Writing in an age of disorder
This project started before COVID. It stalled or died depending on your view as the pandemic roared into the New Year in earnest. I kept one of the initial posts up as a marker in time.
Through the first year of COVID I did scribble a great deal of text and collected numerous cuts from the readings off the web. None of it found a place to be other than in scattered documents in my google drive with little or no order.
Paradoxically perhaps the restarting of this again has everything to do with COVID and a desire to get my thinking back and work through however disorderly some of the themes which have been dominating my thinking.
Much of this revolves around how I see COVID as a prelude/portent to the climate crisis and the politics of sacrifice – how we witnessed the cost of the crisis cascade down and the enormous if not unprecedented accumulation of wealth by the very top in such a short dramatic manner. Coupled with this was the discourse that the solution to the immediate was in the context of each of us acting as individual consumers of self care and protection. The media pieces were always about and remain focused on what you could do to deal with COVID; not what we as a community should do together (community/public health).
The impending climate crisis is invoking a similar ethos: the most common variant the individual carbon footprint. Again the idea that we should approach this crisis first and foremost as isolated atomized consumers in a marketplace rather than as citizens engaged in collective action as part of larger coherent political community capable of affecting the systematic nature of the crisis.
Both individual and collective actions are required, but the latter takes precedent because in its absence individual efforts are meaningless. We must act first as citizens then as consumers.
This politics of crisis fuels already a pre-existing authoritarian far right and a now growing anarchistic far left each feeding off of the same thematic of a need for something radically different. In context of the power of politics exercised by those who are determined to keep their wealth and the growing appetite for a politics of crisis among significant proportion of the population, one has to wonder how long does the the sparse spaces still open to cultural modernism and a democratic ethos survive?
This is no small matter since as Greta Thunberg so correctly posits the essential link between democracy and saving the plant.
Minor Matters
Adorno still anticipated an audience. I do not. This is purely an adventure in working through my thinking; an articulation of a selective collection of the manic thoughts haunting my mind and an attempt to distill the discipline to bring them to paper.
This is therapeutic for me. There is no expectation the assembled mess of text will in any way aid, assist or inspire any collective action or discourse. I doubt anyone will find meaning beyond me.
This exercise is however one part of working through the question posed by Zadie Smith: “What type of militant do I want to be?” Because at this time and in this space I simply don’t know.
July 2024
thelettrist 