On the philosophy of New Year

A few weeks ago I sent an email around to my comrade bloggers here at the third estate to demand that no-one write a stupid piece on new year’s resolutions. I will attempt too, to avoid this, but wanted to comment on the type of thinking that it seems to me characterises the new year in a rather problematic way. That is not to say that I don’t do the new year, or that I against it (as it happens I was as mashed as the next comrade on Thursday night), but it does raise issues that need addressed from a left or critical perspective.

I couldn’t help but cringe and turn the TV off last night when Piers Morgan’s disgustingly smug face came on to present a “review of the year.” There is a tendency at times of changing from one period to another to summate what has happened, to sediment it, and to ossify it. To say “this has happened and now we are in a new space.” This is the complement, or the obverse of the resolution: the reflection on what need be done in a new and empty space. This tendency is one of disconnectedness, of reification. Somewhere in the middle the struggles of subject and object, and of individual and collective are lost.

This summating of the year is consistently presented as pure objectivity, as what has happened to us, what has happened to our material conditions. Where we stand, where we have stood, is written out of the equation. There is no longer a possibility for agency here. The resolution, on the other hand demands pure subjectivity in the form of spurious individuality enacted upon a space that has no meaning. Individual goals are set for individual ends. The possibility of subjectivity is set up as the filling of a vacuous space with the inevitable happening of something rather than any possible transformation of the present.

In deceit of Hegelian ends, the present and the historic are separated, the future is just “out there” rather than part of any ongoing process. Distinction and historicity seem to be the only inevitabilities of the future, disregarding the tendencies for objectification and for disenfranchisement which in themselves justify this view of the world. Let us hope (or maybe make sure) that a year from now, or a decade from now, we can say “we have done this to the world”, and “we are changing things”, for if we can we would know that things had truly changed.