///Culture post is still coming along, starting on the third draft today.
In the meantime, we'll move onto the third AFFECT/METANOIA experiment in the Hypno-Noumenal series, "Wish: Panopticon."
This experiment has to do with creation under observation. You'll notice that the first step asks you to begin the poem in public (for me, a shopping mall); another step asks you to sit near a window, where you might be observed from the outside, and imagine that barrier shattering; a third step asks you to write near others, or, if this isn't viable, near a television playing something banal to try to simulate the presence of others. Poetry is often thought of as an intimate, personal experience: as such, it can be challenging to share with others.The experiment goes even beyond this, asking you to create the poem while observed by others. The experiment is further augmented by the initial imperative to formulate a broad, "preferably global" wish in the face of a subsection of those the wish might effect. I don't recall my own wish, but I remember being not altogether satisfied by it. Imagining it fulfilled proved a further challenge, as did imagining the means to change one world into the other.
Imagining an alternative world is sometimes easy, other times challenging. Imagining the space between the current world and this new world is always daunting, and imagining the means by which we might bring into being the imagined world is downright overwhelming. But it is the latter which I believe is crucial: in "Capitalist Realism" and in many of his blog posts, Mark Fisher formulated the need for the former repeatedly—we must find a way to imagine alternatives to capitalism, something which many struggle to pragmatically do. However, even where we succeed at doing so, imagining and then executing the means to bring this alternative into being provides a further, and perhaps more profound challenge. Yet if we are to succeed in bringing into reality such an alternative, this work must be done, and it must be done quickly.
These "other worlds" ought, yes, to be large, globular, and total revolutions. However, remaining steadfast to that image can make the subsequent, and far more important task, exceedingly daunting. I think a helpful formulation of how to approach this activity might be, how can we imagine bringing this world closer to the one we imagine? Contrary to the boomerang theory of accelerationism, many large-scale reforms and even revolutions have come along precisely because smaller-scale reform action was won by worker-organization, and such realization helped to make the potential of what else might be won significantly clearer. Imagining too largely and dwelling too long on that immensity can lead one to despair, or even into redundant thought experiments without real materiality. Get organized where you can, join movements where they exist, or even found them where there are none.
However "small actions" need to be dedicated and strategic; we can organize liberal marches until the Arctic burns. The 8-hour work day was won by organizing for a 12-hour workday, then a 9-hour workday, and so on. Always there must be a beyond to an effort, the effort itself a single strategic movement in warfare.
Additionally, what we imagine goes beyond a simple reformulation of politics or distribution. Hopefully among our wish is the wish to see other forms of exploitation mitigated. Yes many material circumstances must be changed before even these might be overcome--and not crudely solely on the institutional level: we cannot expect to change people without also changing their circumstances--indeed, rarely have people been changed some other way. But so too do you need to change: do not think you have arrived already into the new world. You're crisscrossed by shittiness, and hardly anyone is really taught kindness. And I don't mean this in the humanist sense of, "We must simply learn to love one another and then the world will change Kumbaya blah blah"--I mean to say that we are not trained how to avoid harming one another in our relations with each other (and of course these extend beyond even that immediacy into how we conceptualize and think about broader populations which are ideas to us, etc.). What I mean by this is that there are plenty of guys in DSA debating about St. Petersburg in 1917 who come home from chapter meetings and treat their partners like shit and assault women at parties, plenty of anti-racist socialist tweeters who haven't confronted their real somatic fear of Black men or anyone who looks sufficiently poor at the gas station.
None of these senses are meant to uncritically endorse, alone, the molecular revolution that Foucault envisioned, where changing one's individual relations and behaviors triggers an avalanched epistemic shift of egalitarianism, or even the schizotechnics of Deleuze & Guattari, and still less the k-tactics of the CCRU (though it is not either a condemnation of them: the enemy is an aspen grove--an arborescent rhizome. We must be the spruce beetle and the forest fire, attacking root and stem). As Trump and Johnson make clear, capital has made its way through to the top, happily deterritorializing our symbolic networks as it goes. The enemy is not an oak grove, and it never was. As Andrew Culp writes, "we need to be careful to engage in rhizomatic analysis rather than act as cheerleaders for rhizomes. It was not just the anti-globalization movement that was rhizomatic, so was globalization; the radical left has benefited from becoming-rhizomatic, but so has “the groupuscule right” of resurgent fascisms (Griffin, 2003). Deleuze & Guattari’s famous warning in A Thousand Plateaus says as much, “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (500)." And, elsewhere, "Today’s techniques of control are now molecular. The result is that control societies have emptied the molecular thinker’s only bag of tricks...which leaves us with a revolution that only goes one direction: backward."
We cannot begin at the base, in the liberal/anarchist sense: buying local, growing tomatoes, doing demonstrations, agitating from everywhere: though none of these has no place in a movement. (Though this is not quite what Culp advocates for,) mass "organ"-ized movements are needed--incrementalism and even this idea of the spontaneous uprising(1) cannot pose a real challenge to capital at this stage. Something which smells of an aristocratic Nietzschean Leninism is still, I claim, needed (and I hope possible)--but this cannot be done if we are not rigorous with ourselves, in our relations, our actions, and our treatment of others. Basically, I'll take a do-nothing liberal who's basically decent over a dedicated communist who abuses those around him every time.
As with the Rage poem, this experiment does not pretend to answer or even fully engage with this problem space. More than perhaps any of my experiments, in my view, this one asks to be really performed, or at the least contemplated. Its implicit challenge asks us to first imagine, while disallowing us from abstracting from the real people before us, and then to imagine the execution of the imagined. Again, imagining another world is not enough; we must also imagine ways to bring about this other world, and work to bring it into being.
As always, feel free to post your results in the forum page or send them to me directly, and thanks to @YoutubeArtifact on twitter for the post picture.\\\
(1) not that I really have anything against the Yellow Vests, just an example I think of a very profound display of broad social discontent, continued for weeks and if I'm correct is till happening in some form, not radically altering the status quo--due in large part to its lack of a single set of goals, organizational coherence, and strategic organizing to achieve particular aims.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
METANOIA:
WISH Experiment: Panopticon
Day 1:
1. Go to a busy, populated area with your notebook.
2. At the top of the page, make a wish that has to do somehow with movement—as large a wish as possible, preferably global.
3. Draw three lines from your wish to three columns below.
4. Beginning from the right, moving left, free write until two of the columns are full. Begin with the word “pyramid” as a verb.
(squeeze out every drop of violence; barricade a cell whose walls are bodies; listen to the perpetual hiss and pop of war at the perimeter of artificial calm)
Day 2:
1. The next day, sit near a window, as close as you can. Picture the window shattering.
In the final column, write a list of words that come to your mind, without judgement.
2. Imagine your wish fulfilled—now meditate on the space between the now and the fulfillment of your wish. Write a paragraph or a list of words which come to you during this meditation.
(avoid injections of cowardice; open playpen gates and refuse a world of clay, all soft, all pastel plastic blades; is it sufficient to evoke the sound and not the meaning?)
Day 3:
1. The next day, between 1:11-1:36 (AM or PM), select some content from your free write.
2. Pick a few words from your list and use them to modify your selected sections.
(an exit wound in the shape of a ratchet; throwing a tantrum of melancholy snipes; registered on a sliding scale of mud in the green energies of my memory.)
Day 4:
1. Write a poem using these lines, preferably around others, or by a TV playing cable news. (If this is not a salvageable draft, wait one day and repeat this step.)
(waxing fluid in a system until it reaches hyperdrive; invigorating breakages, endeavor stops and shudders, cracks in the baleful foundations; being a bitter shard in the gears; a wolf peering among unsuspecting diplomats, lurking in spring, capsizing dragons, emptying spines of their black marrow)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WISH Experiment:
Synthetic Ecologies
engage neurotichemical warfare; instigate radar theft and wage counter-psyops. locked in aerostatic prism, frozen in lockstep, i am a ghost, a sliding door gone missing. one piano note hanging in a recently emptied room.
pyramid the hyperlock; warp smooth into miniscape, throwing switches, blasting hinges, cremating the tarred scientists of chainlink.
wail as the black geode lotus, a rock caught fast in the gears of a dark turbine, a wheel with dead universes tied to its spokes.
rise and shear with my lipids—bladefuses choke the crimson cycles; rip out the tubes of coca-cola machines and wire intestinal ropes to the vacuum.
the blood smith transcribes—in the ward become the wraithqueen, dribbling pigsilk, thundering lash-soaked, sagging auroral, and birth the lion’s roar of Revelation, howl, “the extreme world is everything”
i wish for the death of all binding machines. immunoglobins lurk in spring, waging ecologies which are retrocausal moldbugs. unproud in kernelled panic, crack the lenses of fathers and liberate the space of the verb.
comets alone shatter the frame: roam to the desert choke the forbidder of nomadic grasslands and do not drink the serene, brass meaning.
Comments