Joan Copjec tying together Freud, Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and Fritz Lang via desire in capitalism. From "Lacan꞉ The Silent Partners"

Destroying the sense of the inevitable future that they've implanted in you will free you to become conscious of the actual history that moves through you. The adoption of their horizon depends on the concealment of true history and your living connection to it.

Imagine that there's no bandwidth left to sense or maintain a framework for the future, that all you have is a present moment that precedes no possible future, and then suddenly the past and how it moves into that present moment can be understood on new terms, if that makes sense. You can from that point start to rebuild the future out of history flowing into the present.

We need working-class theorists! Ones that will think alongside events and publish what they've theorized! No, now is not the time to turn away from such things, it's necessary to double down!

Whether working-class or not, we at least need theorists who can manage to evade having their personal horizon captured, or at least ones that can somehow manage to set that horizon aside and connect history to a different future than what has been dictated to them.

We are entering a period where possibility is going to open up. People need to leap at the opportunity, not sit back and fold their arms and call every action immediatism or volunteerism.

In as much as a Deleuzian would say we should refuse the Oedipal structure in politics and a Lacanian would say we should embrace it cynically for the sake of our own stability, I am with the Deleuzians. It's just that neither are reading Lacan correctly if they think he's advocating for the necessity of Oedipus at the social level. He is more or less stating it as a fact of his social realty but was also helping the individual towards a position of responsibility, not establishing political parameters. He balances that responsibility against the fact that these ailments of the psyche are not to be valorized. There is a new position that you can take towards these problems as a subject, but he is limited in what he would advocate towards society writ large. Lacan advocating for *a* symbolic is not the same as advocating for the social symbolic that we find ourselves enmeshed within. He wants to make certain aspects of the psyche conscious to the individual so they can take control of them.

But to me communism is likewise the point at which we accept responsibility. Lacan is right to point out that radicals produce new masters. I want to underline the same thing in terms of either explicit masters or what may be brought about through disavowal. Anarchists sometimes evade dealing with particular aspects of, say, how we would transition to a communist society, that I think would bring about new masters through disavowal of responsibility. And of course some Marxists, MLs, Maoists all in different ways attempt to reestablish the old masters, but especially when they've left the social psyche unexamined.

But yes we should "abolish Oedipus" in the actual structure of the formations that overthrow capitalist society, that should be the whole point. Any Lacanian that says these structures should be maintained or that we should adopt a cynical position towards castration is just a reactionary, and is definitely not giving the problem a materialist treatment. They are working backwards from the psyche to the social structures in a non-materialist manner.. i.e. they naturalize these psychic structures as unalterable rather than as a consequence of social organization.

We don't want to pass through 68 as a retro moment that merely affirms our existence as radicals, just to have a story to tell our grandchildren. There was something in the consciousness of 68 that we want to reconnect with, while avoiding most of what's happened in the interim.

In 68, the capitalist horizon shrunk, reification broke down at least at the level of consciousness, and possibilities seemed open. Moments where people are setting up encampments and fighting the system are like portals out of the reification of consciousness.

A police station set on fire in Minneapolis was also a moment like this. That's what we want back from the world of 68: a breakdown of the reification of consciousness and the opening up of possibility that isn't overcoded with capitalist realism, for lack of a better expression.

What we don't want is the adoption of an aesthetic that itself is now a reification of a radical consciousness that can't see beyond capitalism. Whatever we do in terms of aesthetic has to open possibilities, it has to collapse capitalist realism and make our choices seem open.

But this isn't "anarchism," this is a portal Marxism has to walk through as well to begin to figure out new modes of organizing. You need to go where reification has broke down in consciousness and help establish modes of organization that keep a new consciousness alive.

Twitter is never going to end! Just kill the site already! Now they're saying we're gonna have to pay to use it and I'm like "well, certainly I'm not going to do that! Pay for twitter? How horrifyingly masochistic!" But in a few days I'll bet they'll be like "oh it's just a one time fee of 99 cents" and it's like FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK I'M GOING TO GIVE THEM 99 CENTS NOW AREN'T I

it happens

"Adorno and Social Pathology": Andrew Bowie in conversation with Kate Warlow-Corcoran

In this event, Andrew Bowie, one of the world’s leading Adorno scholars, discusses Adorno’s work and life, explaining some of his key philosophical concepts and the philosophical background and historical context of his thinking. Bowie then explores how Adorno’s exploration of why human reason can have irrational consequences led him to rethink basic concepts like “nature”, “history”, and “freedom”, offering alternatives to many ways of thinking about these concepts in contemporary philosophy.