Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with Marxist reading groups in Lebanon to make the case for the cultivation of utopian imaginativeness, or a radical political imaginary, as politically productive in counter-revolutionary times.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with Marxist reading groups run by a Lebanese revolutionary socialist organization. I examine the labor that Marxist theoretical practice is doing in this post-Marxist political conjuncture, looking at the infrastructures of affect that continue to make the linking of theory and praxis, and the cultivation of a revolutionary subjectivity, worthwhile in a context where "to be revolutionary in the old Marxist or Sartrian sense is to be 'vulgar', 'impatient', 'uncivilized' and 'unable to wait properly'" (Hage, 2015, p. 30). Drawing on Moten and Harney (2013), I frame this intellectual labor as a form of 'dissonant', 'disorganized' study - a mode of preparing for revolution by being together in 'brokenness'. I situate my work within a Lebanese activist scene dominated - like many other anti-status quo milieus at this particular political conjuncture - by a pragmatic conception of politics, in which the critical labor of the radical left is largely considered 'sterile', mired in something akin to what Berlant (2011) calls cruel optimism. Drawing on Munoz (2009) and his defence of utopian imaginativeness, I challenge this linking of political praxis and tangible successes, arguing that for radical leftists in counter-revolutionary times, cultivating solidarity and camaraderie by maintaining a space of study that enables technologies of both self and collective does constitute a productive political act.