WARTEMPO 2021-2022
It's been a rough fucking year. I don't feel as several as I did last time.
Lost some folks, met some. Got a bit more tired. (too much stoicism in my life, lately)
More trial and error, more skittishness at change that requires me to move rather than stand there and bear the brunt of it; to say i'm fomenting plans and starting projects seems useless. What else would i be doing ? Sitting and thinking ?
On repeating myself.
Thinking about the facts of thinking :
I move forward in my thoughts through cycles of repeating to myself certain ideas or observations that are stuck : Stuck because i haven't properly internalized how they work with the rest of my pre-conceived notions. In this and the previous newsletter(scattered signal) it comes out as certain themes and obsessions/distractions :
The fandom pieces : "communities centered around something outside their control are bound to lash out in expected/forecastable ways, religion is cult is politics is fandom is community, etc"
solarpunk/cultural pieces : "practices, not ideas, condition the emergence of artforms"
"wartempo", "Internet as a religious experience" : "everything happens too much"
utopian considerations : "the process of prefiguring the next cultural, social, political, technological forms is necessarily incomplete, not out of failure but out of necessity. Thinking about them is not empty but ripe with potential"
I figure out something that can generally be summed up in the span of a sentence that captures a set of contexts and i add new qualifiers with each new piece of writing until i get to a point where it satisfies the itch. Then I move on but retain past sentences until they erode and no longer apply, either morphed into new sentences or displaced by better ones.
This text is one such attempt at summing up how I think, it's already incomplete and will stay that way because I presume that my life is not ending any time soon and even if it did I only have a very partial understanding of my own thinking.
This is not an observation about something positive or negative, just a particular.
Particularities are neither good nor bad, they're just the way a certain thing takes shape : the way a cat's ears are shaped differently from their brother's, the way your accent is impacted by your upbringing in a way that makes it slightly distinct from your neighbor's, the way no building can ever be the same because of the complex set of labors, ressources, projects, plans, accidents that make its conception and existence possible. No two things are the same in the record of their particulars but you can always make a vague-to-more-precise connection between collections of characteristics.
It's scary to share half-formed thoughts, not knowing where they're going to or what impulse they'll serve, remembering you don't have anything to lose is a minor soothe and a lie. There's always something more to lose as long as you're playing a game. What would be a better heuristic is that anything you lose you can make up for, with time. And sometimes not playing is worst than abstaining.
Do you go for the pain of staying unrecognized or for the pain of being derided and misrecognized ? If you stay in the first kind of pain you may never figure out the myriad of other pains you could experience if you opened yourself up : being recognized and hated specifically for what you are, being recognized and used, being recognized but diluted, being recognized and realize that you didn't want to be recognized actually because you enjoyed isolation and romantic alienation from the world("woe is me for being so special and unique and misunderstood"), disappointment in yourself is another possible kind of pain, hard to shake off if you don't spell it out.
Out of these thoughts I think I've isolated one of the things I need to do to move forward but can't find the strenght to do it and it's been making me feel more inapt than before.
Something is bound to break, probably.
On France as a present day country
As the Left is a coalitional project made up of competing-collaborating-contradicting frameworks and orientations, so is the Right, the victories of right-wingers have nothing to do with a strong Unity or real popular appeal and everything to do with superior attritional capacity and the constant subsidization of their projects from (political or economical) entities beyond the control of their political opponents, The Left. I don't want to hear about nonsense like "the left can't meme" or "we need better propaganda" nobody gives a shit about that, people want material security not media. Provide a solution and people will listen to what you have to say, shut down alternative solutions and make yours the only available path and there's no reason for people to look for other ways out.
When you're the only solution left on the table it doesn't matter if your actual program is fucking shit : you will have enough votes.
I say that with the oncoming elections in France and a mediascape dominated by stupidity as it's privy to be, not simply out of market forces (fear sells) but out of monopolistic capture of that environment by certain outlets. There's still time for black swans or even grey ones. Who knows.
On that note, the possibility that France would be overtaken by the extreme right-wing (understood here as the extra-parliamentary, anti-democratic, anti-human rights fringe of the right) is not an absurd one, it would simply not look like a military take-over but like a soft-putsch by a faction of the radical right (rassemblement national and the likes) which would then be parasited from within by its own extremist elements.
At that, the extreme right wing is not at its strongest compared to its institutional allies. The best it can hope for under a radical right cabinet in power is to be afforded more leeway in terms of violent actions and infringing on people's rights. Potentially getting to positions equivalent to police auxiliaries in certain localities.
The question of the virus is most pressing there : how would a radical right wing government that courts anti-vaxx positions try and tame its extreme elements who tilt even more to the anti-vaxx side ?
I don't know enough about that, I've been keeping away from real politics altogether out of necessity, while knowing full well that the problem I'm routing around will not go away. This is me figuring out what I can do where I'm at and where I'm going.
The world doesn't wait and nature is indifferent.
Here we are faced with a government that is not just authoritarian but also aims at doing an effective job : in such circumstances one can't help but empathize with the anxiety of the cow sensing a cattle prod on the way to its loins. Some things are bound to break sooner or later.
Necessity begs action, action begs preparation, preparation demands time which is pressed upon by necessity. You don't want to half-ass shit in the actual doing : failures are how we learn how to do things but we can't afford to fail at other people's lives. Because once we fail people, we've failed the project wholesale.
So we take a deep breathe and keep going.
"if they ask for your loyalty give them your integrity"
Integrity is loyalty to a principle over loyalty to an object, it's one of the most important things a person can recognize as necessary in their own life.
Integrity means going against your own directly perceptible desires to serve the needs of what you've established to be important to you beyond instant (or even delayed) gratification.
It can lead you down your own demise too if your principles are fucked, which is why you should observe how your moral principles are articulated along ethical lines. Do you refuse to condone murder because god told you so ? Or because it goes against the basic capacity of others to make choices, their agency, their consent to life, their very existence ? Why do you believe what you believe ? Not "who taught you" but where does it go? why do you believe this instead of that? What's the justification, the goal ?
Throwing your hands in the air and saying "I don't know" is a sign you're busy with something else or afraid of what interrogating your beliefs might lead you to accept, refuse, change. It's normal to be afraid, I am too.
"if they ask for your integrity, give them your loyalty"
Do you trust people near you ? Do you feel held up and safe in their arms ? Do you trust their capacity to make the right decision when you'll be in need of help ? If so you're lucky because you can take comfort in those, you can orient yourself with them in mind. You can tell them what you think and feel with trust and the incompleteness of your map doesn't prevent you from moving forward in the landscape, you'll make more plans as you go along together. This is a special way of being alive.
How are you ?
Sometimes I feel like I'm writing an article for some publication and sometimes this feels like writing to a distant friend who I haven't ranted to in a while, unsure if you can understand the particularities of my monologue. Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you ? Is this embarassing to read for you ? Would you rather be outside ?
Lately I've been spending more time procrastinating outside, biking mostly.
I have plans for doing long trips from cities to cities, all with my bike. A friend asked me if I felt free when biking but I really don't. I just feel busy in a way that's productive to my body and my hopes : making it to the next stop.
It's 16:56 and I'm looking at a 7 years old scar on my arm, it's only taken till now to start to visibly fade. The yellowbone hues spreading out the bounds of the cut's memory and into the green of my veins. This would make a fine metaphor for the passage of time and fading memories but I remember distinctly the origin of the cut, I can't imagine forgetting it. I don't feel like I can project any meaning on this slow disappearance, I don't know if I want to, I don't think I need to, even.
Some days I feel incredibly lucky to be alive and part of this world of ours. I will feel it again.