An old teacher of yours once said, you need to learn when it's the endgame. There's some truth in that, you're sure, but it made you feel uneasy.
Firstly, a lot of people who make such pronouncements do not always have some great understanding of the issues or any special insights into the workings of history. More often than not such statements are a reflection of their own personal predicament ( mid-life problems or a life with a severely curtailed agency).
Secondly, it's presumptious ( though they no doubt see it as being pragmatic). The future is always, to some degree or the other, open and so you don't see how anyone can call it ( this also holds, incidentally, when it comes to the critiques of the neoclassical model and it's notion of "spatialized time").
Thirdly, it completely ignores or denigrates those people who are actually trying to change things. The resistance of Kashmiris or Palestinians may in fact be doomed to failure but what do you want them to do? Stop because some typically middle-aged (white) man has, taking a moment's break from sipping his soya latte, deemed their struggle ultimately futile? And even if defeat is inevitable- which it is not- there is something to be said for those who are not conformed to the times they live in.
A line which never ceases to amaze you: 'Falsehood by its very nature is perishable'.
What seems to be most solid, in our own lives and in wider society, can sometimes in reality be nothing but an illusion. We intuit unity, we posit continuity but we know in our heart of hearts that, at least in our human situation, the nature of life is movement, whether we like it or not.
Nothing stays the same, but I will always love you.
---Neko Case.
At the individual level this kind of fatalism might be called despair or depression. It's hard not to resist since there's a sort of consolation that accompanies it, the consolation of security in a world that is going to hell in a handcart. Ultimately, it's the comfort of a spectator looking on at a disaster or the warm thought that you are at least living in a unique time, a pivotal age, the moment when things began to irreversibly slide into chaos.
'ground gives..capstones shift', things resettle.
The dung beetle carries with it an imprint of the first time, as if the universe's celestial mechanics had been translated into its biological rhythms, as if the stars- their silence and their ways- had been woven into the fabric of its being. And as we move our own shit around who is to say what will endure an what will fade, who will come out on top and who will fall?
Firstly, a lot of people who make such pronouncements do not always have some great understanding of the issues or any special insights into the workings of history. More often than not such statements are a reflection of their own personal predicament ( mid-life problems or a life with a severely curtailed agency).
Secondly, it's presumptious ( though they no doubt see it as being pragmatic). The future is always, to some degree or the other, open and so you don't see how anyone can call it ( this also holds, incidentally, when it comes to the critiques of the neoclassical model and it's notion of "spatialized time").
Thirdly, it completely ignores or denigrates those people who are actually trying to change things. The resistance of Kashmiris or Palestinians may in fact be doomed to failure but what do you want them to do? Stop because some typically middle-aged (white) man has, taking a moment's break from sipping his soya latte, deemed their struggle ultimately futile? And even if defeat is inevitable- which it is not- there is something to be said for those who are not conformed to the times they live in.
A line which never ceases to amaze you: 'Falsehood by its very nature is perishable'.
What seems to be most solid, in our own lives and in wider society, can sometimes in reality be nothing but an illusion. We intuit unity, we posit continuity but we know in our heart of hearts that, at least in our human situation, the nature of life is movement, whether we like it or not.
Nothing stays the same, but I will always love you.
---Neko Case.
At the individual level this kind of fatalism might be called despair or depression. It's hard not to resist since there's a sort of consolation that accompanies it, the consolation of security in a world that is going to hell in a handcart. Ultimately, it's the comfort of a spectator looking on at a disaster or the warm thought that you are at least living in a unique time, a pivotal age, the moment when things began to irreversibly slide into chaos.
'ground gives..capstones shift', things resettle.
The dung beetle carries with it an imprint of the first time, as if the universe's celestial mechanics had been translated into its biological rhythms, as if the stars- their silence and their ways- had been woven into the fabric of its being. And as we move our own shit around who is to say what will endure an what will fade, who will come out on top and who will fall?
No comments:
Post a Comment