Give up activism
(Warren Ellis uses the term ‘offboard memory’ for posting something on a blog to avoid having to remember it. So it is here: some notes for my potential paper on political theory)
There’s a Žižek quote which is to do with how capitalist ideology encourages us always to have a position on any issue, when perhaps sometimes the revolutionary thing to do is _not_ to take sides and _not_ to act (if anyone knows off-hand the reference for this, I’d be grateful — there’s fuck-loads of Žižek to wade through looking for it). Benjamin writes (in The Arcades):
> Marx says, revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is really totally different.
> Perhaps revolutions are the grasp by the human race traveling in this train for the emergency brake.
(And incidentally, am I wrong or has Benjamin recently had an upsurge in popularity? And if it’s true that we’re currently finding Benjamin increasingly useful, isn’t it very scary?)
In the recent Contretemps issue, something similar is attributed to Agamben. His claim (from State of exception) that:
> to live in the state of exception means ceaselessly trying to arrest the functioning of the machine
> that is leading the West towards the global civil war,
is glossed as requiring a search for “a theoretical monkey-wrench.” Now, this may be what I have recently seen referred to as “a Žižek/Hegel I’m-dead-wrong-therefore-I’m-right argument,” (Rachel has already accused me of much the same thing), but I’m wondering if there’s some mileage in arguing that _in order to be political_, theory has to be somewhat disengaged, not pursued for the purposes of immediate political struggles. This isn’t to say that we don’t use theory to plan our struggles, nor that the struggles don’t inform the theory, just that it would be a mistake to think that _coming up with a theory of X_ is a directly useful step in taking action on X. This is annoying, as political action would be easier if you could plan it out in advance. Perhaps Badiou’s distinction between the situation (which just reproduces existing ideology) and the event (in fidelity to which we can create truths) is useful here.
(The title of this post comes from an essay in the collection Reflections on J18, which continues to have a subterranean influence on the other-globalisation movement in the UK)
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