I love this post. I love especially the word _vernacular_ in “the vernacular of optimism.” With _vernacular_, incomplete optimism acquires a richness and saltiness, from the old audacity of discussing big questions outside of the holy tongue. It reminds me what kind of song you’re singing for the life that politics should have better organized, but the experience of which might be exactly the loss politics necessitates. The thought of that loss, and of the incomprehensibility of what isn’t organized, kills talk–optimism– about the experience. But vernacular is also the promise of the form of appearance– a new language we could learn if we stopped translating from the mother tongue…

“the work of solidarity, the activity of being not just in existence but in desire together, requires being in the room with the possibility that people don’t share your objects or your imaginaries, and that people will have to give up different things to get to the place of the better good life that you’re risking making imaginable, let alone available”–

of Sara Ahmed’s current project “On Being Directed: Promises, Happiness, Deviations,” a portion of which I was fortunate to hear her present in Dublin this past May. In that work, she argues for the important significance of what she calls the killjoy in any community [or communitarian project]–the angry feminist or angry black woman, the unhappy queer, etc.–who refuses to ever be quieted, ever be happy, and who acts as an important blocking agent to any kind of collective “happiness” or satisfaction that would, effectively, bring certain things to a standstill [which might signal, in one sense, the end of politics]. Perhaps what is needed is not a discourse of potentiality but a politics of purposeful arrested development that always works alongside and cuts across various potentiality imaginaries. In this scenario, the future never arrives [except through mortality] and the present keeps re-arriving while remaining open.

One way to make the distinction is that when we say that someone or some thing has potential we are thinking about what’s done as loss and what’s not yet done as a wide-open horizon (see optimism, babies, any relation of idealization, etc.) But to have potential is different than to be the scene of its impersonal activity. The current theoretical discussion presumes that potentiality is a condition of being and history, not of history as pastness. Sometimes that gets too quickly and unselfconsciously metaphorized as exuberance and joy.

But nz’s contribution is to talk about the relation between actuality and potentiality through “poets” as “tragic”–an “a unbridgeable gap for which “the future” is just a kind of conceptual patch”—I love that phrasing. Futurity in this view masks so many blockages, though, and it would be great to play those out: the future masks the living actuality of the present as ongoingness that is being shaped; it masks the tragic actuality of the present apprehensible in normativity and violence of overorganized consciousness and value; it masks the indeterminacy of the locatedness of the utopian, I can think of at least ten more variations. This is why it’s so much easier to be Zizek than Negri or Agamben, because if you focus on the mechanism of disavowal you don’t really have to make a claim on all of the ways that the unthought known is already and might materialize. I guess there’s queer normativity but what I love about the ideal antinomy of queer and normativity is that the former always demands that the latter be revealed for the convenience (“patch”) it is. Potentiality is a patch-test discourse that forces the relation of determination to rub up against unfinished business. (in haste, argh, my ride is here)

I think, for example, of a poet like Yeats, who vacillated endlessly between two poles: believing that everything that mattered about persons was a function of what you call their particular and differentiating “objects and imaginaries” (Or as Yeats would put it “Think where mans glory most begins and ends,/ and say my glory was I had such friends.”)

and knowing that the only thing that mattered about actual persons was their derivation from the One Thing to which he gave various and lunatic names: what you are calling potential, he would call Great Mind or “Celestial Body” or soul (thus “All dreams of the soul/ End in a beautiful man’s or a beautiful woman’s body.”)

Poets, oddly enough, tend to have a less wooly (and less sunny) understanding of the implications of an investment in potentiality than do some of our recent theorists of the concept. Thus for Yeats (as for Whitman, as for Shelley…) potentiality is not optimistic but tragic. It is the name of an ontological gap between two necessary and incompatible models or levels of the real– the potential and the actual; a unbridgeable gap for which “the future” is just a kind of conceptual patch. (Here’s Whitman: “(Not every century nor every five centuries has contain’d such a day, for all its names.)” That’s ostensibly presented under the rubric of patient waiting for the total actualization of potential (Whitman’s name for it here is “The Answerer”) but it has come not once! and will not ever.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the poetic guardians of the idea of potentiality KNOW that there is no politics of potentiality, precisely because there’s no negotiating it or with it. That’s part of its power and its virtue: It answers the terrible crises of history (the misrecognition of other persons) by relieving us of the idea that persons are dependencies of being recognized.

They also know, however, that the ontology of “potentiality” unleashed on the world is a leveling wind incompatible with contingency and individual life and uninterested in the negotiations between desired ends. All claims made under the rubric of the person defined as potentiality are total claims: If it could be a person you cannot kill it. But likewise if you are person, nothing else about what you are may factor into the ways in which you matter.

Perhaps potentiality is a regulative ideal that must be maintained as the possibility condition of the COMMON life and endlessly deferred as the antithesis of the common LIFE. Still, I would want to make the case for a discourse of potential (a chastened one, not a sunny one) serving a need under certain historical conditions—perhaps conditions not totally unlike ours.