It’s been another couple of weeks of silence from me, but I’ve been making some minor edits on the draft chapters for part two and have decided to try and get your weekly notes to you in the form of notes in this space. It was intended as a notebook and usually works as such, so seems appropriate.
The last two or three weeks as been odd. I had a couple of weeks of intense sleeplessness – a long story – and had drifted into that strange zone of indifference, lassitude, incapacity, operating on a daily basis through some kind of residual functionalism of everyday chores, but where thought had kind of slipped into the aether. Still, a few good nights sleep seem to have pushed that aside.
August began with a ritual fire and sweat session, a return to something I was doing more intensely last year but which I took a break from during the start of 2019. It’s harvest time, physically and (otherwise), and there’s a strong sense of growth. The ritual was interesting – they usually are of course – in that it slipped on like a cloak, settled and simple and ‘slack-handed’, or at least as near to that as I can get. This was a kind of relief, as I’ve been working to lighten the grip I often feel I need on things, particularly the sorcerous, in order to let them ‘do easy’ as Burroughs used to call it and perhaps for the first time in the recent phase on work with the dragon this lighter grip seemed in play. Harvesting the work, the intention, always brightens one up. At the allotment too we’ve been harvesting – potatoes, beetroot, courgettes, beans, kale, wormwood, tansy and yarrow. I’ve been pickling beets and have a load more to do, I’ll bring a jar next time we meet.
In terms of the work, I’ve been mulling over a couple of things in my mind, the first with regard the sense or role of scale, the second to do with the way in which this inflects, infects that movement from passivity to activity that seems core to the revolutionary movement. I spoke a bit about scale in the paper at the recent workshop on Guattari and the institution, drawing on Illich and his work aound ‘iatrogenic disease’ (doctor, or medicine induced disease).
The question of scale seems almost to be co-extensive with the question of politics – at what scale does politics operate? It’s not uncommon to come across the concept of ‘micro-politics’ nowadays, a concept of the 21st century – the ‘Deleuzian century’ as the joke goes – and the ‘micro-‘ aspect of this derives in large part from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, with flavourings of Foucault along the way. In some ways it’s easy to relegate the micro-political to a repackaging or renaming of what, during the 1970’s, was advanced under the slogan ‘the personal is the political’, a slogan that is strongly associated with feminism but is equally applicable to the rise of black consciousness movements. In fact the ‘micro-‘ in micro-politics often presents as being associated with the personal, the individual, with consciousness as a lived experience relation to the world, and to the political. All of this is important, without a doubt, but the ‘micro-‘ here appears a bit like a jargon, a kind of posh academic way of taking over talk about the role of the personal within the political. There also seems to be something lost in translation from the distinction within schizoanalysis between the molar and the molecular, which is often cited as one of the sources of things ‘micro-political’.
Very roughly the problem seems to be something like the following – much talk about the micro stops at the individual, and yet this is not a micro phenomenon. Too often talk seems trapped within this framework of the individual, within the I rather than the We, neither going behind the back of the personal nor producing a new formation of individuation, one that would have to speak as a We, one that would be incapable of even understanding what it was to really say ‘I think…’. Yet it is here, in that which is behind the back of the person and in that which is to be formed as a people, that the revolutionary movement must construct its presence. We speak of the three grids of relationship or connection – the one to one, the group and the community – as ways of being that intersect, overlay, intermingle within the person, within the specific entity. At what scale do these grids work?
Take the moment of transition – or call – from passivity to activity that is to be found as the question ‘what can I do?’ arises. In this formation it’s difficult to connect the movement to a revolutionary horizon, a communist horizon as the contemporary phrase has it, because that relationship is blocked by the form of the question. At what scale can the answer we found here? For the revolutionary the response must almost always be something like ‘join in’, but the act of joining in is deeply troublesome when each I joins ‘actively’, bringing themselves as they are into the connection. There is little more than a cacophonous howl that is produced, much like the world of social media and internet communication, where everyone has their chance to speak, but no-one gives a shit, no-one listens. The voice is nothing without an ear, it simply howls in its isolation. I’ve been reading Doris Lessings’ book The Golden Notebooks, prompted by a Jodi Deans lecture at Goldsmith’s this year, and one of the things that is striking is that the central character, a communist and a writer, is caught between what she perceives as the pointlessness of her voice as an individual in the face of the ‘big issues’ and the almost obsessive need to talk to herself, write to herself, simply in order to be able to hear, to be able to cope with and live in the midst of those ‘big issues’. There are moments when she has to find a way of hearing herself, of hearing what she thinks or feels, moments that presuppose a kind of deafness to ourselves.
No matter how much we speak, if there is no ear it is not speech. Nothing is said before it is heard.
The one to one relationship perhaps has as its image the psychoanalytic encounter and if this is of any value then it is because it’s a space for the production of an ear, of a hearing. We speak in sorcery of ‘listening to the body’, which involves something close to colloquial concepts of intuition in many ways but which is distinct in that there are techniques that can be deployed to get the body to speak, and it’s only through working to get the body to speak that a sorcerer can begin to move towards the point at which they can listen to the body. The body doesn’t know how to speak until it is plugged into an ear, no matter how much it whirs and screams and howls. To plug into an ear, to connect an ear to a mouth, this strikes me as more fundamental even than the mouth attaching to the breast. In the breast attachment the mouth satisfies itself once the conection is made, once the flow begins, it becomes pacified. In the voice, however, the breath is transformed into the active connective formation of ear/voice, at least if the connection is productive. Too often the becoming-voice collapses into exhaustion, not even an echo chamber, simply an exhaustion.
Nietzsche in Turin.
It seems folly to ask ‘what can I do?’ with regard politics, and the folly arises because of the scale at which politics operates.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 
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