was listening to https://www.nts.live/shows/keel-her/episodes/keel-her-2nd-november-2021
really good.
Notes from The Royal Foundation of St Katherine - an extraordinary urban oasis
02/11/2021
political aesthetics
Presentist thinking - troubled
People felt disenfranchised. The commune was a moment where people tried to take governance into their own hands.
The commune was a moment where people tried to take governance into their own hands.
Democratic language comes from analysis.
Fiat - scrupulous and perpetual analysis.
1870- class, mark tralgate?
Identifying with the royal family (WC people in Paris at that time. Working class people identifying with the oppressor. Reagan democrats)
Get in touch with Isabel Armstrong..
“Curse of constitutional melancholia”
Thomson ‘B.V’ - city of dreadful night
‘A being to whom the material realm as been restricted, intolerable’
Labour - connected with the sadness of melancholia. The ‘melancholy angel’ Ruskin and modern painters.
“A studious neutrality” from the editors of the National Reformer, (writing at the time of the commune) whereas the poets were more passionate, and emotional.
The defeat, the desperate fight. Against the internalised misogynist horror (my ego)
Having one, cultivating via an imaginary. And a fight for utopia, a boring fight?
A linguistic counter-culture - Deaf poetics…
Brecht and communard aesthetics - Scott McKracken. Literary responses to defeat.
“Defeat makes u a better dialectical historian”
(Mom in exile from her own life story)
Documents of defeat? Scatter, dispersal, archives of fragments - being aware of shape of what is there.
- Svenborg “fragmentary, broken, reports”
(My proximity to the working class) toilet. shit. These are not the enemy. Even though, even though
“I’m having a hard time, I’m preparing my next mistake.”- something Brecht?
Anecdote as an accepted form, reinserts history into the narrative.
Anecdotes as disruptive.
Guilt and shame - Scott McKraken - anecdote to illustrate a point.
A life left incomplete comes close to being overcome by despair.
- 1933/1937 pre/post exile. defeat.
(( bulldoze )) don’t, just be quiet, calm, careful.
A wager with the future.
Is this a party?
A recognisably communard aesthetic.
Fragileliterary forms. Preserving a trace of hope.
Clare Pettit (KCL) - hope, fulfilled for a little. Idyllic in arts + literature vs utopia.
Idyll is an edgeless zone, transformative, collapsing binaries.
Gustave Courbet - does these with his fruit paintings?
’The commonweal - serial-idyllic? Fruits and sublime idyll.
“Facing horror is indispensable to imagining a hope for the better.”
Morris - pilgrims of hope.
Fallen unripe.
Actual dead.
Communards are bruised fruit.
Putrescence, but seeds fall and reseed in seriality, which looks like hope.
Idyll rejects totality in favour of seriality.
Serial forms - Clare Pettit
Like seasons.
Political consciousness meets with the need to be calm and measured (strategy) communist and archivist, I mean anarchist, balance both.
Ephemerality meets seriality.
The problem with victory is that there is only one instance - and it is terminal.
But not with defeat, that lingers on..
So what do we do about depression?
Thomson had a seriously sad personal story. He was part of the community, with a freedom to speak and he took it.
Scandalously satirical.
Earnest is to fight the power.
Satirical is to fight closer, with individuals?
Anecdotes of adjacency, personal political…
Sad aloneness to ’not’ committing to one political ideology/strategy. The somehow grappling.
In football, the loosing team just collapse when defeated. The defeat takes the wind out of your sails.
Compost heaps
Fruition is not the end point.
Dark, rotten, regenerative - regeneration, not rebirth.
Finding the form to recuperate hope.
Friends and trips to be.
((Photograph shard end house. Try try.))
And outside. Death is a defeat?
A moment in a larger story.
How do you break from the canon?
Imo those with the option for articulation have not been especially close to the reality. We must encourage those who cannot speak. I must be encouraged to speak.
Memory is a physical, sensory experience.
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