douglain

Ready, here we go. It’s got to be a she. Sit down. She splatters paint everywhere, yeah everywhere. On glass, like Pollack, like a crazy woman. She bows down to the ground like to a thunderstorm way off in the distance in purple gobs and bubbles way off. The paint splatters and she screams so the glass shakes and her throat gives out while the splotches pour from her mind and her brain and those evil transmitters, but are they evil? They don’t have to be evil–it should be what you were made like, how you came, could she do this if she weren’t like this, if the doctors weren’t there and the people weren’t there shimmying around her with no idea what they were talking about? Could you live that way? Right, of course, her little girl inside does and cries all night and Mommy comes and is just as confused while the night time stars spark out like the specks of cheap paint on her canvas, on her glass, on her floor.

You shouldn’t be worried– she shouldn’t be worried– neither of you can hear.

She’s on her knees and you’re on the chair and she’s scraping her claws on the chalkboard and you’re sitting here typing with those evil things in your ears. Evil? Do they have to be evil? You’re doing it for your art, your expression, like she does. Could you live any other way? It could be just the way you came. Do you want to go to work and live the way everyone else does and dream dreamless nights and see nothing when you wake and think nothing when linguistic sound waves travel through the air and hit you? They hit her too, but you’re trying to block them off when she just lets them hit, when she just lets them hit.

She splatters paint everywhere and all she can see is her mind and those swirling eclipses of moons and slow milky pools of water like when an oar pushes through on a lake.

Everywhere.

She’s got to be beautiful, just like Audrey. She’s got this curly hair and a sexy thoughtless type of action so guys will stop in their tracks, be distracted from their conversations to keep their eyes on her for just one more moment so that maybe when you, they, go to bed at night they can have an image, some coal black hair, some tortured artist going to buy paint that they can have an ugly affair with in the bathroom of the supplies shop. “Do you like this blue?” “Yeah, you know, I feel like I’ve known you for years…” That’s all it takes and you’re, they’re, with her in a small room, not a real room, but like in porn with a small wave back and forth back and forth and back and forth with dim red lights making your, their, skin that crazy yellow hue.

She walks into the store though, and she walks out, she doesn’t say a word because the guy at the register knows her, knows her that well, and she buys her brushes and bottles and tubes and with nods completes the only transaction besides that of the diner she goes to for every meal. The greasy spoon where her early work hangs, where the gallery owners first put their hands to their mouths when getting lunch on the way back to the city. And guy at the diner, like the paint store guy, knows her well enough to give her a Caesar salad and a chocolate milkshake. Yeah, just like that diner at home. She’ll go in, nod just like she’s buying paint and he’ll know, like the way you’ve always wished those waitresses knew what you were going to order before you ordered it. They don’t know you’re a regular but he knows her, she gets the same thing every time and doesn’t have to say anything. Because she can’t.

You can. You do. You fill the air with waves and you think those sounds mean so much, don’t you, so much that a void just sounds like a hummmmm a hummm like it sounds like right now like it sounds right now just a buzz with a tone, a pitch. With just your voice rumbling in your throat. The mind can’t make sense of the silence; it needs to explain it so it hears something that’s not there.

She hears it all. She knows the silence, her mind makes sense of it. She splatters paint everywhere, you can see it on the walls of the diner, yeah, and yeah she painted the restaurant a mural one day and they all watched. Yeah, there’s a story. They all watched her do it because no one ever knew how or why she could produce such screams, such images from nothing. Artie wrote her a note, once, and what did she do? She closed her eyes, opened them right into his, right through his, and nodded yes. The next day she came with her tool box, it’s a red tool box, a little rusty thing with shelves that pop out like that congressman’s make up artist’s box. Red and crazy all over. Yeah, she just comes in and dips a wash towel into a creamy white and throws it against the wall. She hums a muffled song like this one you’re hearing right now, like this you’re hearing right now. She opens her mouth for the first time and all the regulars are just dumbfounded because they know the sounds she’s making: they remember when they held their ears and heard themselves speak or shout like that to try and ignore the pain, to let words and noises go by unheard and unfelt, because it’s better that way, right? They her working and look at their hands like they don’t know how she’s doing it because there’s a fork in their left and knife in their right and she’s throwing dishtowels against a wall.
She dips her hand into a darker brown and swirls in fisted into the pearl and it’s her milkshake waiting for her under the silver box with fifties writing behind the counter. Artie smiles, big smile. There’s a crowd all around and they know who she is, they’ve seen her on the local evening news and read little articles here and there about her shows and seen pictures of fancy looking sophisticates with goatees and New York City smiles with her under their arm. They know. But they can’t believe what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing; what they’re not. The deconstruction, what’s getting in her way? Nothing is getting in her way. It’s the absolute breakdown of a mind and the composition of its reconstruction– upon a wall that used to have phone numbers and FuckYous written on it.

That’s just like this, just like you’re doing right? There’s no one around you though. There’s no wall. It’s ok, probably someday…but why? Why do you need a circle of people around you who know you from articles and smiles and nods? Why?

She would still compose. She did it when she was, when you were, nine, yeah, and when no one was watching her, you, and she would scream like that into the painted echoes, like you hear now, when no one in the world could listen in the woods. In the woods by a lake where she, you, used to camp with your friends from school. There’s a hammock there she, you, would crawl into and sing that choked song. Hmm…

Yeah. Write her a note, write her a note like the guy behind the counter did, she’ll hear you. Scratch it like she would.

Would you still do this if no one were around? Would you still throw your mind and colored words onto paper if no one ever saw it? Would you?

Then, she splatters words onto the paper below the neat script with a charcoal. She pushes it in front of you but before you can read it she takes your head in her hands, they’re your hands, and she stuffs her, your, fingers in your ears and sings into your eyes. You know what that napkin says; you know what that napkin says. You know what she’s, you’re, saying.

“Yes. Yes I would.”

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

This week’s podcast features a conversation with the fantasist and novelist Mark Teppo on the subject his book Lightbreaker, and the occult themes to be found in his book. Mark’s Codex of Souls series starts with the two books Lightbreaker and Heartland, both of which are out now from Night Shade Books. Also this week Miriam reads Barbara Tannert’s story “OOGA-BOOGA AND THE WRITING LIFE” from the Diet Soap website, and the voices of Jason Horsley, Alan Watts, Noam Chomsky, Ariana Huffington, and others are juxtaposed in yet another podcast collage. Please download the podcast from dietsoap.podomatic.com or subscribe at iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

Chapter 4: The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

pts 73-111

“Equal right to all the goods and pleasures of this world, the destruction of all authority, the negation of all moral restraints — in the final analysis, these are the aims behind the March 18th insurrection and the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished it with an army.”

—Parliamentary Inquest on the Paris Commune

73
The real movement that transforms existing conditions has been the dominant social force since the bourgeoisie’s victory within the economic sphere, and this dominance became visible once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The development of productive forces shattered the old production relations, and all static order crumbled. Everything that was absolute became historical.

74
When people are thrust into history and forced to participate in the work and struggles that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a clear and disabused manner. This history has no object distinct from what it creates from out of itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era considered the productive progression through which history had unfolded as itself the object of history. As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.

75
The class struggles of the long era of revolutions initiated by the rise of the bourgeoisie have developed in tandem with the dialectical “thought of history” — the thought which is no longer content to seek the meaning of what exists, but which strives to comprehend the dissolution of what exists, and in the process breaks down every separation.

76
For Hegel the point was no longer to interpret the world, but to interpret the transformation of the world. But because he limited himself to merely interpreting that transformation, Hegel only represents the philosophical culmination of philosophy. He seeks to understand a world that develops by itself. This historical thought is still a consciousness that always arrives too late, a consciousness that can only formulate retrospective justifications of what has already happened. It has thus gone beyond separation only in thought. Hegel’s paradoxical stance — his subordination of the meaning of all reality to its historical culmination while at the same time proclaiming that his own system represents that culmination — flows from the simple fact that this thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought in his philosophy only a reconciliation with the results of those revolutions. “Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not express the entire process of this revolution, but only its concluding phase. In this sense it is a philosophy not of the revolution, but of the restoration” (Karl Korsch, “Theses on Hegel and Revolution”). Hegel performed the task of the philosopher — “the glorification of what exists” — for the last time; but already what existed for him could be nothing less than the entire movement of history. Since he nevertheless maintained the external position of thought, this externality could be masked only by identifying that thought with a preexisting project of the Spirit — of that absolute heroic force which has done what it willed and willed what it has done, and whose ultimate goal coincides with the present. Philosophy, in the process of being superseded by historical thought, has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its world only by denying it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total history to which it has relegated everything has already come to an end, and that the only tribunal where truth could be judged is closed.

77
When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this historical thought has not been forgotten, its refutation of that thought’s conclusion is at the same time a confirmation of its method.

78
Historical thought can be salvaged only by becoming practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class can be nothing less than historical consciousness operating on the totality of its world. All the theoretical currents of the revolutionary working-class movement — Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx — grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought.

79
The inseparability of Marx’s theory from the Hegelian method is itself inseparable from that theory’s revolutionary character, that is, from its truth. It is in this regard that the relationship between Marx and Hegel has generally been ignored or misunderstood, or even denounced as the weak point of what became fallaciously transformed into a doctrine: “Marxism.” Bernstein implicitly revealed this connection between the dialectical method and historical partisanship when in his book Evolutionary Socialism he deplored the 1847 Manifesto’s unscientific predictions of imminent proletarian revolution in Germany: “This historical self-deception, so erroneous that the most naïve political visionary could hardly have done any worse, would be incomprehensible in a Marx who at that time had already seriously studied economics if we did not recognize that it reflected the lingering influence of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic, from which Marx, like Engels, could never completely free himself. In those times of general effervescence this influence was all the more fatal to him.”

80
The inversion carried out by Marx in order to “salvage” the thought of the bourgeois revolutions by transferring it to a different context does not trivially consist of putting the materialist development of productive forces in place of the journey of the Hegelian Spirit toward its eventual encounter with itself — the Spirit whose objectification is identical to its alienation and whose historical wounds leave no scars. For once history becomes real, it no longer has an end. Marx demolished Hegel’s position of detachment from events, as well as passive contemplation by any supreme external agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theory’s concern is simply to know what it itself is doing. In contrast, present-day society’s passive contemplation of the movement of the economy is an untranscended holdover from the undialectical aspect of Hegel’s attempt to create a circular system; it is an approval that is no longer on the conceptual level and that no longer needs a Hegelianism to justify itself, because the movement it now praises is a sector of a world where thought no longer has any place, a sector whose mechanical development effectively dominates everything. Marx’s project is a project of conscious history, in which the quantitativeness that arises out of the blind development of merely economic productive forces must be transformed into a qualitative appropriation of history. The critique of political economy is the first act of this end of prehistory: “Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.”

81
Marx’s theory is closely linked with scientific thought insofar as it seeks a rational understanding of the forces that really operate in society. But it ultimately goes beyond scientific thought, preserving it only by superseding it. It seeks to understand social struggles, not sociological laws. “We recognize only one science: the science of history” (The German Ideology).

82
The bourgeois era, which wants to give history a scientific foundation, overlooks the fact that the science available to it could itself arise only on the foundation of the historical development of the economy. But history is fundamentally dependent on this economic knowledge only so long as it remains merely economic history. The extent to which the viewpoint of scientific observation could overlook history’s effect on the economy (an overall process modifying its own scientific premises) is shown by the vanity of those socialists who thought they had calculated the exact periodicity of economic crises. Now that constant government intervention has succeeded in counteracting the tendencies toward crisis, the same type of mentality sees this delicate balance as a definitive economic harmony. The project of transcending the economy and mastering history must grasp and incorporate the science of society, but it cannot itself be a scientific project. The revolutionary movement remains bourgeois insofar as it thinks it can master current history by means of scientific knowledge.

83
The utopian currents of socialism, though they are historically grounded in criticism of the existing social system, can rightly be called utopian insofar as they ignore history (that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking place and any passage of time outside the immutable perfection of their image of a happy society), but not because they reject science. On the contrary, the utopian thinkers were completely dominated by the scientific thought of earlier centuries. They sought the completion and fulfillment of that general rational system. They did not consider themselves unarmed prophets, for they firmly believed in the social power of scientific proof and even, in the case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “Why,” Sombart asked, “would they want to seize through struggle what merely needed to be proved?” But the utopians’ scientific understanding did not include the awareness that some social groups have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, forces to maintain it, and forms of false consciousness to reinforce it. Their grasp of reality thus lagged far behind the historical reality of the development of science itself, which had been largely oriented by the social requirements arising from such factors, which determined not only what findings were considered acceptable, but even what might or might not become an object of scientific research. The utopian socialists remained prisoners of the scientific manner of expounding the truth, viewing this truth as a pure abstract image — the form in which it had established itself at a much earlier stage of social development. As Sorel noted, the utopians took astronomy as their model for discovering and demonstrating the laws of society; their unhistorical conception of harmony was the natural result of their attempt to apply to society the science least dependent on history. They described this harmony as if they were Newtons discovering universal scientific laws, and the happy ending they constantly evoked “plays a role in their social science analogous to the role of inertia in classical physics” (Materials for a Theory of the Proletariat).

84
The scientific-determinist aspect of Marx’s thought was precisely what made it vulnerable to “ideologization,” both during his own lifetime and even more so in the theoretical heritage he left to the workers movement. The advent of the historical subject continues to be postponed, and it is economics, the historical science par excellence, which is increasingly seen as guaranteeing the inevitability of its own future negation. In this way revolutionary practice, the only true agent of this negation, tends to be pushed out of theory’s field of vision. Instead, it is seen as essential to patiently study economic development, and to go back to accepting the suffering which that development imposes with a Hegelian tranquility. The result remains “a graveyard of good intentions.” The “science of revolutions” then concludes that consciousness always comes too soon, and has to be taught. “History has shown that we, and all who thought as we did, were wrong,” Engels wrote in 1895. “It has made clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was far from being ripe.” Throughout his life Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his theory, but the exposition of his theory was carried out on the terrain of the dominant thought insofar as it took the form of critiques of particular disciplines, most notably the critique of that fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy. It was in this mutilated form, which eventually came to be seen as orthodox, that Marx’s theory was transformed into “Marxism.”

85
The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally linked to the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. The German working class failed to inaugurate a permanent revolution in 1848; the Paris Commune was defeated in isolation. As a result, revolutionary theory could not yet be fully realized. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and refining it by cloistered scholarly work in the British Museum had a debilitating effect on the theory itself. His scientific conclusions about the future development of the working class, and the organizational practice apparently implied by those conclusions, became obstacles to proletarian consciousness at a later stage.

86
The theoretical shortcomings of the scientific defense of proletarian revolution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all ultimately result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power.

87
As early as the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s effort to demonstrate the legitimacy of proletarian power by citing a repetitive sequence of precedents led him to oversimplify his historical analysis into a linear model of the development of modes of production, in which class struggles invariably resulted “either in a revolutionary transformation of the entire society or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes.” The plain facts of history, however, are that the “Asiatic mode of production” (as Marx himself acknowledged elsewhere) maintained its immobility despite all its class conflicts; that no serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal lords; and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient world ended the rule of the freemen. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won; and that it is also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society. The same oversimplification led Marx to neglect the economic role of the state in the management of class society. If the rising bourgeoisie seemed to liberate the economy from the state, this was true only to the extent that the previous state was an instrument of class oppression within a static economy. The bourgeoisie originally developed its independent economic power during the medieval period when the state had been weakened and feudalism was breaking up the stable equilibrium between different powers. In contrast, the modern state — which began to support the bourgeoisie’s development through its mercantile policies and which developed into the bourgeoisie’s own state during the laissez-faire era — was eventually to emerge as a central power in the planned management of the economic process. Marx was nevertheless able to describe the “Bonapartist” prototype of modern statist bureaucracy, the fusion of capital and state to create a “national power of capital over labor, a public force designed to maintain social servitude” — a form of social order in which the bourgeoisie renounces all historical life apart from what has been reduced to the economic history of things, and would like to be “condemned to the same political nothingness as all the other classes.” The sociopolitical foundations of the modern spectacle are already discernable here, and these foundations negatively imply that the proletariat is the only pretender to historical life.

88
The only two classes that really correspond to Marx’s theory, the two pure classes that the entire analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary classes in history, but operating under very different conditions. The bourgeois revolution is done. The proletarian revolution is a yet-unrealized project, born on the foundation of the earlier revolution but differing from it qualitatively. If one overlooks the originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one also tends to overlook the specific originality of the proletarian project, which can achieve nothing unless it carries its own banners and recognizes the “immensity of its own tasks.” The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot create its own new form of power except by becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of productive forces will not in itself guarantee the emergence of such a power — not even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession which that growth entails. Nor can a Jacobin-style seizure of the state be a means to this end. The proletariat cannot make use of any ideology designed to disguise its partial goals as general goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial reality that is truly its own.

89
If Marx, during a certain period of his participation in the proletarian struggle, placed too great a reliance on scientific prediction, to the point of creating the intellectual basis for the illusions of economism, it is clear that he himself did not succumb to those illusions. In a well-known letter of 7 December 1867, accompanying an article criticizing Capital which he himself had written but which he wanted Engels to present to the press as the work of an adversary, Marx clearly indicated the limits of his own science: “The author’s subjective tendency (imposed on him, perhaps, by his political position and his past), namely the manner in which he views and presents the final outcome of the present movement and social process, has no connection with his actual analysis.” By thus disparaging the “tendentious conclusions” of his own objective analysis, and by the irony of the “perhaps” with reference to the extrascientific choices supposedly “imposed” on him, Marx implicitly revealed the methodological key to fusing the two aspects.

90
The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within the historical struggle itself, in such a way that each depends on the other for its validation. The proletarian class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing revolutionary struggles and in its reorganization of society at the moment of revolution — this is where the practical conditions of consciousness must exist, conditions in which the theory of praxis is confirmed by becoming practical theory. But this crucial question of organization was virtually ignored by revolutionary theory during the period when the workers movement was first taking shape — the very period when that theory still possessed the unitary character it had inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice). Instead, the organizational question became the weakest aspect of radical theory, a confused terrain lending itself to the revival of hierarchical and statist tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of organization of the workers movement that were developed on the basis of this theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit the maintenance of a unitary theory by breaking it up into various specialized and fragmented disciplines. This ideologically alienated theory was then no longer able to recognize the practical verifications of the unitary historical thought it had betrayed when such verifications emerged in spontaneous working-class struggles; instead, it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and memory of them. Yet those historical forms that took shape in struggle were precisely the practical terrain that was needed in order to validate the theory. They were what the theory needed, yet that need had not been formulated theoretically. The soviet, for example, was not a theoretical discovery. And the most advanced theoretical truth of the International Workingmen’s Association was its own existence in practice.

91
The First International’s initial successes enabled it to free itself from the confused influences of the dominant ideology that had survived within it. But the defeat and repression that it soon encountered brought to the surface a conflict between two different conceptions of proletarian revolution, each of which contained an authoritarian aspect that amounted to abandoning the conscious self-emancipation of the working class. The feud between the Marxists and the Bakuninists, which eventually became irreconcilable, actually centered on two different issues — the question of power in a future revolutionary society and the question of the organization of the current movement — and each of the adversaries reversed their position when they went from one aspect to the other. Bakunin denounced the illusion that classes could be abolished by means of an authoritarian implementation of state power, warning that this would lead to the formation of a new bureaucratic ruling class and to the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable (or of those reputed to be such). Marx, who believed that the concomitant maturation of economic contradictions and of the workers’ education in democracy would reduce the role of a proletarian state to a brief phase needed to legitimize the new social relations brought into being by objective factors, denounced Bakunin and his supporters as an authoritarian conspiratorial elite who were deliberately placing themselves above the International with the harebrained scheme of imposing on society an irresponsible dictatorship of the most revolutionary (or of those who would designate themselves as such). Bakunin did in fact recruit followers on such a basis: “In the midst of the popular tempest we must be the invisible pilots guiding the revolution, not through any kind of overt power but through the collective dictatorship of our Alliance — a dictatorship without any badges or titles or official status, yet all the more powerful because it will have none of the appearances of power.” Thus two ideologies of working-class revolution opposed each other, each containing a partially true critique, but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting itself up as an ideological authority. Powerful organizations such as German Social Democracy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation faithfully served one or the other of these ideologies; and everywhere the result was very different from what had been sought.

92
The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present represents both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken seriously — the pretensions of the individualist forms of anarchism have always been ludicrous). From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its constant harping on this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate indifference to any consideration of methods. Its critique of political struggle has thus remained abstract, while its commitment to economic struggle has been channeled toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by a single blow on this terrain, on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have saddled themselves with fulfilling an ideal. Anarchism remains a merely ideological negation of the state and of class society — the very social conditions which in their turn foster separate ideologies. It is the ideology of pure freedom, an ideology that puts everything on the same level and loses any conception of the “historical evil” (the negation at work within history). This fusion of all partial demands into a single all-encompassing demand has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions in the name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some particular critical specialization; but the fact that this fusion has been envisaged only in the absolute, in accordance with individual whim and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to an all too obvious incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular struggle by repeating and reapplying the same simple and all-embracing lesson, because this lesson has from the beginning been considered the be-all and end-all of the movement. This is reflected in Bakunin’s 1873 letter of resignation from the Jura Federation: “During the past nine years the International has developed more than enough ideas to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a new one. It’s no longer the time for ideas, it’s time for actions.” This perspective undoubtedly retains proletarian historical thought’s recognition that ideas must be put into practice, but it abandons the historical terrain by assuming that the appropriate forms for this transition to practice have already been discovered and will never change.

93
The anarchists, who explicitly distinguish themselves from the rest of the workers movement by their ideological conviction, reproduce this separation of competencies within their own ranks by providing a terrain that facilitates the informal domination of each particular anarchist organization by propagandists and defenders of their ideology, specialists whose mediocre intellectual activity is largely limited to the constant regurgitation of a few eternal truths. The anarchists’ ideological reverence for unanimous decisionmaking has ended up paving the way for uncontrolled manipulation of their own organizations by specialists in freedom; and revolutionary anarchism expects the same type of unanimity, obtained by the same means, from the masses once they have been liberated. Furthermore, the anarchists’ refusal to take into account the great differences between the conditions of a minority banded together in present-day struggles and of a postrevolutionary society of free individuals has repeatedly led to the isolation of anarchists when the moment for collective decisionmaking actually arrives, as is shown by the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and crushed at a local level.

94
The illusion more or less explicitly maintained by genuine anarchism is its constant belief that a revolution is just around the corner, and that the instantaneous accomplishment of this revolution will demonstrate the truth of anarchist ideology and of the form of practical organization that has developed in accordance with that ideology. In 1936 anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution, a revolution that was the most advanced expression of proletarian power ever realized. But even in that case it should be noted that the general uprising began as a merely defensive reaction to the army’s attempted coup. Furthermore, inasmuch as the revolution was not carried to completion during its opening days (because Franco controlled half the country and was being strongly supported from abroad, because the rest of the international proletarian movement had already been defeated, and because the anti-Franco camp included various bourgeois forces and statist working-class parties), the organized anarchist movement proved incapable of extending the revolution’s partial victories, or even of defending them. Its recognized leaders became government ministers, hostages to a bourgeois state that was destroying the revolution even as it proceeded to lose the civil war.

95
The “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International is the scientific ideology of socialist revolution, an ideology which identifies its whole truth with objective economic processes and with the progressive recognition of the inevitability of those processes by a working class educated by the organization. This ideology revives the faith in pedagogical demonstration that was found among the utopian socialists, combining that faith with a contemplative invocation of the course of history; but it has lost both the Hegelian dimension of total history and the static image of totality presented by the utopians (most richly by Fourier). This type of scientific attitude, which can do nothing more than resurrect the traditional dilemmas between symmetrical ethical choices, is at the root of Hilferding’s absurd conclusion that recognizing the inevitability of socialism “gives no indication as to what practical attitude should be adopted. For it is one thing to recognize that something is inevitable, and quite another to put oneself in the service of that inevitability” (Finanzkapital). Those who failed to realize that for Marx and for the revolutionary proletariat unitary historical thought was in no way distinct from a practical attitude to be adopted generally ended up becoming victims of the practice they did adopt.

96
The ideology of the social-democratic organizations put those organizations under the control of the professors who were educating the working class, and their organizational forms corresponded to this type of passive apprenticeship. The participation of the socialists of the Second International in political and economic struggles was admittedly concrete, but it was profoundly uncritical. It was a manifestly reformist practice carried on in the name of an illusory revolutionism. This ideology of revolution inevitably foundered on the very successes of those who proclaimed it. The elevation of socialist journalists and parliamentary representatives above the rest of the movement encouraged them to become habituated to a bourgeois lifestyle (most of them had in any case been recruited from the bourgeois intelligentsia). And even industrial workers who had been recruited out of struggles in the factories were transformed by the trade-union bureaucracy into brokers of labor-power, whose task was to make sure that that commodity was sold at a “fair” price. For the activity of all these people to have retained any appearance of being revolutionary, capitalism would have had to have turned out to be conveniently incapable of tolerating this economic reformism, despite the fact that it had no trouble tolerating the legalistic political expressions of the same reformism. The social democrats’ scientific ideology confidently affirmed that capitalism could not tolerate these economic antagonisms; but history repeatedly proved them wrong.

97
Bernstein, the social democrat least attached to political ideology and most openly attached to the methodology of bourgeois science, was honest enough to point out this contradiction (a contradiction which had also been implied by the reformist movement of the English workers, who never bothered to invoke any revolutionary ideology). But it was historical development itself which ultimately provided the definitive demonstration. Although full of illusions in other regards, Bernstein had denied that a crisis of capitalist production would miraculously force the hand of the socialists, who wanted to inherit the revolution only by way of this orthodox sequence of events. The profound social upheaval touched off by World War I, though it led to a widespread awakening of radical consciousness, twice demonstrated that the social-democratic hierarchy had failed to provide the German workers with a revolutionary education capable of turning them into theorists: first, when the overwhelming majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war; then, following the German defeat, when the party crushed the Spartakist revolutionaries. The ex-worker Ebert, who had become one of the social-democratic leaders, apparently still believed in sin since he admitted that he hated revolution “like sin.” And he proved himself a fitting precursor of the socialist representation that was soon to emerge as the mortal enemy of the proletariat in Russia and elsewhere, when he accurately summed up the essence of this new form of alienation: “Socialism means working a lot.”

98
As a Marxist thinker, Lenin was simply a faithful and consistent Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary ideology of “orthodox Marxism” within the conditions existing in Russia, conditions which did not lend themselves to the reformist practice carried on elsewhere by the Second International. In the Russian context, the Bolshevik practice of directing the proletariat from outside, by means of a disciplined underground party under the control of intellectuals who had become “professional revolutionaries,” became a new profession — a profession which refused to come to terms with any of the professional ruling strata of capitalist society (the Czarist political regime was in any case incapable of offering any opportunities for such compromise, which depends on an advanced stage of bourgeois power). As a result of this intransigence, the Bolsheviks ended up becoming the sole practitioners of the profession of totalitarian social domination.

99
With the war and the collapse of international social democracy in the face of that war, the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks was able to spread its influence all over the world. The bloody end of the democratic illusions of the workers movement transformed the entire world into a Russia, and Bolshevism, reigning over the first revolutionary breakthrough engendered by this period of crisis, offered its hierarchical and ideological model to the proletariat of all countries, urging them to adopt it in order to “speak Russian” to their own ruling classes. Lenin did not reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a revolutionary ideology, but for ceasing to be a revolutionary ideology.

100
The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class.

101
“In all previous revolutions,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of 21 December 1918, “the combatants faced each other openly and directly — class against class, program against program. In the present revolution, the troops protecting the old order are not fighting under the insignia of the ruling class, but under the banner of a ‘social-democratic party.’ If the central question of revolution was posed openly and honestly — Capitalism or socialism? — the great mass of the proletariat would today have no doubts or hesitations.” Thus, a few days before its destruction, the radical current of the German proletariat discovered the secret of the new conditions engendered by the whole process that had gone before (a development to which the representation of the working class had greatly contributed): the spectacular organization of the ruling order’s defense, the social reign of appearances where no “central question” can any longer be posed “openly and honestly.” The revolutionary representation of the proletariat had at this stage become both the primary cause and the central result of the general falsification of society.

102
The organization of the proletariat in accordance with the Bolshevik model resulted from the backwardness of Russia and from the abandonment of revolutionary struggle by the workers movements of the advanced countries. These same backward conditions also tended to foster the counterrevolutionary aspects which that form of organization had unconsciously contained from its inception. The repeated failure of the mass of the European workers movement to take advantage of the golden opportunities of the 1918-1920 period (a failure which included the violent destruction of its own radical minority) favored the consolidation of the Bolshevik development and enabled that fraudulent outcome to present itself to the world as the only possible proletarian solution. By seizing a state monopoly as sole representative and defender of working-class power, the Bolshevik Party justified itself and became what it already was: the party of the owners of the proletariat, owners who essentially eliminated earlier forms of property.

103
For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social democracy had engaged in an unresolved debate over all the conditions that might bear on the overthrow of Czarism — the weakness of the bourgeoisie; the preponderance of the peasant majority; and the potentially decisive role of a proletariat which was concentrated and combative but which constituted only a small minority of the population. This debate was eventually resolved in practice by a factor that had not figured in any of the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy that placed itself at the head of the proletariat, seized state power and proceeded to impose a new form of class domination. A strictly bourgeois revolution had been impossible; talk of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” was meaningless verbiage; and the proletarian power of the soviets could not simultaneously maintain itself against the class of small landowners, against the national and international White reaction, and against its own representation which had become externalized and alienated in the form of a working-class party that maintained total control over the state, the economy, the means of expression, and soon even over people’s thoughts. Trotsky’s and Parvus’s theory of permanent revolution, which Lenin adopted in April 1917, was the only theory that proved true for countries with underdeveloped bourgeoisies; but it became true only after the unknown factor of bureaucratic class power came into the picture. In the numerous arguments within the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin was the most consistent advocate of concentrating dictatorial power in the hands of this supreme ideological representation. Lenin was right every time in the sense that he invariably supported the solution implied by earlier choices of the minority that now exercised absolute power: the democracy that was kept from peasants by means of the state would have to be kept from workers as well, which led to denying it to Communist union leaders and to party members in general, and finally to the highest ranks of the party hierarchy. At the Tenth Congress, as the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried under a barrage of slander, Lenin attacked the radical-left bureaucrats who had formed a “Workers’ Opposition” faction with the following ultimatum, the logic of which Stalin would later extend to an absolute division of the world: “You can stand here with us, or against us out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some opposition. . . . We’ve had enough opposition.”

104
After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy consolidated its power as sole owner of a system of state capitalism — internally by means of a temporary alliance with the peasantry (the “New Economic Policy”) and externally by using the workers regimented into the bureaucratic parties of the Third International as a backup force for Russian diplomacy, sabotaging the entire revolutionary movement and supporting bourgeois governments whose support it in turn hoped to secure in the sphere of international politics (the Kuomintang regime in the China of 1925-27, the Popular Fronts in Spain and France, etc.). The Russian bureaucracy then carried this consolidation of power to the next stage by subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror, implementing the most brutal primitive accumulation of capital in history. The industrialization of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society: commodified labor. It also demonstrated the independence of the economy: the economy has come to dominate society so completely that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs for its own continued operation; that is, the bourgeoisie has created an independent power that is capable of maintaining itself even without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy was not “the last owning class in history” in Bruno Rizzi’s sense; it was merely a substitute ruling class for the commodity economy. An impotent capitalist property system was replaced by a cruder version of itself — simplified, less diversified, and concentrated as the collective property of the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped type of ruling class is also a reflection of economic underdevelopment, and it has no agenda beyond overcoming this underdevelopment in certain regions of the world. The hierarchical and statist framework for this crude remake of the capitalist ruling class was provided by the working-class party, which was itself modeled on the hierarchical separations of bourgeois organizations. As Ante Ciliga noted while in one of Stalin’s prisons, “Technical questions of organization turned out to be social questions” (Lenin and the Revolution).

105
Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology — a coherence of the separate governing a reality that resisted it. With the advent of Stalinism, revolutionary ideology returned to its fundamental incoherence. At that point, ideology was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane. The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it says exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle has been confined to certain underdeveloped regions, it has nevertheless played an essential role in the spectacle’s global development. This particular materialization of ideology did not transform the world economically, as did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state methods to transform people’s perception of the world.

106
The ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler of a world turned upside down. The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this fundamental contradiction.

107
Stalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class itself, because this class has no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized status as an owning class which could be extended to each of its members. Its ownership has to be masked because it is based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they have to play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they have to be actors faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet they cannot actually participate in this counterfeit entity unless their legitimacy is validated. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracy’s official line is that there is no bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy — who should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded “a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The atomized bureaucrats can find their collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin — the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as the absolute person, for whom no superior spirit exists. “The lord of the world recognizes his own nature — omnipresent power — through the destructive violence he exerts against the contrastingly powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that defines the terrain of domination, and he is also “the power that ravages that terrain.”

108
When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and has changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police. The project already envisioned by Napoleon of “monarchically controlling memory” has been realized in Stalinism’s constant rewriting of the past, which alters not only the interpretations of past events but even the events themselves. But the price paid for this liberation from all historical reality is the loss of the rational frame of reference that is indispensable to capitalism as a historical social system. The Lysenko fiasco is just one well-known example of how much the scientific application of ideology gone mad has cost the Russian economy. This contradiction — the fact that a totalitarian bureaucracy trying to administer an industrialized society is caught between its need for rationality and its repression of rationality — is also one of its main weaknesses in comparison with normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the question of agriculture as ordinary capitalism has done, it also proves inferior to the latter in the field of industrial production, because its unrealistic authoritarian planning is based on omnipresent falsifications.

109
Between the two world wars the revolutionary working-class movement was destroyed by the joint action of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism (the latter’s organizational form having been inspired by the totalitarian party that had first been tested and developed in Russia). Fascism was a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention. But this rationalization is hampered by the extreme irrationality of its methods. Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movement’s failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is — a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus a significant factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.

110
When the Russian bureaucracy has finally succeeded in doing away with the vestiges of bourgeois property that hampered its rule over the economy, and in developing this economy for its own purposes, and in being recognized as a member of the club of great powers, it wants to enjoy its world in peace and to disencumber itself from the arbitrariness to which it is still subjected. It thus denounces the Stalinism at its origin. But this denunciation remains Stalinist — arbitrary, unexplained, and subject to continual modification — because the ideological lie at its origin can never be revealed. The bureaucracy cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically because its existence as a class depends on its ideological monopoly, which, for all its cumbersomeness, is its sole title to power. This ideology has lost the passion of its original expression, but its passionless routinization still has the repressive function of controlling all thought and prohibiting any competition whatsoever. The bureaucracy is thus helplessly tied to an ideology that is no longer believed by anyone. The power that used to inspire terror now inspires ridicule, but this ridiculed power still defends itself with the threat of resorting to the terrorizing force it would like to be rid of. Thus, at the very time when the bureaucracy hopes to demonstrate its superiority on the terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to be a poor cousin of capitalism. Just as its actual history contradicts its façade of legality and its crudely maintained ignorance contradicts its scientific pretensions, so its attempt to vie with the bourgeoisie in the production of commodity abundance is stymied by the fact that such abundance contains its own implicit ideology, and is generally accompanied by the freedom to choose from an unlimited range of spectacular pseudoalternatives — a pseudofreedom that remains incompatible with the bureaucracy’s ideology.

111
The bureaucracy’s ideological title to power is already collapsing at the international level. The power that established itself nationally in the name of an ostensibly internationalist perspective is now forced to recognize that it can no longer impose its system of lies beyond its own national borders. The unequal economic development of diverse bureaucracies with competing interests that have succeeded in establishing their own “socialism” in more than one country has led to an all-out public confrontation between the Russian lie and the Chinese lie. From this point on, each bureaucracy in power will have to find its own way; and the same is true for each of the totalitarian parties aspiring to such power (notably those that still survive from the Stalinist period among certain national working classes). This international collapse has been further aggravated by the expressions of internal negation which first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of steel workers” — a negation which has in one case already gone to the point of sovereign workers councils in Hungary. But in the final analysis, this crumbling of the global alliance of pseudosocialist bureaucracies is also a most unfavorable development for the future of capitalist society. The bourgeoisie is in the process of losing the adversary that objectively supported it by providing an illusory unification of all opposition to the existing order. This division of labor between two mutually reinforcing forms of the spectacle comes to an end when the pseudorevolutionary role in turn divides. The spectacular component of the destruction of the working-class movement is itself headed for destruction.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

Currently still convalescing from the intensive twelve year MFA program from which I graduated in the early 1990’s, and therefore still too delicate to write fiction of my own, I’ve dedicated my life to helping undergraduates tell their own stories. Well, I suppose I should say ’story’ as there’s really only one: It’s the tale of ‘No Name Depresso who lives Nowhere and has Nothing to Say.’ Occasionally, ‘No Name’ is called ‘Sarah’ or “Magda’ and has either an eating or multiple personality disorder. No Name, Sarah, and Magda are always sad and sometimes angry, but never hungry or happy. And it just so happens that all three girls, as well as all their multiple personalities, want to be writers. The young men have stories too, and it isn’t fair to pretend they don’t. These range from “My character who is not me got drunk and peed in a trash can” to “He watched with parched lips as the figure in blue lowered its musket.” Both genders contribute narratives about cyborgs, vampires, and Jesus, sometimes combining them into a kind of wacky postmodern Mod Squad.

For the most part, though, I enjoy the young writers and the cozy hostility of the ‘workshop’ environment in which we sit in a circle and eviscerate the silent author. My role is that of moderator, like James Lipton on “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” and I like to think that I share something of his startling (terrifying) composure. Even during the minor uprising against the quiet lisping young woman who’d written a fifty-page account of a Mormon missionary named Finnegan O’Malley entitled ‘The Sign of the Albatross,” I maintained my usual intense preternatural calm.

“Yes. It is somewhat improbable that Finnegan’s mission would have taken him to Moline, Illinois, but it’s also not implausible that this particular Moline might exist in some parallel universe, yes?”

I “share” my position as enabler of creativity with a colleague, which means that after years of being paid 98 cents a week to urge affable hung-over fraternity brothers to think of themselves as a ‘community of writers’ we were brought up out of the basement, relieved of Freshman Composition and the Bartlebyish title of ‘adjunct lecturer.’ To keep costs down, we were however reconfigured as “one person,” which meant that Monica, bright, sharp, and professional down to her stylish black boots, had overnight grown a comparatively idiotic Siamese twin. My other half casually took over the college literary magazine, which obediently turned over and won two national awards, writes and publishes screeds of her delightful poetry, and allows students (more than one at a time) to come to her lovely house where she provides them with food and love and support and her charming attorney husband with bail and DWI counsel. I still won’t let students come anywhere near my house because I don’t want them spilling red wine on the carpet.

Aside from sharing a position, I also share an office, this with my husband, who got me the damn job in the first place. He is rumored to be brilliant, despite his remarking to me the other day at breakfast that, when you think about it, human beings were never really meant to walk upright. Since it’s not enough for him to be brilliant on his own, he arranges for other brilliant people to come give literary readings.

The problem is that I never seem to want to attend any such gatherings. Our historic campus has a lovely, formal room in which to honor its visiting poets and writers and thinkers. It’s called The Oak Room and it has a crimson carpet and a glass chandelier, nineteenth century windows, and leather couches upon which the students recline slack-jawed with literary feeling. We the faculty sit trapped on folding chairs in the middle of the room balancing cups of fermented apple juice on our knees and gazing with eager idiocy at the speaker, in one memorable instance a Pulitzer prize winning poet who insinuated (in Latin and from beneath frosted swags of hair) that we were all a bunch of morons. In my darkest moments, while I’m sipping my fizzy apple nectar and nibbling on a silence shattering Japanese rice cracker, watching my students undulate on the couches and my colleagues emit rays of psychic intellectual kinship with the drone at the podium, I have to fight the impulse to confess my own doltish incomprehension, to shout, with feeling, “OOGA-BOOGA! OOGA-BOOGA!”

I am also somewhat limited as a professor of literature insofar as I can only teach one novel. Indeed, no matter what the course, or what is on the syllabus, I inevitably bring the discussion around to Dracula. “Suppose,” I say in hushed tones to a startled group of freshman, “Emily Dickinson was to have entertained Dracula in her bedroom in Amherst. The Count may have flown at her window, a great black New England moth, and thwumped the glass with his wings. ‘It’s Nature, Baby. Let me in!’” Then I’ll try desperately to get back to “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.” It’s the domestic side of Dracula that I personally find so adorable, despite the hairy palms. “And yet, he’s still scary as Hell,” I’ll re-inform my confused students, having digressed mightily from Heart of Darkness. “Why just last night I was afraid to get up and go to the bathroom because I thought Dracula was hiding behind the shower curtain!”

They think I’m joking.

Nonetheless, my reputation as a teacher has taken a wrong turn. The rumor that I’m “crazy” is something I’ve only recently discovered myself on RateMyProfessors.com. But if I were really “crazy” would I sit up there on the desk, swinging my feet, sipping my decaf latte, telling my bright-eyed freshman that “the word on the street is that I’m a lunatic, but you’ve got to be nuts to read The Awakening! Heh, heh, heh!” A few laugh back, nervously. (English is funny!) The rest copy the lunatic speech down in their notebooks verbatim and repeat it robotically at their Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings. Secretly, I’ve stopped reading contemporary fiction, fiction written by adults (in general), poetry of any kind, especially non-rhyming, critical essays, the New York Times, and all the classics (except Pride and Prejudice). That leaves me with Heloise’s Household Hints and Harry Potter, which I find is all I really need in life. I’m afraid I’ll be found out though. Already, my professionalism is, I am certain, being called into question by gimlet-eyed youngsters who come to class in their underwear.

They have cause. I remember one soft, autumn morning, a Tuesday, Tuesdays being reserved for scholarly research, along with Thursdays and Fridays, when I stood barefoot in the vegetable garden drinking coffee and feeling the breeze ripple gently under my nightgown. I had just begun to consider the possibility of planting ornamental cabbages when there sounded, from inside the house, an agitated ringing. With a dawning sense of urgency, precipitated by the memory of the twenty-seven student conferences I’d scheduled for my Introduction to Literature class, I rushed hobblety hoi across the lawn, dodging hickory nuts and angry squirrels, and burst into the kitchen.

“Hello,” I gasped.

“Hello,” I answered myself suavely, “I’m not home right now but if you leave your name, number . . .”

An accusing voice cut across my own: “Professor? This is Courtney K? I’m waiting outside your office? I had a 9:15 conference?”

“Courtney! I’m so sorry! I don’t know what day it is!”

“. . .I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” (Liberty Bell theme from Monty Python blares, ends with simulacra of flatulence). A moment of silence followed. Then, “I’ve got it,” in a low sinister tone.

“Pardon?”

“My essay on the Sun Also Rises?”

“Well done,” I said heartily. “Maybe we could just discuss it over the phone.” It has often occurred to me that this might not be a bad way to conduct literary business. Students could wait outside my office door and I could speak to them from my kitchen over some sort of speakerphone contraption. “Read me your thesis.”

“My what?”

“Your opening paragraph.”

“Modernism is a time of great upheaval and war and the taking down of all kinds of architecture and even changes in literature. Including Ernest Hemingway. When Jake tells Beth he loves her in the dark in Paris he is secretly mourning his lost impotence.”

“Never mind,” I told her, merrily. “Why don’t you just slip your essay under my door and I’ll write it myself as usual.”

“Look, you’d better get over here,” she announced grimly, “Everybody’s waiting for you.”

They were. I had to step over a mass of student bodies lying like wounded soldiers in the little hallway. A weak cry went up as I arrived and they rattled their essays at me, shaking them like empty cups. “Ah! The great unwashed! The teeming hordes of humanity,” I cried to them gaily. Then, head down and heedless to their protests, I hurdled my way into the office (I believe I had changed out of my nightgown but please don’t press me on this point) and locked myself inside. Bozo, a life sized inflated replica of the famous clown (my fifteenth wedding anniversary gift to my husband), stood by my desk, and I was thankful that someone was in charge. And yet, I’m not sure that he can keep covering for me.

Take last week, for example, (it was yesterday really, which is why I’m sitting here in the dark quiet of my basement curled up against the water heater) when a nice red headed young man in my advanced fiction writing class finally managed to catch me off guard. I had asked him to read aloud from his work in progress and he kindly obliged, narrating, in a thin, pleasant voice, the story of American dentist who takes his teenage son to Amsterdam as a graduation present. I was nodding along, lazily contemplating the way late afternoon sunlight illuminated the beer colored highlights in his hair and imagining a story in which a blue figure with a musket fires indiscriminately upon a group of depressed young women while an albatross with a crucifix around its neck wheels lazily overheard, when I suddenly and inexplicably began listening. “Hold it,” I said. “What was that about a nude dancer on a revolving table?”

It would seem that father and son, after smoking some hashish at a little bar on a cobbled street, venture out to see a sex show, whereupon the two of them, dizzy from observing the spinning, gyrating dancers, look at each other, roll their eyes, and throw up.

“They both have weak stomachs,” explained the young man earnestly. “It’s what finally brings them together.”

For many reasons, none of which I care to explain, I felt unable to respond with anything but a hideous giggle. The students, most of them solid, stolid, good girls and boys from the Midwest attempted to cover for me.

“Illness as metaphor?” suggested an ambiguously gendered individual in a ski cap and dark glasses.

“Or perhaps,” announced a rectangular-headed young man, presumably but not definitively a football player, “they’re vomiting up their own evil natures.” He catches my eye. “Like in Dracula.”

“But what I’d like to know,” I said, looking around brightly, “is if the two of them threw up in unison, you know, like synchronized swimmers?”

The students watched me politely for many minutes, these sad mute children of the corn, before, with hysterical gestures I finally managed to wave them away.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

This week’s podcast features an interview/panel discussion with the fine people at Better Bad News. It also features a podcast sound collage with Slavoj Zizek, Jason Horsley, Robert Scheer from Truthdig, and his holiness Osho Rajneesh. Mother Teresa should jump in a lake. Also there is music from Chris “Isto” White and a Titanic factoid from Miriam. Download the podcast from dietsoap.podomatic.com or subscribe at iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

This week’s podcast features an interview with author and publisher Richard Grossinger, and we discuss his books Waiting for the Martian Express, and the Bardo of Waking Life. We also discuss President Obama, President Bush, Yeats, the American Avant Garde of the 40s and 50s, and Zest Soap. Mr. Grossinger also discusses other titles published by North Atlantic Books, the publishing house he founded in 1974. This week also features a voicemail from listener and organic dairy farmer Terry I, music from Negativland, and a Titanic factoid. Check out the new dietsoap youtube videos. Oh. And France. Download the podcast from dietsoap.podomatic.com, or subscribe at iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at The Fiction of Douglas Lain. You can comment here or there.

Here’s an excerpt from a story I’m working on.

It’s still amazing what can fit in your pocket these days, but while standard computing and gaming devices like iPhones and Mini-Wii systems continue to dominate the market, the most expensive and advanced personal computing device, the Time Box, has had a rough couple of months. Both the recent problems with the marketing and introduction of Box3.0 which met with less than the projected demand, and the chorus of consumer complaints that the Time Box version of history is too self-contained and static ( for instance, thousands have written to the company and complained that their visits and revisits to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland always concluded with the Titanic sinking), has led to a downturn in the company’s stock. While educators, science fiction fans, and historical hook-up artists are still purchasing the box, the company must do something to increase sales beyond these niches, and the company is pinning its future to the hope that version 4.0 will reinvigorate sales. The new Box includes many features consumers have come to expect with hand held computational devices like the Box. Partnering with Sprint and Dell, the new Box will allow customers to make cellular calls from the past, to maintain an internet connection as long as one is within the last thousand years of history, and to photograph and video tape both past events and encounters with what everyone agrees is an ever expanding present. –The WSJ, December 20th, 2013

If anyone needed more proof that the gadget driven marketing scam that was the American Empire died years ago, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should serve. Nintendo, Time Warner, and Apple computers have all backed off their various offers to buy out Time Box incorporated, and while it’s hard to fathom that the product may suffer the same fate as Betamax and electric cars, in a world where people have no history let alone a future it’s conceivable. The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War Buffs.

Originally published at The Fiction of Douglas Lain. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at The Fiction of Douglas Lain. You can comment here or there.

This week’s episode does not feature an interview with a guest, but instead is a collaged plea to reject Capitalism. I read from Larry Law’s chapbook series from the early 80s entitled the Spectacular Times and collage together several voices from several podcasts including NPR’s Planet Money, KMO’s C-Realm, the Alan Watt’s podcast, and Dennis Perrin’s video blog among others. The Music of Chris “Isto” White is featured, once again, as well as a Titanic Factoid from Miriam. Please download the episode from dietsoap.podomatic.com, or subscribe from iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

Author and philosopher Ben Burgis is this week’s guest on episode # 25 of the Diet Soap podcast. Burgis discusses paraconsistent logic, Greg Egan’s collection Dark Integers and Other Stories, and the recent alien invasion. His story “Sing, Goddess, Sing Me to the Stars” is presented in a condensed form, and this week’s collage includes cuttings from the Jerry Lentz podcast and the C-Realm Podcast. Music from Chris “Isto” White is included, along with Chopin, Idle, Seeger, and many other composers and musicians. You can download this podcast at dietsoap.podomatic.com or subscribe from iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.