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.

But this is not time. It is a myth of time that we are living in, that even the most revolutionary minds have plunged into: we work to shorten the day, compensate the week, build vacation into the year. In the case of education the mutation of the myth of time we in the States have dragged our shocked and feudal chins against the cracking sidewalks in light of broken promises. Time will not deliver us from the chains of apprenticeship, nor have the hours enlightened us. We found ourselves stuck in the rotting corpses of tradition, and are still fighting to get out alive, to build new bodies, to rescue the myth of time.

What might time be in other hands?

To suggest that time in more intelligent hands is a blazing flag of “history” doesn’t do much for us. We need to name an active struggle. Right now, we must shatter notions of annual progress, of cycles that define us, of apprenticeship that declares titles and of names that demand a decade to contextualize them since they cannot speak for themselves.

The rogue mountainous years must be set in flames and it will be those hazy eyed torch-carriers of tradition and of eventuality that legend will pin to the incinerating stakes.

My car broke down today. If it wasn’t already completely obvious, it is a hard world for us sufferers of cultural diaspora. Our culture? The university, the hibernation and the hope for another world that will be a product of the change that “has to happen. There’s just no way it won’t change.”

The simple fact is that it will not change. There has been no predestination and there is no use thinking in terms of destiny or in humanity. Stop having faith in humanity. Humanity as it stands is not standing at all. Humanity is not in chains– humanity is shackled and tripping up the street in a stupor of selfishness. In a torpor of imagined luxury flourishing in exchange for wilted bodies and dead souls. We drive ourselves into the pavement for the dream that there is something better. Did you really think you were going to get a better job because you went to college?

Favorite quote of the week comes from my coworker: “It probably helps that most of the eccentric geniuses in this town get to spend all day in the library everyday.”

Didn’t you just go because that was the new cultural norm? And for those students who are still in, do you really know why you’re there? Are you really working hard to get that education? or are you inflating your GPA with a lot of bullshit classes? In the hopeful dream for tomorrow, your images of success are images of indolence. Your achievements are engraved in motionless paper folders, a little heavy weight pulp and gilt letters. All that movement for a silent dream. Now things are getting harder. Things are getting harder and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t get harder still.

Stop hoping and start getting angry. Yeah the dream might have been a foolish thing to put stock into. But dreams in general are the most powerful tool that we have against the oppressive grasp that reality has over every withered hour we have had to sacrifice whose injustice depends on our mutilated hearts and sunken eyelids.

Hope is paralyzed optimism. In hope, neither you nor your circumstances change. You just cling to your chair a little bit harder, sweat it out and brace a little bit sooner than you had wanted. But in order to be optimistic, we have to engage reality. We engage the real lives that we should be leading and bring that potential to bear with the nose-bleeding grind and infuriating poverty of mind, mouth, and imagination.  To be optimistic you must fight.

To fight you must give up all hope in what you call humanity and call it the morass of class, race, and sex divisions that makes up Human Kind. Humanity is theory… a compelling and necessary theory of the future.

And just like my professor says, theory is a battlefield.

See, for someone who doesn’t privilege a position political groups above the political as a universal, I would argue that it’s harder to buffer the stress and wear on the individual who is invested in politics. I spent most of my time in college, when I was doing meaningful writing, talking about the flaws of the institution in general and particular. I even wrote a series of blog entries talking about how I should drop out of college in order to pursue genuine education outside. That, to me, was the first step in recognizing my aversion to institutions. But, this past semester has shown me that many of the notions that I (and I would guess most of us) have about intelligence, political legitimacy, and social capability has a hell of a lot to hand to our institutional shaping. This is not a complete shaping, but it affects us more than we know, and when I consider political engagement, I wonder how the university can be overcome.

For example. What am I going to do now with all of my high falutin politics? That’s a common enough question (well not so common). But consider the groups who are active on campus–sure, it might not be about the individuals who run the organization, but there is a fundamental aging out process that happens in college, ie we all graduate, and there’s practically no social outlet for people to talk about the state of their labor conditions once they leave university. It all appears as a dream. There are certain interest groups, for sure, and reading groups, etc. But what do the really smart ones do? What do the really comitted ones do? Don’t they usually go to graduate school?

And so, I’m just sitting here, and I want to get rid of all those ideas and all that shit. If I’m going to follow any of what I said in college, from within the gentle culture cloister, I’ve got to do it in the world place, too. I’ve got to face that 21st century diaspora.

It all boils down to tactics and ethics; yes, I should thank Lukacs for the title. (But if one were to thank Lukacs for everything he ever did then this entry would never happen.) As I sat on the porch with the RUSA folks and later with some of the sitters in from the Rutgers occupation, I realized that there is a fundamentally crucial relationship between the tactics of groups/associations and autonomous critical inquiry. But all the gobbley gook aside for a minute… I’ll just spell it out.

One question that someone asked me during the evening was, why do I pay so much attention to the individual? 

And I think that this question led me to think about political friends and critical engagement in ways that I hadn’t before. What I said at first was that I was convinced that individual critical engagement is the starting point of political empowerment. There is almost nothing to say about this it’s so widely accepted. But there’s another element that I wan’t willing to consider until Matt Cordeiro voiced his concern earlier in the evening in a passing remark about the RUSA elections, which was “we need to get students to care.”

Yeah, that’s the question. The question is how to break the apathy; at least, apathy is the word that RUSA treasurer Scott Seigel used on air on 90.3 the Core, the Rutgers University alternative radio station. The “A” word came up when it was stated that only about one percent of the Rutgers undergraduate population came out to vote. One of the inniatives that RUSA leadership has for the 2011-12 year is to make students feel like RUSA is a body that is out to protect and further student interests.

But that word is a trigger word for me, and it’s one that I’m not willing to accept. I don’t think that students are politically apathetic. I think that there are two major reasons why we shouldn’t frame students as being such, as well as ways that we can overcome that gap toward social empowerment.

The first reason why I think apathy is the wrong word is because popular political discourse is obviously and purposefully hackneyed to the average person. From within the confines of acceptable social action, there are three major outlets: Dem, Rep, or community service. And while the Rutgers student body may not have come out for the elections, one certainly couldn’t say that they don’t show their faces for charity events, fundraising, volunteering, activities, and community service work. Thus, for those people who are already involved in groups and events, it seems that the tactical duty of student government is precisely to show the dominant relationships that determine their actions and social lives in order to get those existing group members to work in a coalition with those students in RUSA who wish to transform RU student government into a vehicle for representation and advocacy.

Secondly, there’s the fact that apathy is the misused name for what is really social alienation. There are thousands of people whose systemic senses have been blunted by inverted individualism. How do we get people to care? or realize that they have always cared? For this, there is an ethical commitment to writing.

The project of writing might seem more like a meta-activity than something in and of itself. But I would make the case that critical writing (just like the kind we humanities… “useless” humanities majors) learned in college, is the very thing that can empower the isolated kid in the back of the Starkeys.

Critical engagement with the self means critical engagement with the world around the self. To do this, one has to read the billboards, watch the television, watch students on the bus, notice the traffic and pedestrian patterns (maybe even the cop-coverage) all around, all the time, and in a new way. Instead of seeing, the critical engagement means looking at the world with eyes that shatter what they thought they saw, and remember what is really happening before them. Critical “did you ever notice” begins with the word and ends with social action. And it’s my vaguely written-up hypothesis that if we can get the most isolated segment of university society to engage themselves and think about the ways in which we live our lives, then we can start writing about it. Once we start writing about it, we start linking up. We start having conversations.

Writing a few lines everyday about the “usefulness” and the “implications” of our college educations is a good place to start. We always want to talk about who we are and what we do in this lovely land of Identity Politick. And in this negative criticism we can start to see the ways in which we are obliged to destroy the illusions that pollute us and build movements, coalitions, and bodies, anew. So, what I’m getting at is that the alienated individual must be empowered and exercise the political autonomy in order to pinpoint just where what we need to knock over and build again… or maybe just leave a pile of rubble. Either way, to talk over the pile of rubble, just as to build a house, you need a tactical vision for political bodies in bureaucratic paradigms… something that I’ll be posting shortly.

“Tactics doesn’t exclude Ethics!”

Tonight, addresseeunknown will meet with the Rutgers occupiers as well as the president of RUSA, so keep an eye out for that interview and note.

There is one characteristic of the Rutgers occupation and battle with administration, and that is the success of the protesters in spite of the administration’s condescending attitude toward the movement and its demands. In all of its public statements, the administration has highlighted (by no mean chance) that the students occupying the building left of their own accord and that no one was hurt, as well as the fact that none of the demands were met on the occupiers terms. We all know, however, that any activity that favors students is the result of tireless activism and outreach. The task now is not only to continue applying pressure to the administration, but also to strengthen the student-worker-professor fabric so that we can become a bona fide model of horizontal resistance against the administration.

It was obvious that police were still surrounding Old Queens for a “back-lash”. If we’re going to back lash it can’t be in the same way. Get organized. Get real. But in the end, remember that you don’t have to get pissed because you’ve already been pissed on.

Tomorrow President McCormick is set to address each of the six demands with a yes or no answer and explanation to all students, and the group won a meeting with Furmanski and McCormick on Monday with the exclusive agenda of student representation on the Board of Governors.

The cops, as expected, look a little grouchy. boohoo.

The important thing that the group reiterated after cheering what could be a great success, is that what McCormick and the administration gives us is not going to be good enough, and that the real discipline kicks in when we as Rutgers students have to fight for what’s ours and correct the flawed half-concessions that are destined to come our way.

On a critical note, I think it’s integral not to slip into a premature stance of power or victory. After all, the way that the administration has already characterized the sit-in participants has been a caricaturisation of these students’ commitment and discipline (see earlier post when RU website has a photo of the students laughing and eating sandwiches that were only brought 20 hours after they had denied non-RU food service food). This event also runs the risk of a falsely inflated sense of activism, where students will not be prepared for the necessity and severity of escalated tensions between students and administration who wish to brush their discontents under the rug with a bunch of make-happy positions in the university bureaucracy.

I have faith in us; but we must stay serious, committed, realistic, and never lose sight of the fact of our longterm goal for the horizontal public university space. And we must do all of this with a renewed sense of purpose, of discipline, and of intellectual nuance that will let us overcome the faults and errors of the past. This starts with the imagination that radically abandons the institution and keeps the education.

BROWER COMMONS 1PM TOMORROW