OCTOBER 20TH. 2023. Journal from Bologna.
“The density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation.” -Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask
It should be okay to say: we believe the whole world should be different.
It should be okay to say: we sit on the precipice of a need for a new experiment in living – in the very meaning of the concept of together, of humanity, of being, of you and me.
One of the reasons I love old things, particularly in this case, old Universities, is because the history of the world’s ‘oldest institutions’ are a history of what was formerly a new institution.
The historical creation of these formerly new institutions has, in my mind, created such a sedimentation in society that we can no longer experience or imagine the possibility of creating something ‘new’ for ourselves.
This, to me, is my own nostalgia.
I am nostalgic for a day when we created something so new that in 1000 year’s time, the future can only tell the story of a past that paved an unforeseen way for generations without end.
To create something new, and then it becomes old, but the memory of its invention appears as if from nowhere. In this case, it was the spirit of the ‘guild’ and the coining of the term ‘universitas.’
One day, after the Bible, (maybe), will be able to have faith in the idea that there are new things that happen or emerge under the sun. We just have to be open to inventing it.
Now is the time to get creative, inventive, experimental about the prospects of the future. This is optimistic nihilism. In a present with no future, I smile at the infinite and infinitesimal expressions of impossibility set before me. We are no longer seeing further because of the shoulders of the giants we stand upon; but rather, we are stifled by the shoulders of our giants and what we need is a willingness to get beyond them.
The loop of nostalgia is always the door of conservatism and what sustains the conservative, is the fascist within us all; or rather, the fascist dream of returning to a mythic time of utopia for which the present can never be, and the future can never derive.
The loop of nostalgia is the dream which thinks it is only through bringing back the past that the future can become utopia. And utopia, remember, is a metonym for ‘no-place.’ A place that has never been. The remnants of delusion and illusion: a past to cherish because it never was. If we are to cherish the past, it should only be because the historical material has become fodder for an unknown future in which the present is the place of its creation.
We will never get there longing for a time that is no longer our time. We will never get there by yearning for the same return again. We have to begin the experiment of ending the world as we know it, and we have to take the tabula rasa of that destruction and invent something worthy of the end.
Our greatest minds did not die off with the birth and death of modernity. Every greatness of mind is not a modernist return. Our greatest ideas have yet to be spoken. The greatest minds of my generation have yet to be heard and the greatest minds have yet to be born.
This is what positive pessimism is, and I am happy with it. I, too, want the end of the world. In my desire for the end of the world, I understand every ending to be a leap of faith that every generation must answer the call for.
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
I am of the generation that possesses within itself the immanent possibility of a tabula rasa which might give rise to that which remains unimaginable from the current horizon of thought – from the current lineage of giants and their shoulders.
Perhaps, in the near future, we will no longer need the word: world.
Perhaps, the knowledge of our non-local entanglement might offer a different conception of what it means to live and die on this plenum of matter with one another.
Perhaps, we will become so alien to ourselves – on the other side of catastrophe, on the otherwise of otherwise – that the word: human, will sit uncomfortably on our tongues.
Perhaps, we might begin to see ourselves as kinds of cosmic hoboes, brought into being through a grand cosmic accident…
By god, by the gods, by the goddesses, by godlessness and the miraculous lawlessness of nature.
The necessity no matter what is the experiment: the very discovery of truth depends upon it.
All lives of invention are thought-experiments in action: every life of invention is an experiment in thought.
We must take the leap of faith in the idea that our ideas can invent something
that has never been seen before!
We must come together to ensure that this unseen is better.
We must take the leap of faith in the idea that the better for All can emerge!
If we are a generation of no hope, it is because we are our only hope and for that reason alone,
we are hopeless.
Mumble Theory 