that can cover it while also perpetuating it. But there’s another kind of denial also, which doesn’t respond to knowing, since it expunges, removes the very space in which a thing has occurred or is occurring. This is not to say that the damage-event that’s denied is inexpressible; Fran Lock calls it horseflesh. But such forms of expression are strictly non-exchangeable. They are thought-figures which are forbidden to drift above themselves and be creamed off. Not allowing a thought-figure to drift into the sphere of exchange is a principle that gets laid down at the beginning of your poem Loading Terminal.
It’s very hard not to slide into some kind of denial inside the intractability of current crises—political, ecological but also crises of language and thought. Language exhausts itself quickly. I think I mean language in its function of ‘is’, of predication, of naming.
Freud’s notion of ‘binding’ came into the conversation at the recent Mayday Rooms meeting. Freud’s use of the term, where binding works in terms of ‘an energy which flows along chains of ideas and implies associative “links”’, suggests a possible cross-over between inner life and the political outside. When you write ‘there is no outside to an injury’ are you posing this as an outside where resolution might have been possible? I want to say that a wound with no outside is the pair of a situation with no solution—a situation where words are stuck in chains of association that perpetuate an impasse. Not that individual wound and social wound are homologous, but that they exist in a certain relation to each other. What kind of relation? The insistent trauma-talk of narcissistic selves falsifies the relation. Once you accept that life is suffering, you can accept the challenge of living. That’s Jordan Peterson speaking, and inside his voice the long history of voices that have said that suffering is an entirely internal matter, a belief highly acceptable to capitalism. Individual wound and social wound are not homologous but what they have in common is isolation.
Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ sums up a basic element of Leftist tradition: to break all moorings, the call to rebellion as radical subjective unbinding, the legacy of the Paris Commune gathered into that call, that cell of meaning. That Rimbaud got labelled a poète maudit was a manoeuvre of bourgeois literature, we know that. The boat lands in Africa and finds itself facing white men with firearms: subjective emancipation includes colonial violence. That’s the corrective to individualism. But the binding, undone, without new binding consisting of a changed social order—does it go where we need to go? Does it merely end up bending to a new master?
That seems to be more a question for those, like myself, who experienced 1968. ‘All things come into their comparisons’, Robert Duncan wrote in the nineteen sixties. Now everything seems to face its limit: not just emancipatory politics but ideas of the commons and the collective and of political will as such.
I’m not arguing for the abandonment of that tradition (you refer to people who have done that) but that our account of where we are should acknowledge the unmooring of ideas from their historical basis, right down to the linkage of words in their phrasing. I’m reminded of the slogan that headed an announcement of the recent International Workers’ Memorial Day. It said ‘Mourn for the dead. Fight for the living.’ It might have been better the other way round; then there wouldn’t have been the illusion of a place to fight from.
So, to mark some conditions that determine our situation: wars in Europe and the middle east; resurgence of oil and arms industries; postponement of any real, state-level action to resolve climate crisis; inability of states and ruling classes to guarantee survival; political chaos. These add up to time for new analysis, critique of inherited models for revolution—critique, for instance, of the thinking that assumed that the Soviet revolution constituted a necessary pathway for struggles in other places (but also critique of flat rejection of the Bolshevik experience), as well as critique of capitalist subjectivation in ourselves, including the production of isolation. I was going to write ‘the production of isolation and confusion’, but attributing confusion simply to action of the political enemy seems one-sided. A least, I sense that that a future MDR discussion of confusion might have to take that on.
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