----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
On reading the call for resolutions, I thought what a tall order, what
could I change about myself, what resolutions could I form to oppose these
cataclysmic, global forms of oppression?
In my circles of either baby or veteran left graduate students, who want
to organize or show up for the left, and then to guilt-strickenly retreat
from organizing—for our exams, dissertation and grant writing, it can feel
like this:
http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1914
I want to resolve to manage my time better, be less distracted, more
productive, so I could do more for more. But how much of this is already a
current of neoliberal thinking, of life-optimization? The recently departed
Mark Fisher warned against magical voluntarism, "the belief that it is
within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to
be", particularly the magical voluntarism of the left, "The[y] imply it’s
possible to act now, if only we recognise our own power. This is the left
version of magical voluntarism. Often the emphasis on direct action comes
out of a depressive conviction that there’s no possibility of indirect
action, of changing things at the level of dominant ideology and
institutions.” ("The politics of depression"
https://rs21.org.uk/2014/04/27/kpunk/.)
In the private debates I've had on being a relatively cloistered graduate
student spending half my year on a hill, writing on ethics, politics and
cinema while the world implodes...I think too of Jean-Luc Nancy's "What is
to be Done?":
What is to be done, at present? The question is on everybody's lips and, in
a certain way, it is the question people today always have lying in wait
for any passing philosopher. Not: What is to be thought? But indeed: What
is to be done? [...] Especially if the question were to presuppose that
one already knows what it is right to think, and that the only issue is how
one might then proceed to act [...] (Retreating the Political, 157)
Fisher's resolution in "The politics of depression" cited above was: “We
must recover confidence that we can change things while recognising the
many reasons why we don’t recognise our own power." So, between Fisher and
Nancy, my modified mantra for the year, would be to embrace
thought/indirect/direct action—in the messiness of their entangled
happening, to resist the tide of anti-intellectualism, to still believe in
ethics, cinema, to resist defeatist and triumphalism, and to recover
confidence that I could change things, through (metaphorically) diurnal
forms of organizing and nocturnal acts of writing...
P.S:
On the organizing front, I've been working with a group of undergraduates,
graduates, faculty, Ithacan activists for a teach-in at Cornell on Jan
27th. So far, we have over 26 sessions with topics as wide-ranging as
struggles against Islamaphobia, history of US social movements, Black Lives
Matter, global feminism, DREAMers, building a working-class movement,
climate change, decarceration, immigrant rights, ethnic studies, gender and
sexuality, Standing Rock, white supremacy:
http://www.peoplesschoolithaca.org/
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