[A response to this, which is a response to this]
Dear Will,
Thank you for responding, for opening this up into a conversation. I think you’re right to push us back towards things that are actually happening: the ‘conditions which determine our situation’. Those are the hardest things to talk about, but I’ll try at least to follow you in their direction.
You say that there are damage-events that are denied that nevertheless can be expressed, but only by ‘thought-figures’ that are strictly ‘non-exchangeable’. It follows from this (clearly) that these are difficult to analyse, or even just to name. If they do emerge into a common and transmittable vocabulary, they are no longer fully perceived. Your finger is chopped off in a poorly lit factory. You name that experience an experience of class. But this thought-figure of class is exchangeable almost by definition, and this creates a political problem that is itself difficult to talk about, and easy to deny (I’d be really happy if you would say more about your thinking about this.)
So what is that ‘political problem’? Partly it’s that in demanding that our own damage-events be taken up into shared political language, we get stuck in a cycle of misrecognition. In this case, we need the basic concepts of shared political analysis to do something that they were never intended to do, which is to address the innermost recesses of our individual experiences of loss, or grief. I’ve seen what happens in that cycle. People double down into endless attempts to extort from their shared language a kind of personal recognition, of their ‘own’ personal damage-event (lost fingers literal and figurative), as if they were trying to win damages in the small claims court of their own private interiority. And there is (as you put it) some minor ‘satisfaction’ here, in the feeling that your pain is inexpressible in our language, a reassuring sense of personal distinction -- but pretty inevitably that satisfaction drifts off in the direction of quietism, or reactionary thinking, or a cocktail of both, a species of banal would-be-aristocratic anti-politics in which there is nothing but pain, glittering and seductively irremediable. Sometimes this is me. A friend writes: ‘I remember thinking once that to be a communist you'd have to believe people could change’. And I think I now believe that dignity is a big part of the problem, that the tacit claim that ‘your’ pain confers dignity on you, and allows you to make special kinds of demands, is a LIE, and that the idea your pain should be respected and dignified is a ANOTHER LIE, and that the general assumption that ‘political ideas’ are obliged to wear tuxedos and carry your pain around like some kind of funeral bier is A WORTHLESS LIE and needs to be TRODDEN UNDERFOOT like those stupid tuxedoes themselves and all of the hierarchical yearnings they represent. Shit is inexpressible, and ‘political concepts’ are always flimsy and gossamerlike, but I would rather parade through the street in them laughing at my nakedness than take them to fucking court for damages. Humourlessness will destroy us.
Towards the end of your letter you talk about Rimbaud’s unbinding as a ‘basic element of Leftist tradition: to break all moorings’. You also say that we presently feel unmoored, that this unmooring is the default, and that we ‘should acknowledge the unmooring of ideas from their historical basis, right down to the linkage of words in their phrasing’. This recalls to my mind Stephen Hastings-King’s metaphor in the text we discussed in our first MDR meeting: ‘we float’, SH-K wrote, ‘like plankton … near the surface of an online sea’. And so unmooring itself becomes unmoored, is no longer a call to rebellion as radical subjective unbinding. And the unmooring that seems nearest to us is not the unmooring we know from Rimbaud but the one that was immortalised in Mayakovsky’s suicide poem (in which ‘the love boat has smashed against convention’), or the devastatingly prosaic unmooring of tiny isolated floating organisms which serve as food for larger and more complex systems. Capital, for example.
‘Plankton, meaning to drift, or wander in a sea’.
So, is this part of what at the end of your letter you call ‘confusion’: that we no longer know what it means to ‘rebel’? The mark made on our intellectual lives by years of fascist provocation is obviously relevant here, but there are other things at stake too. In the first draft of the reply I wrote to you, I finished by saying that ‘for a long time I've felt really sick, and now I feel less so, and I want to try to talk about why’. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, this giant luminescent encyclopaedia of images of the other world scattered through human history in fairytales and myths and scientific theories and music. Yesterday when I first tried to get down my response, I made an attempt to talk about this ‘hope’ in terms of space, and poetry. I wrote about Satan’s passage through chaos in Paradise Lost, and Pasolini’s ‘Testimony’ in which he describes walking ‘all night long’ through filthy suburbs in search of sex (‘the sex is a pretext’, he says), and about Alice Rahon, who says that ‘for a while now, I’ve lived inside a map on the wall’. And that wasn’t wrong, exactly, but the emphasis isn’t in the right place. What I want to describe to you is a feeling that there isn’t space anymore, that there isn’t space for us to think, that all of the available positions have been occupied already by something foul and that wherever we go we find ourselves in the same cramped room, surrounded by our enemies. And when in your email you point out to me that grifting conservative psychologists also instruct us ‘to accept the challenge of life’ (as, in one of my proselytising moods, I might also have done) I feel a trace of this claustrophobia rise up in me again, a thin sheet of panic that has been working its way through my body for years now, and which acquires another layer every time I try to think about what 'radical politics' is: and always there’s this sense that I’m standing in the middle of a room surrounded by people who I can’t bear, and if I try to move away from one person I move closer to another, and the doors on either side of the room are marked ‘acceptance’ and ‘denial’, and both lead into another identical room where the same problem is repeated.
I said earlier that I want personal pain to be undignified, that I want to accept (not to deny) that political concepts will cover it badly, that I want to accept that the pain will stick out or bulge in ways that seem unseemly or gross or ridiculous. I said that I want to find that fucking funny and for the comedy to be as it were ‘communally recognised’, and not a grounds for personal affront or retreat into vast vanilla terrain (a green area?) of aristocratic interior self-regard, disdain for mass politics, educated immunity to illusion etc. ‘For a long time I've felt really sick, and now I feel less so, and I want to try to talk about why’. And clearly this is a thought about how things fit together or don’t, and about what it means to talk about ‘coherence’, or ‘cohesiveness’. I’ve been reflecting alongside Bloch on the way Pier Paolo Pasolini could say the most reactionary things and yet expect them to mean something different to what they seemed to mean, because poetry in his conception opens up into the unexpected space inside of our own bodies and in political parties and suburbs and the ideas of reactionaries and teenage boys as well as Communists and mothers and lovers and streets, because he still knew how to rebel, or maybe just because he wasn’t afflicted by this mindless claustrophobia like us, which we only call ‘confusion’ because we’ve forgotten that there is something that needs to be done beyond organising concepts in their relations to each another, and because we no longer see that the more organised these concepts become the more ‘confused’ we tend to be, because each of them becomes more and more like a point on a grid or a node in a system of coordinates that have no internal dimensions and no field of possibilities and so no fucking principle of hope either. And we are trapped inside of those points, feeling claustrophobic and confused, wondering whether we should have started another one of those nice abstract conversations about feelings. THERE IS NO OUTSIDE TO INJURY, I write, thoughtfully.
So at least now we have a list of terms. Incoherence, confusion – and claustrophobia. I'm tempted to say that we also have a list of counter-terms (coherence, lucidity, ability to move), but that feels too convenient and anyway like I say excessive 'coherence' is an aspect of claustrophobia and not its antidote. Rather I think the point should be about finding a way to move backwards through the sequence, from claustrophobia through confusion and back out again into the 'incoherence of life' where space opens up inside of things unexpectedly and it's a part of our (one might call it) 'intellectual training' to prepare ourselves -- meaning, to make sure we're ready when it happens.
(Is this also the human basis for something like community justice: the ability to see the space opening up inside of people who are traversed by violence, or in whom we mark Blake's marks of weakness, marks of woe. I mean the ones for whom the reality of injury cannot be denied. I don't know what I think about this.)
And can I try to lever a
question out of all this. Is it possible to talk, Will, about the very large
things that you mention at the end of your letter – ‘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’ – or to oppose them – without feeling
like that they are themselves the walls that are closing in, the answers
that have been poured like concrete into their questions, the wall of
convention that Mayakovsky’s love boat smashes into? If I feel less mentally ‘sick’
now than I did (and if I keep repeating this it's because I want to convince myself
that it’s true), it’s because I’ve stopped screaming at myself. I have
stopped telling myself to piece things together. I am trying to meet things
differently, to ask different questions of them. I don’t ask them to behave
like keys. Does this make sense? ‘To know how to recognise and pick up the
signs of power we are awaiting, which are everywhere’ (Tristan Tzara) -- and specifically Tzara says to pick them up, like radio signals in the air, rather than to bend them out of shape like picks for a self-invented lock in a single self-imposed theoretical door. I know this must sound stupidly obvious. But it is a principle of hope for me.
D
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