Who them man tryna draw out? Could never be me—the last time I saw him his chest got bored out, I dipped like four of them neeks. I ain't got no patience, play for the pagans—man get smoked like trees.
Que'st-ce que je fait le mois dernier? Hum, honnêtement c'était un flou pour moi. Pour la première fois, j'ai rejoint le canal vocal avec mes amis en ligne et j'ai utilisé ma voix. J'avais oublié mes écouteurs dans l'appartement de mon ami, mais l'autre jour j'en ai reçu de nouveaux par courrier. Le mois dernier j'ai essayé de lire quelque livres en français mais j'en ai terminé aucun. Je crois que La déchéance d'un homme est parfait pour mon niveau actuel. J'ai essayé Neuromancien avec un livre audio mais c'était un peu trop difficile pour moi maintenant. En outre, j'ai essayé Fils de sorcières mais même apres presque sept mois le vocabulaire me dépassait malheureusement. De La Phenomenologie de l'esprit j'avais lu quelques chapitres mais j'ai arrêté avant Force et Entendement parce que j'ai eu du mal avec La perception. Maintenant, je veux terminer le livre de Osamu Dazai avant de commencer Dune en français quand j'ai le livre audio. C'est très passionnant pour moi parce que je crois que puisque je peux parler et écrire en français je devrais pouvoir apprendre beaucoup de choses pour améliorer mon expression dans la langue.
Aujord'hui, je ne sais pas du tout ce que je veux lire. Le mois prochain je recommence l'école donc je crois que je devrais lire quelques livres qui pourraient aider avec mes études. Vraiment, je ne suis pas allé à l'école depuis l'âge de 19 ans et je suis un peu nerveux. Dernièrement, je me suis concentré exclusivement sur mon français donc j'ai eu peu de temps pour autre chose que j'aime. Maintenant, mes études personnelles sont très désorganisées. Je me sens en désordre complet.
I didn't want to totally get rid of the above paragraphs but unfortunately they still bear the marks of my level of apprenticeship of French, which I still think is a few months, or even years, away from being satisfactory enough for me to write in for entire blog posts without having to stop what I'm doing to check whether or not what I'm writing is correct. So, a first for this website, we have a blog post within a blog post. Truthfully, as I said before, the last month or so has been quite a blur, I feel like I'm in the process of letting the previous incarnations of my scholarship
die so that new forms can finally take root and blossom. Thus, a big update, next month in August I should finally be starting school once again after a long absense since I was about 19, a couple years after I had graduated high school.
Finally, I can begin to mention a few things about my scholarly journey that I think I've neglected to write about adequately here. I started school after moving out of my parents house, I was living in a house my roommates and I rented. The institution itself was a community college that services most of the state which I reside in, and I paid for my meager tuition with money I earned working my first job, I was the assistant manager at a pizza place. At the time, one of my roommates and I had taken classes together. If I recall correctly, we only did two semesters. One of the classes that we took, and the only one that I recall having any credits whatsoever, was a history class we took together about primarily early to late 20th century American history, I remember we started around the time of the Haymarket massacre and ended with the Vietnam War, which I ended up having to write an essay about. One lecture I remember was about the Gilded Age but I'd be hard pressed to remember any details other than the period discussed. The other class we took together (twice) was simply a remedial algebra class that both of us elected to take since neither of us were particularly confident in our skills in math, at least not enough to take the college algebra class that would've been accredited. We got a C in that class twice because we'd start out strong and then towards the end of the semester we both slumped out and didn't do the homework or failed badly on the tests. As an aside, I remember the first time I had ever watched Neon Genesis Evangelion was on a school computer while we were avoiding our work.
All this to say, I didn't end up continuing with higher education because the entire experience left a rather bad taste in my mouth that I wouldn't be able to make sense of until recently. I had a truly awful time in high school and community college felt like much more of the same old thing. Now that I'm registered for classes at the same instition I ask myself, what makes me think I can do any better now than I did before? To start, I'm taking three classes that I think I'll be able to do relatively well in, an English class, what I expect to be a rather typical Intro to Philosophy, and a Principles of Sociology course to ease myself into my new major. All three of these relate in large and small ways to the kind of academic work I want to engage myself in, so I think they'll be perfect to help orient myself towards the demands of college work while balancing my own needs with friends as well as the requirements of my job. Truthfully, I'm still a little worried about both the cost, because my job pays very little, and about my schedule, because that job demands way too much of me all the same. Truly an abominable combination.
As far as my own work, there's a very limited number of avenues I think I'll be able to explore before the demands of school take over. Firstly, I'd like to finish my third reading of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory which I've spoken about on this website a little bit before, this time taking the time to read the labyrinth of footnotes the author provides. For anyone who would like a particularly helpful introduction to this work, here's a podcast episode with the author of the book that I've linked on Jampack Vol. 3, he gives a much better introduction to his overall project than I could in the short space of a blog post. Second, I'm quite interested in reading through Mark Fisher's lectures entitled Post-capitalist Desire, partially because they take place in a university setting with his own students asking questions and prodding Fisher for further explanation. While listening to Acid Horizon's podcast episode on the collection, they noted that none of the students ask particularly bad questions, and that one requirement of the student is a certain strength to ask questions in a classroom to be able to grow intellectually. Hopefully, this will provide a rather interesting outlet for me to engage myself in the classroom before actually doing it again.
There's a couple things that I'd like to get through before the semester starts but I don't know if I'll end up having the time to get through them, one of them is James Maffie's Aztec Philosophy that I've floated the idea of reading but never actually made the time for. A non-western account of philosophy before entering into an Intro to Philosophy class I think would be a good primer beforehand. The other, which I really don't think I'll have to time for but hopefully I'll get to is a little book called Stylish Academic Writing simply to help with my own capacities for writing the academic essays that'll be expected of me. Lastly, I'd like to be able to finish re-reading a little over half of the writings of the CCRU in the collection I finished reading the other month. Simply, I enjoy them immensely, although everything in the Pandemonium section that explicates the Numogram is still quite a bit of a puzzle. I plan to try to read the writings of Nick Land in Fanged Noumena before giving those writings yet another re-read after going through the CCRU writings that can be found in the collection entitled Abstract Culture.
For my own homegrown intellectual ambitions, there's two rather large projects that I think I'd like to tackle although I still have no idea how I want to approach them. The first would be an interrogation of the works and history of the Tempel ov Blood, an Order of Nine Angles affiliated group that was the brainchild of an FBI informant. The second would be an analysis of the Red Guards and ensuing Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of the United States, as well as a prodding of the theoretical works of Struggle Sessions which I see as the link between these two organizations, perhaps wrongfully or rightfully. I think my work on one project is likely to inform my work on the other but I'm probably going to try to focus on the Tempel ov Blood first. Simply put, although I find all of the resources on the Ex-Red Guards/CR-CPUSA Hub for Information and Recovery website quite useful, ultimately I still think their labeling of the Red Guards/CR-CPUSA milieu as a cult
to be largely misguided, as well as a trivialization of the efforts of members that struggled for a better world irrespective of the poisonous and deplorable activities of their leadership. There is absolutely a case to be made that the results of those movements can be seen as the logical outgrowth of the theoretical and political dead-ends of Gonzaloism
and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism,
challenges which I think are entirely appropriate, but I don't think reducing that sequence all to the caustic suspicion of cult
is the best path going forward when analyzing the theory and practical action of these groups, especially when a big part of my work is devoted to interrogating the history of a movement that can be more rightly described as a cult, but even with an organization of unhinged Satanic Neo-Nazis it's still a category I'd like to avoid altogether since I think the word cult obscures more than it illuminates. Thus, in both of these projects I opt for what I hope will be a rigorous materialist analysis of concrete historical conditions, and I think flattening either to the category of cult
would be detrimental.
But, as far as intimations for how I want to approach these projects, I think it will begin with my re-reading of Dr. Josephson Storm's Metamodernism since his theory of social kinds seems to be quite a useful line of thinking to follow. At least, that's the impression I still have after getting through his book. It warrants further investigation. Second, what would've seemed unthinkable to me a couple years before, I would really like to make time for both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia alongside my readings of the works of Mark Fisher, Nick Land, and the CCRU. It's highly likely I owe this to my persistent listening of Acid Horizon, a self-described Deleuzian podcast. In addition, I've been much more interested in reading Lyotard's Libidinal Economy as well as some work from Baudrillard. Lastly, I'd really like to bring Bataille to bear on my analysis of both of these organizations. Now, I can imagine all of that flies in the face of my rigorous materialist analysis of concrete historical conditons,
that's why I think the figures of Althusser, Moufawad-Paul and Badiou will all be lurking in the background of my work and I hope to read and re-read them further as I undertake this challenge. I also hope to get through the Phenomenology of Spirit and Spinoza's Ethics again, but this time from a different angle than the secondary I had previously explored. Sorry this last paragraph is kind of a mess! My thoughts are firing in every direction. One small thing I'll note is that in the process of reading Liber 333 from the Tempel ov Blood I've been highlighting and taking more extensive notes in the margins than I normally do and it's adjusted how I engage with other books. Normally when I read something like Hegel or Spinoza I'm simply in awe of the intellectual craftsmanship but with a book like this I feel much more at liberty to be an unwelcome dinner guest and really speak my mind on how shoddy I find their thinking. I hope to carry this more polemical bent over into my re-reading of the works of the Struggle Sessions milieu.