Nowtopian

The Heart of Politics

Thanks to another smart post over at Long Sunday called “Learning to Love Again“, I followed the link to a fascinating collective interview (pdf) under the same title with Wendy Brown in Contretemps.

Emotional pain and grief impede creativity and political thinking (even if there are countless brilliant artists and writers who have been driven by their grief to do great work). Paralysis and catatonia are common enough reactions to sadness, loss of love, etc. I’ve been resisting that kind of response pretty well, and this blog is part of my answer to the cavernous futility that sweeps out of the hole left behind. Seeing this title, “Learning to Love Again,” didn’t grab me right away, since I don’t really feel like I ever forgot how to love… au contraire! It’s a deep and richly flowing vein that I actually wish would subside and nap for a while, since it has no outlet for now.

But the title is derived from a question posed to Wendy Brown regarding her work on “left melancholia” and how, broadly speaking, we ‘of the left’ (a label I don’t wear comfortably) have lost our sense of the future AND one of the key historical ideologies (liberalism) towards which we have been opposed. The twin collapses of ‘really existing socialism’ and liberalism (which Wallerstein’s After Liberalism does a great job of linking over a 200-year history) has caused disorientation and even depression among various old and new left thinkers and activists.

Brown has written about this melancholia and describes the missing act of mourning as a key piece of it. In the interview John Dalton accepts that history has deposited us in a new and unknowable place, and states “Nothing is stable. A ‘left melacholia’ can then be thought without negativity, as the natality of a politics to-come.” He goes on to point to the horizon of globalization as a key arena for a left politics to renew itself, not by memorializing the past but by seeking new norms beyond the nation-state. This leads Wendy Brown to emphasize how big the future mourning will be when we have really moved beyond the nation-state as our frame of reference, since people of all political inclinations to a great extent still frame their political thinking and action in terms of a national stage. She qualifies her point by acknowledging that we are still quite bound up in both national and post-national politics, but she’s trying to get at the experience of loss that besets an agenda of human liberation.

“It would be a fabulous left project to develop a productive way of coming to terms with what we are all losing, and with what must be put into play as the affirmative prospects of those losses, or the affirmation that comes from that loss. What is allowed to live when something else dies? What is opened as a possibiliity when something that has claimed us is finally put to rest?”

This language is eerily apt for personal loss too. How does one hold and honor the anguish and grief that accompanies lost love, but let it pass, let it die, and then see what is newly opened? Wish I knew! I know I’m open and looking, but of course, this isn’t just about my personal drama. Because even though I see and feel it quite profoundly in terms of my personal life, I also live it every day in terms of the broader political culture.

Continue reading The Heart of Politics

The Time it Takes

Just finished reading Giovanni Arrighi’s two-part essay in last year’s New Left Reviews called “Hegemony Unravelling”. I like Arrighi’s essay, especially at this weirdly insular moment in U.S. history, where an inarticulate fool like Bush makes a speech that focuses SO much attention and discussion among the chattering classes. (I couldn’t even bring myself to join the demo in downtown SF to “drown out” the Bush regime… more cannon fodder duty, no thanks!) Arrighi’s essays argue for a long view of world capitalism, building on the work of David Harvey, Ferdinand Braudel, and his own collaboration with Beverly Silver (I briefly reviewed her important book, Forces of Labor, in Processed World 2.005).

When the ebb and flow of scandal and appointment and war news grips political imagination, it’s terribly difficult to get an overview, to appreciate our moment in history, to think beyond the personal and political dramas that will soon be utterly forgotten as the trivia they are. In “Hegemony Unravelling” it is argued that there have been distinct periods of capitalist development in which specific constellations of government and business institutions “fixed spatially” regimes of profitability. He identifies various periods starting with the city-states of Venice and Genoa and the latter’s relationship with Portugal and Spain, through Amsterdam and the Dutch control of world markets (all of these are transitional city-states depending more on control of instruments of finance than actual territorial domination), and then the British empire’s rise and displacement of the Dutch financiers. In the 20th century, the U.S. ‘wins’ WWI and WWII and finally takes over the central role in managing and designing world accumulation from England, only to founder on its overreach at the current moment. Arrighi is arguing that we are at the terminal point of the U.S. empire, and shows how the period from the signal crisis of U.S. hegemony (the Vietnam war and the ’60s) was overcome by a belle epoque (the 1980s and 1990s ‘prosperity’) similar to ones enjoyed by previous hegemons between their signal crises and terminal crises.

The Neo-conservative attempt to use the military to extend U.S. power and control for another 50 years, destroying in the process the international mechanisms painstakingly created by FDR, Truman and the rest of the U.S. rulers since WWII, is already clearly an abject failure. While they’re bombing the middle east back to premodern conditions, and subverting any popular movements they can (from Haiti and Venezuela to Bolivia, west Africa, etc.), the Chinese are gaining enormous financial leverage over the U.S. government. This doesn’t predict a specific endpoint, or describe how the U.S. hegemony will actually come completely undone, but it underscores the deeper historical processes we’re living through. These processes are far more important historically than the breathless fear and hysteria that accompanies every twist and turn of Washingtonian politics.

And then there is food.

Continue reading The Time it Takes

Aging Bike Rides, Healing Brain

Rainy Saturday night after a fun morning ride with a couple of dozen old friends. It was the 15th annual San Francisco Bicycle Messenger Association 49-mile ride, traditionally a seriously besotted ride that barely travels a mile or two before stopping for another lengthy drinking-smoking-and-snacking break. Hardly any “real” messengers on it anymore, though a healthy smattering of former ones, and then some of us who have been friends of the scene for years… It was gray and we spent our usual time socializing at McKinley Square on Potrero Hill, at Toxic Beach (where we crossed paths with another ride working on the bay trail), at Pier 7 and Coit Tower.

Got jammed up by a bunch of rent-a-cops trying to pass over the 3rd St. Bridge. Somehow the people staging a motocross in the ballpark had fenced things off so we were funneled into a cul-de-sac from which there was no way out except to open the fence and move on. The rent-a-cops on hand were deeply upset and confused, but after about 3 minutes of tussling and pushing, they relented and let us pass. Very dumb…

Here I am at 7th St. Pier, with my new dunce cap!