"The term “direct action” was first widely used by the revolutionary union IWW, or the Industrial Workers of the World, in 1910. It refers to the practice of working directly to achieve social change, rather than using politically-mediated methods such as voting or petitions." - Max Wilbert
[ A note about this epigraph. It appears, perhaps, that Max Wilbert is here conflating all of 'politics' with what I call 'state politics' -- the politics of the state. In my view of 'politics,' this conception fractures 'politics' away from the magical and potent arts of the communal sphere and robs us of power. But even this is not a true robbery, as at any moment we can flick the light switch and brighten the room we are in. We can dispel the darkness and enact our real power as poets with hands and hearts. ]
On most days, I spend some time thinking, reading and writing about direct action. Like most people, I tend first to pick the low hanging fruit of inquiry and research. I explore the general terrain and see how the pieces fit together. This generates questions -- because having some answers to questions generates curiosity and further questions. And away we go. It's a complex and tangled journey of discovery. And, like most journeys of discovery, it tends to involve some journey of invention as well. That is, I'm not merely exploring, studying and contemplating a thing, I'm doing so in such a way as to add my own unique voice and perspective to what it is I'm exploring. Research, writing and philosophy are a form of poesies -- of poetics. We're creating something new even as we're discovering it.
Some folks do research and inquiry (philosophy, if you will) by another more methodical method than I do, generally. That is, they will have a sort of fleshed out mental map of the terrain before they've actually wandered around and explored the terrain for themselves. They come to the matter at hand with an often unconscious, but deeply entrenched set of assumptions about the matter they are exploring and investigating. But I'm a radical holist. Indeed, my radical holism is the most salient feature of myself as a serious amateur philosopher (amateur only because I don't make a living at it or work in a university department). My holistic approach to all things is such that when I come upon a topic to investigate it is like coming upon what had been a ball of knitting yarn which a kitten (or two) have played with for hours. It's tangled and complex and almost impossible to un-knot or sort out in any clear way, if indeed sorting is one's task at hand.
What I mean is that everything in the real world is entangled with everything else in a way which the linear, sequential, grid-laid mind--which begins with a blueprint or a neatly devised plan--simply cannot fathom. If we are to fathom the world as it is, we must first become lost, either completely or at least mostly. So philosophers of my stripe are grateful to J. R. R. Tolkien for having so famously said, "Not all who wander are lost." He gives us permission to get lost and not be ashamed that we are lost... or rather, that we wander. So there are differing kinds of lostness, one of which is wandering. It's nothing to be ashamed of. We may wander in seemingly purposeless meanderings, but we have a purpose for this unruly and tangled approach. Yes, in some sense, we are lost--quite lost. But we understand that our wanderings are guided by a tacit knowing which is both brightly lit and dark as a cave or a dungeon. (Some paradoxes are very real.) We begin by knowing that we don't know, which is why we are inquiring and wandering. We layer in facts in our research, but we're trying to gather a sense of the patterns which connect the facts together. And often we're also exploring the profound mystery of ethos and ethics, which points us to our hearts. Certainly I am! And weaving our ethical and aesthetic meta-inquiry together with whatever it is we're investigating -- say, a bit of history, a social practice, a form of thought or of life--, and how forms of thought and life congeal into institutions, material cultures, economies, livelihoods, etc.
Things are way messier in most areas of inquiry than anyone who hasn't done deep research could imagine. Those kittens have strewn yarn throughout the house. And the dogs have overturned the furniture and half-eaten the books which were so neatly shelved before we went for groceries. Someone with heavy leather boots tracked mud everywhere. Or, to be less metaphorical, there is little agreement as to what words and phrases mean, when first they were used, what the history of things are, etc. This is why research is inevitably as much about invention as it is about discovery (yet another paradox).
One cannot wander far into a serious inquiry about direct action without knowing a bit of its history -- the history of the use of the phrase and conceptual forms which have been attached to it, the history of confusions and arguments about the phrase, the history of the thing itself (not its words) which predates the phrase in certain respects. But as I wander I'm guided by a tacit knowing. Somehow, something in me knows (but only inchoately) that there is something here for me to both discover and invent, and the invention itself is a discovery, and vice versa.
I just had shimmering sensations ripple through my torso and arms while writing that last sentence, and these are confirmation that my tacit knowing is saying "Yes, James! Yes! Stay with this my friend!". Something in me knows where this is all headed. It's heading toward a wedding. An inner wedding of feeling, thinking, sensing, intuiting, perception, conceptuality, factual knowledge... and what folks call "action," by which I mean poetics / art / imaginative creativity in the world ... -- all of my faculties of knowing. Radical holism is all about weddings. In holism, the world is not made so much of parts as it is comprised of wholes--, wholes within wholes. Things tied to things in relation. Everything coming together as a world, a universe, a cosmos -- and an ultimate mystery which need not be solved (and could not be).
Lately, it's becoming increasingly clear that I'm being drawn into political philosophy, which also is being drawn into ethics and aesthetics -- but, for me, with each of these (and so much more) longing for the wedding, the wedding of hands and heart.
The cosmos presents itself as a whole -- but in process. There are only processes and relations, after all. So to learn the connections one must get lost in the tangled yarn of their connections and relations. Research thus goes out in every direction at once--which is both necessary and impossible (another paradox). It is tangled and messy. It does not first set a foundation down for the house, as Descartes had wished to do. It hasn't any blueprints. Because what we think of as 'philosophy' hasn't yet matured. It hasn't ripened. It hasn't become poetic enough. It got lost in search of foundations and certainties stacked one atop another, as if forming a tower.
A whole and wed cosmos isn't set down upon a foundation, doesn't stack into a tower. It emerges from it's center, and the center is literally everywhere. This is pertinent to political philosophy -- which has yet to become fully artistic, which has yet to find its poetic inflection, its poetic voice--, at least in textual form.
Political philosophy has not yet found its heart. What it lacks is not a foundation but a center.
The convergent crises of this time in world history simply require--and this is without any doubt--a radically new kind of political philosophy, which requires a fundamental re-imagining of what politics is. It requires us to perform a careful archeological dig into the history of the notion--and practices--of 'politics', and to see, understand, know, feel... all of this in a very new light. This new light is one in which we must also radically re-imagine that key word in politics: power -- who has it and who has not. And why. And what is power, really, anyway?
What draws me into an ever deepening inquiry into 'direct action' is an ever deepening, evolving, developing yarn-tangled, kitten infested, insight into power, who has it, and who has not. Something in me knows that the darkened room can be lit in an instant by flipping the switch. When the room is dark we ordinary, everyday mortals assume we are powerless. This is because 'democracy' has become a sick, and rather brutal, joke on us. It has become a choke-hold which vampirically steals our very breath and aliveness--that which weds our hands and heart. It has become a form of sickening parasitism and a pathetic and miserable ruse. I think it resembles a prison in which the gates are open and the cell doors are unlocked, but the prisoners do not imagine just waking out.
And then the light comes on and we see the room, scattered as it is with mud, yarn and kittens. Nothing much matches with the labels of old. Democracy isn't what we assumed it to be (not even close, really!), nor politics, nor 'direct action'.... Nothing is any longer what it was because a paradigm shift came with the flipping of the light switch. (Light has always been a symbol or metaphor for knowing.) A whole pattern of connections reassemble, but this time with our knowing hearts as center--, and no foundation at all. It turns out we never needed a foundation. It turns out the desire for a foundation was based on an illusion. What was needed was a center--an awakened heart. Not some ewwy-gewey New Age cotton candy sappy Hallmark Cards heart, but our very own unique heart knowing itself as itself, alert to its own magnificent knowing. Yes, we can literally feel it in our chests. It's that real.
This is coming. I can feel it shivering and shimmering in my skin, wending the contours of my bones. I will make poetry of politics. I (and you) will lead politics it to its own heart, which is my heart, which is every heart. Heart conjoined again, at last, with hands! The soul reunited -- wed within. Heart needs hands to breathe a full breath. Love is only manifest as creative, responsive engagement within a world. It is felt as an untamable aliveness--a wild aliveness--which cannot be contained or constrained in its grounded ecstasy. As Henry David Thoreau put it, "In wildness is the preservation of the world."
Aristotle said that the 'soul' thinks in images. But I say the heart knows in poetry. And poetry is a word which has poiesis as root and heart (nucleus, center). Its a Greek word for "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before." (Wikipedia). For such, hands are needed. Doing is necessary, as is non-doing, which too form a paradoxical whole. Poetry can take the form of prose. It can take the form of silence. It can even be mimed, but never falsified or counterfeited. Poetry is always sincere, innocent, and in a special sense, naked.
We are all going to do this. We will turn our hearts on together and look upon this world with shimmering, surprising, awakening light. In doing so "direct action" will expend, exhaust and swallow itself as an idea, a phrase, a useful concept--just as a seed is expended in becoming a tree, or a caterpillar in becoming a butterfly. Both the seed and the caterpillar are utterly necessary in giving birth of themselves to something new. When the light is on, and when the heart is on, all action is direct action and the notion of "activism" is silly, paltry, absurd, and obsolete.
We will need the notion of direct action for a moment longer -- days, weeks, months, maybe even years at the longest. Direct action is an ouroboros concept. Ouroboros is a mythical dragon or serpent who swallows himself whole by swallowing first his tail, and then the remainder. Nothing is more important than direct action for the time being. It will be the heart of a new, emerging politics, and that politics too shall be reborn as a butterfly, having consumed its own living flesh and brought into being a new world.
It is increasingly being said that there is an epidemic, even a pandemic, of loneliness in our world. I believe this pandemic has a root in the disconnect which lives mostly in the dis-association of heart and hands. Direct action is the repair of this broken bond. And the heart is imaginative and poetic -- and has love at its very core.
We will heal this wound -- together. No one can do this alone.