A momentary break writing notes on the run apropos of some recent discussions, trying to start getting my thoughts in order a bit, in order to think about this stuff more when I get home and have more downtime. Will insert hyperlinks to the conversations I’m talking about soon, they’re at Steve’s and Jodi’s.
First, regarding continuity or otherwise -
I found a copy of the New York Times on the bus today. Read an article about Randal McCoy, survivor of the Sago Mine disaster. Depressing and angering by turns. McCoy wrote a letter saying that the emergency oxygen thingums didn’t work, at least some of them didn’t. Perhaps part of why the miners died.
There are many other examples, but one that’s on my mind because I just saw a film where it figured big recently, is the Speculator Mine fire, in Butte Montana 1917, part of the cycle of events that lead to Frank Little’s lynching by company thugs.
None of this is to say that nothing has changed. Steve and I basically agree, I think, that this continuity or break thing is a matter of emphasis. I like the emphasis I like, that on continuity (relatively speaking) for two reasons at least. First, capitalism continues to kill us. (Today is Workers Memorial Day.) I think that’s an important reason folks revolt which hasn’t changed significantly. Second, I think that the forms of self-organization people are capable of haven’t changed significantly, or more to the point, I think that people in the past were just as capable of self-organization as we are today (put abstractly, the self-declaration and act of subjectification wherein the part of no part says “enough already!” has been possible trans-historically) though we today organize ourselves may in different ways and use different techniques (this also varies along a number of axes, not simply era).
Re: subjective destitution, I’m intensely nervous about the term after a post at Steve’s dealing w/ a post of Kpunk’s. Kpunk talks about a scene of subjective destitution in V For Vendetta. I’ve not see the movie, but I’m told that the scene in question is one of torture. I’m uncomfortable with that for a number of reasons, not least because it’s a scene of male-on-female torture. Particularly if the idea is that subjective destitution for someone else is something which one can and should create deliberately (a constructed situation?). The term also doesn’t sit well with me simply for the connotation of poverty and of stripping of some quality. I prefer an aggregation upward, so to speak, a gaining (or better, positing) of qualities, by a subject who is often disallowed from being more - forced into relative destitution (qua proletariat) and from which we intend to emerge. We have been nothing, we shall be all.
One question on subjective destitution to my mind is how it can be accomplished. Can it be done to someone else voluntarily? Or does it require some objective occurence (an event?)? And, in either case, what does and doesn’t count? Has Randal McCoy been subjectively destituted? How does the mine disaster not count? (And if it does, why is this something to valorize? To my mind, if the category contains events like this then it’s one about whcih I don’t want to say “up with this!”)
Lastly on this, I don’t like much of anything that posits some precondition for revolt. These kinds of descriptions very easily turn over into prescriptions for the working class, legislating who is and is not capable of (authorized to) revolt.
I have similar reservations about philosophical accounts of (a need for) Event. It seems to me to posit an objective precondition such that without one people can’t act. Which is to say, it sounds to me like a type of spontaneism, which I’m opposed to. I’m solidly voluntarist.