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Is there a way to make toward these summits from the neoliberal foothills of today?
We are witnessing and sometimes personally experiencing a sharp de-classing of intellectuals. Our precious credentials are increasingly useless for generating income and — let us hope — social prestige, too. This should mean that most intellectuals view ourselves as sinking, economically, into the lower-middle or working class, and that “meritocratic” markers — the contents of our bookshelves and iPods; our degrees — accord us less and less social status in our own and others’ eyes. Not to say there won’t remain a self-protective cultural elite hoarding its prestige: the hostility to criticism among mutually appreciative writers, artists, and academics — an aversion to meaningful disputes — is contemporary evidence of such a siege mentality. But we can also hope for something else: perhaps intellectuals’ increasing exposure to socioeconomic danger will give a new political dangerousness and reality to what some of us produce. Might the continuing commitment of de-classed left intellectuals and radical artists to their vocations, in spite of withered prospects and eroding prestige, give our work an antisystemic force, and credibility, it has lacked?
"neoliberal foothills" is great
The ongoing proletarianization of intellectuals prompts any number of further questions. Should we abandon the corporate publishers before they abandon us? So far we haven’t done so, but we’ve tried — as have many others — to fill the gaps left by the industry’s consolidation and caution. In our own work, should we tend toward more “accessible” language and popular forms — or take the increasing hopelessness of making a living from writing as license to experiment? In search of cheaper rents and fertile ground for new institutions, should we leave Brooklyn and make for the provinces? (Will we cross our displaced academic friends fleeing the other way?) Or do we stay and fight for rent control and the right to the city? And how to reply to the familiar reproach: If you want to change and not just interpret the world, why not give up writing and become an organizer or activist? Part of the answer, at least, is that learning to organize, like learning to write, takes years, and you can’t just substitute one job for the other — we will have to be amateur activists. Another part is that if activists are indispensable, so are intellectuals. The words of Adorno in “Sociology and Empirical Research” (1957), arguing for the Frankfurt School’s own version of critical sociology, come to mind: “Not only theory but also its absence becomes a material force when it seizes the masses.” Just this — for theorists and the masses alike — has been our problem.
These tentative answers to the whole perplex of culture and politics can also be taxed with vagueness and no doubt confusion. We’re trying to figure what to do from an unstable position amid crumbling institutions and generalized crisis. More than one variety of brave and honest, necessarily incomplete response to the dilemma can surely be offered, and still more varieties of evasive bullshit: a good ear will know the difference. We can’t bring ourselves to cheer the failure of institutions that have sustained us — but we can at least be grateful that the collapsing structures are carrying out a sort of structural rescue of meaningful individual choice, in politics and culture. Bobo or ProBo? Siege mentality (“We writers are in this together!”) or sorties beyond the walls: “We’re in this with almost everyone!”? Reform existing institutions, or replace them, or cultivate your own garden, or retire to your Unabomber cabin? Join the traditional intellectuals and seek patronage among think tanks, foundations, rich individuals, and multinational corporations, or do something for cultural revolution? Not that the old Marxist jargon matters too much, adopted or abandoned. What counts is history asking us a question — about our content or purpose in a society of accelerating insecurity, including our own — that one way or another we need to formulate as sharply as possible, since we answer it with our lives.
ahhhhhhh
I had made no conscious decision to be single, but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Because of this, people around me continued to view love as a sort of messianic event, and my friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love was something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape. I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration. Whether love was going to arrive or not, I could not suspend my life in the expectation of its arrival. So, back in New York, I was single, but only very rarely would more than a few weeks pass without some kind of sexual encounter.
What even to call these relationships? Most of my friends had slept with one another and I had slept with many friends, too. Sometimes years separated sexual encounters. Things thought buried in the past would cycle around again, this time with less anxiety and greater clarity, in a fluid manner that occasionally imploded in horrible displays of pain or temporary insanity, but which for the most part functioned smoothly. We were souls flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, circling around, awaiting the messiah.
pretty
“You have to love dancing to stick to it,” Cunningham once said. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Cunningham’s own archive argues the contrary, and the institution that tends to his legacy offers more than a semblance of permanence; the Capsules do give something back, as outlines for potential reconstructions. But Cunningham may have meant that these things are just placeholders, mementos. Cage once described Cunningham’s work as “less like an object and more like the weather.” One is no less present than the other; both are tangible. But an object is good at sticking around. The weather, on the other hand, passes on.
i like this
I'D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY of an Oneida show and see if you can place it in our fifteen-year history. I imagine it will be instructive to anyone with any kind of fantasy about being in a band.
i love this intro
Haas wore leather pants when he performed. He was tall and rail-thin with large hands and an obsession with bebop and hard bop music of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — Charlie Parker especially. When we arrived for that first class he handed out a transcription of the solo from Parker’s tune “Koko” and played the recording from which it came. It was a revelatory experience. I saw the genius of Parker’s instant composition — the nuances, the harmonic development — all over the course of a two-minute piece. The recording ended and I looked up from the paper transformed — I was almost crying. Up until that moment jazz was a blur of notes, an approximation of a form I wasn’t able to grasp, but that recording with the notation unlocked the form for me.
I became possessed and was made despondent by the music. Possessed because there was an infinite reserve of recordings to mine and only a few weeks of concentrated study to crack the surface, and despondent because I was 20 years old and still a mediocre musician.
maybe inspo for strong emotion as well?
When I was a child, my mother told me that by the time I was old enough to die, a machine would have been developed to prevent it. Like the child in “The Eye,” I believed in this consolation until an inappropriate age, when its impossibility arrived all at once, with a similar hollowing force. The experience of recognizing a moment of your own emotional life in a piece of fiction — the reason, I think, that most of us read fiction — is especially characteristic of Munro’s work [...]
As with any crossover success, Balibar’s offered grounds on which purists might complain of betrayal. Civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights activists all spoke the language of rights. (This has also been true, though more obliquely, of the antiwar and environmental movements.) By demanding legislative action, these movements acknowledged the legitimacy of the state to make laws and guarantee rights. In the eyes of some, such an acknowledgment, even a tacit one, could only be a right-wing deviation. It’s the liberals, not us, who talk about democracy and human rights. We’re the ones who know that the state is a tool of the capitalist class, right? How is it possible that Balibar lets himself be seen shamelessly keeping company with bourgeois concepts and institutions?
Something like this was no doubt going through Badiou’s mind when he called Balibar a reformist.
i like this style: recognising this argument goes a long way toward defusing it.
I suspect the problem here for American readers may not be the concepts of democracy and human rights as such, or even the word liberal (which is not yet so firmly established in the US as to be obligatorily shunned by the pure of heart). Skepticism will more likely come from a natural repugnance for the triumphal narrative of America’s unique moral and political greatness. As materials out of which this self-congratulatory narrative is frequently constructed, human rights and democracy will naturally suffer a sort of guilt by association, as will the idea of progress. The rules of this game are familiar: I prove my independence of mind by seeing through the complacent Whiggery all around me. You naively tell me that something somewhere is no longer quite so awful as it used to be. I shake my head in gentle disbelief and reveal to you all the bad stuff you have somehow forgotten about.
There is never any shortage of bad stuff. And yet it doesn’t follow that the job of the left is always and everywhere to harp on it. That would not be an independent thing to do (on the contrary). Nor would it be the authentically left thing to do. The fact that progressive narrative is claimed, exaggerated, and disfigured by liberals does not mean it can be abandoned to them. You have to believe progress is possible in order to get up and try to make some. That’s why they used to call us progressive.
love this
Paradoxical as it may seem, giving up on politics has probably been part of Marxism’s seductiveness for a long time. No one in Balibar’s cohort (Balibar was born in 1942, Badiou in 1937, Rancière in 1940, Žižek in 1949) could have felt confident that as Marxists they came of age at a propitious time for plunging into the class struggle. If 1968 didn’t turn out to be the revolutionary conjuncture, no moment that has followed has come closer. In nonrevolutionary times, the most tempting and pervasive of revisionisms is to give up on changing the world and just interpret it. Nothing supplies serviceable analytic distance like the conviction that you don’t have a horse in this race. Witness the quietism of the New Left Review, the foremost organ of Marxism in the English-speaking world and yet a journal that you go to for searching analysis, not for uplifting news of movements and conflicts. For some years NLR, strongly influenced by Althusser, ostentatiously ignored thinkers in the messianic mode — and bless them for it. But isn’t there a sort of secret alliance between messianism and quietism? How can you stay so coolly detached unless you’re absolutely sure that in the end your day will come?
ooh this is interesting. another perspective on the teleological aspects of marxism