Anxious. Starting a “writing retreat” today which is not starting, seemingly. What is in my way? Walking over the threshold into productivity again is hard. Guilt, about how much time I’ve wasted. Not convinced with Bataille and Lafargue and Boscagli that laziness has the potential to be some kind of grand, worthwhile state. In Bataille’s terminology I guess this is because I have refused a kind of mastery. Instead I drag myself around like a whipped cur, feeling the lash of my own deficient (yet sharp) work ethic. Mastery of my own labor, or mastery of its refusal? Or both? Is there any kind of fullness of personhood to be had here, amidst the realization that subjective labor is authenticity extracted and alienated at a deeper level? What Boscagli and the switch within the precarious workers’ assembly of Occupy Oakland (to a “workers against work” frame) seem to be suggesting is a kind of positive valence of the refusal of work. But A.D. had already suggested this to me in 2007 or 08, before the irruption of the current moment and movement.

I’ve never quite accepted the positivity of laziness or waste on a gut level, though it’s useful I guess as a negation of the Calvinist-Franklinian capitalist-Stalinist ethic of thrift and zealous productivity. There has to be another position. My original route into thinking about it was the “wholesome sorrow” of the Desert Fathers. What would a form of praxis be that is not zealous but shot full of negative affect, not necessarily negative affect about society as a whole, critique, rejection – all of which are “easy” – but negative affect about itself? But praxis which still insists on being praxis.

On this point, we should observe that waste, laziness, and refusal could in differing forms be understood as modes of praxis, as refusals of praxis, or as forms of activity which just don’t fall under the rubric of praxis. The first: they are collective, conscious, and deliberate. Even the strike could be understood in this mode, or especially the wildcat, though classically speaking people discuss as “refusal” forms of activity which seem less obviously conscious and collective than the strike, but may turn out to be so upon a closer look: phenomena ranging from the wildcat to sabotage, slowdowns, calling in sick, loafing. The second: understanding these forms as a kind of antipraxis. The third: the extent to which these forms may draw on preconscious, unconscious, refusal of at least the universal collective, though perhaps drawing on “partial” social groups, and especially, spontaneous rather than deliberative.

Both zeal and antipraxis have roles to play in transformation, and I’ve long insisted that the apparent contradiction of spontaneity and deliberation, action and organization, should be understood as part of a “dialectic of spirit and structure” in which neither pole can be expended. But the cohering pole – which is something different than “synthesis” here, though it mediates, it does not sublate and dissolve the particularity of the other poles – may be that of wounded praxis, melancholic praxis, captured momentarily at least in Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Thus I write around the thing, or the opposite of the thing, which is a form of waste, perhaps, or better yet a form of self-trickery which blurs the line between the beginnings of productivity and procrastination. The most optimistic gloss on this would lock horns with Adorno’s claim that in the modern world the impulse to praxis is necessarily reduced to mechanized, Stalinified inhumanity, to say that the new glimpse of a liberatory praxis is precisely that which begins to grow, most hesitantly, behind the back of Praxis, as understood institutionally with great banners unfurl’d.

Towards a Phenomenology of Writers’ Block: the magnum opus I will not write while finishing my dissertation (or just my dissertation’s naughty Other).

Personally, again, and without frills: I could say that I’ve wasted a lot of time in grad school. Or I could say that I’ve lost a lot of time, to two main things: 1) to praxis that “escapes value,” i.e. does not appear on my CV: activism; 2) to my own depression and melancholia. Neither of these are terribly remarkable or uncommon or even interesting, but perhaps this is enough to turn down the volume on a crushing sense of guilt. Now the truth of my life over the next few years has appeared unadorn’d: several years of a level of precarity that involves a greater brinksmanship than grad school, in that it could resolve essentially into two things: a cushy, stable job, or starting over. The term precarity, used this way, or for that matter used in much of the contemporary left, is incredibly stupid, not least because it erases the differences between social groups. There is no such thing as a generalized precariousness or precariat outside of the variegated social groups who experience it with different dynamics and real kinds of risk. Standing on the precipice of one thing and another thing and holding your breath, though: that is phenomenologically real. Against this one has the feeling of wanting to assert a certain mastery, but the valences of mastery here are contradictory: performing within it, escaping it, crushing it. What I choose, here is a praxis which limps along, divided against itself but continuing.

p.s. Rereading my notes from DDB. Calming. "You are trying to manage guilt, not time." Entry sequences.
--> Managementality of managing affects, reactions, the self, time; how are these the same & different philosophically?

p.p.s. Six hours of procrastination and fighting myself, one hour of free-writing, one hour of cleaning my workspace, one hour of planning and reviewing planning notes, and two hours of chapter writing. Were there really that many hours today? I think so. It wasn't pretty, but this retreat is underway, and I'd say I'm over the brink. I feel like the actual writing in my dissertation is the worst writing I've done in years, in the sense that the sentences and paragraphs have no elegance, the argument and conceptual progression feel forced, and my head feels lugubrious and sticky while I write. No matter; I won't let that slow me down now. Looking at DDB notes - she's all about the entry sequences. I think I will try the following tomorrow, now that I feel I'm underway: first two units in the morning without checking email or Facebook.

So, I said I would do some evaluation of my Lent experience this year. Since Lent is now over, it seems like a good time.

General thoughts: Lent is always kind of humbling for me. It's harder to stick with something for 40 days than I expect. I suppose that's part of the point. This year, I had a lot else on my plate. At least three weeks if not four were really given over to the postdoc interview, and I suppose that is a good and unexpected lenten lesson, about pride and attachment. The emotional ride was an interesting experience. I had no attachment to it at all before getting shortlisted; then I had three weeks to a months of intensifying fantasies, then a couple of weeks of disappointment, and finally, I think I've ended up more or less where I started. I suppose some of the things that loudestyeller said in those frenzied moments before I got the news might now sink in: I wouldn't have been worth a jot more as a thinker and scholar if I'd gotten it, and I'm not worth a jot less now that I haven't gotten it. Humility again: realizing that pride (or the excitement at anticipated pride) and humiliation are so utterly interchangeable.

Also interesting: the relationship I developed with laws entirely of my own choosing, into which I had programmed a lot of elasticity. A cycle of feeling "clean" and excited to feel in control and putting certain things aside, fighting myself and wondering why I tried to do so much, grinding away, coming to terms with it all, coming back to it fresh.

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So, I interviewed for a fancypants postdoc on Monday and found out yesterday I didn't get it. Yesterday late afternoon I spent on the phone and on chat with loved ones, which was draining in some way; essentially I felt like I needed to be "on" to show them I was fine. People reminded me that this isn't a reflection on me as a scholar or an intellectual. And, while I appreciated their affirmations, I was like, I know that, yo. Rockhard resilient self-worth in this arena. Wish I had half that much resilience when it comes to romantic rejection.

The things that were hard about it are a bit orthogonal to that, and I really could only admit them to myself when I was alone, after the phonecalls were done, though I guess I admitted one of them in a joke on FB. I had started to let myself imagine what it would be like to have a living wage and a professional identity - to be able to apply to myself that label of "professor" at fancypants school, even if it was a non-tenured situation. I'm so tired of being an underpaid adolescent at age 38, a condition that I feel like feeds into my romantic sense of a lack of self worth. I was kind of looking forward to moving out of state, in the perhaps misguided fantasy that maybe my body would be more acceptable in the Midwest. (Though maybe it's just that in the Bay Area, the culture encourages both women and men to be fatist, whereas elsewhere in the country I might benefit, sadly enough, from the double standard. Or maybe I'm just making up some aspect of this in my brain, and my romantic woes have a more ineffable source.)

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If I thought this mattered, I'd probably make it an open letter. Instead, consider it more of a torn up note, something scrawled on the back of a coaster and left behind at the bar, detritus from a thought experiment.

Communization current: I suppose this is what I'm now calling the political crew which has been at the heart of Occupy Oakland, the Oscar Grant movement, and the "insurrectionists/occupationists" in the 2009-10 Bay Area student movement. I'm searching for a comradely term, myself being outside of this current but trying to relate to it in a respectful way. A friend suggested this term to me, and I like it. It is fairly coextensive with the people for whom OO is "the Oakland Commune." This current is particularly strong in Oakland and Santa Cruz, but it exists elsewhere around the country and the world; it is a growing current within radical, anarchist, and anti-authoritarian circles. It's not particularly accurate to call it "insurrectionist," since many people in this current wouldn't claim to be any such thing; in fact "insurrectionism" seems mainly to exist as a limit concept to sets of politics people actually have. A lot of people in the communization current will write things like: "When insurrectionary anarchists say X, they are not entirely wrong." Part of this distancing may be a security measure, but I think it is also somewhat real; a pro-insurrectionary sensibility is not the same as reducing all politics to the call for insurrection, now. The communizers are not as a group naive; their politics emerge in part out of the worldly, self-aware, ironic milieu of all politics both mainstream and radical in the US, always a bare dialectical half-turn away from "apathetic" or depressed disengagement. It's not correct to call them occupationists anymore, of course, since (thanks in part to them, as they remind us at great length) we're all occupationists now. The term "ultra-left" is self-consciously embraced by some people in this crew, though not by others, and short of quickly raising lots of conversations about what is and isn't infantile, I'm not sure it gets us very far. So I'll stick with "communization current" for now.

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I wasn't sure I was going to post anything about Lent this year. The scriptures for Ash Wednesday almost always (always?) include an admonishment from Matthew 6:

6 “Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven. ² Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. ³ But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴ that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly. ⁵ “And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. ⁶ But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.

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As I look back at last year, I feel like I’m gradually getting this right. One thing I feel I should do more this year is to check in with myself periodically, and to write up an evaluation at the end. For example, I tried much of this last year, but I can’t really remember how it went, for example, with minimizing animal products.

Watchwords for this year, once again: modesty, humility, acceptance, compassion towards others and self.

Fasting

1) Follow the Catholic rules for days of fasting: only one meal, in the evening, on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, which can be supplemented with two smaller meals (or better: juice) if necessary.

2) Try to do at least one or two days of liquids-only fasts, perhaps Good Friday being one of the days.

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Revolutionaries can and should debate black blocs and other formations as they relate to revolutionary praxis, in concrete, historical ways. But the left-liberal critique of the bloc, at least in the US 1999-present, is something else, quite politically noxious. It's chattering-class hand-wringing at its worst, and older, white revolutionaries should check themselves if they find themselves anywhere near that bandwagon. For amortization purposes, the black bloc is not a form of praxis, but an Act of God. Left-liberals would do well to forget about praxis when they think about the black bloc, i.e. something that is under their control or influence. They ought to put it, mentally, in the Act of God category.

There's about as much point in left-liberals criticizing the black bloc as there is in my family who are farmers in Kansas criticizing a tornado. It's the corollary of the old Charles Dudley Warner quip: Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. The point of the quip is: there's nothing you can do about it, so shut up, unless you just want something to talk about, in which case, admit it and get on with taking pleasure in complaining. But then, I'd rather listen to farmers complain about the weather than listen to left-liberals complain about the black bloc any day. Way more texture to it. Motherfuckers know what they are talking about.

A marginal note on black blocs and street fighting in response to the beehive of a conversation stirred up by Chris Hedges and the aftermath of Occupy Oakland's move-in day on January 28. I suspect most of this will be fairly obvious for people who were involved in move-in day, but some of the specifics have been lost in the broader conversation taking place.

There wasn't much of an organized black bloc presence on Jan 28 in Oakland. Four things need to be separated: 1) willingness to scuffle with the police, 2) a stance that once a confrontation with the police gets going, people should hold their ground, attempt to maneuver, if necessarily using small-scale street-fighting techniques: barricades, throwing bottles, and burning trashcans and dumpsters - rather than disengaging, getting arrested in civil disobedience fashion, following orders, etc., 3) actually initiating such a confrontation or escalating it, 4) black blocs, which for contemporary US purposes are really groups of black-clad people committing conscious, targeted property destruction during demonstrations. (I realize that the black bloc tradition in Europe is different, but I think what I've just said roughly characterizes US black blocs including and since Seattle 99.)



A key set of people who play an important leadership role in Occupy Oakland hold the position described in 2): people should hold their ground, maneuver, and engage with the cops, using small-scale street-fighting tactics. This means that on Jan 28 a lot of people found themselves in category 1), willing to scuffle. And lots of people not themselves throwing bottles or using barricades stood their ground with those who were doing those things. Some of the leaders in this scenario are not fully masked up, though others are, much less the followers. Furthermore, none of them are really behaving as a bloc.

(I realize that my terminology of "leadership" here is questionable, given the ideology that Occupy has no leaders. In my experience this ideology is strongest amongst the real, practical leaders. In my view, it would help us to move forward if we could start by being more sociological and less ideological about the practices of leadership in Occupy, without abandoning horizontalist ethical commitments.)

A lot of people claim that 3) is happening: "people are provoking confrontations with the police." Though I was pretty close to the front lines on Jan 28, I wasn't quite willing to be enough in the middle of the melee to see who started what. I think this claim tends to be exaggerated by people who don't want confrontation. That is, it naturalizes the fact that police themselves often come to demonstrations ready for a police riot. Psychologically, pleading with other demonstrators not to provoke the police is a bit like pleading with your brother not to "provoke" an abusive parent. The extent of the provocation is exaggerated out of the fear that you, yourself will be victimized. Abusers and perpetrators of violence tend to deploy violence with a pattern that feels random to the victim or abused. We go to a demonstration not knowing whether police are going to be relatively restrained or hyper-aggressive. The same behaviors that might provoke them at one demonstration meet with no response the next time. This is not to say that the movement shouldn't have a conversation about how we comport ourselves; far from it. But we should be careful not to exaggerate the extent of "provocation." More of the conversation should be about how we respond to policing, especially in the inconsistency of its use of various repressive techniques. That's a real conversation, and I'm not necessarily promoting one approach or another here.

None of this really has anything to do with black blocs in the strict sense. There were over a thousand people on Saturday the 28th who found themselves in category 1), ready to scuffle to some extent. Some of them might've been led to do something different if there was a leadership trying to get them to do something different, or if such a leadership had emerged. But I'd say that of the 2000 or so people who were there for the first part of the march on Jan 28, probably 1800 knew there was a good chance of scuffling; of those, some probably planned to stand aside entirely, while the rest sized up how much risk they were willing to accept, how close they wanted to be to the front lines, what they wanted to do, etc. Note that I'm not necessarily saying this was a good model or a bad model, I'm just describing the scene on Jan. 28. If people want to criticize street-fighting, either engaging in it or initiating it, that's a conversation we can have, but it's actually pretty separate from the black bloc question, which in the US is mainly about targeted property destruction by a small group within demonstrations.

What to do going forward, what political possibilities and what kinds of political imagination are under consideration, and a serious political discussion of a diverse set of tactics arrayed in practice in a movement is a separate question, which I won't undertake here.

Revolutionary time and cyclical, liturgical time are two modes of experiencing time which coexist, layered on top of one another. By "revolutionary time" I do not mean a revolutionary situation in the strict political or social sense; I mean mainly the apparent condensation of time which accompanies a quickening or intensification of events. This sensibility is reflected in the quote from Lenin I've seen all over Facebook since the Occupy movement took off: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." While the present moment is not a revolutionary situation or even a pre-revolutionary one, what we have been experiencing is a revolutionary condensation of time in this sense (if, of course, it is not a manic delusion).

By "liturgical time" I do not mean a specific religious content, but the sense that a quickening or slowing of events is part of a greater cycle; in this sense Lent is the melancholic, depressive moment which precedes Pentecost as the manic moment which precedes what is bluntly called, in a term that could benefit from being translated so frankly into a secular context, "normal time." Liturgical time in this sense is a very common secular approach to time, reflected partially in the pendulum notion of history - even moreso in the notion that "things are finally getting back to normal."

The notion of "linear time" is basically a fallacy, though it's an instructive one to some degree. The notion of history as a steady accretion of progress or as an even series of events is not one I've heard anyone defend in all my time in the academy or in intellectual circles outside it. It may reflect a common sense present to some degree in progressivist notions of US history, manifest in old-school history textbooks. More than this it is a misapplied bugaboo used to dismiss Marxian and Hegelian understandings of history, though of course positivistic, mechanical versions of Marxism did not help much. Still, anyone with a basic understanding of dialectics ought to be puzzled when anyone claims there is anything linear about it. There are genuine debates between a Marxist and, for example, a Foucaultian idea of history. Foucault highlights the emergence of elements which have been suppressed, elided, or rendered subterranean, aspects of history which might be overlooked in basic, schematic (Fichtean, thesis-antithesis-synthesis) dialectics. One could imagine a dialectics which would take up such suppressed elements, but such a dialectics would probably have to abandon the chimera of prediction.
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I'm not sure that I really want to relive this, but I've noticed that the footage of police violence at UC Berkeley circulating on Facebook was mainly of the afternoon. In my experience, UCPD and the Alameda County Sheriffs Dept. were unleashing a lot more force and viciousness at night, though obviously the afternoon stuff was bad enough for the people who got cornered and jabbed with batons.

This video gives a bit of the flavor of what went down at night before the crowd swelled to 1000 - some cops queasily unhappy to be there, others jabbing their batons into protesters' torsos with relish. Start watching around 2:45.

I'm not really capable of outrage about this; to me it is mostly cops doing what they do when someone orders them to use force
to destroy a peaceful encampment. It does make me sick, especially when I think about the sanctimonious statements of the Berkeley administration who claim a legacy of nonviolent protest for themselves and that we were doing it wrong. They continue transforming the legacy of Berkeley in the 60s into a parody and a corpse.

I do appreciate the outrage and solidarity of friends. For that reason, even though this is a couple of days old, I hope people will share this footage, which is really nothing more than the carrying out of official UC policy: "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

I spent some time this weekend looking at old meeting minutes from the first period in my life when I was participating in long, painful meetings - my undergrad days at Deep Springs. Since then, as a student activist, union organizer, union activist, and organized socialist, I've become something of a meeting junky.

Almost all of the Deep Springers who spent a while looking through the old student body meeting minutes - the archives were open for special viewing at our reunion - commented that we were too hard on each other, often about stupid shit. Of course the minutes also reflected the fact that we were 18-20 year-olds taking responsibility for a community in a way that almost never happens in US society. Perhaps there's no way around the fact that learning how to do that is messy.

I felt that this being-too-hard-on-others was particularly true of myself. Of course, at the time, I had a bit of a puritanical-stalinist streak. I leave both of those words lower case advisedly. I identified at the time as a Quaker (decidedly not Puritan) and as a democratic socialist (decidedly not Stalinist). But I had that slight authoritarian spark directed at promoting a cohesive, "progressive" total culture that E.P. Thompson in his discussion of Weber identifies as the connecting thread between secularized Puritanism, Ben Franklin's capitalist ethic, "national" developmentalist capitalisms, and Stalinism.

Looking back on it now, it makes me decidedly queasy. I haven't necessarily swung all the way over to what you would call anti-authoritarianism. When you get into messy, real organizing questions, issues of authority (along with structure, charisma, and group dynamics) seem to me more in need of being examined from practice "up" rather than from principle "down." I suppose one could make the argument that questioning the authority of abstract principles in favor of those drawn from practice ought to be an anti-authoritarian method. But this defeats itself as itself an abstract principle, and besides, who am I to propose anything?

Is "being less hard on people" a political principle? It doesn't feel like one. It feels like a pragmatic realization expelled with a sigh, won with a rising count of gray hairs and memories of minor battles that were half worth it. Nevertheless, I will own it.

Of course, now, I'm imagining the counter-argument, which I hear now and then from leftists who seem pretty sure they are more principled than I: figuring out how to fight about principles well, now, even if the battles only half matter, trains us how to fight better in the future battles that do matter. Maybe. I wish I'd been less of a puritan-stalinist at 18, but I wouldn't take back the experience of being in those meetings. But shouldn't those fights also train us when not to fight, when to just let some shit go? Of course, I'm quite possibly going into academia where, as a former professor remarked, the ratio of dramatic sparks to meaningful stakes couldn't be higher.

The strange feeling of "watching" an earthquake on Facebook: one minute my feed is about this and that, Libya and pop culture; the next, everything is about this. 5.8, everybody's ok, many are scared, many are excited, one fellow has huge cracks in his building. I've watched protests this way on Twitter. I'm reminded of the monitors in the Matrix, except instead of green digits it's thumbnails and avatars. All chatter, all unreal. Even protests a few blocks away that friends are attending feel unreal, viewed this way, but compelling in a train-wrecky sort of way. (Is there a psychological term for this? It seems like a distant cousin of schadenfreude.)

I suppose this is a fairly banal observation; why is it compelling? Maybe because there are other times (like, being in the middle of a protest, tweeting and updating Facebook), when it feels completely different; it feels important to get the word out to the world, our side of the story. Maybe it is because I don't understand the relationship between viewing and doing in social networking. Mostly social networking about news and politics seems to me useful for speed and aggregation of differing perspectives, but prurient, safely alienated behind screens which bifurcate viewers and doers. Yet occasionally it breaks out into: everybody out to this place at this time to fight this thing. The difference seems to be more objective than subjective: 99% of Facebook events with the theme, everybody out to this place at this time to fight this thing produce nobody except the people who have spoken to an organizer in person. But 1% of the time, there's contagion.

Maybe this is nothing historically novel, just speedier. (18th century version: you publish hundreds of pamphlets; 99 are only good for kindling but the hundredth catches fire.) An old conversation: does the network form of media, the digitization of communication a) inaugurate a new phase of social relations, b) exacerbate existing tendencies, c) constitute a mere historical epiphenomenon? I suppose my answer usually tends to be around the area of b) though deciding what marks "a new phase" makes much more sense with hindsight than in the present. And of course social relations can respond out of sync with structural changes. The question may be whether these changes in communications are structural, and to what extent. I.e. is the network form a new infrastructure or just a new form of media?

At long last reading E.P. Thompson's "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." This may be a side note, but I find the “Saint Monday” tradition, also known as “Fuddling Day,” quite fascinating. First, this seems to have been a privilege held by the more privileged and skilled layers of the working class for as long as possible. Secondly, “fuddle” is an interesting word, implying both drinking alcohol and confusion. Although the OED does not record it, I suspect that another sense of the word is “wasting” in the specific sense of “wasting time;” reminded here of a possible sense to some of Bataille’s privileging of waste that gets away from the aristocratic, Nietzschean aspect of Bataille. At least this use seems to me to have survived in contemporary Midwestern US usage, closely allied with “puttering,” though puttering doesn’t have the connection with drinking. (Could actually be etymologically related: Thompson records that English potters were particularly observant of Saint Monday, and puttering is etymologically related to “potter.”) Third, the document that records this particular term has the exact gendered labor sense of Maria Mies’s critique of the Marxist notion of expanded leisure time. Give working men more leisure time without changing the structures of labor, both Bowley and Mies seem to say, and you’ll have men fuddling about – demanding labor of women, breaking things, being rude and possibly dangerous, and wasting money.



I have to admit that I’m not sure I ever completely understood Mies’s alternative. Her point I suppose is to say that men with lots of leisure time, which seems like the utopia of Marxism at some points, is not necessarily a utopia for women, but is in fact something worse than the status quo. So a socialist-feminist idea of utopia shouldn’t just be men who are able to hunt in the morning, farm in the afternoon, drink to excess in the evening, and not get up until noon the next day, at least in the way that this 19^th century skilled working-men’s utopia relied upon invisible women’s labor. Anyway the Bowley piece helps me see the point of Mies’s critique in a way I never quite could before.

Hard to escape the experiential side of it: I seem to need a fair amount of time for fuddling and puttering, and to guard this need jealously, yet my own fuddling and puttering are also a problem, not only for my disciplinary-protestant-productivist sense that I should be working, but also maybe for my feminist-solidarity sense. Of course in my specific situation I don't have a wife who is being driven crazy by my fuddling, and most of the women I know are more likely to be co-fuddlers than providing invisibilized labor to make fuddling possible. But then, it's worth thinking about what might still be invisible or less than apparent.

Emphasizing here the critical side, but part of what is interesting to me about this is what seems to be the necessity of something like fuddling, the creative, restorative aspect of "downtime" that doesn't fit neatly into our concept of "weekend" or our concept of "workweek." Our concept of "weekend" too often turns "recreation" into a kind of work itself, a set of alternative tasks involving consumption / production of "fun." Recreation in the older sense of recovery, downtime, a little of this a little of that, is very hard to validate in our contemporary culture.

Anyway, lots of interesting stuff in Thompson beyond this, thinking about "natural" work rhythms, how this varies in different eras and from agricultural to craft to industrial to subjective work. Has the reintroduction of piecework meant that people are able to take up these "natural" rhythms anew, or is there an industrial logic that continues to be spread around the world, even if we are in some sense in the twilight of the era of the timeclock? I suspect something closer to the latter. Though the universality of the central, large factory with a timeclock may not be what it was, the micro-regulation of time within work tasks seems to be extended within an industrial logic.

On Saturday, I presented at a conference - the closest thing yet I've done to a "real" conference presentation, though I was presenting a thought piece rather than a carefully referenced paper to a very supportive, friendly, and homey audience. In the past, I've presented at an informal Friday Forum on campus and as part of an activist panel attached to a conference on "Risk - Crisis - Literature" in Vancouver last year. I'm kind of enjoying the fact that my two conference presentations have been at conferences revolving around the notion of crisis; next time, perhaps, I should cover myself with ashes.

Of course, this fall I'm going to the American Studies Association conference, and I'm trying to hit the conference circuit pretty hard this year in a belated but real attempt to take seriously my own professionalization.

Why did I wait so long to hit the conference circuit? Clearly, in part I have been navigating through some resistance; of that, there's little I should say here. In another sense, I think I've followed what has been compelling. I've presented myself intellectually, quite a bit over the past few years, but mostly in contexts outside the university (political organization) or at the university but not of it (my union, union reform group, anti-cuts / student movement, etc.). I've shared my academic work only in more intimate contexts (seminars, mainly). So in a sense this paper is both an intro and a coda to a certain perverse innocence, as I stand at the outside edge of my own inside-outside relationship with academia needing to take myself deeper within it. It was strange to experience myself presenting as both very senior amongst the grad students and also as a novice. Then, even with my undergrad thesis I was a novice trying my hand at metaphilosophy; perhaps it makes sense, then, that I've felt intellectually at home in HistCon because its relationship to the disciplines is both as a meta-discipline (as some people claimed at the conference) and as suspicious of the disciplines, rightly or wrongly. Also, I think this paper and my dissertation are methodologically in line with one another in that they both understand that the personal is philosophical, and the philosophical is personal, while using political economy as a defense mechanism to hold the personal in abeyance.

In any case, here's the paper. I wrote it with my spoken cadence of my speech in mind, rather than how I usually write, though I let myself ad lib when it came to the need to pepper the talk with the occasional "aw, shucks" and "golly gee."
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Does anybody have suggestions for good music for Lent? What would make good Lenten music? I suppose it could treat themes of guilt, debt, sin, and loss in a spiritual, seeking manner. Or, it could explicitly deal with questions of faith, conversion, and seeking. Or, it might have a spare, abstinent quality. Or, it might not eat meat on Fridays.

I should say that I'm a rather eclectic, subaltern Christian. My idea of "good Lenten music" includes some stuff that is or might strike some people as blasphemous. (Take Diamanda Galás. In some of her music, I think she's consciously going for blasphemy. I find her music to have a seeking quality, such that a meaningful Christian faith really in the world today would have to see such blasphemy as in dialectical relation with itself. Some of her music strikes me as having a Lenten quality, though of course there is no promise of return to the feast of faith nor the regularity and comfort of the liturgical calendar.)

Playlist so far:

some Gregorian chant
Diamanda Galás
Sinéad O'Connor (a few albums)
Gillian Welch - Revival
Maybe some Johnny Cash, although for some reason his best religious music seems to me not quite Lenten. Maybe because of his typically Protestant preoccupation with the Word? Or maybe because he's too concerned with judgment? Or maybe because his theology is just too eclectic and typically American, occasionally too upbeat, while Lent is largely out of step with Americanism?

So ... suggestions? I'm open to more classical music, possibly some seriously Satanic metal if it has a seeking quality rather than a playful one. I realize I'd like to know gospel much better than I do, and I'm sure there's some gospel that would fit well with Lent.

I've tried to stay away from diary-like LJ entries - of late, when I have something personal to blog about, it's friends-only and involves some wrangling.*  Today, however, I received some very nice news, both exciting and validating: I have (preliminarily, whatever that means) won the Mellon/ACLS fellowship for next year. I can't bring myself to turn this into a Facebook status update, so I thought I'd write a little diary entry over here instead - sharing with the random assortment of friends who read this and a few people I don't know who probably think they are reading a political blog.

I'm pretty excited, partly for practical reasons (I won't have to TA next year, which means I should have enough time to finish my dissertation, apply for jobs and/or postdocs in the fall, attend some conferences, and maybe even submit some articles for publication) but even moreso, for the moment, because I appreciate the validation.

Now this comes with a large proviso and more than a little embarrassment. I'm very in touch with the fact that academia isn't a meritocracy. You get ahead in academia because of some combination of the following - 1) your project is hip, or 2) you know somebody, or 3) random chance and persistence sometimes pay off, or 4) the fact that you have amassed a slew of impressive things on your resume allows you to continue amassing them unless you really fuck up. The funny thing about my self-talk is that when I'm on a negative jag, I can convince myself that 1) my project isn't academically communicable at all (even though lay people and academics alike seem to find the subject-matter at least somewhat interesting), 2) I'm horrible at networking, 3) I have too many aversions to have anything approaching a good work ethic. I suppose part of me thinks I am a master of 4) - somehow I'm still coasting along on the "merits" of honors I earned in high school which I haven't really deserved since. I'm going to try not to focus on that idea.

Maybe it's just nice to be reminded of an alternate narrative to that of dejection / I'm too old / I've let too many opportunities go by. In this alternate narrative, I've been pretty successful when I've applied myself and even sometimes when I haven't, and I may have taken a long time to get where I am, but I'm still on track to do a lot of things I want to do in life.

( Institutional-pedagogical excursion )

Well, that excursion took me far afield from the fellowship. Um, I'm happy! This was supposed to be a diary entry, dammit. You can take a theorist out of the woods, but that won't stop him from climbing a tree. Though to some extent this is what I mean when I say that it would be nice to cultivate a writing practice that's neither about introspection nor analysis, though of course I'm good at those things and like doing them. It would be nice to be a bit more spacious in writing, at times.

I've had a couple of sessions with a dissertation consultant and am feeling reasonably content in my personal life. The blockages to progress are still real, but they are being winnowed down to their essence, and I think I can work through them. Certainly now I have what should be more than enough time: truly a gift.




* I've actually been thinking I might want to switch up that model, since it seems like there's personal wrangling, on the one hand, and political wrangling, on the other. While I'm a very political person, I didn't create this space primarily to be a political blog. I've had a couple of different thoughts - one is that I should start a new blog, wordpress maybe, that's more of a politics / theory / philosophy blog - less formal than publishable stuff, but less personal than most of what I write here. Another is that I'd like to expand my "range of motion" on this LJ, to experiment with other topics, styles, and modes of writing than those that have felt the most urgent and available over the past few years.