<div dir="ltr">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?<br><br> 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:<br><img src="cid:ii_iy1w9bdy1_159add606477098b" width="544" height="236"><a href="http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1914">http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1914</a><br><br>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" <a href="https://rs21.org.uk/2014/04/27/kpunk/">https://rs21.org.uk/2014/04/27/kpunk/</a>.)<br><br>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?":<br><br>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)<br><br> <br>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...<br><br>P.S:<div><br>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: <a href="http://www.peoplesschoolithaca.org/">http://www.peoplesschoolithaca.org/</a><br><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:'times new roman'"><span> </span></span></p>
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