On denial

I have been trying to think about my feeling that it is getting harder to talk openly about the things that are happening to us. Does the feeling capture something true? What do I even mean when I say this? 

On reflection I think that my 'feeling' stands in for or congeals several related experiences: 

1) of a decline, in most of the channels that I can still access (first listservs, now also 'social media') of anything resembling 'political debate' or even extended discussion. These spaces all resemble bars just before closing time -- only the stragglers are left; most of them are talking to themselves etc.; 

2) of a more complex disintegration of many underground political and artistic communities. The feeling of people not speaking to one another anymore, or of work that continues, but with less and less sense of common or communal purpose (of course there are countertendencies); 

3) connected to (2), a loss of the sense that it is *worth* analysing broad-level political events, a sort of exasperation at the perceived obligation to be *able* to respond to, or to encompass and meaningfully address, the major events of any particular year or week, as the case may be. (The last time I felt a common movement of desire to respond in this way was in the early months of the Covid pandemic. Then responses were filtered into familiar 'pro-' and 'contra' positions and hardened into camps; then silence descends again);

4) more personally, and in a way that makes me distrust my own instincts, I feel a growing impatience with the thinking and the intellectual routines of 'my' culture. On the 'radical left' in particular, the prevailing intellectual 'phase' seems to be one of denial. In relation to Ukraine, I see friends and one-time influences either blatantly cherry-picking facts in order to support their obvious preferred conclusions, or else ignoring the war altogether, because thinking about it is painful and can't be operated upon with our preferred conceptual and practical 'tools'. This experience has produced a kind of paranoia. I find myself wondering how much of my own historical education has been guided by my desire to arrive at pre-determined conclusions. I feel ashamed of what I allowed myself to believe about Kosovo, Lybia, Syria (this also holds when my beliefs were 'agnostic' and not polemical). 

A friend writes to me: 'I have a sense that the existence of pro-rationalisers of Putin has been a profound shock to you.  I suppose it has not been so much for me, having been so shocked by the British “left” supporting Serbian fascists'.  

This was a useful phrase for me. I realised that the existence of 'pro-Putinism' *has* been a shock for me, that it's made me feel as if the ground has been pulled away from under my feet, that I am suddenly suspended in mid-air, that I have nothing to stand on and no base to which to return. It's more than a feeling of 'anger' or 'disappointment', because it is possible to feel angry and disappointed without feeling personally implicated. For the first time in my life, I do feel personally implicated. I no longer want to defend 'my tradition' against deviations; it is the tradition itself that feels corrupted and untrustworthy. Also the tradition is inside me, and I know neither how much of it is false nor what authority can accurately disclose this  

--Something deep inside you sustains an painful injury. You feel instinctively that it might not be fixed anymore. You can't tell yet *how much* is broken: You *know* that something has snapped, but you can't bring yourself to look directly. You still want to believe that it might be 'all in your head', so you continue to look away, and your body fills with adrenaline and this adrenaline is translated into panic or despair or fury directed against those who have betrayed you. But the injury is inside you, and you know that, eventually, you *will* have to look. Something's there.--  

I've felt like this now for more than a year. The feeling hasn't abated. I want to look now. 'I know' that in this period 100,000 soldiers have been blown to pieces and millions of people have had to permanently abandon their homes. I know how de rigueur and empty sentences like that have become. I originally wrote 'how fucking empty' but I no longer think empty signifiers of vengeful rage transmit any particular emotional content. 'I yell “Shit” down a cliff at the ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as “Alas.”' What I do have is the urge to confess; and I want to understand why it is that it feels so difficult to talk to one another. 

***

I wanted to say something about the last time something like this happened. Between 2016 and 2018 we all observed a small group of friends and comrades translate their feelings of exclusion, shame and wounded narcissism into hatred of the 'community' of the radical left. It was a novel spectacle; we gossiped about it and tut tutted. We all knew that the emotional damage *came first* and the post-hoc intellectual apostasy only later. The period 2016-18 provided the perfect stage for this kind of intellectual theatre. But the stage keeps on getting wider and wider, and I'm not sure who is in the audience anymore. 

***

What does it feel like to look at an incurable wound? I realise that I'm recurring to two distinct metaphors here. I realise that my thinking is incomplete and liable to misunderstanding. I started this 'project' (this 'blog') because I wanted to try to create a space where we could talk about undecided and unsettled things in a language that is itself unsettled and undecided. I now know that that itself requires an expenditure of effort and sensitivity of which I am not always capable. I *feel* undecided. I also know how easy it is to say things that I don't mean, or that mean more than I mean to mean. And I know about opportunists and renegades and apostates.  

The first of the two metaphors I recur to is the metaphor of an outside. The emotionally damaged ex-leftists of 2016-18 talked about stepping outside all the time; they were obsessed with it, the language recurred like a leitmotiv in their writing, like a pole star, it was inescapable, it was almost poetic: 

--Something deep inside you sustains an painful injury. You *know* that something has snapped, but you can't bear to look at it directly. And you still want to believe that it might be 'all in your head', so you continue to look away, and your body fills with adrenaline and this adrenaline is translated into panic or sadness or fury directed against those who have betrayed you. But the injury is inside you, so you know that, eventually, you *will* have to look. Something's there.--  

but there is no outside to an injury. That's the whole reason why you're not able to look. You know that whatever you see, once you've see it, will be a part of you, that it will *be* you, for as long as you continue to live: and all that you can do is accept that internal reality or deny it, retreating deeper and deeper into a kind of hallucination, a beautiful dream, in which everything's OK and still pristine, and just like it originally was, undamaged, brand new, like a new toy, or a theory that has just opened your eyes. *Looking* means accepting that the wound is there, that it changes everything and that possibility for you will from now on have to be defined through the parameters that it establishes. *Not looking* means holding on to the possibility of the outside (of exteriority of injury to self) in its attenuated form as a kind of feverish denial: a dream valediction. Which do you choose? What can we do with this limb, this hour, this remnant, this fucked up tradition full of emotionally damaged people, this demi-language, etc.?    

And what is a theory of political action for someone who is (or equally, for a class of people who are) tortured, hunted, imprisoned, injured, or aphasic? Revolutionaries don't like to think about this, the preestablished outputs invalidate the inputs. The problem is relegated to 'poetry' and poetry regurgitates its usual reservoirs of generic panic and despair. How tasteless. Which metaphor do you prefer? 

That one must sacrifice coherence

to the incoherence of life, attempt a creator

dialogue, even if that goes against our conscience. 

That the reality of this small, stingy state

is greater than us, is always an awesome thing

and one must be a part of it, however bitter that is. 

*

I still don't think I'm putting any of this right. I'll post it anyway. Perhaps someone can correct me. What does Pasolini mean by 'creator / dialogue'? What does he mean by 'against our conscience'? What does he mean by 'our'? What does he mean by 'be a part of it'? What does he mean?