“Our Line’s Been Changed Again” (Joe Glazer)

“Communists devout” protest the Party “line” that alliances be made with “bourgeois groups” and even, ugh, Socialists. No coherence to such “kaleidoscopic” politics, and, meanwhile, what happens to the Revolution? “It can wait.” But, in truth, it hasn’t arrived, yet, and such brinksmanship risks what Mangabeira Unger calls “the dangerous limiting case of transformative politics.” The empty purity of the hard line.

 

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“Igneous” (AMM)

Ongoing attempt to rewrite the rules of improv.  Unlike, say, jazz improvisation, it’s difficult here to discern much in the way of traditional themes and variations, call and response, etc.  Under the rubric, The Nameless Uncarved Block, the goal of the project is to avoid form, and to focus instead on the matter itself, enacting a kind of Marxian materialism.  With patience, one can recognize the guitar, the piano, and the like, as the instruments’ physical possibilities are patiently explored and potentially exploded.  But the problem with the materialist orientation brings one to a classic différance: as soon as matter becomes coherent (is read as “igneous,” for example), one already has given up on that which is “nameless” and has invoked an implicit form.

 

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