No next, next turn, on several themes in the summit...as I develop this maybe I will even change my mind....

I was so inept in putting a picture into the first version of this blog that I lost it altogether, so this is a hasty rewrite of an already hasty posting. I was letting off steam,and I forgot for a rare moment about how one of my best ways to do this is not to write an angry posting, but to think about some art. So before the rewrite I did think about some art and the peculiar twisting of the vision in certain baroque paintings and how they pull you into a weird relation with oneself, both submissive and unexpected, and how the summit failed to do this, but left me only with the feeling of being submissive. Nothing unexpected happened, though I did get the impression that there was quite a lot of being born-again, which is a strictly post-eschatological (trick n')treat. I got an ideology and the hubris of a certain will, but not a version of myself; rather what looked to me like this crazily redemptive eschatology of the becoming non-un-aligned, but no now and certainly no next which is the inner process of the distension of the now. And if all of that sounds rather Greco-Catholic, why not? Those ideas drift in and around a Derrida or a Nancy and limit their thinking as well as enabling it. I can't become un-non-aligned because I can't will away my unconscious with a conscious gesture, because I can't count on the taming of desire, because I can't disinvest the ambivalent investments that stay me in the institution and the wider world and also because I love all these conflicts, contradictions, coexistences. It was easier for the fascist Sukarno, the authoritarian Nehru to will 'their nations' into a grand historical fraud hacked out on the chance that if Russia would not pick up the bill then China would. So why does 'one' wish to hark back to this historical fantasm as any kind of a model for now?

At a later session I heard that one progressive form of education was to give students a reading list and then leave it to them to come for discussions. Sounds like authority to me, quite intact. At another that sometimes there are adminstrators who protect funky things in the institution. Big discovery. Or that having Martha Rosler and Liam Gillick to do seminars is a radical programme. Sounds par for the course, no? There were stirring moments - Berardi's wonderful and constructive pessimism, but it was out of key with comingness as well as with the very material concerns of oppression, and there were many happy discussions in the wings...but by and large I had the odd feeling of drowning in an agenda of denial. Florian has written to say that doing these things is very hard, breaking, un-aligning, that it is very uncomfortable. But my dissension is this - it is, on the contrary, far too easy.

This is just a brute reaction to the online sound waves of the opening session and to whatever followed that I then tried to follow in Berlin: to hearing strangely once again the the denial of authority re-clothed in the garments of democratic centralism, that I once practiced oh-so-well, the maoist-leninist habit of the expropriation of the knowledge of the 'masses' that it dreamed up and on which it relied to present the leadership as the substitute for the people...as if I were ever that, who knows? Maybe THAT was the version of myself I got.