a.

celebrity philosopher / paypal.me/certainwoman

[certainwoman]

I really really need to update my blog more beyond the times when I am feeling worried about something. i have been doing rather well actually. i just do not watch films on my actual laptop nowadays and i do not listen to as much music, and i forget to post when i am happy. So it seems my life sucks way more than it actually does.

[certainwoman]

Coffee shops are sacred places

[certainwoman]

amazing spam email

[certainwoman]

i cannot start having political discussions on tumblr again lmao

[certainwoman]

"In a context like this - characterized by a shift in the balance of forces within the state in favor of the bourgeoisie and the installation of “policies without politics” - many people on the Left are understandably pessimistic about the prospects for socialism. The primary question reverberating loudly through the terrain of struggle is this: what grounds do we have for continuing the hard labor of sustaining a revolutionary movement in highly adverse conditions? Insisting on the indispensable presence of hope is perceived as playing with fire. However, hope is what we need. Without hope, there is no possibility of sustained engagement in a revolutionary movement. Moreover, hope for a radical re-constitution of existing societal conditions is present in the very movements of capital. In other words, we need to discover the material determinations of hope in its present mode of existence as a hidden potentiality and turn it into actuality through conscious revolutionary action

(...)

The material determinations of hope derive from this fundamental fact. Since individuals create their own history, structures can’t be considered as unsurpassable obstacles. Structures are themselves the result of social practices. To overcome structures, critical consciousness needs to be combined with revolutionary action; the glue binding them together is hope. In the current conjuncture, hope needs to be reclaimed so that the struggle to achieve socialism can be revitalized. Once this is done, the political praxis of the Left will gain the ability to appropriately problematize our structural conditionedness and pierce through the open-ended nature of history."

Yanis Iqbal, Dialectics of Hope

[certainwoman]

If I was being completely true to myself and what i believe, I think the extremely negative stance on hope in this day and age might even be dangerous and I have been known to flirt with postmodernism. Despair and apathy are being forced upon us more than ever. Not hope. Not the faux mindless optimism of the early 2010s. Chaos and doom. "Nothing you do or say matters". "You are useless". "Your hope is pointless and daft." And this is destructive to communities, this is destructive to socialist movements, this is destructive to individuals personally.

[estrellasrojas]

so like is there any hope or is it all fucked

I mean what does it look like. Most people know it’s fucked at this point but they do what they do anyways. I think anyone with hope right now is either deluded or dishonest with themselves, unless their own prospects are abnormally good and they’re solipsistic, then their hope is justified. Hope in this situation is not only irrational, it’s actively a conservative force keeping people from acting proportionately to the existential crisis we’re in

[certainwoman]

I might get extremely negative responses to this, call me an idiot dumbass but no, this is an extremely jaded response that is one of the many reasons why people feel lack of motivation to take any kind of political action and why they cannot even comprehend the power the masses could have, that they do have. We have enormous potential to cause change and hope has always been crucial in any kind of revolutionary action. How can we bring upon change if we do not have hope that our activism, unity, community can bring upon change? What are we without hope even? What is the point then? And no, I am not deluded and dishonest with myself, I feel like not only does this kind of doomerist stance lead you to not even attempt to make any kind of political contribution, it also makes you mentally rot on a personal level.

[bimboficationblues]

“hope” is just a vague description of an affect of “longing for things to be different or better in some way that is improbable or difficult” (if it was probable then it would be, idk, assuredness rather than hope). another way to phrase it might be “wishful thinking”

I am skeptical that the thing holding back political action nowadays is “hopelessness.” It’s true that people can lack a sense of the possibility of improvement to such a degree that it limits their ability to act because “what’s the point.” people can also, as OP is pointing to, use hope as a means of delaying their willingness to think creatively, to take risks that might pay off, to cultivate the actual skills and capabilities that are far more directly useful to achieving desired outcomes than possessing hope. if I lack the skill, tools, or capacity to achieve a goal, hoping that the goal will still be achieved probably won’t change the outcome (although random chance is still a possibility but I wouldn’t want to rely on it). and if I throw up my hands and say “well there’s no hope” because I lack those things, that is, counterintuitively, still an assertion of hope’s supposed value as an affect and also a way of denying my own ability to act.

which is to say that hope can have bad effects on motivation as much as good ones. in this particular moment, where hope is largely expressed in wanting rescue, in the expectation that some other set of actors or attenuated set of circumstances will make transformation possible, I think it is correct to ID that as a conservative (even religious) instinct.

[certainwoman]

So I would argue then that it depends on one’s definition of hope and whether your hope is combined with action. Improbable or difficult is not included in most definitions of hope I have encountered. Hope is often in fact predicated on what came before. If I am a marxist / socialist, and I see past revolutions and their conditions, my hope is both based in the past and the future. Whether hope includes optimism and what is optimism (Terry Eagleton for example claimed optimism was passive and hope was active and brought action, however problematized it). Various marxist / socialist / political theorists, historical and contemporary writers discussed hope, some deeming it necessary. Mark Fisher whom I love was perhaps even more critical of it. Nowadays, however I find a lot of inspiration in the combination of hope and action. I find a lot of personal and political inspiration in hope. I fundamentally agree with those who say it is not necessary, however I do think at this time it would serve us well. I do not mean some vague concept of only hope. I do not mean that we should merely only have hope and sit on our asses doing nothing. Hope does not entail that.

"Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures." David Graeber

"I want to explore how optimism and hope participate in this turning. I do not want to argue that optimism and hope are always good things or necessary tools for revolutionaries. To be turned is not always about being turned into action but can be about how one is turned by the actions of others.

To become revolutionary would seem to require a belief in the possibility of revolution. To become revolutionary would also seem to require a belief that a revolution is necessary. In other words, you would agree that what exists is something against which we should revolt. The revolutionary might have pessimism about the present but optimism about the future. This does not mean that revolutionary action depends upon subjects acquiring the right kind of orientations toward the present or the future.

I want to turn to the question of hope as a way of reconsidering the temporality of feeling, how feelings are directed toward objects in the present; how they keep the past alive; and how they involve forms of expectancy or anticipation of what follows (the future is always “the what” that follows, never arriving, always or only tomorrow, even when we have past futures behind us).

(...)

We do not need to argue that the lessons of history are that of the relativity of good fortune to learn from Durkheim’s work. What he shows us is that our history, our arrival, involves moments of fortune and misfortune, and that hope is an orientation toward such past moments as the relativity of fortune." Sara Ahmed

[sunbentshadows]

Thread from Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on her experience in a hospital in Cuba

[certainwoman]

So exhausted by any form of cynicism. So exhausted by the indifference and / or defeatism.

[estrellasrojas]

so like is there any hope or is it all fucked

I mean what does it look like. Most people know it’s fucked at this point but they do what they do anyways. I think anyone with hope right now is either deluded or dishonest with themselves, unless their own prospects are abnormally good and they’re solipsistic, then their hope is justified. Hope in this situation is not only irrational, it’s actively a conservative force keeping people from acting proportionately to the existential crisis we’re in

[certainwoman]

I might get extremely negative responses to this, call me an idiot dumbass but no, this is an extremely jaded response that is one of the many reasons why people feel lack of motivation to take any kind of political action and why they cannot even comprehend the power the masses could have, that they do have. We have enormous potential to cause change and hope has always been crucial in any kind of revolutionary action. How can we bring upon change if we do not have hope that our activism, unity, community can bring upon change? What are we without hope even? What is the point then? And no, I am not deluded and dishonest with myself, I feel like not only does this kind of doomerist stance lead you to not even attempt to make any kind of political contribution, it also makes you mentally rot on a personal level.

[borderepisteme-deactivated20260]

"Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability, between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge."

Fredric Jameson, Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan

[certainwoman]

did tim hecker and tim heidecker ever meet

[certainwoman]

I have had people tell me “i want to know more about you” “i want to get to know you” several times this past few weeks. Completely random people. It was not even some awkward dating app thing (which i am even more insistent on not engaging with, i hate dating apps) and somehow those words trigger some kind of flee instinct within me. They really make it certain that they are very unlikely to ever get to know me. Call me bitchy or rude (?) but conversations are supposed to flow and the process of getting to know one another should be easy going, spontaneous, it should feel exciting but never like a burden, there is no order, there is no priority of information.

[certainwoman]

Best compliments from friends

[certainwoman]

the internet is broken today. apparently instagram has not been working for many people. reddit went down. and now i go to my favourite film site criticker and they are undergoing maintenance

[capacity2]

But tumblr is still standing

[certainwoman]

Never Published

[certainwoman]

I love perfume but i will never be a perfume Person, like what do you mean kenzo flower is an old lady smell? It is beautiful