"The literature of the discontents"
"The literature of the malcontents"
"The literature of the content"
"Memos to the boss"
"Emails about the boss"



Correctness, rectitude, rectify, regret, regress

Understanding the nature of the mechanisms lined up in front of you is a worthwhile way to occupy your time in the event that one or more of those mechanisms should have to be altered, replaced, or destroyed. There are limitations on the tolerance of people for certain forms of domination, coersion, or the shaping of their lives by others (these limitations fluctuate and are relative to the historical scenario at hand: they are lower and higher in general in different periods, and also relative to the perhaps historically inexplicable variations in the individual natures of the people who make up the body to be analyzed and the relations between those people). There are also limitations on the ways in which people can react to the movement of the previously mentioned limitations in either direction (either towards a more palatable and preferable state of affairs or towards one which they are less inclined toward). Understanding the limits which affect the ways in which one can alter or react towards one's political situation is one method which can (sometimes) enable the alteration or expansion of those very limitations. The intolerable situation imposed by, e.g., the inability of women to vote was obviously the motivating factor for the emergence of the women's suffrage movement, which effectively altered the ways in which a woman can react towards her political situation. Certainly a great deal of apathy preceded the emergence of this movement, and it is unlikely to have been predicted 200 years prior to its emergence, but emerge it did. Similarly, today there is a great deal of apathy in the West towards a certain cluster of problems which are 'taken seriously' by academics insofar as they write about them but about which very little is done on the ground because the feeling seems to be that certain things might as well be accepted, given the seemingly insurmountable difficulties which have to be faced in order to alter the situation. Or, worse, the solutions to the general problem hold no intrinsic interest because the problems, such as they are, are only understood as they apply to the individual at hand--the academics write as if the situation were otherwise, but this writing is also bound up with the whole apathetic turn connected to the tendency to understand problems in terms of the individual.

But, just as women's suffrage was by no means an 'obvious' solution to the felt-dissatisfaction of women and men prior to the emergence of the right to vote for women, similarly, we can't imagine what possible solutions might emerge from the perceived miasma of apathy infecting a large portion of the population with regards to the ills of, e.g., bureaucratic civilization or capitalism. All the big successes of the world begin small and unpredictably, and it is only with the hindsight of history that we are able to describe the logic of their emergence as if it were something fated. That the academic's gesture towards communal action and things of that sort are all but hand-waving and journalism is made apparent by the way in which those selfsame academics live their lives, for the most part, according to 'individualist' criteria. This may have the result that a meaningful solution to "the problems" in the large sense will actually be a rephrasing of those problems in a much smaller, individually more soluble sense. Or, it may have the effect of becoming such an intolerable contradiction that new forms community based activity arise which are not based solely on limp academic proscriptions. Another option, too, is that there may very well emerge something new under the sun, wherein the seeming opposition between the individual and the community is supplanted with something entirely different, which cannot at all be predicted or completely understood from within the stock of concepts currently available to us. One thing is certain, though, and that is that things will not simply stay the same; the world will not simply reproduce itself infinitely, small accretions have an additive effect and, over even the relatively short time span of 50 years, much of the political landscape of the world will likely be completely unrecognizable by all but the most schematic of understandings. But, too, our lives are generally short in comparison to the time span at work in deep and meaningful political change (though this seems less true relative to the rapidity of change in the last 200 years or so). So it is not at all a surprise to see many people eager for change throwing up their hands in disgust and resignation at what will most likely be another decade or more of roughly the same kind of apathy, and in all probability longer than that unless something remarkable happens (as is occasionally the case).

The least requirement, in any case, is in being genuine and fighting the ironic or distanced engagement prevalent as much as one's temperament allows; and often, as in my case, this is not very much at all.