Like this:

Solidarity is more or less about time. In the occupy wall street protest, there is a lot of potential; perhaps much of the anxiety that people on the Left feel emerges from the horizontal quality of the meetings there. Horizontal means that there are Ron Paul supports there, that there are Main Street Americans, that there are Anarchists (for better or for worse) and there are Leftists… not to mention a bunch of anachronistic hippies and general peace-loving liberals.

Cornell West called it a moment of democratic awakening. Perhaps. But for me, that’s not enough. That’s not even that valid (in and of itself) in conscious-based revolution. I was at the protest on Sunday and there was a sign that said “don’t be afraid to call it REVOLUTION,” and I do believe that I am quite nervous about it. Quite. I’m tremendously anxious about this pre-figurative event because of its amorphous potentiality. That is not to say that solidarity is not one of the more important commitments that a committed Leftist should hold up, but it is worth noting that this is not the event, folks.

Hm, even there I feel that I could be completely wrong. To find any sort of coherent mode of imagining the vicissitudes of political action in time, especially political and social action that is rooted in the experience, is an anxiety-ridden matter for us theoretically minded activists, or non-activists.

At what moment does an event that was previously vacuous (of determinate political content aside from the reactions to police brutality, etc) or at best amorphously anti Wall Street, transform or have the transfigurative powers of a real riot? I mean to ask: should this action that has no determinate force or meaning other than its potential to “awaken” and kindle political relationships and bodies that will act concretely in the future, be taken for a revolution?

What is the level of ethical and political solidarity that the (ultra) left can really engage in? My partner said it one way: “I will talk to students and people I see about it. I will talk to them about what it means and how this event might affect things, or at the very least what questions it makes people think about. Yeah, I’ve gone to the protest, but for me, I don’t think I agree with the protest enough to camp out over night.”

I, however, instead of approaching the event as something that I needed to support with outright political solidarity, felt that politically-ethical solidarity does more to define the potentiality of that movement. That is to say, I would camp out there overnight as a sign of solidarity to the potential of the moment and of the eternal possibility of the event. I am now thinking that “ethics” is not the right way to categorize what I am trying to express. I am trying to express an anxiety about political and ethical experience in the lag of history.

In five years, ten years, or in a narrative version of all this, one might be able to point to this event in the prologue of events. It might be the event that sparked a violent protest in Texas or the Midwest, and that was where we finally had some political boundaries drawn in the sand. It might be said that this was the event, itself, because it really was the first emergence of protest to reach the American main stream. It might not be remembered. It might be called a hippy dance.

In truth, and in expression, there is a fear about time and theoretical expression in time, it’s about wanting to act and show and be in a place where its inhabitants cannot see the surrounding geography. It is a land illuminated by the dust of yesterday’s sun and the anxiety to do the right thing, even if we never see the light of day again.

And yet, we know that we will.

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