by
The Common
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A happy idea takes root: it’s not too late to take it all back. She could tell him she’s been on some bad medication that’s been fucking with her moods, and then promise to throw away the pills so that things can get back to normal. They could even laugh about it, once enough time has elapsed. It is almost unbearably tempting to do this, knowing the words would summon his broad smile, his instant forgiveness, and that afterward they could go drink rosé and eat paella in the shadow of a medieval bell tower, and maybe, later on, dance in a dimly lit square by a fountain. The vision is so powerful and beautiful she almost succumbs to it.
But then she thinks again about his hands, their strength and size, about what it has felt like these last few weeks to have his body pressed against hers—the rush of panicked nausea; the irresistible urge to run as far as she can—and she knows she has to go. The fight-or-flight response is already uncoiling like a snake in her brain. She can feel her neck going red and beads of sweat forming behind her ears.
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
[...]
<3 this one passage justifies all the time it took to type up the stupid TOC
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
sweet
The great advantages of the interview are its manoeuvrability and range. Beginning, usually, in a conversation and resulting in a printed representation of that, its production process is more complex than this suggests, combining the greater spontaneity and pace of speech with the greater scope and control available to both parties in written revision and supplementation, where in fact much of the work of composition may occur. A singular form only in the minimal sense in which the novel can be said to be one, the interview accommodates a whole array of spoken and written varieties at both poles of the exchange (exposition and narrative, and elicitation, but also argumentative rallies, interjections, anecdotes, asides) and licenses elliptical transitions from one topic to another—jump-cutting—in relative freedom from the constraints of the standard article form. At other times, it may serve the purposes of what might have been an article, creating a monologic argument or narrative with a facilitating second voice, in effect. Some of the interviews reprinted here move at this end of the range, offering extended and methodical historical treatments of their material. But even in those cases, the differences are palpable. For the interview as conceived of here is among other things a kind of portraiture, or rather self-portraiture—and a mode in which, then, however discreetly, thought becomes thinking, something of its character as a process is reanimated, as concepts find their forms and effects in the grain of biographical sequences and historical construction is re-inflected in the lived interpretations of memoir. Even at its most austerely conceptual or political, and in so far as it goes beyond the merest formal simulation of spoken exchange, the interview takes on the distinctive colorations of autobiography and memoir. The temporal complexity of these interviews brings a further enrichment of meaning. Each, read alone, is straightforward enough: a specific mix of recollection, statement and expectation framed at a point in time. Read as a confluence of voices, in the order suggested here, their suggestions multiply, often movingly and not least ironically. Shared chronological time is criss-crossed by individual histories, one account varying from other accounts of the same thing, the anticipations of earlier generations sometimes coexisting awkwardly with the retrospects of the younger—and both now exposed, after a greater or lesser lapse of years, to readers who, for now, have the privilege of final retrospect. Impersonal cruces in politics and theory are not rendered less objective or less demanding in this process; the fact of ‘complexity’ is not an exemption from judgement, and the personal is not a solvent of public contradiction. But they are heard differently, echoing as moments in a collective historical experience.
<3
[...] The concept of labour is the hinge of my analysis. For labour is not biologically determined. If a lion attacks an antelope, its behaviour is determined by biological need and by that alone. But if primitive man is confronted with a heap of stones, he must choose between them, by judging which will be most adaptable to his use as a tool; he selects between alternatives. The notion of alternatives is basic to the meaning of human labour, which is thus always teleological—it sets an aim, which is the result of a choice. It thus expresses human freedom. But this freedom only exists by setting in motion objective physical forces, which obey the causal laws of the material universe. The teleology of labour is thus always coordinated with physical causality, and indeed the result of any individual’s labour is a moment of physical causality for the teleological orientation (Setzung) of any other individual. The belief in a teleology of nature was theology, and the belief in an immanent teleology of history was unfounded. But there is teleology in all human labour, inextricably inserted into the causality of the physical world. This position, which is the nucleus from which I am developing my present work, overcomes the classical antinomy of necessity and freedom. But I should emphasize that I am not trying to build an all-inclusive system. The title of my work—which is completed, but I am now revising the first chapters—is Zur Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins, not Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins. You will appreciate the difference. The task I am engaged on will need the collective work of many thinkers for its proper development. But I hope it will show the ontological bases for that socialism of everyday life of which I spoke.
[...] Lenin [...] never presented basic changes and new departures as merely continuations and improvements of previous trends. For example, when he announced the New Economic Policy, he never for one moment said that this was a ‘development’ or ‘completion’ of War Communism. He stated quite frankly that War Communism had been a mistake, understandable in the circumstances, and that the NEP was a correction of that mistake and a total change of course. This Leninist method was abandoned by Stalinism, which always tried to present policy changes—even enormous ones—as logical consequences and improvements of the previous line. Stalinism presented all socialist history as a continuous and correct development; it would never admit discontinuity. Now today, this question is more vital than ever, precisely in the problem of dealing with the survival of Stalinism. Should continuity with the past be emphasized within a perspective of improvements, or on the contrary should the way forward be a sharp rupture with Stalinism? I believe that a complete rupture is necessary. That is why the question of discontinuity in history has such importance for us.
It is interesting to note that popular dissatisfaction with the economic situation in Czechoslovakia was greater in the more recent period, when living standards were much higher, than in the period immediately after the war when the masses believed that austerity was in the service of revolutionary ideas and socialist construction. By replacing revolutionary ideals with the promises of a consumer society, the bureaucrats only create trouble for themselves. On the other hand, it should be stated that an economic crisis itself is not sufficient to bring about a change in the situation since bureaucratic regimes have reserves with which to prevent an explosion caused by purely economic factors.
Yes, I think it would have happened and it was already happening even before 1968, as a reaction against the egalitarian system introduced in 1955. Under the latter, everybody in Czechoslovakia was within a narrow range of salaries. This means that there were no material rewards for responsible jobs, whether for intellectual work or for important posts in the factories. From the ideological point of view, you may say that this was progress. But in the transitional period of development of a socialist society, I think it is necessary to use both moral and material incentives. Precisely because a socialist society should favour technical and scientific development more than capitalist society does, its technical and scientific personnel should be paid accordingly. Of course, even in this period, inequalities did exist, in the sense that even if people had identical salaries, some of them—party leaders for instance—had many other facilities.
interesting
I think this question of involvement in politics is a very interesting one. I always believed, until really quite recently, probably till about twenty years ago, that in an ideal society everybody would take part in politics, that it was natural for people to wish to have some control over their lives and that the best way of achieving this was by political structures and political activity in the broadest sense—through tenants’ committees, students’ committees, workers’ committees and so forth. It always seemed to me that this was what most people, if they had the time and the freedom and the education, would want to do. Only fairly recently did I discover that most people want a quiet life and that the dedicated committee person is the exception rather than the rule. I think this is one of the things I learnt by being involved in politics. As long as you are involved you think it is really the most important human activity, you think you really are changing the world and affecting history. But you have to be able to stand back a bit and realize that most people don’t see it in that way. One of the biggest shocks I ever had in Cambridge was when I discovered that people in the college lumped me together with the Conservative secretary, because we were both interested in politics. I thought we were at the absolute opposite ends of world experience, but in fact to the rest of the students the politicos, left and right, were much of a muchness.
[...] Lenin would certainly have rejected the idea that Marxism was a critique of political economy: for him it was a critique of bourgeois political economy only, which finally transformed political economy itself into a real science. But the subtitle of Capital indicates something more than this—it suggests that political economy as such is bourgeois and must be criticized tout court. This second dimension of Marx’s work is precisely that which culminates in his theory of alienation and fetishism. The great problem for us is to know whether and how these two divergent directions of Marx’s work can be held together in a single system. Can a purely scientific theory contain within itself a discourse on alienation? The problem has not yet been resolved.