About there being a Bigger Picture – The inchoate Riots, which have rudely awakened me from my self-satisfied dialogic sleep and bounced us out of our customary safety zones – and that good things can manifest out of bad ones.
The struggle, and it is a constant struggle as I find it against powers that seem intent on creating a disconnect between the two, between good things and bad ones that is, and equally at the personal level between my (existential) experiences of anxiety, fear, confusion, disappointment and sense of loss, and the political and ethical urgency demanded of the Bigger Picture.
For me it is, if you like, how to find agency in melancholia. Among the many helpful resources we have come across during our walkingtalkingwriting travels which help us with the disconnect, HERE are some categories:
– Historicise. We recommend Postwar by Tony Judt. I also recommend TJ's latest (sadly his last) stuff too… eg Ill Fares the Land, and his (free access) posts on the New York Review of Books Blog.
– Theorise. We recommend making at least some connection with the 20th C continental tradition (rather than the Anglophone / AngloSaxon tradition of 'Smart Thinking' - too smug or what!). Begin with Walter Benjamin (‘Uncle Wally’ in our blog-speak)… try One Way Street. Follow the curve of the Frankfurt School etc… via Theo Adorno et al… and 'negative dialectics' through Critical Theory to Feminist (Post-feminist etc / Post-post… etc) writing. Yea… I know it is hard. I mean, does one actually (try to) read these kinds of books for 'pleasure'? Here's just one from among a big heap of examples; Judith Butler Giving an Account of Oneself.
- Fictionalise. We recommend everything written by WG Sebald of course, since our blog here also belongs to the literary tradition of ‘Spatial Stories’… from off the top of a very long and growing list – eg I would also add Open City by Teju Cole on the basis of The Guardian review last Saturday (fingers crossed since I have not read it yet!).
– Operationalise. There is the evidence. For more accessable writing I recommend The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas still Walk among us, a Chilling Tale by John Quiggin (nb check the author – there is another book with the same title). For rolling up our sleeves and getting dirty in the nitty-gritty of the "bit surreal" or "parallel quality” of the disconnect experience (between good things and bad ones that is), I recommend looking at the heterodox investigative tradition as it is being developed through what is called 'Critical Realism'. It is a way of understanding and operationalising different levels of understanding, and especially accommodates emergence. Try this paper by Tony Lawson as a get-dirty-quick taster.
Back to blackbirds… other categories on our political journey include Poetise (eg Wallace Stevens) and Psychologise, but time deadlines and word-count limits demand these are left for another time. And there is the important Carnivalise category too, as in: Gangs are Good (Breaking things and Hurting People isn’t).