Temporal play has long fascinated me, ever since watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that offered a rethinking of the space-time continuum and the epistemic modalities encompassed within it. However, I have only recently become cognizant of my own slavish adherence to linearity in my practical affairs and the potential damage this has to my ability to be a high functioning academic. The stringent, assembly line like, focus is the consequence of an immature understanding of Zen in martial arts.
The notion of focus, complete and utter concentration, was greatly emphasized in my practice. I, however, began to interpret that as an avoidance of all other tasks, projects, spaces until my object of focus had been completely finished. This initial understanding has grounded much of my day-to-day life and its larger frame.
As I write this, however, a larger emotional tide has drowned me in the realization that linearity may have also cost me a relationship. Reading one book to the end before picking up another that is also due, finishing one paper before even beginning another, and other similarly small tasks may not be the sole victims of a rigidly linear mode. This part of my life is dedicated to X, while the next phase––post doctorate to tenure––will be dedicated to Y; this leaves no room for Y to show itself in the same room X is, thus shutting the door on possibly productive cognitive tangents.
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I hit random on my hip-hop collection and stumbled on a gem that I had long ignored; Mobb Deep The Infamous, specifically “Eye for an eye (your beef is mines).”
Chorus:
As time goes by, an eye for an eye
We in this together son your beef is mines
So long as the sun shines to light up the sky
We in this together son your beef is mines
Interestingly, I heard this song just after reading “From Citizen to Volunteer: Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty” by Susan Brin Hyatt, which makes a compelling case for the complex social relationships already functioning within impoverished communities. “That is, informal structures of reciprocity…have long flourished among the poor. Such relationships of mutuality do not arise autochthonously but have emerged in response to the exigencies posed by state policy.”
A long running trope in hip-hop is the interwoveness of federal and state policy, especially in terms of police injustice—the “Jake”—and local solidarity organized around race, class and age—the ghetto black youth. I had never thought of gangsterism as a mode of social solidarity in the same way more ‘legitimate’ neighborhood organizations and efforts are cognized. While this struck me as interesting in itself, I was also struck with a new sense of aesthetic appreciation grounded in the radical political gesture such productions manifest; radical not for the notions of resistance, but for the politics of solidarity that are both a response to and a product of government policy.
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I went out to lunch with Kristine and had the briefest of conversations about a framed photograph on the restaurant wall; a series of smoke stacks that cast a shadow modified to look like classic Greek columns.
Me: “Why is everything so didactic?”
KFD: “Because that’s bad art.”
Indeed. However, a strange tangential rumination this afternoon bore a new thought. Perhaps such didactic productions are necessary as initial forays into self-reflexive thought. My command of aesthetic forms and their politics is minimal, so bear with me. When I pursued this line, didactic as necessary, it occurred to me that we have been influenced greatly by such productions, if only in the early stages of politicization, which is precisely the space that interests me here. At age 5 or 50, it seems to me that we have gone through a moment when such productions actually bore an insight into larger conditions and our relationship to them. Now, however, when such critiques blaring a message that has already been internalized, they become are banal, reductive clichés.