For several years now I have been thinking about ways to organize my ideas in groups that might give my reading and writing some direction. Thinking seriously about politics requires a certain amount of order, if only to manage what is a potentially massive and unmanageable flow of information. If a person is involved in politics, and that interest extends beyond self-interest, then thinking clearly about political possibilities (i.e. the future) and how to progress ones concerns and interests, requires a disciplined and well-researched capacity for political reflection.
My first attempts at grouping were heavily influenced by styles of categorization that I learned when I did my honours years in politics. The style was academic. I have no difficulty with that. I quite like the third person distance when I read a well-researched and well-written book. However, I found that this way of writing finally did not suit me. I am not an academic, and I prefer to move between first and third person. I write when it is convenient and I write to please myself, although I do try and keep an eye out for any possible audience (one or two, he says humbly) or perhaps a small audience when I am dead and gone.
The subject headings I first devised went through several different configurations. The last one before I started this work went as follows:
1) Justice, Democracy and Social Planning.
2) Technology, Culture and Consumption.
3) History and Theory.
4) Sovereignty, Power and Bureaucracy.
5) Globalization and Imperial Power.
6) The Individual and Social Existence in Literature and the Cinema.
7) Populism, Democracy and Religion in the Era of Late Capitalism.
The difficult with these categories is that I would have to deal systematically with the wide-ranging research that stands behind these words and phrases. I did not think that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to write about these ideas contained in these topics in a less systematic, and more free ranging style. Part analysis, part biography, part diary, bit and pieces thrown in as I walk through life. While I would not dare compare myself to Walter Benjamin, I want to be inspired by some of his work that has a scrapbook quality about it all. Fragments of ideas, a mental archeology of a person’s life.
As I have gotten older (in 2003, 48 years old), I find that life has become more interesting. However, it is also more depressing, from the vantage point of ageing (the aches and pains, the rising fear of major illness); from the chaos and cruelty of modern existence and from the narrowing of political options. I don’t have it in me to try and conceptualize existence in late capitalism. There are many brilliant scholars who can do that job for me. I am happy to pay the outrageous prices they charge for their books. I just want to record the interesting things I find on my life’s journey.
So I thought that there might be a different way of ‘organizing my thinking’, one that is more centered on how an individual would experience the modern world of late capitalism. The beginning and the end of history is after all, about the way in which the individual might experience it. From there, from the individual, it moves to the collective and to the institutional structures that are created from the actions of individuals. From those institutions of collective life (of the state and civil society) it moves once again upon the individual, whose person is then transformed by those collectivities.
Imagining The Future
The Experience of the Present.
Considering the Past.
The Head and the Heart in the Currents of Public Life
Pathologies of Modern Life
The Individual and Social Existence in Literature and the Cinema.
The Experience of Power .
8:21:07 PM 
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