Please Note: In the time between recording our newsletter and sending it to you, we made the difficult decision that Brian Massumi will not travel from Montreal to Chicago. The live event will feature Matthew Goulish in-person hosting Brian Massumi virtually for our Chicago audience, with books for sale and a reception to follow. We have provided a Webinar link for remote participation in the program.

Dear friends and supporters,

Voices of politics incline toward shouting. With shouting—shouting down your opponent, shouting to be heard by the assembled crowd—comes simplification. Some thoughts remain unshoutable. They can be communicated only quietly, in the space of time and concentration that their shades of complexity and insight demand: the contemplations from within a state of emergency that point to the directions of escape.

Events in the political realm tend toward speed. We cannot keep up with them or process them as they overwhelm us, which provokes the sense of emergency and the perceived need to match their accelerated pace.  Slow, a close friend of quiet, shares the imperative of counter-urgency. It unmasks speed’s hollowness, its spinning in place like a minor whirlwind.

The pitch and volume of the today’s political climate in the US not only obscure comprehension, they also feed on themselves. They pulse with thin desires for power and control; valorizing action, dominating opponents, negating difference. Taken to their most violent extremes, these operations offer characteristic historical definitions of fascism. Rather than considering fascism as a fixed condition, arguing about its manifestation, armed with our nonviolent weapons of quiet and slowness, we may rethink fascism as a verb, an anti-process of fascisizing tendencies, a mode of operation that generates the desires it feeds on, channeling them into abstract general ideas that close in on themselves and turn away from the world. These tendencies preface every question with a ready conclusion. They remain uninterested in accuracy and particularity. They thrive on the negation of all the rich differences that unfold from the strength of the our most gentle attentions.

All of this is to say that we cannot address a problem, or intertwined set of problems, however threatening and urgent they appear, without first thinking about them clearly. Thinking clearly is an act. Finding accurate language for an event in all its complexity affirms our engagement in that event and shifts the poles of possibility. This is how I understand Brian Massumi’s activist philosophy, the thought and writing that I have come to rely on in navigating the bleak landscape of our current moment. His practice aspires to the creation of new concepts and the public service of constructive estrangement from the presupposed. After the insurrection of January 6th, 2021, he went to work and produced two essential volumes, lifelines for thinking clearly about where we are, how we got here, and how to actualize a different future—The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-fascist Life (Duke University Press), and its companion Process Vocabulary (Minor Compositions). Brian’s project of diagnosing the symptoms of how fascism returns to enact itself in new variation begins by reconsidering personhood, situating it within a discourse of process and event. He draws on the foundational thought of Baruch Spinoza, Charles Peirce, William James, W. E. B. DuBois, Alfred North Whitehead,  Erin Manning, and many others. Brian is a human library and machine for the creation of concepts—redirecting our engagement in the political, defining in detail the affirmation of the event that turns away from the familiar regime of reaction. Can a more durable logic of inclusion influence the forum of politics? Moments of sacrifice and progress in our history tell us it is possible, but sometimes those advances only arrive in response to the most brutal and unforgiving obstacles.

In such moments, those of us who cannot become activists overnight might strive to find the latent activism that we may awaken from within our existing practice. That’s another way of saying: do what you are good at, what you are in a position to do, that with the slightest shift becomes an effective act of resistance.

At Every house we turned our abilities for devising a public performance and assembly into a moment of dialogue that might bring this clear thinking to a wider circle. Because I am fortunate enough to call this giant of contemporary philosophy a friend, I was in a position to invite Brian Massumi to Chicago from Montreal for a public dialogue on his two books. The planning of the event has already galvanized networks of colleagues including our hosts Pilsen Community Books and Watershed Arts and Ecology. If you cannot make it in person on April 19th, we hope to make a sound recording to share with you.

In either case, we will revisit the simplest idea: that when we gather, in the meeting place of the slow and the quiet, we understand again how darkness makes our own light apparent. We awaken to new channels of possibility. We affirm the values of a more just and inclusive society, as a more complex world draws near, and we know ourselves to be less alone.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg