Becoming Otherwise Occupied

[Written for Eastside radio 87.9FM's Something Else program. Available to listen here, produced by Lauren Carroll Harris.]

In August 2011 I was lying on a hotel bed in Nashville, Tennessee sending a desperate text message: Aaaarg, you who occupy me so! The response I’d be stinging for arrived the next morning in an email, it’s essence encapsulated in the line: Don’t occupy yourself with me! In emotionally vexed moments like this I always write to Fred, who was in Sydney, and he offered this consolation: When I was running in the beautiful spring evening I had the thought that one’s love is always in excess of oneself, and therefore accurately describable as something that one occupies or inhabits, rather than possesses.

When Occupy Wall Street began in September 2011 I felt it as a set of talismanic co-incidences projecting directly onto a longing now dislocated back to Sydney. And so in October, when Occupy Sydney arrived, it was for me already conjugated by love in an uncanny and narcissistic manner. Compared to collective global struggles the banality of my romantic ego seems irrelevant, offensive even, the tedium of a private privilege that has nothing else to do except gratify its infatuations. I’m reminded of what Jenny Marx said after first encountering the Parisian bourgeoisie when her and Karl first moved to the city in the 1840′s: they have nothing to do but obsess about their love.

To be sure, my particular love woes are utterly insignificant, as are yours, but that doesn’t make the question of love insignificant to politics. One of the things Occupy taught me was that I can’t dissociate my politics from my love. Although I believe both commitments to be sincere, I cannot honestly distinguish the desire to Occupy as a political commitment from the desire to become otherwise occupied by love. I’ve come to think that love is at the centre of any real politics, and that true politics can never completely distinguish between nor absolutely align its commitment to others and its commitment to who it loves. When private love is staged directly in relation to a political movement we are compelled to ask a significant question: how do we invent systems that extend love’s generosity beyond the limits of the people who we love?

Our love, in the sense of saying to someone I love you, is a love that is privileged and private, something reserved for the few, and the infinite generosity of our love is exclusive, it’s only for them. This private and exclusive privilege of love explicitly contradicts a politics that is public and inclusive and underprivileged. Here I think about the love my parents have for me, a private, exclusive and privileged love in which I have been provided with endless opportunity. And I think the same when I look at my nephew, how he must think that the entire world exists for him to extract maximum benefit from it. But of course, like most families, my family are inclusive and extensive in their generosity to their friends and to my friends. And this is something like the defining attribute of exclusive love, if you find yourself inside the privilege then it’s pure and open generosity. But everything turns on this if. The purist experience of communism I’ve had has been in the bosom of privilege provisioned by capitalism. Indeed, my life could reasonably be described as a mobile commune funded by capital. And not only my life, right?

I saw a sticker on a car recently that put it nicely: Fuck your family. This is a far more political statement than any sticker that garishly announces its politics, because it scandalises the sacred cow of political discourse, that thing which everyone apparently agrees upon: that one’s family is the most important thing in all the cosmos. That as an individual you can and must do everything for your family, and that doing what must be done for them, no matter what, is justified. And as a corollary of that, what society must do is support families by either helping them out or getting out of their way as they express their natural and inalienable and incontestable rights to be just what they are. A brief encounter with political discourse would leave you with the impression that this thing called society has changed its name to economy and that this entity is made up of a conglomeration of working families. If you drink enough of this diet-discourse you might conveniently forget that global financial capitalism was the controlling agent. I would like to propose a sibling car sticker to Fuck your family, which says: Fuck your Love. Fuck, that most malleable of words, would in this case be a metonym for politics, and we could effectively translate this as: Politicise your Love. Or again: Politicise Love.

The problem of privileged love is, of course, internal to capitalism, and capitalism is that system which perfects the art of love for the few at the expense of the many. Those strange medieval and metaphysical creatures known as corporations are the exemplary models of this art of inequality. But it’s important to remember that love’s privileging is not exclusive to capitalism, it existed long before it and will survive it. Against the cynicism that is so easy to mobilize I find myself wanting to say something optimistic yet pragmatic and true: Love precedes capitalism and will survive it.

We perhaps find ourselves wishing that we could either sever or align love and politics. That is to say, we wish we could sever the relationship between exclusive love and the exploitation of others, and we wish we could align our love to include the excluded and exploited. This, we might hope, would resolve the contradiction. But the presence of contradiction is absolutely crucial and this resolution is in fact impossible. Contradiction, like love, is a sure sign that politics is truly present. Remember how after the Berlin Wall fell they said, market capitalism has prevailed, there are no longer any systemic contradictions, there will be one system to rule them all and it will contain and resolve all its contradictions. This is the end of politics, they said. Of course, now they admit they were wrong. The question is, therefore, not about the resolution of contradiction but rather the full articulation of contradictions so that the anarchic principle at the heart of democracy may express itself, and that this expression would become the polis. This would not be the democracy we know but would be another democracy, the democracy to come, one perhaps closer to the political model Occupy was experimenting with.

But, of course, you can’t really love everyone. I was once in love with someone who tried to live the infinite extension of love. It was intoxicating, the richest kind of social giving, but it was self-destructive and disastrous. They spoke about how it obliterated their person-hood, and it was a big part of our unravelling. So there is and there must be a limit to your love. Yet there is in the experience of love a movement that absolutely exceeds oneself, as Fred said, one’s love is always in excess of oneself. We are never more threatening to our limitations than when moved by love, and the threat, which is also a promise, is one of global transformation. It’s this transformative affect of love’s movement that I want to extract and place at the centre of my concept of political love. If you are falling in love, or your love is breaking apart, the deepest sense of your self-organisation is threatened with total transformation. You will be someone different after this. When my one significant experience of love was breaking, I felt a level of self-exposure that was in fact a death experience. In the most painful way I understood Rimbaud’s famous line: Je est une Autre. I is an other. Later, having come to terms with the fact that love’s apocalypse is never the absolute death it initially seems, we said of our love that we had given each other the gift of our adult selves. The experience of long love, as it always is, was utterly transformative.

I have spoken about the love that is one’s own, but we are never the origin of our love. Love’s movement always comes from outside ourselves and for this reason is a divine force. Love itself is not, as in Greek mythology, a god per se, a god who might seek praise in return for good favour, but is rather a spirit who gifts to mortal life the apex of its experience. Although peerless, the gift that is given is not Love itself because Love itself is impersonal and cannot be given to our experience. Yet the gift remains singular. Put in terms of mythology: think of Cupid, the Roman god. Cupid does not give himself to us but rather shoots an arrow at us, and in loosing his bow he initiates an unparalleled motion from the universal to the singular and from the singular to the universal. It is a shocking movement that comes from beyond us, pricks us, floods the nervous system, burning a passage through the body, firing the neurons, flushing bone on the way back to the skin, leaving us occupied, haunted and attached to its trajectory. What becomes our love is a sort of witness to the sense-experience of this movement that gives more pleasure than any other conceivable action, which is neither ours to refuse nor ours to own, precisely because it exceeds us. Its double movement shudders through the core of the creature at the same time as it retains its impersonal force, that which, owing to its premium intensity, is simultaneously the thing most personal to us yet does not belong to us at all. This then is Love’s paradox, it’s both totally narcissistic and absolutely selfless.

Love shares the following quality with those brave and silly souls who threw themselves into Occupy Sydney: it is something most personal to us yet it does not belong to us at all. You cannot own a movement, even if you happen to be at its centre. Love and Occupy also share the character of being an infinite and impossible demand. One morning down in Martin Place a lady walking past said to someone I’d like to support you but I don’t know what it’s for. This was the criticism repeated ceaselessly: you don’t have any demands. The demand for a demand is what’s expected in return for tolerating protest. Tell us what you want and we will say no and then you will go away. But Occupy, like the declaration of love, is not a protest with a time limit, it’s an occupation with no time limit. You don’t say to your lover, I love you until I get what I demand, you say I love you and the declaration is infinite and also impossible. You cannot guarantee this declaration I love you, but without this declaration, there can be no love. We do not make the declaration to Occupy because we can guarantee that things will change, and in this sense, revolution is like an object of infatuation, you will never have known if the revolution was real until afterwards, perhaps never. But certainly, there will be no revolution without this declaration.

In the face of love’s transformation we can feel cautious and self-protective, we are unsure of ourselves: is this just infatuation? We will never have had enough time to distinguish our true love from our delusions, but for the transformation to take place we must embody the possibility that is given in the promise. Occupy, also, can never know if it’s momentum is or has been truly transformational, it’s politics is prefigurative, it tries to embody the kind of change it wants to see in the world rather than politely request change to the powers that be. This prefiguration takes the form of a horizontal structural, an artifice that is an experiment in extending love’s generosity beyond the limits of the people and things that we love.

The anti-hierarchy of the general assembly is relentlessly inclusive and requires a forgotten patience in a world where we have outsourced difficult collective decisions to representatives. The Occupy process is difficult, inefficient, tiresome, plodding and messy. But the presence of mess, like contradiction, is a necessary condition of democracy. If your love is clean then it is short. The time of mess is essential. If there is no time for the people to decide then there is no democracy, as the people of Greece know: the slow time of democracy and the fast time of global financial capital are not compatible, in fact, directly at odds.

Needless to say, the slow time of direct democracy is a tough love. Love, I hope you understand, is not soft, although it contains softness. It is not effusive, unifying and orgiastic. The intimacy of a hug is important, but it will not be by hugging everyone that we tame global capitalism. The love I speak of is difficult, severe and rigorous. It is vehement, even violent. It comes at the greatest of costs, a cost that I for one have never had the courage to pay. I think once again of Jenny Marx. She who was a Baroness and fell in love with the son of a Jew, and who’s love lived on the promise of a book, a book that would catalyse and frame the revolution. This book missed its revolution by nearly two decades and it was not in the end the revolution that was promised. She whose love was giving everything to others, at the expense of her life, which was one of exile, poverty and lost children. She whose love was a faith bound to Karl and the promise of a book and the cause. But no matter how deeply in debt, no matter how distant the prospect of revolution seemed, Jenny Marx welcomed every exile and comrade into their home, fed them and helped them on their way. The home of the Marx’s was a place where the generosity of love was always extended beyond the limits of the family. Jenny Marx knew best what it was to live a life of political love, and exactly how much it costs.

The School of Cosmic Realism

14. (Vivace)

Did you hear the one about the orientals who own the moon, the Spanish who own the lyric atmosphere, the indigenous whose songs own the long sentence and the English language that owns everything else? I forget the details but I remember the moral was make sense, and love making it, or fuck off. The antidote to the undue influence of billionaires is more billionaires, so I’ll see your Palmer, Tinkler, Forrest and Reinhart and raise you a Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg and Buffet. Actually, come to think of it, the question of billionaires is a glaring omission from this clash of fundamentalisms. Straight off the bat I have to say how great it is to hear the Cardinal talking about the bodily assumption on live television. If your concept of heaven limits me to a human body then your heaven can suck my balls. Any heaven worth its salt would have open metamorphoses and free temporary transmigration as an entry level privilege. The ridicule of secularists is water off a duck’s back if only you could promise me the experience of being the duck and the water off its back. I’m barking up the wrong tree here but when we get to preparing the alter boys with a concept of Hell that repeatedly falls into a Hitler-trap of its own making, it’s clear we’re talking seriously light-weight theology. But still, to be live on television and suggest, even in the absence of meaning to, that real presence is neither literal nor metaphoric but metaphysical, well now, could that be a true revelation about this supernatural medium, this information temporality we’re locked in? As expected, the bitchy atheist is having none of it: I’m trying to be charitable, you can’t possibly mean that, and now he’s yelling what’s so funny about that!? at the crowd-planted Catholic youth who like the rest of us are enjoying his attempt to define nothing. If I die and my soul becomes a Tweet it will Tweet: My metaphors bring all the boys to the yard, and they’re like, they’re better than yours. Damn right, they’re better metaphors. I could teach you, but I’d have to charge. But uh, shit, that’s thirty characters too many.

The School of Cosmic Realism

13. (Allegro)

It’s so far up my alley you’ll need the torches of convenience to find it, the ones that are always burning and never run out, unless the god Plot should desire it. Sex scenes double as back-story filler, the money we save not doing battle scenes goes into costume and set design. It was very thoughtful of the medieval world to light itself with the future of television in mind. Of all the false historicisms that can be packed into a single crack-hit, are the cliches about feudal violence the most objectionable? The stylised sound-gore of the blade in a world where only Sean Bean is not resigned to ceaseless brutality, and for which, naturally, he will be decapitated. It’s not merely fantasy but is more properly science fiction, where one has the impression of a fictive, foreign world, seen by other creatures, but also the presentiment that this world is already ours, and those creatures, ourselves. Watching you watch your dad’s head being cut-off and then being forced to see it rotting on a stake, I’m now sure this sort of thing was a daily occurrence for millennia, as old as steel and megalomania. Medieval violence is fine for some unless they show what they actually did, but can we imagine a subject who was in charge of their own life, who controlled the production of their economic livelihood, and in return received protection for more or less reasonable taxation and the occasional ostentatious display of fealty? If that seems more sophistry than simulated ignorance then what about this one: could Aristotle look at a modern citizen who was fully indebted to financial systems, whose entire labouring life was spent repaying their debts, and conclude that they were not slaves? I know we don’t usually do Aristotle on Sunday afternoons Daddy, but I thought it would be fun to take him to a football game, see what he thinks of the spectacle.

The School of Cosmic Realism

12. (Vivace)

I’ve long toyed with the idea of starting a school of cosmic realism. Kirsten Dunst will be my exemplary student. We won’t have a motto, just a basic stick structure to hold hands and huddle under when Melancholia hits, and the obligation to experience the end-times as the beautiful weather event that they are. The only requirement for admission is to answer one question: Does the fact that everyone will die at the same time make you feel better or worse about dying, and what are the aesthetic implications of this? I realise that it’s going to be difficult to distinguish our school from a host of other long-established and more reputable institutions, and that accounts for why we’ve struggled to get beyond the speculative phase. But now the apocalypse is really here it’s far too late to be initiating complicated bureaucracies, and that will be our competitive advantage, to have started a school when there was no time for it. Securing a bourgeois premises with a golf course will be easy since most one percenters have chosen suicide with pills in the stables, although for us cosmic realists this kind of ending is a really bad dad joke. Our strength derives from the extra-sensory yet deeply sensual intuition that the question of significance has to be a cosmic question if it is to mean anything at all. You’re boss will be the best man at your wedding, in fact you’ll still be working, harangued by an underling all night long for a tag line. Later you’ll fuck this boy on the eighteenth green and he’ll propose a rival business venture. The nearer the fly-by planet gets the more fashionable our brand of cosmic realism becomes. Clearly, if your brand is on people’s mind as the apocalypse arrives, you win.

The School of Cosmic Realism

11. (Andante)

Conservative poets are notorious sticklers for hunt etiquette so I’ll rock my scarlet pinques with black breeches and dress boots for tonight’s game. Culinary ignorance requires cat lovers to wear a tweed ratcatcher all season but as the resident dogmatic Marxist I have to say your desire to define game as a flavour is just petty bourgeois materialism. All this game-foxing clearly violates my poethics of sequential meaning, that is to say: any event of language which I can’t understand is at best feeling guilty about jerking off and at worst publicly advocating genocide. In this next sentence I will contradict my functionalist ethics by punching you in the face. Imperial Pelvis is probably my favourite DJ coming out of the Atlantic Boing movement, have you head of it? It sounds like a blue whale mated with a sperm whale and produced offspring whose song is the lament of a creature for whom no possible mate exists. But they always say that about genres, don’t they, that they have no future? Frankly, I’d sooner go body-surfing with hard-right Catholics than continue this dog lovers discourse where books substitute for coffee dates and sex. It’s the same people who drive souped-up Holdens to eco-poetics conferences in Queensland and whose sad atheism sequences the game whose outcome we previously intended.

The School of Cosmic Realism

10. (allegro)

The vagueness of this notional outside accounts for the somnambulist, but the burning question my friends is whether you feel you have been given this time or whether you have chosen it? A good rule of thumb I’ve found is this: if you remember anything at all, remember that not being able to forget is utterly debilitating. A better rule of thumb I figured out yesterday is: if you can’t work out the erotics of this experience then you’ll end up doing a lot of wanking. Ignore the cabinet of cynics, her majesty the Queen (no, not that one) has a new chap book coming out that eloquently differentiates being given from having chosen. Forgive my improper sprechen my friends, it’s just that I’m sad we can’t go binge-drinking in Second Life and I want to acknowledge the concept of a heated argument even at the risk of fisticuffs. Good friends can exchange firm blows without loving an ounce less. I found an old how-to manual in a box in the garage and it said: Without a bit of vehemence, the bankers will keep fucking us. In that case, I’m not leaving until the whiskey bottle is bone dry. Have you noticed how many of these old things lying on the ground are turning out to be prophetic? It may have been something you said, but a drunken Muppet turned on us with aggressive lyricism, saying Look mate, four hundred metres of electrical tape is a shit load in anyone’s language! We could have argued the point but that would have involved his apocalyptic mistress, and she was already enraged by the ethically-driven theft of her shoulder cat. I like animals as much as the next animal but the subtle and peculiar policing methods required to settle this dispute are only moderately compelling, so I’d like it if we went home now, please?

The School of Cosmic Realism

9. (allegro)

While saying they were born is plain wrong, invented perhaps overstates the role of the human, so let’s say that synthesizers were latent potentia until the day two friends walking down an alley pinged a football between brick walls and were stupefied by the reverberation. Of course it was the dork behind the wall and not the dumb haptic jocks who began ruminating upon the aural phenomenon. It seems you’ve thrown down the semantic gauntlet with: two’s right to charge ey, thank you very much, challenging us to imagine six different contexts in which this would be a meaningful utterance. The scenario of a man sitting in the control room of a steel works operating the blast furnace is fanciful, to say the least, but not entirely unworthy of the fluro men who chisel authentic speech-acts from the marble of muteness. The penny really started to drop around the same time as the bomb and so like most things has to be historized in relation to it. Rock puritanism was not even alive and already it was turning in its grave, grinding its teeth down to the blunt stubs and bleeding gums, not instinctively the first place I’d go to get a blowjob. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that replacing oxygen with plastic in the effort to conserve a body requires that cadavers be sourced from the black market, but as your lawyer let me say: although this adequately expresses your unhinged temporality, body-snatching is only comparable to a hydrogen bomb in the sense that destruction is built into the architecture of all things.

The School of Cosmic Realism

8. (allegro)

Dusty came to the property to demonstrate to all the staff how to deal with snakes. Somebody filmed the event and had the sick presence of mind to zoom in as the python dug its fangs into a petrified Tracy. Henry was Cool Hand Luke and went off to get disinfectant. Noticing the flame trees in bloom (those weeds) he reflected: As tiresome as it is my friends, you mustn’t get too fatigued by the institution. Chalk it up as an artifice that more or less offers you some time to move around space. Comparative logic is not our first love, but measured against the enormous cracks in the dam wall this seems an easy enough place to fully inhabit our boredom. It’s certainly been my friend up until now and the benefits of having a mountain on campus are obvious. Pause the Playstation, pass the bucket bong: isn’t it usually around this time that the Tawny Frog Mouths go hunting? I hope you’re okay with reliving faded intimacy because at the Museum of Mobile Phones there’s no space for new messages until old ones get deleted. The oldest text I found was from a high-school friend who’s now an eco-terrorist, it said: If everyone pays their debts then there is no economy. This is all the more reason to play the fat man’s tune to your own time signature. Depending on which side of the bed you ream from, our fat man is a racist redneck or a lucky charm, but either way, never undervalue the work of the admin angels who buffer us aesthetes. Within strict OH&S guidelines I permit you to do something you like, like go to a meadow or just not do the things you don’t like to do. I accept the negatives are dizzying, but still, this atmosphere of cosmic fatigue makes it feel like the whole species is exhausted.

The School of Cosmic Realism

7. (adagio)

When video formats throw parties obsolescence is the elephant in the room. It’s been many years since I squatted a steel container so I’d forgotten what it’s like to be beaten over the head with a looped door. I think after the fourth or fifth reminder I started to see how slow motion machine guns make bullet dodging a plausible pass-time. Everywhere you go you always arrive together, hand in hand with the weather, the way phone ringing and jug boiling enter into the economy of cliches. Note how the middle third is sandwiched by a basketball metronome. Volume I of his magnum opus was systematically ignored across the continent and this left Garfield bedridden with despair, but today is the day Laura marries Lafargue, so the carbuncles must be dressed and the arsenic imbibed. Blinding pain accompanies every move, and although it was on my insistence the wedding date be changed so Fred’s acerbic wit could be here, I’m annoyed he’s using it to make the bride cry. Drafts of Volume II and III were promised to the nervous publisher months ago but Garfield is stalled, chronically, the current excuse being the need to teach himself Russian in order to read new books on social relations and economics. I’ve wrecked my life on the reef of this bookish empire and have no energy left for persuasion, now I live for legs of lamb and the hope my girls marry men who won’t similarly sacrifice their families on the alter of radical politics.

The School of Cosmic Realism

6. (allegro moderato)

Cicadas get rhythm, but do they get the blues? If you spent all that time brewing underground then you’d want to shed your skin and make a big song and dance about it too. For years I’ve been running in local elections on an expressivity as joy platform, and this has made me something of a town pariah, but lately even the most cynical apparatchiks have been susceptible to seasonal wonderment: what an ecstatic substance time must be for those two weeks above ground in this cursed one-life universe! Insomnia and sighing as you look out into the middle distance feels closer to it than platitudes of reincarnation. You could go to the mountains for ten days of meditation, or we could munch these mushroom caps and go to a beach I know of where no one thinks talking and fucking are small-minded impediments to transcendence. The implied chaos has some old hats scrambling to find the lead in their pencils but we’ve seen enough dramatisations of science to know its just the order of relations. Naturally, as usual, everything hinges on the way in which you misuse the terms natural and usual. Contemplation is a dark ale hand-crafted in a micro-brewery and served on tap at the Hotel of Busy Skulls. It’s a popular binge-drink for industrial zone commutors who come to ask the image of the wilderness if it likes its status update. The internalization is now irrevocable so it’s no surprise you were already awake when the alarm went off. You should train with Jimbo for a year, give it everything, and then you’ll know if you could have been a runner. When the thugs who run the place come and ask what they can do for you, tell them to get out of your sunlight.