antipopper

Do you ever hack away at a project endlessly, letting it absorb all your mental and emotional energy, and yet fail to grasp the key that will let you unlock its heart? Sometimes you just have to give up. Which is what I’m doing.

I’ve been trying to write an article about Cronulla, racialisation and the different ethico-political conceptions of the world that such situations demonstrate, but unfortunately I don’t have an adequate ethico-political conception of the world of “my own” to offer. (I’ll possibly have something in a year, when I’m further into my thesis.) Neither do I have anything much more than a descriptive account of how nationalism is currently working in this country, when what I really need is an idea of what’s going on, which I take to be somewhat different. So I’m tossing in the towel.

I’ll disclose a little of where I was heading, though: when apprehending traumatic events, it’s useful go back to Walter Benjamin’s sense of the historical materialist’s mission that he outlines in the old “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, and see it as not some programme for an abstract “intellectual”, but as something everyday that people do. Of course (and I rarely see this discussed), Benjamin’s language can get somewhat uh, problematic:

The historical materialist leaves it to other to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. [Benjamin 1992: 254]

Oooookay. I used to think one could simply set aside the dodgy trappings in which these kinds of allusive aphorisms are wrapped, but while there’s something undoubtedly very valuable in Benjamin’s conception of time and the event, it’s nontheless informed by a kind of masculinist and heroic fantasy of the subject that needs inverting.

[ tags: historical-materialism, marxism, walter-benjamin ]