Formation of Purpose
This summer it felt like history was taking shape around us. Within this is the feeling of re-attuning to historical continuity and causality. We remember things come AFTER other things and happen BECAUSE of other things: they have precedents, causes, and relational enmeshment with other happenings past and concurrent. The sensation of ‘awakening’ is the revival of mass movement aligned with our historical consciousness. History is a social, political, philosophical, economic, and material inquiry into the past. From out this inquiry sparked by recent state violence we see the past is present and as thirsty for our blood as ever. We see its imperatives - capital, racism, incarceration, heteropatriachy, nationalism, war - won’t be sated by our concessions and indignities but will speed up feasting like it suspects the meal is almost over. And our inquiry tells us we must resist. This conviction makes our resistance a historical act. We are acting upon history as we feel it acting upon us.
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But there is also a parallel history at work here. An affective history, a symbolic history, that produces false consciousness.
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Media exploits events via dialogue that exhausts us while never establishing them within any historical pattern or lineage. It’s contrary to the kind of inquiry mentioned above. National news is discussed like the biggest - even the last - story there will ever be. Think Rachel Maddow spending like 27 years on ‘Russiagate.’ This isn’t the measured language of examining new information in context of the old. The hysteria actually makes context impossible. These are politicized emotional appeals to a base where analysts deduce what they’re ostensibly supposed to explain. Stories become prisms filtering a viewership’s attitudes back to them; symbols equipping sides at war in the politics of pure signification.
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But they’re relevant only as long as they stay useful to the outlets mining them for attention. When the next story appears that produces sufficient hysteria the previous crisis is abandoned. They are now alienated from what came before it and whatever comes after. They meant something only to and only during the moment they emerged, never becoming kind of memory we can explore for historical inquiry. These objectified, alienated events make for a past told as a story of impressions, but not lessons or conclusions. This is an affective history told to us through the recollection of these symbolized experiences.
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But there’s that thing about symbols: Does the symbol prepare reality for its emergence into a more literal form? Or is the symbol residual reality? Do things stay symbolic for long? How long?
