blah-feme

post-the-first: Beginnings are always by nature traumatic.

They (and there is always more than one, of course) bring with them not so much a wide-eyed, forward-looking and open-mouthed breathless expectation at the infinite and shiny possibilities of the future (I like hyphens), but the almost crushing weight of a future of bad possibilities: what if I or we were to stray by the tiniest fraction of a tiny microchoice and wander down the worst of all pathways?

The future here and now is just the potentiality of that awfulness, its ever nearing probability, an infinite grayness, as Kafka once called it.

It is the present, not some abstracted or eternally deferred notion of presence but the political nowness of now, that productive mythological ground of action that makes all radical (and some conservative) politics possible, that is our concern: we have been told so many times by the dearest of opponents that the present is just a kind of instance, a simpering micro-dally in the play of omnidirectional meanings.

But this is where we start - in refuting that brutalising abstraction, in refusing the denigration of the now. The now is always, of course a construction, but it is a construction that can be put to work. In this red-hot present, let's begin again and again.

Nothing is safe in this present, nothing still, nothing closed. That potentiality at least can do good work; that potentiality at least is something to conjure with. A politics of the now, a politics of being in and engaging with the world as it finds us.
Blah-feme begins with this first blasphemy.

posted by blah-feme @ 13:24