T-6005
05-18-2012, 11:30 PM
Perhaps I'm addressing the wrong crowd. Certainly, as it comes to presenting something fully-formed, ready-made and easy to swallow, this is the wrong place. Anywhere is the wrong place to present an idea in progress.
I have posted less and less as time has dragged on, barely stirring from lurking slumber to correct or 'props' my most lovely of peers. There are reasons for the lapse a recent breakup, a packed schedule, a decreased engagement with the now-gone members of this forum I once identified as idealized (and admittedly flawed) contemporary intellectual benchmarks but in the end it comes down to a particular form of apathy that I find it hard to deal with. I remain well accompanied here even to this day, but the engagement has flagged on a collective level.
The will to do nothing (always as opposed to having nothing to do) has always been strong in procrastinators and ne'er-do-wells of all stripes, but within every era of history it seems like the refusal to produce has represented a very specific engagement with and rejection of the zeitgeist, a quasi-utopian rejection that implied another potential future not built along the hierarchies that the dominant order has built for you.
In this day and age, if the phrase can be used, that sort of negative engagement seems stronger than ever. We face a generation of managers and accountants, none of whom produce a damned thing, attempting to engage with the material realities of their existence and finding them empty. Post-marxist as the suggestion might be, the technocratic mode of existence has seemingly created a class unlike any in history, one which is jaded with the origins of its own success and which regards the means of its maintenance as jejeune and downright dangerous. Engaged in the post-political managerial mode of thought, you end up with an emergent class suffused with privileged ennui, shot through with the will to think yet devoid of the will, and keenly feeling that moral lack.
Individuals are the unfortunate kings of their own destinies, and in the end accepting neo-liberal latter-day logics of a free-market utopia may seem logical to those benefitting from the exact logics of production existing in this particular age. At the same time, we find a disillusioned collective consciousness that despairs in the most of contemporary politics, seemingly unable to access the same mechanism for change that the civil rights movement or the women's rights crusade managed to tap. The world is broken, and despite our strains of thought determining a new and better world, the stale thoughts of our forebears animate the worlds within which we work. To change that doesn't just require a shift in thought it requires a sudden takeover, and it is the technicalities of the newly dangerous non-productive revolutionary class that elude the definition of the future.
*Please note that the use of French and German keywords are meant to be a nod to the histories of the words rather than a claim at 'my God I'm a huge jackass and I know those words'
I have posted less and less as time has dragged on, barely stirring from lurking slumber to correct or 'props' my most lovely of peers. There are reasons for the lapse a recent breakup, a packed schedule, a decreased engagement with the now-gone members of this forum I once identified as idealized (and admittedly flawed) contemporary intellectual benchmarks but in the end it comes down to a particular form of apathy that I find it hard to deal with. I remain well accompanied here even to this day, but the engagement has flagged on a collective level.
The will to do nothing (always as opposed to having nothing to do) has always been strong in procrastinators and ne'er-do-wells of all stripes, but within every era of history it seems like the refusal to produce has represented a very specific engagement with and rejection of the zeitgeist, a quasi-utopian rejection that implied another potential future not built along the hierarchies that the dominant order has built for you.
In this day and age, if the phrase can be used, that sort of negative engagement seems stronger than ever. We face a generation of managers and accountants, none of whom produce a damned thing, attempting to engage with the material realities of their existence and finding them empty. Post-marxist as the suggestion might be, the technocratic mode of existence has seemingly created a class unlike any in history, one which is jaded with the origins of its own success and which regards the means of its maintenance as jejeune and downright dangerous. Engaged in the post-political managerial mode of thought, you end up with an emergent class suffused with privileged ennui, shot through with the will to think yet devoid of the will, and keenly feeling that moral lack.
Individuals are the unfortunate kings of their own destinies, and in the end accepting neo-liberal latter-day logics of a free-market utopia may seem logical to those benefitting from the exact logics of production existing in this particular age. At the same time, we find a disillusioned collective consciousness that despairs in the most of contemporary politics, seemingly unable to access the same mechanism for change that the civil rights movement or the women's rights crusade managed to tap. The world is broken, and despite our strains of thought determining a new and better world, the stale thoughts of our forebears animate the worlds within which we work. To change that doesn't just require a shift in thought it requires a sudden takeover, and it is the technicalities of the newly dangerous non-productive revolutionary class that elude the definition of the future.
*Please note that the use of French and German keywords are meant to be a nod to the histories of the words rather than a claim at 'my God I'm a huge jackass and I know those words'