Day 18: Incomplete and Incommunicado

The political, if this word may serve to designate not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such, the destination of its sharing, must not be the assumption or the work of love or of death. It need neither find, nor regain, nor effect a communion taken to be lost or still to come. If the political is not dissolved in the sociotechnical element of forces and needs (in which, in effect, it seems to be dissolving under our eyes), it must inscribe the sharing of community. The outline of singularity would be “political” – as would be the outline of its communication and its ecstasy. “Political” would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking: a community consciously undergoing the experience of its sharing. To attain such a signification of the “political” does not depend, or in any case not simply, on what is called a “political will.” It implies being already engaged in the community, that is to say, undergoing, in whatever manner, the experience of community as communication: it implies writing. We must not stop writing, or letting the singular outline of our being-in-common expose itself.

(by Peter Connor 2001, 41 ))

Today I finished, but did not complete, some rambling on the topic of Finishing Work on the Incomplete. I kind of hate it, tho the “idea” (if one can call it that) explored there struck me as significant. Worse, the key notion there is something which I still haven’t properly internalized or comprehended. I think I hate it because I truly believe the way of thinking followed in that note is obvious and cheaply derived, yet it moves me. I find my own taste distasteful.

The scribbling on finishing talks incessantly about “working” and “work”. The excerpt above is taken from an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy entitled “The Inoperative [or /unworking/] Community”. Terminologically, my scribble’s focus is at odds with Nancy’s notion of the “unworking community”. I’m afraid that the conflict is not merely in choice of words¹, and that it reflects a problematic fixation and confinement of the terms within which I am able to understand and engage in activity. To get a hint of the stakes of this fixation, I’ll recall why Nancy insists that a community must be unworking:

This is why community cannot arise from the domain of work. One does not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of finitude. Community understood as a work or through its works would presuppose that the common being, as such, be objectifiable and producible (in sites, persons, buildings, discourses, institutions, symbols: in short, in subjects).

…

Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called “unworking,” referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. Community is not the work of singular beings, for community is simply their being–their being suspended upon its limit. Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional.

(by Peter Connor 2001, 31 ))

The objectification of common being is the metaphysical gesture belonging to totalitarianism and so we strive to oppose, resist, and interrupt it. In Nancy’s view, any work towards producing and reifying an essence of our common being culminates in the work of death, regardless of whether that essence is projected as nationalistic, collectivist, or the neoliberal nightmare of atomic individualism. Community can only emerge as the mesh² of communicating singular beings (such as we are), not as the product of work. This all needs lots of unpacking (for myself as well), but the shape of it feels deeply right to me. Conceptually, Nancy’s evocations of the unworking community is the political and aesthetic vision which I find most amenable to the synechistic structuralism which I adhere to as a metaphysical framework.

In my notes on finishing, I do not fully eschew or disengage from completion and production. The whole discourse is focused on how thoughtful work can proceed to produce usable components in the service of an incompletable project. My questioning along this line points towards modularity, and I think that connection is important. But what I am really after is a more substantive understanding of programming as communication, and of the way in which the produce of the work of programming – programs – can be structured to ensure the possibility of an encounter with “interruption, fragmentation, suspension”.