Shaun Ferguson received a doctoral degree in Economics at the New School for Social Research in 2004. Shaun taught briefly at Birzeit University in the West Bank, and he served as economic advisor to the Palestinian Minister of Planning. He has lived in Beirut, Amman, Ramallah, and Geneva. With twenty years as a development economist observing the historical development of global trade relations under contemporary capitalism, his current interests are to serve as a trans-economist building bridges between philosophy and economics in a Marxist/Hegelian approach to communist striving for post-capitalist forms of intelligence.
Website and Links: https://edibletopicals.wordpress.com/
Project:
Vanishing State
What direction to the object of my attention
We need to be able to create vortices
Which means we have to be separate elements, capable each of freely entering into a symphonic relation with the state-to-come
Giving an account of the object of my attention and the direction by which I approach it
To enter a vortex without this
Is to enter a death spiral
To talk about where your langauge came from
Your whole intention is a dog bark
It must be diagnosed
It’s all about scale: Billions of particles being dispersed in different directions, may from the center be opposed by a distant perspective which sees merely an undiverging mass moving all in tandem
You are an object whose desires go beyond you, desires which emit from somewhere unknown before you
To understand this is the beginning of communism
To transfer your desire to an object. To allow the object to determine your desire
En masse this offers a vortex whose elements are expanding in every direction, the direction of their desire which is now freed from predetermination however much it may always remain anchored by contingency
If you don’t want to play, then go ahead all of you
I don’t want to be all of you
I want to be in the dynamic exploding vortices of desire
Where communism is not kept at bay
Is communism just a name for something euphoric
No, it is the scientific study of the dispersion and attraction of objects
If Robert Frost allowed his apple tree to produce uncollected fruit from time to time, by my lights, the contrary notion, of only an occasional gathering and ordering of fruit— this has its merits. Let us think on them: Arguably the figures that can be drawn are not less versatile or rich
Embarrassed of form
Because it takes us back to the bump which set us falling so evenly
A detour is required
You must be charmed out of your chateau
Think of the golden ass
You must be completely removed from your surroundings by the object
They who don’t have me have everything
And I am going to join those who don’t
Transferring your desire to the object will cost you everything
The object itself can dispel your suspicion of my intentionality, your fixed view of my fluidity
Is there a concept ahead, I don’t know
But the one behind us is only there to by surgically considered
This is an interesting door to look at the objects which collided, giving birth to our unknowable universe, birth to our desire
These collisions are local and can be observed— and we all derive from a meteoric event that took place in discrete moments of the not-so-distant past. Not so inaccessible as we think. But just as inaccessible as Marx tells us
Everything that came before the meteor was, however much the same, somehow very different. To diagnose ourselves we need only go back that little way
However much, we think we derive from past lineages, it is u true for we are the same contemporary animal
Anybody can see traces in the deep past which makes for a confidence that our mercurial nature is not
But we are beasts of the moment
Without getting out of, by first getting around, we need to know how much we are a single mouse with a long tail
And it gets vulgar every time. Unless we are not a ‘we’ but an it
Now let us go into the vortex where desire directs us toward a vanishing state, but a state nonetheless.