Breaking Through.

I realize my posts have been rather depressing lately. So let's have a lighter hearted post today, shall we?!

I have done a lot of thinking since my last post. I realize it sounded dismal and fairly hopeless. And instead of giving into the feelings of despondency the capitalist regime causes me to feel, I refuse to let it drain me of my creativity. Because then hegemony wins. And another artist submits to the machine.  And I won't do it.

There are plenty of other artists, theorists and intellectuals who have written from within far lesser and more decrepit conditions than I. What about Antonio Gramsci, one of the most brilliant yet oppressed intellectuals in the history of Marxist criticism? The man was born with scoliosis, was sentenced to life in prison because he was resisting Italian fascism and, despite these terrible, utterly demoralizing conditions, he did everything he could to get his ideas of resistance out. He wrote on pieces of toilet paper and sneaked them out, literally through the prison bars, to his accomplices and comrades who would then later help him publish The Prison Notebooks--one of the most brilliant treatises on the plight of intellectual  hegemony ever written.

If a man like Gramsci can take those conditions, conditions that are utterly and deplorably worse than mine, then I have no excuse.

In fact, I should consider myself a hypocrite for lauding the work of female activists, poets and writers like Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Emma Goldman, Margaret Fuller, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Vandana Shiva (I could continue the list indefinitely) while not continuing in their tradition. Each of these women has confronted the most abject of conditions and has utilized that as a form of fire, as a catalyst to bring forth new thought into the world.

I need to do the same.

The capitalist regime blinds us with a thick layer of seemingly impenetrable hegemonic wool. But we have the shears, we have the tools. It's time to start cutting, deconstructing and using every cell, every tool possible, to remove it and cultivate our own form of resistance and existence.

Let's begin.