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Arrival

Every Beggar is Odysseus

On the heels of a week-long tour of the Midwest, we present the fourth issue of LETTERS , our anti-political communist journal. Issue four includes a beautifully illustrated journal as well as a literary supplement, both printed and bound by our friends at Eberhardt Press. The journal and the supplement are presented in a screen-printed envelope.

In the journal, we explore topics outside of the usual focus of communist analysis: fate, friendship, theology, and being. The supplement features original poetry and fiction, as well as literary discussion, a film script, and interviews with novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya and translator Tim Wilkinson. As with previous issues, we present installments from the novel The Unseen.

From the introduction:

The first sin of the pro-revolutionary is to frame everything on a scale inversely proportionate to her significance. As she becomes more insignificant, her vision grows in grandeur. The whole of history is flowing towards her, however slowly, however imperceptibly. She waits to shoot down the partridges that do not come. As she waits, she speaks of the coming partridges as if their coming was like the expected arrival of a clown to a child’s party, not the Mashiach to the world. She waits and speaks, never taking an account of herself, devoted, as ever, for such a short time.

Another world does not exist anymore; nor the movement; nor the community. The young can say: when the movement is there pretend it is not there, and when it’s not there, pretend it is. And so we move and pretend and move to pretend, tracing our outlines in the street as detectives to our own disappearances. It’s still OK to leave. It’s still OK to stay. That much hasn’t changed. I remain with nothing and nothing but so much to say. In the absence and weight of absent community I write what I cannot speak, trace maps where I cannot walk, cutting flesh of imaginary enemies.


Contents:

JOURNAL
Introduction
Arguments: parts 1 and 2
Fate: parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
Friendship: parts 1, 2, and 3
Letters: parts 1, 2, and 3
Novelty: parts 1, 2, and 3
The Parallax Few
Post-Script

SUPPLEMENT
Introduction
Arguments
The Parrot Cycle
Other Poems
Short Fiction
Howls in Favor of Sadie
Unfinished Discussion: Franz Kafka’s The Great Wall of China
Interview: Horacio Castellanos Moya
Interview: Tim Wilkinson
The Unseen

Copies are available for $10 from www.littleblackcart.com

For a review copy, please contact editor(at)lettersjournal.org or write to 838 East High Street Number 115, Lexington, Kentucky 40502.


WHAT IS THE VALUE OF THE THEORY FORM? WHAT FORMS THE VALUE OF THEORY?

Stolen Image

Stolen Image

Fate

Fate

1. Human ‘subjectivity’ is constructed from:

a. absolute autonomic processes (internal biological and environmental pressures)
b. arbitrarily autonomic processes (the unavoidable inheritance of accidental historical and economic developments).
b. ongoing processes of that which is becoming autonomic, (i.e. the processes by which dead labour is actualised in the world around us and which we take to be our second nature).
c. subjectivity, or inter-subjectivity itself (i.e. the forms of conscious awareness and activities which feed into each other, conflicting, destroying, combining etc).
d. Human subjectivity is always set recursively in various environments, however within Marxism it is framed specifically thus:

2. There is a conjectured objective trajectory within history in which social development is identified by communist discourse as the progressive realisation of the human species; this trajectory becomes more apparent in subjective consciousness the closer it is to realisation (which is conceived as the clear-eyed control by humanity of its own fate). It is supposed that at the point of this realisation there will appear a subject capable of controlling the forces which reproduce it as an expression of the entirety of human society constructed for itself.

3. However, it has become apparent that the exponential increase in proportion of the domination of dead labour in ratio to the capacity for subjectivity has led to a qualitative transformation in the potential viability of a subject that is capable of controlling the forces which do not so much sustain as subsume it.

4. Therefore, if communism is the expropriative increase of consciousness (i.e. effective decision-making capacity) in ratio to productive forces then communist revolution cannot be seen as simply the ‘communisation’ of existing productive processes but must involve a deliberate deconstruction of technologies up to the point where consciousness (i.e. decision-making) is actually, really, and objectively in advance of the processes that sustain it. That is to say, arbitrary and value driven forms such as nuclear power and GM technology which have been developed precisely to foreclose on decisions about their viability, cannot simply be decided against – in other words, distinct capitalised forms will continue to exist and will continue to dictate to society no matter what form of governance is developed subjectively unless somehow there is a means to put them back in the box.

5. Obviously, there are feedback issues here. That is to say:

a. consciousness is always a delayed reflection upon the material forces which produce it
b. we do not want to ‘double back’ to the point where we have to reinvent the wheel every morning.

Even so, I think, within an anti-political communist discourse (i.e. a framework which rejects the religious ideology of an objective benign ‘real movement’ in capitalism), there is an optimal relation between decision-making and automation which historically was probably located in what can be described as the ‘mechanical’ or bourgeois age, that is where decision making was still a fundamental factor of production.

Prayer

Prayer

I read among similar examples of a Rain King in Africa to whom the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means that they do not really believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods of the year in which the land is “a parched and arid desert.” For if one assumes that the people formerly instituted this office of Rain King out of stupidity, it is nevertheless certainly clear that they had previously experienced that rains begin in March, and then they would have had the Rain King function for the other part of the year.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, discussing James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough

In The Limits of Prayer, Moshe Halbertal describes Wittgenstein’s understanding of prayer as an expressive gesture rather than a causal agent.  For the traditional scientific atheist, prayer is an irrational superstition, a holdover from the time before people understood how crops and rain cycles worked.  Wittgenstein demonstrates very simply why this understanding of prayer does not make sense.

Reading Halbertal’s article the day before leaving on tour, I realized I had never prayed before.  Not even once.  I do not know how to pray or to whom I should pray.  I still do not know.  I did not pray on tour.

Unsubstantiated theories about prayer:

  1. The primary trauma of g-d’s death is the disappearance of prayer as a space of healing.  When you speak, no one is listening.  The sinking feeling that you are alone.  The trauma of freedom.  The disappearance of ritual.  The trauma of g-d’s death is not the lack of miracles; to pray for a miracle is to pray vainly.  The figure of g-d was a space of healing because it received prayer and listened unconditionally, not because it acted to end or prevent suffering.
  2. Theodicy is still indecent.
  3. As a secular reproduction of prayer, psychoanalysis failed.

Is a prayer for communism a vain prayer?  Please send your feelings on this question.

Review Copies

Review Copies Available

If you edit or write for a periodical or website and want to review Letters Journal #4, please contact editor(at)lettersjournal.org to receive a review copy.