For Trace: On Ambiguity

When we first encountered the work that was being done in this area, when we first encountered what you were doing in that place, ambiguity and getting shit done were already constant bedfellows. The drive to have formed, coalesced, done - and the seeming lack of position at times that can curiously define non-hierarchical structures. Who is doing what, when, why ... questions that had risen to the fore when we visited Gripia and which might be termed questions about praxis, questions about ideology.

One of our greatest learnings here has been what we might call the letting go - rising beyond, embettering. Some process of release, of becoming thru letting out the corset strings or the battens or the grasp. And a part of that, of course, has been learning about what makes for an equitative or participatory economics. Understanding that ambiguity may be required in order to allow for alternatives to exist, for a hegemonic reckoning not to be the only narrative.

That which has happened is not only "a time and environment specific event, full of particular personalities and details" - as Zizek writes

when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over.

You say yourself that "we should have some idea of how we would like our relationships to work by the time we have the words available to provide the basic outline" - which one could take to mean that once this structure has been built (the arc-chamber constructed, the heart's impasse corralled and futile hope thwarted) we fill in the outline. It seems to me that it is damn ambiguity which makes it otherwise.

It's ambiguous not because we can isolate windblown stretches of the highway and tag 'em, bag 'em - we can say that this circumstance produced that outburst, that this particularity has no currency, that this can be discounted because of that - we end up with a spindly, windblown thing, a nothing, a haint. It's ambiguous because we are both outline and filling, ground and figure. The ruins at the backs of your retinas are both glorious and shameful, proud, buckled.

We die on our feet only when we have the fortitude to draw a new outline every day, to rise up and question, unreason, to pardon ourselves. To know that we are weak and shelter incoherence. That we are bitter beyond all reckoning and can cast it out like some spittle-demon. We do, and do.

Yes, there is no other way but to ache for work that means to be done. That work is a painfully ambiguous, full-on wrestling with the outline, the form, the figure. And it never stops.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again (M Piercy)

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