Considerations

Is the body radicalizable minus rational processes?

The mind to be gotten-around like a kind of textual bypass surgery? No, duh, but

I want to preserve that binary provisionally, long enough to finger it as integral to an allegation that radicalism does not/ought not (bob and weave) happen except in a kind of transcendentalist input-output tabulation, no bodies need apply, a form of reason with no stake in the flesh (hah). Basically, I see it as used to slur a certain kind of coming-to-activism.

(aside: the bodies-in-space-ness of 70s “consciousness-raising” groups. I realize that I can’t actually imagine what these looked like. Where people sat during these groups. What their gestures were like? How did they gaze at each other? How did they meet or fail to meet each other’s eyes? Why don’t people record this? So-called shifts in consciousness? What else was going on?)

Scene: I’m arguing with Megan about whether useful action can ever come from spontaneity (synonyms: rashness, impulsiveness, naiveté, not-thinking-it-through). Two issues are in play (and rereading them I realize I am conflating them, but I'm too tired to disentangle just now): a) whether spontaneity as such exists, and b) if it exists, whether it can be good.

Exhibits:

radicalism thru punk rock (sensation/community).

radicalism thru drug communities (exploration/introspection)

radicalism b/c your friends are doing it (bodily proximity).

radicalism b/c something hurts you too hard to forget (pain)

Possibly far more people get radicalized these ways than by reading books. Not possibly, surely (and binaries be damned, reading is a sensation and a proximity and an exploration and a community and an everlasting source of new pain). In all these instances there is something prior to reason (though not to the body). Priorness is still too simple to be what I’m after, though. I’m after a proof of interlockedness. And I don’t think that these are just the disposable means toward a higher state of consciousness. I want to acknowledge them as the material means of change…

Megan’s contention was that all political positions should be thought thru before any kind of action is taken. The will should drive the body?

I’m suspicious of words like “spontaneous” or “rash” as suggestive of a kind of sudden mindless physicality that is inadequate to describe most activist action described as such, because of that interlockedness, and because the only real kind of spontaneous action I can imagine is a reaction to pain/pleasure, which it is profane to demean…(Raissa said something earlier this year that amazed me: she described protesting, or spending hours in the rain for a given cause, as an understandable physical reaction to the pain experienced in response to an outrage…) People don’t ask permission to scream when they are hurt. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream” Art is made ABOUT torture never DURING torture. There is always a distance from the pain. So the issue is not whether or not that will happen, but how we rank that expression among other forms of expression…

Another kind of “spontaneity,” already more bound up in language, is just "impulsiveness". This too interests me, because the radical potential of the unconscious interests me…But not everybody's down with the pre-discursive, I know, and I think that impulsiveness might still just be another distraction...

Politically the accusation of “thoughtlessness” basically becomes a cudgel that moderate liberals use against people who think/feel/act/know "too" vociferously, and IMO can be often translated into “it’s in bad taste”. It is hard, sometimes, to escape the suspicion that to “think things thru” is to pass the gauntlet of people savvy enough to insist that things must be thought thru. It assumes the aspect of purely aesthetic consideration, in an aesthetics that does not permit the outré, the tacky, the chaotic, the moment-of-chaos…

Assorted reasons that not everything should be thought thru:

1)   “thinking thru,” with its virtuous ring of commonsense, comes to mean an almost ritually specific procedure that means a certain way of thinking, and frankly, often seems to ensure a certain kind of outcome (nondirect, nonviolent). Certainly, “thinking thru” as a timebound activity, must have the necessary result of sapping fury and energy. Late capitalism, further, happens at the speed of injustice. It seems like any strategy that allows a matching of that speed should be categorically dismissed...

2)   That access to the “correct” information necessary for a “thinking thru”—let’s call it a “penetrating social analysis”--is a field deliberately restricted from the people who are most likely to want to take action. Young people, old people, poor people. That at this point, reacting to the event-in-the-body (the pain caused TO YOU) over and above the event-in-the-world becomes the natural and viable reaction to restricted access to the event-in-the-word. Again, the scream.

That further, uh, who the fuck gets to judge when something has been “thought thru” enough? This is a gigantic problem that doesn’t, for me, exclude the vital importance of critique & forethought. Maybe Megan can shed some light here.

CASE IN POINT

I think sometimes FORM is a thing you must GROW into.  I was delighted with Kocik’s interest in trying new behaviors in order to find their form because it is such a near (if still not quite adequate) description of my own experiences as a vegan. The reasons have remained similar (though not identical) but the meaning has changed extensively over time. I have thought about it as a political message, as a sacrifice, as an economic boycott, a literally utopian gesture, and, most recently, as a form of theatre... 

Each of the previous meanings proved inadequate, which in the end all points to the extreme difficulty of crafting legible responses to insane circumstances. What do you do AFTER you have determined that civil discourse is a rigged game and AFTER you are done screaming? Something in-between. Something partly thoughtful, partly not. Something absurd, but weirdly effective, with any luck.

I mean, it IS an illegible action, for instance, as a boycott or as a sacrifice, because you cannot boycott your way to revolution, and because the sacrifice will never satisfy the dark gods of agribusiness. But as a long-illegible, but nevertheless purposed action, it draws my attention, over and over, to the paradox of the system it lives in…It is obvious to me that you can begin with very little understanding of a system beyond some sort of human reaction, pursue a course of action, and derive benefit from paying close attention to the nature—the deliberate cultivation—of absurdity…

There is a gulf between meaning and practice because that gulf is ENFORCED BY OTHER PEOPLE.

I also don’t think I’m an unusual case. I’ve seen people grow into their politics, following the movement of the body. You cannot perform an “absurd” action (whether that be standing in the rain with a piece of paper and something written on it, or eating only plants, or sitting in redwoods) without growing into that action. I think I’d rather see MORE absurdity, more illegibility, more crazy, more reckless….