After the rapture

This is an adapted snippet of a longer piece on endings that never end that I read at Arika in Glasgow as part of the event ‘Four Endings to Begin’.

I began by reading from Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Elegy in Joy’, which you can listen to her read from here.

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I called this text ‘after the rapture’ but it might equally have been called ‘after the rupture’.

I have a vivid memory of sitting in a plant-filled room in a library in Moscow procrastinating by skim reading a pdf of a book by Félix Guattari on my tiny acer netbook. It must have been 2013. A very different time. I copied and pasted this passage from an essay called ‘The Group and the Person’ because it felt so true and I emailed it to distant friends who I thought would appreciate it too:

A certain type of group initiation has its own special imprint: real militant activity in a reified social context creates a radical break with the sense of passivity that comes with participation in the usual institutions. It may be that I shall later on come to see that I was myself contributing a certain… illusion of effectiveness, a headlong rush forward. Yet I believe no-one who had the experience of being a militant in one of those youth organizations or mass movements... will ever again be just the same as everyone else. Whether there was real effectiveness hardly matters; certain kinds of action and concentration represent a break with the habitual social processes, and in particular with [inherited] modes of communication and expression of feeling...

I loved this passage then but it is striking re-reading it that Guattari seems to accord subjective transformation more significance than the achievement of political goals. His claim that ‘real effectiveness’ is secondary, almost incidental, now strikes me as strange and is obviously quite politically troubling - as if the only point of political action is how it makes you feel.

But what does become of such experiences of subjective transformation, in the case of movements that failed? What happens to that feeling of being caught up in the middle of something after it has come to an end? If the transformation is permanent then is that really the end?

I don’t think it makes much sense to say that ‘real effectiveness hardly matters’, certainly not if you remain committed to political transformation. It obviously matters. But the ‘radical break’ in subjectivity that Guattari describes does nonetheless seem like an important phenomenon to address. If people are permanently changed by their political experiences what does it mean if they were not really effective at bringing about the material changes in social conditions that they had envisioned? What happens after the end?

Vincent Bevins’ recent book If We Burn surveys the huge protest movements of the 2010s – from Brazil to Ukraine, Egypt to Hong Kong - and asks why in so many cases these movements not only failed but often ended up with situations that were even even more right-wing and authoritarian. It is a book about strategy and organizing, about the limits of horizontalism. It is not a book about feelings. But it ends by asking a question similar to that posed by Guattari.

‘BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT FEELING?’ Bevins asks on the last page of the book,

What about that intense, life-changing collective euphoria?... What about those magical radiant days, the moments when you felt your very soul became fused with the forces of history, that you were bigger and more powerful. That all your differences melted away, and that you and your fellow revolutionaries were literally remaking the world, with each and every thing that you did. This supernatural experience was something that took place all around the world, and everyone agreed it was important. Some people said they would relive those days for the rest of their lives.

Do the ecstatic experiences associated with the height of a movement have a lasting meaning even if movements end in defeat? To answer ‘yes’ seems weirdly unmaterialist and yet again and again that feeling was brought up by the people he spoke with. They could not let go of the memory of that feeling and described it as something incredibly profound, as something that really changed them forever.

Everyone recognized the feeling but they did not agree about what it meant after the end. For some people looking back in retrospect they concluded that the feeling was illusory – little more politically meaningful than the joy felt dancing at a club – but for others ‘It is the most real thing that one can ever feel. It is not an illusion at all; it is a stunning momentarily glimpse of the way that life is really supposed to be.’

Can the experience of the during of a movement outlive the end? Can that euphoria be revived? Or should the feeling be mourned to focus on the problems of the present? If people are really changed forever by these experiences then surely it means those same people can act to change the world they live in again?

The most beautiful expression of this unanswerable conundrum that I have come across was written by Arwa Salih who was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party in the appendix to her book The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt:

The tragedy of a generation that lived the experience of rebellion is that no matter where each individual ended up… they can never go back to being the person they were before the rapture took them. They can never be free of the memory of that magnificent moment of transgression, of freedom; of a lightness whose beauty is almost unbearable. The dream will remain, as exhausting as compunction, as inspiring as the purest moments of exuberant life, and so painful. For the truth is that the ‘road of no return’ isn’t just a third possible outcome. It’s always there, at the very heart of the moment in which you stake your whole being in order to follow the dream… I still keep the possibility of dreaming close by, and this, in spite of my growing suspicion that we are in fact nearing the end of times.

After the end something lives on. We can keep the possibility of dreaming close by. We are living in endless end times and we need to remember that it is still possible to recapture the rapture. Or maybe the rapture is always there just as every end is also a during. It is still possible begin again.