Nihilist Optimism

These are some notes I made after attending a gathering of comrades discussing the thirtieth anniversary (or perhaps birthday) of the Midnight Notes Collective . In other words they are from 2008. This meeting led eventually to the Promissory Notes  pamphlet.  I’m posting them here not so much as a response to that but in the sense the overall point I was trying to make, that a greater comparative focus on class decomposition and the forms of political recomposition that are made possible by it, still strikes me as a compelling point. And it’s one that I’d like to revisit and expand in a more substantive. Or something like that anyways… First off let me apologize again for taking so long to write this, which is especially lame given as I wrote down these notes in June. Sigh… lame excuses aside, here we go: I have to admit being a bit surprised to encounter the framing of discussion at the gathering in June in terms of crisis theory, or more particularly the framing of ...

1. Zerowork Training? “One the problems,” Ben said, “is that while we’ve been quite good at celebrating the refusal of work, we never had anything like zerowork training.” When I heard this statement it struck me as quite strange, and not because of the context, which was odd enough in itself. My friend and comrade Ben made this during a meeting of the editorial collective for Autonomedia , a long running Brooklyn-based autonomist publisher. He said this in a context of discussing what he learned and experience in the everyday operations of publishing. More particularly Ben, after being involved with the project for a decade, had decided that it was time for him to move on. In other words this was the autonomist equivalent of an ‘exit meeting,’ a moment to declare his exit from a collective whose state goal was to exit from work as well, to “substruct the planetary work machine” in the words of p.m. When I heard this at first it seemed a bit amusing and absurd. What exactly wou...

or that's how I'm going to frame it... Feels a bit strange to finally be catching up with a technology curve a mere 15 years or so late... Nevertheless, got there eventually... anyways, bad jokes aside, will be using this space to post bits of writing in development, malformed ideas, and other ephemeral bits of text that I wish to make public... in many cases more for the function of making put some thoughts down into writing more regularly, but without necessarily expecting them to be fully worked out and polished. Or something like that... will see how it goes...