Thoughts - 26/09/2012

• Marx speaks of alienation as spiritual poverty: lethargy, practical activity as an external rather than external/internal synthesis, frustration and impotence, inability to act without outside pressure, the treat to subjectivity inherent in an entirely "objective" labour process.
• The transmission of information, rather than it's emergence from and relevance to experience, always ends up placing the subject externally to other subjects. Hence, it breaks the 'social flow of doing' (Holloway) which is material-practical-discursive activity. If others do not respond to the analytical framework, the set of categories, it does not mean they do not (or could not) understand the issue. If there is no gestural accompaniment, with its sympathetic and sensori-motor feedback between speaker and audience, communication will be entirely one-sided and didactic. In a crisis situation, it may seem more important for those who understand the systemic foundations of the crisis to urgently impart this knowledge on those suffering from the crisis, but part of the alienation from creative activity and conceptualization. We shouldn't speak as priests, or therapists, warning of the impending apocalypse and/or irreversible symptoms. That never solves systemic problems, which have their roots in a relational crisis - with other people, with nature (mere resources), and with the world (things or data). Even the best-intentioned fall into the trap of thinking that total knowledge will rescue them from the problems of living - which, while greatly exacerbated by oppression, are not automatically solved by removing it from the top-down. This doesn't preclude drawing on past experience and connections, but it involves opening them to new possibilities and encounters not originally conceived.
• Knowledge is embodied, it is intuitive and dispositional - it's our sense of how things fit together and ability to navigate and form relations. There is a strong imaginary and affective component, which is not about individual conscious emotion, but is more like a collective unconscious.
• Regardless of what people are thinking, just the fact that they are present and responsive/sympathetic to each other stimulates recognition in public spaces, not the other way around. Our bodies immediately betray the shape - the form + content - of our seemingly personal thoughts, or our state of mind. The way you move through physical space says more about the mental space you inhabit than what you say or consciously project.