Kairos I: Exemplary Acts of Revolutionary Potentiality

Kairoticism: Exemplary Acts, the Whatever-Messiah & Revolutionary Post-History

There is no revolution without exemplary acts... moments when revolutionary potentiality was not only present but was affirmed in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also pointed toward the future... 

- Maurice Blanchot, May 1968

Part 1. Exemplary Acts

Writing in Paris during his intellectual and political engagement with the tumultuous events of the student revolts of May 1968 –  a revolution successful at best in part – Maurice Blanchot, in Comité (a single issue publication) defines the “'exemplary act' [as being] such because it goes beyond itself while coming from very far away, superseding itself and in an instant, with a shattering suddenness, exploding its limits.”[1] Two exemplary acts will serve as our approach to the problematic of the eminently temporal conditions of possibility for revolution, to a concept and experience of time as kairos. First, an event of May '68 itself:

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

The highest violence was no doubt in an instant of non - violence,when, to reject the ban (the banning of (Daniel) Cohn-Bendit was the pathetic “exemplary act” of the powers that be), thousands of workers and students – revolutionaries in an absolute sense – stamped their feet and chanted: “We are all German Jews.” Never has this been said anywhere, never at any moment: inaugural speech, opening and overthrowing the frontiers, opening and disrupting the future.[2]

Myth of Progress (in progress) 2.0

Oftentimes the direction of a thought process occurs across various social networks, these days.

The other day I posted this to twitter:

@agent139 So long as our civ is driven by the myths of progress, & the industry that follows it, psych desire will stripmine ecological capacity

This was ported over to Facebook and it triggered a reaction from a friend, ""Myths of progress"? Go throw your computers and devices in the river, while your at it, toss in your clothes (also products of development and technology). Oh, and stop going to the doctor, next time you get a broken bone you just walk that shit off like a man."

This point is actually well taken, but follows (I think) from the first definition of myth I list in the IoM editor's intro that Reality Sandwich ran earlier this week. A myth like "progress" or "individuality" represents not a single belief but a complex belief structure, often with levels of strata that can be hard to excavate. Calling it a myth is no slight; however different results follow from different cultural complexes, different myths.

I'd like to explore this issue more, and hopefully expand on it in greater depth in one of my articles in the book.

My reply:
Every myth has positive and negative effects. The Enlightenment gave us a new license on science, it also brough about new possibilities for global conquest (& war)- science itself gave us both penicillin & the bomb. (Many other things too, you get my point.) If a myth of individuality & progress wasn't embedded in our culture, something else would be- which would yield its own +s & -s.

In my opinion there's a particular problem with marrying progress (a teleological obsession- towards goals / ends) with the myths that come along with capitalism. But that's going to take half a book for us to explore.