Micah:          Hello, today I’d like to begin my lecture with a memory from the history of activism. Let's go back to 1917; the Russian revolution is sparked by a spontaneous strike by women. The eruption was completely unexpected; in fact, Trotsky tells us the most militant Bolsheviks have been urging workers not to protest. Lenin, the most important revolutionary leader, and theorist rushes back from exile in Switzerland via Germany, a nation at war with Russia.

                     Germany was hoping that Lenin’s return would destabilize their enemy. And on April 4th, the day after returning to Russia, Lenin delivers the same speech two times. And he specifically tells us that he delivers it slowly, so everyone can hear what he's saying. This speech will come to be known as the April theses. It is a monumental moment because Lenin openly breaks with the Bolshevik orthodoxy in order to push for a new path that was, in some ways, at odds with the Bolshevik leadership.

As an aside, it's worth noting that the April theses called for, among other things, the abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy. So Lenin broke with the tradition of the party without abandoning the party. His move was dialectical for he to quote Elaine Badu accepted ''a relationship between tradition and change''. As I think one of London’s strong points is that it was his capacity to realize that the Bolshevik approach had to change in light of the unexpected events of the start of the second Russian revolution.

So I was privileged to participate in a seminar led by Alain Badiou, while I was at the European graduate school. And although the seminar I attended was not the one we read today, I want to share with you just first a general sense of Badiou as a person, before going on to his text. So the first thing that I felt around Badiou is that he had such a strong aura of a true philosopher.

There's a deep quietness to his soul, that is the result of, and I think he's well close to his 90s, a life of quiet reflection and philosophical reflection. He felt like a true philosopher; it was very interesting. But at the same time, he has a long history as a political activist at least since his student days, when he was a Maoist. And what's most interesting about Badiou is that he continues to be a Maoist today.

There are not many people who are still Maoist today, so let's take a closer look at why Badiou insists that he is still a Maoist. He went to China in 2014 or 15, I believe, and while he was there, he was interviewed by an anonymous Chinese philosopher. And one of the questions that the philosopher asked was, ''are you really serious, or are you being provocative when you say that despite the terrible destruction inflicted on China by the Cultural Revolution, it should be considered as a source of thought and not as a disaster?''

And Badiou replies:

“One could claim that the Paris Commune in 1871 was a complete “disaster”—20,000 workers shot to death in the streets of Paris—nevertheless, it was by reflecting on the Paris Commune that Lenin developed the means for a victorious revolution in 1917. Likewise, it is only by reflecting on the Cultural Revolution that we can prepare for the future of the communist political movement. Why? Because the Cultural Revolution was the sole example of a revolution under the conditions of state socialism. It is no coincidence that the most important creation of the Cultural Revolution took the name the Shanghai Commune.”

So here again, we have that tension between situating oneself within the tradition of revolutionary activism, while at the same time, arguing for a kind of change. And what's so fascinating I think about Badiou’s position on Maoism, and then we'll get into the reading for today.

I think what's so fascinating about his position on Maoism is that he argues in effect that Maoism has ceased to exist today, and therefore we can learn from it. So in a very real sense, he's recovering a lost tradition. And in doing so, he's not only changing the tradition, but he's situated himself within the revolutionary tradition. So let's turn now to the seminar that we read today, which I think was an extremely just fascinating piece on change.

I think change is one of the most difficult things to think about. And in fact, we at Activist Graduate School have often thought about maybe we should change our name to something like the Social Change Institute. Since I see activism as a kind of subcategory of change more generally. Anyway, so in the Badiou reading that we did today, there are a few points that I want to highlight.

First, Badiou points to the breakdown in the classical revolutionary vision. And so what he's arguing for most persuasively I think in here is a new conception of how revolution happens, and what revolution is going to look like. He also does something I think, which is very important, is he distinguishes between change inside the world versus change of the world itself. And I don't think this should be confused with the idea of should we work within the system or should we work from outside the system to effect change. But rather I think what he's pointing to is two different paradigms for change.

Now, this really struck me because I want to backs back up a little bit and I want to tell you that right before I decided to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos, a gathering of elites, I first visited the World Economic Forum's offices in New York City. And while I was there, I met with the founder of the World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab.

And in this meeting I had with professor Klaus Schwab and others, I asked him, basically, you know is your position that we should effectively abandon revolution as a goal or as an attainable object? And what he said I think was so fascinating, at the time I thought it was fascinating, and now I find it doubly fascinating because it echoes so much what Badu just said. Basically, Schwab said, you know we can have systems change, but we can no longer have a change of systems.

And for him, this meant that the world that we have, this economic structure that we have right now is what we are going to have. But we can influence it, and we can change it, and we can tweak it, and he's called for different ways of changing it that he calls for example stakeholder capitalism. Now I’m not saying I agree or disagree with him, but I’m pointing to this aspect of change, which I think relates to the question of tradition.

Which is the change going to happen with inside the world, or is it a change of the world itself? Returning to Badu, I also want to highlight another thing which I thought was interesting, which is his rejection of pure change itself. This is I think one of the stumbling blocks of a lot of activists because there is a conception within Marxism that I’m sure Badiou is absolutely fully aware of.

Which is the idea that everything which exists deserves to be destroyed. There's a kind of nihilism within some aspects of revolutionary leftism that says that everything is a manifestation of a broken capitalist regime, and ought to be destroyed. Badiou rejects this position. He instead argues for accepting a relationship between tradition and change. So this leads me to the final question I’d like to present for vis-a-vis Badiou before moving forward, which is: What kind of change is activism capable of?

Now the reason why I bring this up is because I think that sometimes we fault activism for being incapable of the creating kinds of change that itself is not capable of doing. And what I mean by this is, I wonder to what extent activism can or cannot do systems change versus change of systems. Maybe activism can only do one of those kinds of change, like a change of systems. I want to identify not just can; you know what kind of change can it do, but also what kind of change is it best suited for.

So what I’d like to do, just the question I’m having here is, can we further break apart the different kinds of change, and then can we identify the kind of change that activism is specifically activism is the best at. Now, for the Foucault, I thought what was really interesting here is that he's talking about techniques of the self. Which I think immediately leads the question of what are the activist techniques of the self, the activist techne that allows us to create ourselves as activists.

And I think there are a lot of them that we do, not only do we as activists you know read non-mainstream political analysis and that kind of stuff, which I think is part of the technique of distinguishing our political ideas from the mainstream or from the status quo. But we also submit ourselves to these kinds of intense public protests which are scary, and which are also joyful and great.

So I want to just pull out the Foucault as just this question of what is the activist technique of the self. Specifically, I think for our class to bring it back to what we're trying to do in our classes, what kind of techne of activist self will create the kind of self capable of rupturing the disciplinary tradition?

So what I mean here is if we were to identify what would be the character type of the activist best suited for rupturing you know a discipline, whether it's anthropology or classics. What would be the techniques to develop that self? I think that would be a very interesting question. Because I think that, the kind of activists who are going to rupture disciplines, probably are doing different techniques of the self, than the kind of activists who are going to rupture other kinds of traditions.

Because academia requires certain, you have to know the material; you have to know how to do the seminar space. You have to know how to communicate your ideas and write them down. I think academia is very resistant; they call it an ivory tower for a reason, it's very resistant to demands for change from the outside in a certain sense. So I’m going to leave it with that, what technique of the self will create the kind of activist capable of rupturing disciplinary tradition? And finally, I think we had in the classical examples a clue into different ways that different activist selves. And why I like these readings is really because you have two completely different approaches to activism, two different models.

On the one hand, you have Seneca, who's arguing that you have to cultivate a kind of detachment from the crowds, from the people around you in order to to become the self that you ought to become. He says, ''you should not copy the bad simply because they are many, nor should you hate the many because they are unlike you. Withdraw into yourself as far as you can.''

So faced with an unjust world, a world where people are literally being, as he starts in the beginning of his letter, being pulled into arenas and forced to fight each other to the death while people laugh and cheer and eat food. His answer is to withdraw into yourself. This is a completely different answer from one of the greatest unknown activists of all time, Herostratus.

Who burned the temple of Artemis and Ephesus. The temple of Artemis was recognized as one of the most beautiful buildings in antiquity; then he destroyed it. Why? Well, apparently, he claimed under torture that he wanted to immortalize himself. But I also see it in there as a nihilistic act of pure change. You know he's saying to himself, I just don't want the temple there. I just want to destroy something that this society that I was born into reveres. The crime was so great that they tried to erase his name from all of history, but they failed.

And so we remember him now as another archetype in the long memory of activism. Maybe there will be a time in which Herostratus is the appropriate way to respond to one society. Or maybe there will be a time when Seneca is the appropriate way to respond to one's society.

MW:   Yes. So I think one of the kinds of gifts I think of antiquity and classics is that there are these archetypes of activism that are not, either not so well known today, or are kind of like the original characters. So I think for the Herostratus, what's so amazing about that story.

Basically, the story is, here's this person who burns down what was considered one of the most beautiful temples. And when they arrest him, and they torture him, and they demand why did you do this, he says well, because I wanted to become immortal, my name to be immortal. And then they try to erase his name from the history books, but it fails.

So here we have a story about someone who their motivation, they admit, is purely Anihilistic; they just want to destroy the world. They are the force of pure change; they are what the status quo rightly probably critiques about activists who just want to tear things down. He wasn't trying to build a new temple or anything.

And then, on the other hand, you have Seneca, who is a completely different archetype I think of an activist. And I think we actually probably have more of the nihilists today than we have with the Seneca model. Which is he's also a difficult figure because he is someone who is practicing a kind of detachment. But he's embedded within this horrible regime, but he himself is extremely wealthy.

So he has these like interesting kinds of personal characteristics, but what he's saying in this letter, which I found so interesting and powerful, is to try to, basically how to live a path that is neither hating nor imitating the dominant society around oneself. And I think this again; this is one of those challenges for activists.

Because especially activists within academia who are embedded within these cultures that they are trying to change. Seneca is actually advocating, and maybe we don't agree with this, but he's actually advocating a kind of don't fight with it; don't hate them, just work on your inner self, which I think is an interesting provocation for today's activists.

BH: Yes. It's interesting because even I think you had chosen that Seneca before we were going to do the Foucault. But this idea of withdrawal from the crowd, or withdrawal from the political in order to pursue an aesthetics of existence or a Techne of one's bios, which is what you have in Foucault’s kind of account of Seneca. This withdrawal is sort of critiqued a little bit by Robinho in the interview that we read.

Or he consistently is questioning Foucault whether he's capturing something beautiful. Not the destruction of something beautiful, about the creation of something beautiful. Or is this just a pursuit of narcissism? Is this just what we see Berkeley elites in early 80s California doing and trying to beautify their lives in the absence of kind of political vision or political engagement. And I think that tension remains throughout the interview.

It was certainly a big part of the ambivalence the reception of Foucault’s late work of the extent to which this is a withdrawal from the political, into a kind of cultivation of the self. Or whether this is a kind of realization of, as he describes it, his program is looking at these three sites for doing genealogy. Knowledge, power, and ethics, and so for Foucault, it's not at all withdrawal; it's a completion of a project. But the late Foucault is very caught, I think, within these two polar extremes.

MW:   Yes. I mean, I think in some ways, it's a more, I hate to say it's like a more mature position that you could come to later in life. Because I think that there is a kind of, there's a frustration. I think that that one thing that happens when you're young, `either young at heart or young literally as an activist, is that you overestimate how easy it is to change the status quo. And you overestimate like the easy the ease at which it is to change the exterior world, and you largely neglect, I think, the process of trying to change the inner world.

So I don't know, I think that I want to put them forward as archetypes without judging them as whether or not they're appropriate. But yes, that was kind of my inspiration there. Yes, I want to focus on this question, though, if we can, about this technique of the self. I think for me was really powerful in the Foucault.

And I think it's also just about the kind of; there's something that, I think that the withdrawal is also kind of a technique of the self, it's like an exercise for activists to attempt in a certain sense because it's not easy to do that, that withdrawal, I don't know.

BH: Well, I mean, do you think like Foucault has this very in classic French fashion, very well organized account of what these techniques are. And so there's the substance that you act upon, there are the norms that you're sort of orienting yourself in relationship to the actual techniques, and then there's the end result or the kind of teleology.

And I wonder whether we would give an account for an activist, which would look different from the account of someone working in the institution. Or whether we would want to give an account of what this kind of ethical formation or self-reformation is, in relationship to a common political reality or a common cultural reality, such that the activists and the academic would be pursuing the same work, because the conditions are the same, right?

So I guess my question is if you think that work is important for activists, is it a change to the particular practice of activism? Or is it attuned to the particular political moment or cultural moment that we inhabit?

MW:   Right. Yes, I mean, I think that's a good question. I don't know if I have a full answer because I think there's also the other layer that Badou is kind of bringing out, which is also a question of what kind of change are we pursuing? And so there might be a kind of change, I think definitely Seneca’s withdrawal is probably more, I mean I don't know we'd have to like think it out. But maybe it's more akin to a change within the world, versus a change of the world itself. Whereas the burning down of a temple is more of an act of someone trying to start trying to spark a new world.

And I think it's interesting, because in today's world if you were to burn down a temple, it almost would be the start of a social movement. Like it's a much different, it reminds me so much of like the throwing the poo at the road statue. It's the same kind of like flagrant like disregard, disrespect for something. And in our contemporary moment, that seems to inspire others to kind of rise up.

And we don't have any recordings I don't think of what the public's response was to the destruction of the temple. But what I’m trying to get at is I think that it's also this question of what kind of change are we pursuing as activists. And that also depends on, like you're saying. Like well, what is the site of the change that we're trying to pursue?

So are we trying to demolish the university entirely? Are we trying to change the university? So it depends, and to find your appropriate tactic depends on what you are trying to, what level of change you're trying to affect.

BH: Yes. I mean, I guess part of the issue is the extent, once you knock the statue down or you burn the temple down there, there's a kind of void. And I mean I guess from a Foucauldian perspective, and there's like the laws of power like the laws of energy. Like power will be attracted into the void.

And the question is whether there's, whether there's a world-building work that can accompany the act of destruction that can hold the space for the cultivation of new worlds, or whether in fact, we want to imagine that before the statute was toppled, there's work being done to sort of build up the Linumens of another world that will come to take it's place.

And maybe not supplant it entirely, but maybe we'll make its home in the ruins of the statue that was toppled, for example. I think that's the worry that I always have; I mean, we were reading France foreign for the AOS reads event, and so I’ve been reading a lot about Fentanyl this week. And it's very hard I think at this moment to read Fentanyl, and you have the optimism in the sense of regeneration, and then you also have his vision of what would happen in an independent Algeria. And that kind of hope of what would sort of this new world, and this man that would arise from Algeria.

And then you have the kind of resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism or nationalism, or these forces which were there. And you think you're sort of going to negotiate with them in order to bring about this end, but they survive and fill the void after one dominant regime has been toppled. And I think that's always the anxiety that I always have about radical moments of revolution, of a hope to just clear the slate is you do have this kind of crisis capitalism.

It's like precisely in the void that capitalism will come in, or power structures will re-invade as it were. And so that's I think where this kind of world-building work. The question with someone with Foucault does this cultivation of the self, is it in preparation for the moment after?

Or is it working in tandem with the critique or the moment of critique in the moment of destruction, such that it's already building another imaginary? Or is it merely the withdrawal into a form of quietism that believes it's doing political work but is really just pursuing art for our sake in the library.

MW:   Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think again this kind of, it ties back I think part of what you're gesturing at, you're getting at is it also ties back to this question of tradition. Because I think that, and this is, I think, one of the points that was really articulated well by Badou in critiquing pure change. I think that one of the ways in which the void goes unfilled is that sometimes there's a tendency to not be grounded in a revolutionary tradition per se.

So I think that especially like we saw this with, I think new activist movements want to or tend to lately like conceive themselves outside of the traditions of Marxism, or all these things that gave such weight to 19 and 20th-century revolutionaries. So like when the secular youth in Egypt overthrow Mubarak, there wasn't a tradition that they were like really bringing out.

And so the people that did have a tradition was like the Muslim brotherhood. So again, I think that the challenge is that, and this is kind of like why I like that Badou insists he's still a Maoist, is that I think part of what's going on is that there is a kind of I think there's a loss of revolutionary tradition, or there's a lack of our tradition that we can build on to fill that space that we're destroying.

BH: Yes. And then I think this goes back to the question that that Kiara and I were talking about in the first weeks, where she raised this question like what would be the imagined community of activists, like would I want to be part of it? And I think against the model of a kind of exclusionary community, which is going to dictate who's in and who's out.

There's also the sense of well, could we live without imagination and can we live without community? Because in the denial of that need, we tend to, I think, often fall back on the models of the status quo, without actively engaging in alternative speculative work. And without actively trying to constitute communities.

And the question then becomes whether that community can be imagined fully prior to the revolutionary moment, right? Like is there a way in which it's always a kind of romantic negation of the status quo, and then the world changes, and what is its place?

To what extent does that work of imagination need to be situated or flexible or mobile. And I think the importance is just the feedback loop between certain political work and imaginative work, rather than the opposition between the two.

MW:   Yes. I think that's right; I think that a lot of this, I think, has to do with also a sense of in terms of the imaginative work, is thinking about where activists draw their lineage. And I think that one of the things that's for me coming out of this class is that, I think that perhaps we were right to kind of, as activists, to step away from Marxism and Leninism and Stalinism and Maoism and all this kind of like, all the traumas of the 20th century to step away from that.

But at the same time, I think that we haven't done the work of reimagining well; what is our lineage? Because as we saw, like from the previous weeks like there is a whole range of forgotten memories. Like there are the slave uprisings, and there's the secession of the plebes. Like there are other episodes from which a tradition or lineage or an imagined community could be constructed.

That I think is like, could be one of the places where the work could be done. But again, I think that to me, it's interesting. I think another point that's really coming out for me though, especially in that guardian reading, is that it really isn't about what people say are protesting, saying they're protesting about.

That's why the removal of the statue doesn't get rid of the protests. The protests are also kind of just a manifestation of a social desire for change. So yes, this is all these different issues coming together, but it just makes me think it comes back to this question of construct, I think for this week, especially because of culture. It's like this question of like constructing that imagined community, that imagined lineage in a way that allows us to interact with the status quo and change the status quo in some way, it's difficult.

BH: Yes. I mean, I think that the kind of dystopian reading of the roads must fall is the sense of the void, again that comes after the statues done as if that were an end to itself. And I think maybe there is a kind of an adrenaline rush that happens, and the statue is toppled, and then it's over. And then what is precisely where the world-building begins.

But I think that there must be also a way in which nothing nearly, like actually toppling the statue, transforms the conditions of possibility within which that work happens. And so I think there's a lot of debate now, right? Like about confederate statues and what is it that we remember, and what is in the kind of, what is in the landscape, and is it just benign, right?

Or sometimes people will say well, this is just part of the past, and you have to sort of take it as it comes, right? And of course, that always mistakes the fact that these are neither benign because they're sites of persistent valuation, which means that it's not just a mutual record of history, but it's history focalized from the perspective of either the lost cause which manifests it's forms of white supremacy in the present or through forms of romanticizing the civil war itself.

And I think that that's a lot of what you see with classicism. I mean, one of the things that became really apparent to me in thinking about and working in the art world was in the museum in particular. Is how much classicism is transmitted through the cultural backdrop, right? Through statues, through the temple, right? Like in what it began to be like what I call proprioceptive classicism. And thinking about the ways in which our cultural values are asserted in a space outside of what we're focused on.

And I was thinking; it came to mind, Vanessa might remember because she was at this talk I gave on sites wobbly. But I was thinking about an essay I had written on Twombly for a show at the muse of fine arts in Boston, which is which is Twombly and antiquities. But even when I gave the talk which was earlier this year right before coronavirus.

I was thinking about the new executive order that had come out the week before from Trump's white house about the new standard for all federal buildings. And they all had to be classical or neoclassical, and there wasn't going to be any modernism. And why? Like why classical architecture, why federal buildings? It's because they were beautiful, right? People don't want ugly buildings.

We just want beauty as if beauty were politically neutral. And of course, the fact that classical beauty in architectural forms for federal buildings would be mobilized by Trump should be a good sign. That all of the parts when those terms are mobilized outside of Trump, though they're also political, it's just it takes Trump for us to see the political calculus that was sort of implicit in them all along.

And the more I started to think about this through the eyes, think about Twombley that is through the eyes of Trump's order; I began to really think okay. I went to go see this Twombley at the muse in Philadelphia, museum of fine arts, I guess in Philadelphia. Which has super neoclassical thought, right? And at the end of this very classical LA and you go through, there are columns everywhere.

And then I went back to where I was working at the New York public library in the Stephen Schwartzman building, right? So it's funded by this private equity manager. And it's just layer upon layer of New York wealth building on this classical facade and all of the sort of accouterments of classicism. And then I was bringing Butler library, which is another site of classicism. And then the show is at the MFA, which is another site of classical culture.

And like Twombley was raised in, was he raised in Lexington, Virginia? Like somewhere that was like just imbued with classical architecture, soldered to the memory of the heroic South and American imperialism. And all of these valuations of, and sort of politically freighted investments in classicism that are just there in American history. And the more I thought about it, the more I just thought like this is just everywhere. And [00:21:00.00] it's operating on us and on our subconscious all the time. And that's culture too, right? That's classicism in the culture; it's sort of in the backdrop infusing what you think of as art or value or history or the appropriate forms of memory.

Such that when we tell stories like the 1619 project, where we think about negative music classics, this is actually seen as a form of ugliness. It's seen as destruction, it's seen as burning down the temple of Artemis, just as a form of nihilism. Because what else could we have if not beauty, right? I mean, that's how close the fusion is between the classical and the beautiful. And so sometimes I think if we see those as acts of nihilism, it's there's a risk that it feeds into the myth of classicism as substance.

MW:   It's interesting, yes. And also, I mean, I think that it really, what you're saying, I think really highlights just the simple fact that Trump is able to evoke the classical tradition. And just by doing that, he gets all of this power and all these things that accrue to him.

But as activists, we don't have that same, we don't have at hand a ready-made tradition that we could suddenly imagine we win the white house and we're like okay all buildings have to be in soviet realism. Like that, we don't have that equivalent where we just say we're going to just claim something from the past, and immediately give us all this power. And I think that's...

BH: Well, modernism in a way was that attempt, right? Like modernism certainly is predicated on a rejection of classicism as dead past as dead tradition and aligned with the creation of a new agent.

MW:   Right. So what we have is the new, we don't have the old I think that's part of what is, so because which I think is interesting, because the activism does as we've been talking about, have along. I mean there's a lot it has a long history, so it could have, it could have that old. But there hasn't been this systemic work to draw this lineage that we would have available to us. We have to constantly create it, or we have to valorize just that we are the new. And that's what's good about us; it's just that we are new.

BH: Yes. And that's exactly what Budgie is trying to critique, right? And I think that's what when we did this course on pre-modernism, it was like well, so much of modernism response to classicism, but also so much of the revalorization of antiquity and someone like Nietzsche’s precisely as a repudiation of a kind of modern Neuralism.

And a kind of refusal of not only dead philology but also the kind of myth of rupture with the past. And an attempt to kind of go back to some pure notion of what a subject is. And of course, that's the risky side of this circadian techniques of the self, is that Nietzsche’s impulse to go back to the beautiful being that is the Greeks. And again, you can see that in the interview with [Inaudible ].

Where he's really pushed in that direction, and then he'll say no like we can't go back to Greece, I’m not saying we can go back to the Greeks, but within our own tradition here are other contingencies. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about with activism, is it's like well, what can we imagine a tradition that's capacious enough to have other possibilities other than the hegemonic forms of capitalism or racial capitalism or imperialism that becomes sites for re-imagination.

And that are nevertheless, and this is what Foucault I think is saying when he's talking about the [Inaudible] of Chinese philosophy or Chinese aesthetics where he says well, and this is I mean you could push on this is not our culture, right? So there's. Also, he's drawing the parameters what is a cultural tradition. Okay, it starts with the Greeks, and it goes to Nietzsche essentially.

But we're trying to find offshores within that tradition that could be other ways of knowing. And I think that Foucault’s choice there raises this question of life well, how radically could we go and find say indigenous Cosmo divisions to go, Bajia's notion of how do we imagine another relationship between the non-human and human world. Maybe the whole thing is wrecked, right?

And we just need to go somewhere else. But that raises its own problems too because I think that that's its own form of romanticism, and I think sometimes the desire to sort of leave the Greeks behind or leave the west behind and go somewhere else it's like we fucked up planet earth and let's go like build a colony on Mars. Like we got to like make life within the ruins of this mess we made. So I feel like that's part of, a little bit what the positive side of Foucault trying to work with the Greeks is.

MW:   Yes, absolutely. And I think the other thing though that he's also, his big point about constructing your life as if it's art. Is also I think something that is or could be very much in line with a new activist sensibility. Because I think that right now, a lot of activists, the activist approach around techniques of the self that relate to like having the correct ideas.

Not ideas per se, but it's like there's lingo, and there are clicks, and you're supposed to have the correct interpretation of events. So if something happens in the social world, then the activist community is supposed to have the same interpretation of what that event means. I think there's another kind of possibility which I liked in the Foucault, which is instead that, when we do activism, we're constructing a kind of art.

And we see this, I think in some of the great activists of the past, is that their life was beautiful in a certain sense. Like Che Guevara, I think is a very good example of a person who did make their life into kind of a revolutionary art project, and there are so many stories from his life that are like out of a fictional story.

So I think that I’m, so there are two things, I guess one is wondering what it would take for, what would be necessary for activists to do in order to like make it such that when people evoke the classical tradition, it's not quite so obvious that they are like pushing in favor of a certain kind of Trump or power or something.

And then I think the other question is also, this question of like is there a way in which we could be constructing ourselves differently as some sort of avenue out of this too. So I’m just trying to find different ways of thinking about the problem without because I guess what I’m trying to say is I think that that I mentioned this idea of the taxonomy. Because I think what we want to do is elucidate different solutions without identifying as of yet which one is the appropriate one for our moment.

BH: Yes. I think you put your finger on something important, which is the relationship between one's the creation of a life as exemplary, and that form of myth-making that accrues the revolutionary figure. And it isn't necessary; it goes back to that question of the imagined community.

How much work and myth is required for us to imagine communities? To imagine alternate futures? To imagine forms of speculation that can be productive or generative of new worlds. Like there's a certain amount of we call it romanticism or utopianism or mismaking, but the question is, what's the alternative, right?

Pragmatism, not overrated and pragmatism by any means. But then the other side of it is the techniques of the self, where one is really pursuing work that is invisible or may not be visible in spectacular ways. And here I really think of someone like Pima children, bringing in like the kind of Buddhist side of things.

Where there are moments with Pima children where she says, look, like when you're helping the most vulnerable among us. Like you're up against the ugliest parts of yourself, right? You're not like looking at like yourself in that work; then, you're not going to be working with compassion.

And because you have to have compassion towards your own vulnerabilities in order to do genuinely constructive work with others in communities in that kind of invisible community building. And those are kinds of two different modalities to go back to the kind of critique and post-critique model that was a little bit in the background, in the beginning, is like one side is this kind of work on oneself and in a very sort of self-effacing way.

And that's maybe even less of the Foucault and more of the Pima children, and the other is this kind of spectacular with making around the life. And again with [Inaudible] introduction to his wretched of the earth, and he says for him the political emotion that matters is anger, anger is what drives politics. And there was a very strong sense of [Inaudible1] anger and the anger of the writing, versus the kind of torment of a lived life.

Where he said I hate the weakness in myself, like the part of me that requires that violence is something, that's the intellectual, that's the part I want to suppress, right? Because revolutionary fervor needs to be purified to a state of pure anger. And those are two different modalities, right? For imagining the work of change in the world. There are two different ways of imagining the relationship to the past, right? The making of an imagined community. But I think they both are in play when we think about what kinds of archetypes we use in order to actualize our political agency and imagine ourselves as agents in the world.

MW:   Absolutely. Yes, I mean, I think that maybe this is kind of where we're going to end our conversation because I do think that one of the things I think about activism is it's a very contradictory phenomenon. And I think one of the contradictions that we're, or paradoxes maybe is a better word.

But one of the paradoxes that we're kind of coming up to in this week on culture is that withholding judgment as to whether or not it's true, but there does seem to be an argument that there's something about the quiet work of working on oneself that is a productive way of trying to change culture. And that's paradoxical because it seems so much more obvious that we should just burn down the temple.

But I want to still hold that tension and say well, but maybe there's something to this other question about A, is it possibly a construction of the self as a beautiful project? Or is there just like Seneca says, just to withdraw into yourself as far as you can? And that in itself is an effective way of confronting a culture that is toxic or injurious.

BH: Yes. I mean I think like to kind of to close out, I mean it's like it's hard for me not to hear at each of these sites something that's really fundamental to Foucault’s analysis, particularly of the Greek material, which is the masculinity of it, and the obsession [Inaudible] and the ways in which this is about master of oneself so that one can master others.

But the worst thing is to be feminized; the worst thing is to be impotent; the worst thing is to be weak. And I think that there is this tension within thinking about revolutionary culture work between destruction, and destruction is an expression of radical agency, right? And then that aftermath of well now what, well what kinds of agency are required then?

And I’m not speaking about sex roles; I’m just talking about the gendering of political agency and the way in which it frequently recurs as where the only forms of sort of legitimate political engagement are masculine. And can't reckon with failure, can't recognize with vulnerability or with true kind of community work.

And again, it's about the kind of distribution of gender within how we map agency, and that does seem very haunted by Greco-Roman obsessions with autarky, probably because of modern perceptions of it. But we're still working through that.