For Simondon we experience something that is eternal in that we experience both our power and limits: we are aware that there is something in us that exceeds this moment, and something of us that is so ephemeral, disappearing the moment that it is experienced. In each case we are aware that our individuality is not the end all and be all of our existence. For Simondon it is situated between the preindividual components of our existence the transindividual relations that we enter into.

Muriel Combes has drawn out the implications of this remark in her book on Simondon, referring to the “intimacy of the common.” The common, the shared language, habits, and affects that make up the backdrop of our subjectivity, a common which exists only in and through social relations, transindividuality, is not something that we only experience in moments in collectivity, in the delusions and madness of crowds, but is always present. The reference to intimacy also underscores that what is common is not something that is exterior to our individuality, it is not some role that we play, but is constitutive. Thus, to draw the two remarks together, the eternal that we experience is perhaps the common, is the irreducible relational aspect of our existence.

This remark sent me chasing around the internet for a quote I barely remembered, John McDowell quoting Stanely Cavell, I used it in a paper in college ten years ago (I no longer remember the subject of the paper nor do I have a copy). The internet, glory be, found it for me:

“We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further context. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals, nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, senses of humour and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, oof when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation - all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’ Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.” (Stanley Cavell, “The Availabilty of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, in _Must We Mean What We Say?_, p52)

Strikes me as quite similar.

So I’m in the middle of moving to a new place. My friend went to Mozambique and left me his jeep for the summer. It’s a good sized one so I can fit a lot of boxes in the back. So I’m hauling a lot of crap (and as I lug stuff I become increasingly convinced that it’s all crap, crap that only a dolt like me would own: smart people own light things and few of them) back and forth from current place to new place. This is tiring and leaves me kinda sore, despite the precautionary back brace. I slept like 11 hours last night, I was so tired. I’ve had a great day, though, in part because I haven’t done any moving yet. I’m gonna once I finish this blog post.

Instead of moving, after sleeping in and eating breakfast I laid in bed and read Neil Gaiman’s new book, The Graveyard Book for a while. Then my wife and I walked the dog. Then I went back to bed to read. (Then I had some delicious baked zuccini and onions that I made last night.)

I finished the book. It’s good. The tone… that’s not the right word but I can’t think of it, I want the visual analog to “tone” … is similar to his Coraline: dark, creepy, magical.

I started it 2 or 3 days ago or maybe it was yesterday. It’s not perfect but it doesn’t have to be. To my mind this is something that characterizes a lot of page turners - forgivable imperfection. No, imperfections that you don’t forgive so much as not care about, because you’re so busy with getting to the back of the book and the fun or compelling-ness of what happens en route. It’s like the last Harry Potter book - characters underdeveloped sometimes, events that should have been a bigger deal in the book’s world seem not to have the weight for the characters that they should (like Harry using an unforgivable curse), but that’s not the point.

Since a fair bit of what I do for a living involves reading, and reading things that are not written for the sake of reading but for others thing conveyed or accomplished by reading and writing (they’re about effects like giving contents or convincing people of things, etc), I sometimes get tired of books. Page turners are great for this, reminding me that reading can be fun and can be an end in itself, reading for what happens in that reading rather than for what I’ll take away from it or how I’ll use it or what response I’ll have to it. The only down side is that a really good page turner rarely has a satisfying ending. I mean, they can be really well-written but it rarely feels like I’m ready to put the book down. When I was a kid I would chain read to minimize this, reading two, three, five, eight books at a time. This was partly that I was disorganized and partly that I was a compulsive reader - wherever I was I wanted a book with me, and I often left my books places: this one on the kitchen table I left when I finished my breakfast, that one on the backyard picnic table I left when I went inside to get some juice, this one on my bed I left when I went to the bathroom, that one in the back of the car I forgot to take with me when we got home, etc. That way of reading also had the result of minimizing the “I’m done with this book but I wish the story wasn’t over” feeling.

I think this feeling of partial dissatisfaction when the book ends is likely something that most page turners have, because the page turner is about the rush of reading so it feels ambivalent when the reading is done. The mixed feeling is I think a testament to how good the book was.

Brainy Noodle’s post also reminds me, I want to read more Borges! And I want to read Elbaum’s book.

I am a model of equanimity and poise.

Seriously, though….

What follows is some stuff I wrote a while back cobbled together. Some of it’s taken from this longer talk I gave a year or two a go (which I should edit into something about developing individuals rather than - or, as the way to understand - organizing economic units).

Sadly tomorrow is an anniversary but we have in many respects gone backwards. Here’s the thing I wrote:

The IWW Founding Convention of June 27th, 1905 brought together people from around the labor movement and the class conscious left. The Convention included representatives of important radical working class organizations like the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), who played a very important role in the founding and early history of the IWW. The WFM itself grew out of a merger of a number of miners unionsin the early 1890s.

Today is not June 27th, 1905. If anything, the present is as much or more like the 1880s than 1905. Our present tasks are less like those who founded the IWW than they are those of the people who worked to form the initial unions out of which the WFM grew, and later the IWW. Today is June 26th, 2009, but tomorrow is not June 27th. June 27th is a long term goal.

In 1913 Paul Brissenden wrote that “[s]yndicalism is the most modern phase of the revolutionary movement.” Brissenden hastened to add that “to express accurately what in French is implicit in the word “syndicalism,” it is necessary to make use of three words - Revolutionary Industrial Unionism,” the doctrine of the IWW. Brissenden noted that “the Industrial Workers of the World is not the first organization of workingmen built upon the industrial form. Even its revolutionary character can be traced back through other organizations” such as the Knights of Labor, the Western Federation of Miners, the American Labor Union, the United Metal Workers International Union, the Brewery Workers, and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. (Brissenden, 2.) Which is to say, the IWW did not drop from the sky but was the product of a process based on earlier experiences and ideas.

The IWW founding convention in Chicago in June of 1905 resulted from a prior convention, also in Chicago, in January of that year, which in turn resulted from an informal meeting and exchanges of letters between radical unionists in November of 1904. The November 29th letter (sent after the meeting by Clarence Smith, George Estes, W.L. Hall, William Trautmann, Thomas Haggerty, and Isaac Cowan, and signed by Trautmann, Estes, Hall, Eugene Debs, Smith, and Charles Sherman) which called for the January conference states the need for “a labor organization builded as the structure of Socialist society, embracing within itself the working class in approximately the same groups and departments and industries that the workers would assume in the working class administration of the Co-Operative Commonwealth.” (Proceedings, 82-83.) This organization would, in the words of a December 16th, 1904, letter from Hall to W.C. Critchlow of the International Laborers’ Union, “represent class conscious revolutionary principles.” (Proceedings, 94.)

The January conference produced a document called the Industrial Union Manifesto, which called for the June convention at which the IWW was founded. This Manifesto called for an organization which would “build up within itself the structure of an Industrial Democracy - a Workers’ Co-Operative Republic - which must finally burst the shell of capitalist government, and be the agency by which the working people will operate the industries, and appropriate the products to themselves.” (Proceedings, 7.) James Kennedy, in his article “How the IWW is Organized”, published in the May 1921 issue of the Industrial Pioneer, summed up the IWW’s aims in three points. “(1) To organize the workers in such a way that they can successfully fight their battles and advance their interests in their every-day struggles with capitalists. (2) To overthrow capitalism and establish in its place a system of Industrial Democracy. (3) To carry on production after capitalism has been overthrown.” (18.)

History is a resource but not the only resource. Whatever tools we turn to, we sorely need our own version of the processes and discussions that led up June 27th, 1905. From there we can create a situation from which to truly move into the future, to chart a different path than that taken by history from 1905-2009.

(via.)

It’s funny because it’s true. Why’s it so compelling a mistake?

Part of it for me is just habit. Part of it is also craving a certain sort of intellectual interaction that can sometimes happen via electronic communication (but rarely does, and even less so if the goal is to prove someone wrong, it requires instead I think a commitment to rigorous but friendly collective effort). A great deal of my formative intellectual and political education occurred through informal electronic interaction. Remembering that, or half remembering it, is part why the habit is so hard to break despite its only occasional success.

This is going to sound terrible, but I will say it anyway: the problem with any living philosopher, or political theorist is that they go on living. When a philosopher dies a space opens up between their texts and whatever contemporary problem or situation which one might want to address. It is debatable that Spinoza would recognize himself in the idea of the multitude, or if Bergson would embrace the vitalist accounts of contemporary society, but this does not matter. As long as a philosopher is still alive, capable of commenting on current events, then it is tempting to take their word as the last word on the matter at hand.

I initially misread the opening (typical). I thought it said “the problem for any living philosopher, or political theorist is that they have to go on living.” As in, folk wrestle with motivation. This is a freudian slip of sorts, reading my own motivation problems into the post. I don’t have any problem going on living , but I do have trouble staying motivated about some political stuff, making a political life. Some of this is lack of motivation to do needed and work and some of it is just feeling tired while I do that work. As I’ve said, I don’t buy the ‘politics should be joyful’ thing that some friends and comrades are into. Abolishing the bad old order is not immediately identical with the existence of the new good order. Achieving good things often sucks en route (and maintaining good things involves stuff that’s less than fun too, though necessary - diaper changing is just one example).

Anyhow, it seems to me that there are maybe two or three things that people need w/ in their world or outlook to hang in there. One is a peg on which to hang hopes. For folk in theory circles this is often a theoretical peg - capitalism is doomed because of the inevitable fall in the rate of profit; capitalism can’t eliminate resistance because resistance is always possible within the sale of labor power, a condition which capitalism is dependent on; and so on. There’s other sorts of pegs too, looking to past examples of positive results - Russia 1917! Minneapolis 1934! Spain 1936! Hungary 1956! Everywhere 1968! Chiapas 1994! Argentina 2001!

Folk also need a peg on which to hang (or a tack in the shoe with which to generate) their outrage. This too can be theoretical or historical.

I think both of these pegs (hope and outrage) and both types (theoretical and historical) are important, and I don’t have an argument about what sort matters more. I think preferences for one or the other are just that, preferences, and the advisability of one or the other is contextual. (At this point I personally favor anger over hope and pegs cut from history rather than theory, but again this is preference and not an argument - and perhaps there’s a link between this preference and my low motivation, I dunno.)

I think both of these are primarily a matter of narratives or myths. I’m not against that, I’m all for it, but I think it’s important to recognize that neither sort has any necessary relationship to analyzing and understanding the present, nor any any necessary relationship to formulating positive (programmatic?) action steps in the present.

Another part of the narrative needed is that when action steps do occur we find something in them that encourages us (or at least allows us) to keep on keeping on. This function is crucial. Agai, though, it’s different from drawing lessons in terms of what to do next. Celebrating our victories, even if that means some difficult interpretive work to make our victories appear as victories, is important for keeping going. Celebrating victories, like hope and anger, are about securing that we keep going. But securing THAT we keep going is different from WHAT we do and how and how we figure out what’s a good idea and so on. Myth is largely about motivation, and motivation is not self-interpreting, it doesn’t make decisions for us or provide a process for making plans. That’s not a failing, but we need to be clear on this, what it is a tool is for. At this point, I can use the motivational myths again, to recover my political optimism, but I don’t want to fall back into the mistake I used to make of acting like optimism is a sufficient political program.