not be permanent solutions. Rather, they would be oriented to escape attempts,
some of which would take root: a series of fireworks inserted into everyday life
which could confront or sidestep the ‘behavioural codes that are not unilateral or
totalitarian or especially disciplinarian, and which furthermore appear to offer great
freedom of choice, but which none the less convey us effortlessly into a life of
normalcy and convention’ (Ginsborg 2005: 20). At this point, I am often stuck
for words to describe what I mean, so let me take someone else’s instead – Greil
Marcus’s homily on Robert Johnson as a force, and not just a mirror:
At the highest point of his music each note that is played implies another that
isn’t, each emotion expressed hints at what can’t be said. For all of its elegance
and craft the music is unstable at its core – each song is at once an attempt
to escape from the world as everyone around the singer believes it to be,
and a dream that the world is not a prison but a homecoming.... Johnson
is momentarily in the air, flying just as one does in a dream, looking down in
wonder at where you are, then soaring as if it’s the most natural thing in the
world.
(Marcus 2005: 103)Now I am well aware that the cultivation of this form of knowledge may
be interpreted as an irredeemably middle-class pre-occupation, the equivalent in
theory of Bromell’s (2000) characterization of white middle-class teenagers as
insiders who long to be outsiders, the kind of consciousness of the world that too
quickly falls into a call for ‘a quick revolutionary fix that will please everyone and
just reinforce a cosy feeling of powerlessness’ (Lotringer 200 4 : 18).^9 But I think
there is more to it than that, much more. For it suggests that there may be a more
general means of opening up an allusive field in which ‘the listener’s attention
is seized and dropped and held and released by possibilities of meaning that
amuse and interest but do not quite come into being’ (Bromell 2000: 133). This
is what I mean by a politics of hope,^10 the prospect of constructing a machine
for ‘sustaining affirmation’ (White 2000), of launching an additional source
of political nourishment and responsiveness and imagination in a time when so
many forces militate against it, of locating and warming up the technology of
questioning and non-questioning ‘by which attention forms and experience crystal-
lizes’ (Connolly 2005: 166). In other words, I want to try and add a distinct co-
operative-cum-experimental sensibility in to the mix of the world that will help us
‘engage the strangeness of the late modern world more receptively’ (White 2000:
153). In turn, we could perhaps live in a less ‘stingy’ (as Connolly (2005) puts it)
and more playful way, overcoming or at least bypassing some of the cringes that
have been sewn into the fibres of our being as we have learnt how to be embodied.
The net outcome would be that the texture of the feel and outcome of the everyday
could be reworked as traditional forms of expression were slowly but surely
breathed differently (Abrahams 2005).
What is then at issue is what form these practices would take. There is nothing
that automatically leads them towards such forms of generosity, after all. In a sense,
4 Life, but not as we know it