29/6/07

The danger is of this becoming a mere empty exercise: you have already procrastinated fifteen minutes (fifteen minutes) before putting pen to paper; thus a process aimed at enabling writing becomes itself threatened with the very blockage it aimed to free. There would be nothing new to this: the proliferation of control committees in the Soviet apparat, of bureaucracies aimed at cutting down and controlling the size of the bureaucracy, is the other instance you always think of: the reforms succeeding only in relocating (at best) the problems they were aimed at solving to another position within the system, like a superegoic agency that merely expresses the neurosis it seeks to control.
The self as state, as community, as multitude: why has this been such a persistent trope in you thinking? Is it merely because you were studying politics and political theory at a time when you would have been better engaged in (aesthetically inclined) introspection (Mallarme as opposed to Marx)? It seems likely that the reasons go deeper than this, and that the conflation of the two expresses something basic to your way of thinking: a monstrous solipsism on the one hand (the political world as self writ large, the social and historical processes that play themselves out in it analogous to psychic ones), and, on the other, a readiness to see the self as a determinant of that political world, as a mere, perhaps artificial, creation of it. Thus there is an ambiguity to it, which leaves open a 'liberating' potential, though there is no denying that the emphasis has always been on the side of the solipsistic. Are your journeys here merely extended exercises in solipsism, in which you can find yourself projected on the fantasy screen of the 'Caucasus'? The capacity for maintaining an openness to people and to aesthetic experiences seems crucial here; something you have always found such an effort (but then, you have so little experience), but which is vital if you are to achieve anything. Amis thought he could deduce teh quality of the person (and by implication, the life) from the quality of the prose: this is an unfashionable view, but there is probably some truth to it. And the same applies to novels themselves: they translate a life, a life experience, into an aesthetic form, and the translation preserves, and carries with it, all the strengths and failings of that life. Thus when you judge an artwork you are also judging its maker - unavoidably, and perhaps somewhat coldly and callously. The irony of the novel, a form opened up by new possibilities in human experience, the notion that one's life need no longer conform to some socially predetermined plot, that it can be something 'novel' in itself, is that it (the form) is now succumbing to the development and extension of those very possibilities (or at least their 'bad' development); the insertion of 'choice' into all areas of human activity, into the most vital and important actions one can commit in one's life. To be effective, the novel, like all art forms, required a restriction or barrier that is now disappearing: it required freedom within certain limitations. It is not that now one necessarily has greater freedom, but that those limitations have redistributed, reshaped themselves. In doing so they have created a new internal landscape - or rather, flattened the barrier between the internal and the external - which calls for some new innovation.