The answer to the question no one has been asking - why "open mode"?
I thought I’d jot down some thoughts on why this thing’s called ‘open mode,’ if nothing else as a throat clearing exercise. First off, I miss blogging. I did that for a while in the mid to late aughts and I learned so much, found it so rewarding. This was back when we walked both ways up hill in the snow to get online and we liked it, back when life was authentic and noncommercialized and pristine and dinosaurs roamed the earth and you could ride them. I don’t actually think anything was better then, except maybe the average planetary temperature, it was just a time when I happened to be in the right place when it mattered for me. I’ve been lucky that way a few times and I miss the qualities of all that so I figured I’d try to make my own luck here somewhat.
What I liked about the old timey blog days was it felt like everyone was listening and talking and also no one was. It was a big crowd in a tiny hole in the wall club, so to speak. It was private like a loudish conversation at the bar, and it was public like a loudish conversation at the bar - there was a sense of baseline friendliness, smallness, engagement, no one a big deal, everyone able to get up on and do a bit on the open mic, and there was a bit of hubbub, energy, people excited, pursuing some kind of unfolding project to learn from the doing of. Intellectual curiosity and excitement in common, is what I’m saying - thinking done in various ways each of which could be called an open mode of thinking.
Second, I’m interested in a corner of the Marxist tradition called Open Marxism, and, being a true record collector nerd, I have preferences within this tiny sub-sub-subculture (“I like early dubstep right as it was emerging out of being a darker variant of UK garage”), which is that I especially am drawn to the efforts to ‘do’ Open Marxism as a form of qualitative social science informed by a particular set of readings of Marx and the Marxist tradition. A major canonical figure for this stuff is the sadly recently deceased Simon Clarke, whose work has been very thought provoking to me and the thought and provocation don’t feel finished yet - I don’t feel like I’ve taken it all onboard yet, so to speak. So I figure I’ll use this blog thing to help myself continue that learning from Clarke and people who learned from him. I also think it has a great deal of light to shed on the pandemic, about which more in a moment.
The third reason it’s called open mode is there’s this John Cleese talk up on youtube where he describes doing creative work as involving two kinds of activity, a closed mode of working that’s linear, no nonsense, getting shit done, very necessary for bringing projects to fruition and just making do in the world, and another that he calls the open mode, which is non-linear, playful, creative, and generates the interesting bits of projects that are worth bringing to fruition. He says that there’s nothing special about people doing creative and intellectual work, it’s just a matter of developing the skill and habit of, and spending the time to, plug in to the creative kinds of thinking - spending time in the open mode of working. He also notes that the open mode tends to involve laughter, which doesn’t mean the activity isn’t serious, just that there’s a certain sensibility of doing play even if it’s serious stuff. Maybe it’s all nonsense, just a mythmaking, idk, but I find it appealing. Part of the point of doing this stuff is a certain pleasure of concentration - getting into a flow state really - and having relationships that involve doing this together (my go-to analogy is always music, it’s fun to play and to play with others). I’m perpetually complaining that the context for this is flawed in my life, and then reminding myself that no one’s in a context that isn’t flawed, the work and play is done in a flawed context always. But my silly self-pity notwithstanding it does take work to get into this headspace, takes some deliberateness and commitment to create the right settings: getting into the open mode of working feels like good luck and as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design. So this is me trying to design myself a little more luck-conducive context.
Okay, so, like I said I’d get back to - open marxism and the covid pandemic. One of my main intentions here is to deepen my understanding of the pandemic and to act on my hunch that understanding the pandemic requires a marxist analysis. This is not at all to say that it’s automatic - be a marxist, comprehend the plaguescape! - far from it. It takes, it’s gonna take, a lot of work. I figure I’ll make an effort to do that work here. The plan is to do that in dialog with the mighty Abby Cartus (https://buttondown.email/abbycartus) and other comrades - the Death Panel podcast crew (https://www.deathpanel.net/) is a major reference point for me. (Yeesh, that sounds so impersonal! 'A major reference point.' I mean, it's true intellectually, but also, and maybe this is me getting overly parasocial - I'm a product of the times, don't blame me! - but I fucking love them cats! 'A major reference point' expresses the view from the pointed top of my egg head, but leaves out a lot of the affect, and the affect is a non-trivial part of the actual doing of what I'm after here - the open mode is a vibe, maaaaan. [See now THAT is what I want out of this, parenthetical remarks, and bracketed remarks inside parentheses! I'm gonna digress my way to whole new planes of human insufferability.]) I guess I’d say if anything cool happens here it’s a product of the collective context of which I’m a cypher (idk if I used that word right, but I’m allowed to use words wrong here, it’s just a lil blog - open mode, bingo bango!), and if anything goes wrong (like in that last parenthetical remark [parenthetical remarks! parenthetical remarks! that dopamine hit!!]) then that’s all on me. I’m going to make a mental note to try to tag posts in the titles so I know and others will know if they’re pandemic related. Maybe I’ll call it Covid Zero Zealot Marxism, CZ2M for short.
Alright, throat cleared, mode opened (what?), time to end this, might write another post, can't stop won't stop