[-empyre-] escaping work & having your mass and monad too

[davin heckman]

Simon, Aristide, Cara,

I apologize for only partly following the conversation this month.... but
your comments inspired me to jump in.

I have a friend from graduate school, Patrick Vrooman, who used to talk
about "acquiescence" every time the conversation turned to resistance.  And
I wonder if part of finding an "escapist's strategy that doesn't end up in
escapism" might be to think in similar terms....  worry less about what we
want to get away from and more about what we want to get into.  I think
Deleuze's discussion of "desire" comes in handy here as the means by which
consciousness migrates across the material world to create new organs of
sensation and modes of experience.  If you join up with someone in a deep
and committed way, you effectively surrender to them, you depend upon them,
and they depend upon you.  This kind of thinking is threatening, especially
for contemporary subjects, who enjoy their autonomy, who imagine themselves
as pure individuals, who are trained to experience their consciousness via
decisions about what to buy and what not to buy, etc.  And beyond
inconvenience, it carries substantial ethical and physiological risks.

If we look, for instance, at the link that Cara has provided: Occupy
Everything, I think we can get a sense of how these dynamics work.  While
there  are clear expressions of resistance backed by astute critiques,
"Occupying" space is first about being present within that space.  It begins
with a utopian goal of being.  And my experience in successful interventions
is that they achieve a level of community and pleasure at the site of
practice that suggests things could work out well if the normal order is
suspended and control is left to the community.  On a daily level, the
difference between a livable and an unlivable locality has everything to do
with our willingness to "give in" to each other, whether it means riding a
bike without getting smashed by a car or answering the door when someone
knocks.

On the other hand, we live in a world that has systematically destroyed that
trust.  Restaurants and food manufacturers want us to trust their products
over street vendors, home-cooked meals, and farm foods....  which we are
conditioned to see as dirty.  We (and I know this is not a universal,
immutable "we") trust something with a label or corporate identity before
trusting something made by hand.  The solution, from the individual
perspective, is to run towards those earthy, interpersonal pleasures, to
explore them, and to share them.  Beyond our personal experience, however,
we must also teach, train, cultivate, and habituate virtues of trust and
human interaction and dismantle the general feeling of fear and dread that
can be crippling.

Davin

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 7:30 PM, simon <swht at clear.net.nz> wrote:

> Dear <<empyreans>>,
>
> Two moments:
>
> [to talk to Aristide Antonas's post]
>
> escaping work or the work of escaping the representation according to which
> the telos of every field is visibility correlates with the work of
> resisting. How to encourage escape but by an escapist's strategy that
> doesn't end up in escapism? What David Foster Wallace calls the liberal
> education has this good and admirable goal in its sights, by giving the
> student to gain insight into the chains binding them to ways of thinking and
> ways of behaving, leading the student to ask questions, which in themselves
> are nodal points of escape - points all too soon coopted into an optic of
> resistance, like the field of a mass action. Recuperation of resistance as
> information.
>
> A new barbarism is intriguing. It smacks of a desire for an effort of
> thought, of critical thought, or archeology - shouldn't that be a geology?
> as in a crossing of the threshold of slowmo? - with the quick violence of
> the earth as the upsetter? The point is taken, however, that this cooption
> of liberatory knowledge to information, that is, representation, and this
> appropriation of action to the field of visibility, likewise,
> representation, tank up civilization - but as we know it, uncommonly well.
>
> The desperation of facing urgent situations without recourse to action, is
> it more or less a black hole for the civilian, more or less a barbarism, for
> the city, than "spontaneous unorganised violence due to the urgency of
> desperate situations"?
>
> The political space need not immediately become a place enclosed by the
> three theatrical walls of a living archive accessible by screen imagery, its
> fourth porous wall, its magic. If it is not an open space any more, we
> should look for the exits?
>
> I must admit, I am attracted rather than repelled by the concatenation of
> political space, live archive and interweb or net. And I would like to add
> the note that it might be precisely the violence and the urgency of
> desperate situations that make the thought think. Less a tank, than a
> gnawing at the earth, a disturbance in the field, a sudden inrush, a
> tremour, "more than surface, less than depth." An illiberal, illegal,
> unauthorised, unorganised and nonhuman violence to the fields of thought and
> action.
>
> Secondly, I have been thrown by recent posts seeking to establish fields of
> names and negotiate those fields in terms of singular actions, singular
> movements. To identify them with the singularity of an event or a monad.
> Whether talking of an historically unfolding field of political action,
> liberatory or encapturing. Or, in fact, enchanting and magical. If we are
> with Badiou, then the event itself, in its singularity, has given rise to
> this open set of subjectivities we know by their names. If however we are
> with Deleuze, then the individual as a diffuse, clear confused, distinct
> obscure field is the event and the mass captured by its monadic singularity
> has escaped representation and cannot in turn comprise representatives of
> whatever revolution in thought and action has occurred. Except as a branding
> exercise?
>
> Best,
>
> Simon Taylor
>
> www.squarewhiteworld.com
> www.brazilcoffee.co.nz
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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