Reflections on Living Together, Somehow

collecting some thoughts and proposing some directions

November-December is always a time where I tend toward introspection, and can be prone to ruminative reflections. There’s always a tipping point where reflexivity becomes an inward-coiling loop; one cannot ‘solve’ by the patterns that connect and the analysis of analysis of analysis. Right now I’ve been thinking about this blog. I haven’t yet been content with it: the work I’ve done, its direction (such as it is, or could be), what I want to offer my audience, who that audience may be – and so forth. Everyone is always only trying to (E.M. Forster) connect in some way:

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

But connect (with) what and to what, and with whom, and ¿for why?

In order to get at this, I decided to pose a few questions back to myself. It’s an annoying trick, but hey, Foucault got away with it, so I’ll have a go.

As often with this blog, the was written very quickly, about two hours, with very minimal editing and revision. First thoughts, best thoughts, fast thoughts; you can read it at according pace.

What did you hope or intend with the blog in January?

This is an interesting question, I’m glad you asked me this – thank you.

I had been doing a lot of academic writing after a bruising year of trying to teach during lockdown, with both parents juggling working from home with homeschooling two kids, and dealing with a toddler.

The academic writing itself had been extremely arduous, requiring (as always) a huge amount of checking and tuning, re-writing, re-placing commas and colons, tightening and tightening until there was – more truth? – and less loose flowing joy in it all.

I didn’t mind this this arduous style of writing labour so much as what it feeds (in me) and feeds into (out of me): the fraught coalface of academic writing, the ‘submission’ wherein everyone becomes a supplicant moving through clunky web-based platforms and curt emails. It’s very difficult to convey to anyone outside it just how busted and surreal the process can be; full of norms, the ratio of dos and don’t stacked in favour of the latter, none of the don’ts declared, no support or advocacy, and, above all, the strong impression that no one has, or will, or wishes to read the submission you’ve worked so hard to pull together for the journal. This means a process something like the following is typical.

First, you go through the painstaking labour of trying to write a submission to minimise the things you can be pinged for during peer review. This art of ‘defensive writing’ takes ages. It’s hard to do well, and doesn’t always produce more truth or better arguments and evidence.

Then, after getting a revise-and-resubmit, the ‘editorial process’ of journals: this is about responding in good faith to bad faith anonymous peer reviewers, and trying to parley with the journal editors, who want to use their anonymous peer reviewers’ comments (who may be them, or their boygirltheyfriend, or their friend, or someone who owes them a favour) in order to parry their stated role – as editors.

By the end of the year last year (with last year being the kind of pandemic year it was at home anyway), I basically concluded that the proper ratio of academic writing could be defined as

“that which consists in the most amount of labour for the fewest caring readers”.

Academic writing, by and large, means spending months polishing phrases for nobody, then, if you’re ‘lucky’, bending over backwards for strangers whose email replies sit right on the borderline of professional minimum, moral indifference, repressed hostility, and offhand contempt.

Years later, ‘success’ means you find a few people have cited your work, but in a way that also shows that they can’t possibly have read it attentively.

Academic writing feeds into another contemporary system that is about the opposite of reading attentively.

Knowledge production: is this even a thing?

And academic writing was fucking my writing. Doing my head in, doing my pen in. For even as you need a set of techniques for honing your banging your head against a wall, the better to do so in the least unsuccessful way; this same set of techniques can ruin a writer for other modes of expression. Like the difficulties of improvisation for a trained classical musician without score and a conductor, the impact of academia on my writing was impacted academic writing. And no one noticed or cared. The readers’ stools were empty; but my head hurt with it.

So by January, in light of this repeated, sustained experience of throwing good energy after bad, and writing works that had cost me significant effort yet pleased (and reached probably-literally) nobody, I wanted a ‘way’ (Weg), some kind of ‘way out’ (Ausgang) of the impasse of 99% of academic writing. I’d had a face full of cul-de-sac, for years, and I wanted a way to de-school my own language and syntax, a ‘way back’ to the freer and more fluid writing I’d achieved at moments while blogging and in essays in the later 2000s: times and places where I’d written spontaneously in a way that had pleased and satisfied me and then resonated with a small audience of appreciative readers. That was all I wanted (which is a lot!). PC Freely.

So, then, in January, the blog was a way of encouraging the kind of letting go that was also a way back (and potentially out and forward, opening onto a larger horizon): moreover, a kind of way that might restore a no longer bruised but by now deflated and spidery, dusty shed-cast sense of myself as ‘some kind of writer’.

What have you realised about this January wish-intention, now it’s November?

It’s very clear to me that I am a finite creature of middle age. Ten years of parenting, and three rounds of babies and sleep deprivation, in the context of often bruising teaching workloads, it knocked the youthful piss and vinegar out of me.

I feel an ambition, but now the primary ambition is to read better. To read well. I know how hard it is to write, and how seldom people actually fucking read. And then to write spontaneously: so to be more precious about how I listen and attend to the written words of others, then to try to ‘ungrasp’ and give generously and with fewer second thoughts when I express myself in writing.

It's also clear to me, after the teaching year has given and taken so much, that good quality tertiary teaching that really connects with the struggles and strivings of the real living people who are our students, it takes a lot of work, and it’s good work and has intrinsic meaning – for me, nearly always, and for the students, appreciable numbers of whom do see, notice, and respond to the different energy of someone who is giving freely with generous sincerity and frankness, which is the energy I try for.

I was really surprised that a pathogen killed neoliberalism in the student body, and yet this has been true in my experience this year. A genuine and pleasant surprise. I’ve been able to meet more of my students as real and living people wishing to learn, and I’ve been able to teach better and connect well with those among them who turned up and did their best – and were truly open to learning. It was fresh, it was meaningful, it was fun. Yet this also takes a lot of energy and headspace, probably at least 50% of what I have, once I’ve given the other ¿50%? to my children and partner.

As for the blog by November, then, I’m all for the limited ink of embraced constraint. At the same time, it’s clear that the best kind of blogs are those where people can post 3-6 times a month: I don’t mean in terms of what drives eyeballs and turns content into popularity and fame (though if you’re chasing that, you should also do shorter posts more frequently). I just mean in terms of the sense of energy and suspense, maybe in the way that his audience looked forward to Dickens’ latest instalment, when he was paid by the word and brought his novels out in instalments. I guess I’m saying that, by November, it’s clear that I struggled to give the blog enough ‘firewood’ for the fire to be a crackling hearth with its own pull dragging me toward it. It’s also, frankly, that my place of employment deals out too much fucking marking. But the holiday house bathrooms of the executive won’t re-renovate themselves, I guess.

Nearly everyone I know reports feeling overburdened, and the overproduction of content is a huge part of this. So, like, aside from just the discipline and commitment of doing the blog while doing everything else, there’s also a sense I have of like: am I just adding more pile to the piles of piles? Every time I go to a well-stocked bookshop, I feel deeply repelled. This is a complex feeling for someone whose mother was a librarian and who values books, reading literature, writing, and written thinking very highly. But it’s just so clear when you go to a piled plump bookshop, especially before Christmas, like now: we don’t need so many titles; we can’t possibly read them all; if I write one of these, am I not adding to the problem, at a cumulative systemic level? Are we not dealing with a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters producing the blurst of times, alongside the best?

All year, I went to kids’ parties held at children’s play centres, where all the food is fried and processed, all the cutlery is single use plastic, and all the parents have to effectively give over ¼ of their already crammed weekend to staying there, as the kids can’t be left in the places without ambient supervision, and you commuted to get there &c. This transpires out of the social fact that, as everyone is overburdened, and most parents both work full time, most families can’t come at the 80s norm, so beloved of my childhood, of hosting said parties at people’s houses. Never in all my childhood did I go to a birthday at a children’s play centre; not once this year was a party my kids were invited to held at a family’s house. No one plays pass the parcel anymore; no one pins the tail on the sad donkey. Instead there are bouncing castles and indoor rock climbing and the smell of re-used chip oil and sparklers.

A society of people who cannot give any more of themselves then ask more of others: I feel repelled by academic and by trade publishing, and then go on spewing words that, I suppose, my small audience feels some measure of obligation to read and keep reading (hello, if you are). The average Australian spends 48 minutes a day commuting in traffic, and 6.6 hours a day on screened devices. Again: am I not adding to this, am I not then just another link and more content on your screened devices?

What’s clear to you, from today, in November, after and in light of this year?

I’m happy to keep writing this blog; I’m really happy with the audience of 40 or so I have. A friend’s has taken off, and now they have several thousand readers, and climbing. I remember this pressure from the music blog when we might have been at similar scale, and I didn’t always like it. Then what happens if you become a Name? Then people want to see the Body, and ask it questions, hear it speak, give an account of itself. Writer’s festivals, as paradigm and metaphor, repel me nearly as much as bookstores and the only two publishing paradigms we have. I love that DeLillo refuses to do any of this stuff, but it sucks that you have to get to be DeLillo first (not for DeLillo, he made it, just for the rest of us).

…The blog’s title still capaciously captures the purpose I’m interested in, how we try and fail and still try to live with one another, and with ourselves….

My eldest son asked me what my (nascent) book is about. I explained that it was about how people tried to make meaning and keep connecting with other people trying to make sense and keep on living when the world went mad, for decades, and when everything fell apart and kept falling apart. I said I’m also interested in how different kinds of characters and dispositions – alienation, shock, anxiety, loneliness – emerge in periods of disintegration, as well as how different people are creatures of one age and not another. How we live out of joint; how Xi and Putin are creatures of the Cold War whose time has passed, but who are so frighteningly agentic now, and the meaning of this kind of untimeliness.

I have a muse and an animus.

For the muse, I find myself deeply interested in how so many intellectual movements and -isms coalesced in the disintegration Austro-Hungarian Kakania: the downfall of liberalism and socialism; the profound contradictions of urbanisation, imperialism, industrialisation, capitalism, and feudalism; the conflicts between modernism, romanticism, and humanism; the rise of anti semitism and fascism – and how this tends to be explained or ‘routed’ via the First World War. As of writing, I’m trying to read well enough right across this period of time in order to be able to see Freud and Kraus as the great two ‘tuning forks’ resonating to all of this (one ‘anti’ the other), and the enormous attempts at characterology made by the profound philosophical-literary works of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, the grotesque character portraits of Elias and Veza Canetti, and the misguided but deep intuitions of Otto Weininger, Adolf Hitler, and Wilhelm Reich.

To my animus: many of the social theorists who I resonate with* were hugely influenced by Freud (including Freud). One of the interesting things, however, is that none of them stayed orthodox Freudians (even Freud evolved in ways that are more interesting than many Freudians seem to see) – and many broke with the orthodoxy at enormous professional risk and personal-reputational cost. I’ve spent a lot of time reading the Frankfurt School over the past few years, and really, what’s common to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, as well as the many postwar uses of American Freudian social explanation that gives me the absolute screaming meemies**, is a rusted-on commitment to drive-theoretical explanations as the deeper meaning of complex social processes, and the wholesale condemnation of cultural totalities as irredeemably pathological, in ways the critic can see and denounce but aren’t implicated in; or might be implicated in, but in a way that doesn’t require of them that they change their heart, their mindset, their behaviour – or do any empirical research to test the theory.

I also think we’re living through another cyclical period of disintegration, as Broch did of his Germanophone totality. In a sense disintegration is always happening: entropy is one of the strongest and most reliable cosmic forces, and it’s only bounded organisations feeding on energy that offset this fundamental process, often with tragic costs, and always only ‘for a time’.

So I guess that’s my fundamental perspective. How do we live together, somehow, in and through a period of disintegration? And what can we learn from other people who have survived distintegration, in very different milieus, very different cultures?

So I’m going to sharpen up the topics by writing more specifically

about alienation, shock, anxiety, loneliness,

in the context of ‘living together somehow’

in a period of disintegration.

And for those of you, including me, who finds that to be a real bummer set of topics,

I’m also interested in integration and creativity, imagination, utopia, courage, and techniques: ways through, whether good sailing technique or excellent nautical charts.

For ‘we are embarked’,

as Pascal says.

~

*Wilhelm Reich (with caveats), Hermann Broch, Norbert Elias, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Deleuze and Guattari (with caveats), Michel Foucault.

**Christopher Lasch in the whole of The Culture of Narcissism, Wendy Brown in the final ‘explanatory’ bits of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Peter E. Gordon in his recent stuff ‘reading Adorno in the Age of Trump’