1-- to the world which sits
july 30, 2021. a confession on another godless night.
i began writing this piece on the night of 31st july. it has been a week since. to preserve the process of my test of faith, in religious fashion, i haven’t attempted any edits to chapters once closed nor tampered with its linear structure. apologies for any strenuous jumps. i hope to tie it all together by the end.
back in the 1960s, guy debord made a harrowing wager.
‘suicide or revolution’
— he proclaimed.
countless spirits have tried their hand and lost everything at such a gamble, both before and after his time. yet, reading on debord’s and recently mark fisher’s deaths have caused me the worst agony.
the truth is you already set off the slow process of decay at that very moment you decide the revolution is worth dying for— or more accurately, that you’d rather die than cease fighting for it. in a moment you shed your identity as a political subject and assume your new role as the vanguard. It may be said it’s a lacanian ‘symbolic death’ — a maoist transformation of a ‘comrade-as-an-object’ or a huey newton style ‘revolutionary suicide’ depending on who you ask.
yet, debord and the like didn’t just die a shallow worldly death. they slit their souls to the point where no resurrection is likely. what haunted me the most though, was that they never showed doubt about what they prophecised. for debord knew very well, that the spectacle of his imaginations, in theory, could not vex us forever. he, like lukacs, held that as more and more of our existence becomes reified, the wider the internal contradictions for us to notice.
and fisher did end capitalist realism by writing :
the long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as
an enormous opportunity. the very oppressive pervasiveness of
capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative
political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately
great effect. the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain
of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under
capitalist realism. from a situation in which nothing can happen,
suddenly anything is possible again.
or ilyenkov, who phantasmagorically wrote in cosmology of the spirit (an early manuscript) that communism is a necessity not just for humanity but for the total self-destruction and rebirth of the universe itself.1
it upsets me because they all held creative social activity as consecrated, in a way — yet they couldn’t bear to wait. to be innocent, what upsets me more is the fear that they had discovered a darker, sinister truth which led to it all. an understanding which perhaps is now unknown to me, and could be forever.
on why the world is sitting down
will God forgive us for what we're doing to his creation?
by conjuring debord, fisher and ilyenkov together, could i map a way out of my own neurotic/postmodern condition? the astrometry of subjectivist (western) marxism can only be observed by someone standing very still. and while traversing through the valleys of objectivist leninism, it’s hard not to listen to the ghastly wails and warnings. there’s hesitation, always, on every other step on that sunken soil. freirean cartography on the other hand teaches you how to walk through these tough terrains, yet it doesn’t tell you why. what lies in that distant future that will redeem us from the utter despair of our lives?
i’m convinced, it is possible to philosophize the true nature of the thinking body. and also our relationship to social activity including the causes of the range of alienation and anxieties (not in the pathological sense) we face. but i’m not sure whether that knowledge alone has inspired me, atleast, to mourn the present. you, comrade, can tell me all the social causes of my array of neuroses but that is not going to just take it away. it might be why our rationalisations about why we do what we do creates such a dissonance during a bad breakdown. it is hard to tell oneself to go through all of life for a vision of a better human condition which even if you concluded the necessity of communism; there is no certainty of achieving in our lifetimes. even the biblical story of job would’ve been incomplete if God didn’t appear to him in the end. the thought-experiment i like to carry out is whether the hope of communism would’ve pushed me away from the noose, if i already didn’t know love? is it reason enough to tell to a friend in an abusive household? is there any real difference between me and a missionary serving a promise of heaven.
the three ghosts knew of these philosophical truths. of the necessity of communism, of social praxis as the way to liberation and surely they were smart enough to come up with interesting solutions that would atleast make their sufferings diminish. but what was that worth to them? perhaps it is not the pessimist with dystopian dreams who wastes oneself. it is enough for those dreams to be presbyopian. eyes aged until they were too weak to look closely on what is in front of them. the anarchists say that, the future is a god obeyed at the expense of one’s immediate desires. it does reveal quite a lot about their scorn of speculative philosophy. yet, this sober focus on activity aimed to dissolve anxieties about the distant virtual future, paradoxically, creates the exact opposite effect. it establishes the empirical present as the really real. the only real. the task upon the revolutionary thus (wrongly) becomes the creation of a new reality. a reality which is radically different from the one we exist in. this creates a sort of chasm in the non-reality of expectations and the one of sensory perception. this naive realism is blinding — hidden is still the reality of the virtual.
despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses one's certitude rather than admit God is more creative than we are.
to make the invisible, visible
i began typing with just the vague idea that ilyenkov’s conception of the ideal (as an embodiment of social-human activity) could be a useful pedagogical tool in expressing the (autonomy of images in the) society of the spectacle as well as (the ideology of) capitalist realism as a scientific problematic. perhaps that was not the right usage, but my intention is precisely to logically arrive at concrete programs which can be tested and hypothesised. postmodern theory on the other hand mystifies this domain. the spectacular is shown as a totalising imperative2 of late-capitalism. what ends up happening is the responsibility of negating the spectacle is delegated to a revolution in the distant future. i too have reluctantly advised psychiatric drugs to obviously social pathologies. we live in a society where the spectacle itself is spectacularised.
what is invisible in our world? a fool who denounces ghosts and becomes the vassal of reason is nothing but a ghost themself. isn’t bruce willis from sixth sense the ultimate potrayal of the postmodern condition? to most cynics it would seem fairly obvious, that they would in all likeliness— realise if they were to become a ghost one fine day. for they derive their agency from their skepticism and ironic distance. yet, as fisher pointed out:
how could it ever be possible
for us to believe successive or even co-extensive
stories that so obviously contradict one another? yet we know
from kant, nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much as
dreaming, experience, depends upon just
such screening narratives. if the Real is unbearable,
any reality we construct must be
a tissue of inconsistencies.
it is frightening to me as well, that my interiority “owes its existence to a fictionalised consensus.” i cannot stop pondering what those activities are, which i can attribute onto my will? and where am i a puppet to the autonomous will of the spectacle? the first step to exorcise any foreign spirit is to acknowledge its existence.
evald ilyenkov was subjected to a witchhunt. and like all true witches, he sang of incantations and sacrificial rites. ilyenkov’s hegelianism is materialist to its very core. only the most dialectical necromancer could explain ‘the ideal form and its relationship to socio-human activity’ as ,
the ideal form is the form of a thing,
but outside this thing, namely in man,
as a form of his dynamic life-activity,
as goals and needs.
or conversely, it is a form of the thing he creates, which represents,
reflects another thing, including that which exists independently of man and
humanity.
ideality as such exists only in the constant transformation
of these two forms of its ‘external incarnation’
and does not coincide with either of them taken seperately.
to ilyenkov, ideality (read, consciousness) is not a chemical process in flesh and brain — neither is it merely an illusion of language. to him, the ideal is very specifically a form of our activity. this is best interpreted in the context of the commodity. the fetishistic power of the commodity is merely social-human acitivity embodied in its ideal form. nevertheless, de-fetishizing the commodity does not mean persuading oneself that the fetish is an illusion of the mind. nor does it mean totalising it as the commodity’s sole existence — devoid of any social activity. the dialectical thing to do is abstraction, in hegel’s words, the ‘absolute power of man’.
by way of seperating a commodity’s ideality from its physical form, but also externalising it, the subject cleanses itself of any poltergeists. that which has been possessing my psyche and the world outside myself alike; liberates itself or as hegel would put it, sublates its externality. 3
it is only by freeing one’s ghosts that, substance becomes subject of its own activity. this point is crucial for understanding our role in history. zizek’s commentary on hegel has been crucial for me to develop this train of thought which set off from ilyenkov. initial exposure to popular marxist discourse led me to believe that true subjectivity lied in self-expression and creative/political activity. reclaiming subjectivity from my oppressors meant understanding all of nature in its socio-historical context and declaring my dissent. yet this turned out to be a clouded misunderstanding of the dialectic between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. it seems to me that both ilyenkov and zizek agree upon the fact that the most radical subjectivity is also the most passive.
dialectical logic
is therefore not only a universal scheme
of subjective activity creatively transforming nature,
but is also at the same time
a universal scheme of the changing of
any natural or socio-historical material
in which this activity is fulfilled
and with the objective requirements of which it is always connected.
that, in our opinion,
is what the real gist of lenin’s thesis on the identity of
dialectics, logic
and the theory of knowledge of the modern, scientific,
ie materialist, world outlook consists in.
this independence of the sequence of Logic from our will and consciousness is what zizek also described in the preface of his sublime object,
for hegel, on the contrary,
at the level of Absolute Knowledge,
the cognizing subject is thoroughly passivized:
he no longer intervenes in the object,
but merely registers the immanent movement
of the object’s self-differentiation/self-determination.
the subjects is thus, at its most radical,
not the agent of the process:
the agent is the System (of knowledge) itself,
which ‘automatically’ deploys itself
without any need for external pushes or impetus.
yet the radical subjectivity at the heart of our existence is elusive, because it is a form of suicide. accomodating the split inside one’s soul requires great defiance. a defiance against the sin of assuming oneself as a self-sufficient whole. rather, the easier option is to fetishize the fracture within — delegate it to disparate objects. fetishism is a reluctance to accept a truth chasing your every breath. i am myself, i say, but unaware of the trembling of my voice. i am afraid of vanishing, or to realise that i was never really there. and for that cause, i consume everything in my vicinity like miyazaki’s no-face. i assume the fracture —the contradictions — to exist outside myself. internalising communism as an altered state of the outside world — i can continue being myself. tragically, i fail to see that i am also a part of that very fracture. recently i came across an intepretation of hegel’s Absolute as a description of forgiveness and acceptance.
courage, not reason, is the solution to despair. wisdom is holding two contradicting truths in our mind, simultaneously.
the god-whisperer
a few months ago, a study published in the journal nature showed how people systematically overlook subtractive solutions. majority of those who participated in the experiment came up with complicated additive solutions while ignoring obvious subtractive ones — which later they all agreed were intuitive after being shown. while im far from a behavioural scientist or a sociologist, i think knowledege of this apparent bias could be instrumental in the development of a new proletarian consciousness. or in other words, an outlet from my subjective deadlock.
the closest to zizek’s concept of the radical subject i’ve come across is in saroj giri’s introduction to k murali’s book, of concepts and methods. by quoting mao,
the communist must be among the masses,
like fish in water.
he explains the political subjectivity of the maoist militant using his own proposed term, ‘comrade-as-object’. the resemblance to the thoroughly drained subject in zizek is obvious in the following lines:
the comparison with fish and the injunction to be
among the masses like fish in water,
is not about inflating any generic inflated ego of the revolutionary “subject.”
it is about breaking with
the so-called creative uniqueness of the “individual”
who is fatally nourished
by the fetishistic powers of the commodity,
by the oppressive logic of capitalist production.
from the petit-bourgeois perspective,
mao’s comrade does seem to be nothing
but a lifeless automaton—but that precisely is the point.
breaking with the solipsistic consciousness of commodity fetishism,
now the “new” individual,
the comrade as object,
must tend towards what appears like “an object.”
this de-classification and de-personification is perhaps maoism at its most radical. the subject’s inner dialectical process also outlines a larger external process of de-spectacularising the social. giri talks about how, only when the individual is not pitted pathologically against society, can we understand the mechanics of the ‘repressed unconscious’. such a transformation in subjectivity can be instrumental in abstracting the ideal manifestations from the system’s immediate-materiality. this is ripe with emancipatory possibilities as well as in prefiguring the future of capitalism.
there’s a quote always thrown around nyctophobia —that one is not really afraid of the dark, but of something lurking in the shadows. i, for one, have always been fearful of being watched or followed. this paranoid instinct later culminated in a psychotic episode where i was led to believe i was always being watched, not in a state surveillance sense, but of a more direct gaze. years have passed after that, but still i cannot but feel something awfully similar when i think about the sensational overload i experience everyday on my phone. as someone who’s also afraid of spaces closing in, this congestion overwhelms me. although i still continue being in a constant cycle of deleting and reinstalling social media apps, decyphering the nature of consumption in the digital age is something which i find crucial in controlling my various neuroses, but also in the question of a larger political subjectivity.
lenin once said that he refrains from listening to beethoven’s sonatas because it “makes one want to say kind, stupid things and stroke the heads of those who, living in such a foul hell, can create such beauty.” following through the notion of the Ideal, the ideality of these artworks must be seen as nothing but social activity — yet another ghost. for a trained mind, it is possible to abrogate an object of art from its spiritual dimensions. but what about things we consume unknowingly — when the frame of a painting itself is delimited?
in walter benjamin’s infamous essay, he celebrates how mechanical reproduction of art liberated it of its aura. the aura for benjamin is ‘a unique phenomenon of distance however close it might be.’ for him, the uniqueness and tradition associated with an artwork clouds our ability to extract the material determinations of it.4 but this gap is closed in by the reality shattering capabilities of the machine. once a work of art loses its aura, when the original film reel of modern times loses any practical difference between a copy reel, it becomes possible again to extract its material determinations.
yet, i’m worried whether the same aura has made a return in the digital age. browsing through social media lacks that exact proximity which benjamin theorised. we are bombarded by parasocial elements adding to the aura of the artform. as an example, the like-count affecting how you perceive an instagram post. the algorithm becomes your unconscious. the interface — the boundaries of human subjectivity. the recent revival of debord’s thought is also not a coincidence but a show of the unconscious activities being performed by us on a great scale, and the fall of subjectivity.
in the digital age, consumption cannot be seen just as the mirror image of production and a link in the productive chain. the line between work and consuming has been blurred out. a lot of the activities performed by users in free social media apps can be classified as labour for it directly adds value to the product. some browsers even pay you a percentage of the ad revenue(the same ads they are making for you, apparently). the time calls for politicizing consumption and a rethinking of the web.
as in the nature article mentioned above, paradoxically, subtraction or getting to less, can mean doing more or atleast in thought. the politics of subtraction is not entirely new. the quintessential philosopher of the sixties, herbert marcuse, wrote about ‘the great refusal’ as a refusal to participate in the dominating forces of consumer society. marcuse stressed the cultivation of radical forms of subjectivity as the antidote to the totalitarianism of capitalism. although shadowed by his frankfurt school peers, due to a variety of causes (such as capitalism gaining popular support in the 70s and the birth of the new right), marcuse’s thought could experience a resurgence in our time. an era where we are collectively dealing with hysteria over our crippling mental health and questions over identity and personality resurface periodically due to cracks in our false bloated images of ourselves.
as our fallen ghosts have shown, the quest for absolute freedom necessarily carries with it, painful consequences. nonetheless, engaging directly with the void in my self is the only path i see before me. it is indeed painful not to have my most effective defense mechanisms at my disposal in times of despair. and i am aware that i’m marching towards the purest form of solitude; self-desolation. an act of vanishing in the buddhist sense. and it is this evanascence that animates the world with its self-activity. and in true messianic fashion, emancipating God from the world of things. for once, i’d like to prove guy debord wrong. i’d like to believe the more radical expression is: suicide and revolution.
these thoughts and recollections are not so different from those i confide to God every morning. when it is possible. when He is listening. this journal is a form of speaking, of communication from one to the other. a communication which can be achieved simply and in repose without prostration or abnegation. it is a form of prayer.
reverend ernst toller
this was a very personal terrain for me, and expressing it through writing brought much needed clarity in my thought. hopefully i’ll be writing more of these in the coming weeks. for the next one, i’m considering shifting my focus towards the other most important thing in my life, Love. hoping to see you there, comrade.
though not a face of socialist political thought, phillip mainlander is worth a mention here — for the metaphysical similarities to ilyenkov’s and also for his early suicide.
used precisely in the kantian sense. the spectacle is popularly regarded to be true a priori.
zizek gives a fascinating reading of hegel’s notion of sublation in the preface of sublime object of ideology. not surprisingly, it relates to ilyenkov’s ideal.
the resemblance to ilyenkov is clear.
Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22:18-19
Well written. Hope you’re doing ok and continue to write :)