White Light Black Light

Those who know me are familiar with the fact that I have an ongoing love affair with all things Indian. My trip to India in 2004 really impacted me; The place really just blew me away. And so the other day I went to a screening in Berkeley of a new documentary called She Write about subversive women poets in Tamil Nadu. The film-makers were present after the film and a very interesting discussion ensued. I'm so glad I went. Anyway, one of the female poets interviewed in the documentary said something which spoke to me really profoundly which I wanted to share here: To paraphrase, "And I reached a dilemma in my life: Was I going to write Marxist poetry, or romantic poetry?" And just today, I watched a spoken word piece entitled "Fencing" by my new hero (or should I say "shero"?) named Kelly Tsai. In it, she said something very similar: that there are those who write poetry about politics and those who write poetry about love, but very rare are those who write about both at the same time. Such an important observation! Why can't we infuse our politics with love? Why is it that we impose this false division between the revolutionary and the romantic? Typical of this mindest is Bertolt Brecht when he writes: "You can't write poems about the trees when the woods are full of police men." Bah! There is always room to write about the trees; about beauty, nature, and love. And this needn't be mutually exclusive to politics. George Monbiot also exemplifies the mindset that cordons off the revolutionary from the romantic when he writes in the introduction to his book "Age of Consent: Manifesto for a New World Order" (published in 2004) something or other like the following: "If you are one of those people who believe that we should all just love one another more, and that this is the solution to the world's problems, then you are probably wasting your time reading this book". Monbiot champions what he calls the "Global Democratic Revolution" (which is an interesting idea in itself, since it rejects the traditional notion of the National Democratic Revolution, replacing it instead with the notion of post-nationalist revolution), but he sees no space for love in this struggle. Once I would have wholly agreed with him, but now I feel like 'Why the hell shouldn't we love one another'? Obviously, this isn't a solution in itself, but it's definitely not mutually exclusive to revolutionary struggle. In fact, it should be an inextricable part of it. If you need any more convincing about the real effects of this false division between romanticism and revolutionism then you only need look at social movements anywhere in the world to see the ubiquitous divisions between lifestylists and activists (or between hippies and socialists). The former emphasise living ethical lifestyles within the current system and nurturing one another. The latter, in contrast, emphasise a complete overthrow of the system. To these people, love and all that fluffy stuff can wait till after the revolution. But why do these approaches need to be segregated from one another? On the one hand, surely revolutionaries can show more love to each other, nurture one another more, and live more ethical lifestyles in line with the future they wish to create. But on the other hand, surely lifestylists and hippies can attain a more politicised understanding of the structures of domination and see that simply loving one another and living ethically, while definitely important, aren't in and of themselves enough. Surely we need to retain both approaches and learn to meld them into one complete and total struggle. I believe this is part of what Foucault and Hardt/Negri were on about when they wrote of "biopolitics". By way of another example of the inadequacy of a soulless revolutionary approach, a good friend of mine was once complaining to a socialist about the rough time he'd had within Resistance - a socialist youth organisation in Australia. He had been having issues with depression and the like, and lamented the fact that nobody in Resistance supported him through his struggles. At that point, the fucking soulless dogmatic socialist he was confiding in said "Jesus fucking Christ, Resistance is a political party, not a fucking support group". Well, to me, that's just fucked up. There's no reason activists should not nurture one another. In fact, I would say that it is imperative for us to do so; especially given the daily bullshit we face in capitalist society. We need to reclaim the spirit of MUTUAL AID (or what the Filipinos call "Bayanihan"), which was once central to revolutionary struggles - for example, during the Great Depression - but has since been lost to subsequent generations. The reason both "She Write" and "Fencing" spoke to me so deeply (and have sparked off all these connections) was that this issue of politics and love is one I have been struggling with for a long time. I am a hardcore revolutionary, but I am also a romantic. One would think that they wouldn't be so hard to reconcile, but for some reason they are. I've been trying to figure this out for a long time, and I think I'm finally beginning to make progress. What has really facilitated this has been eschewing scientific approaches to revolution in favour of aesthetic ones (I owe this to the amazing latter works of Felix Guattari). You know, in the past, the revolutionary in me has looked at the world and seen only poverty, injustice, exploitation, misery, war, and oppression. And so naturally I am compelled to want to overthrow the capitalist system and institute something kinder in its place. On the other hand (and this is the crux of the dilemma), the romantic in me looks at the world and sees only beauty: the beauty of nature, of the human spirit, of the interconnectedness of all things, of art, of little things. And so this side of me wants to preserve and augment what is beautiful in the world. How then to merge the revolutionary spirit with the romantic spirit? I would contend that this is the key task of grassroots social movements today. I think this was the spirit behind the name of the radical group Love and Rage which is unfortunately now defunct. Furthermore, the autonomist philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt are working at the moment on developing LOVE as a political concept. I can't wait until their works on this topic are released! I think they're due out in a few years time. I will intervene here with two quotes related to all of the above: 1) "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I would contend that the revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love" - Che Guevara 2) "Is it necessarily politically reprehensible, while we are groaning under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of the left-wing papers call a class-angle?" - George Orwell Ooh yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Is anybody feeling me?