Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No. Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness...

It is hard to resist, caught within the circles within circles of our field of reference, or rather it is not not easy to slip into, the becoming of our own example. Then, how are we to prevent our arguments representing what we are talking of?

We do not know how to model (and thus also fail in this modelling) an anti-(or non)-prefigurative life-world. Prefiguation (as a heuristic for not falling for that again) has become the overriding concern of all those post-war ultraleftists who set themselves up explicitly as not the Party, and who have fervently eschewed the Party-form which they associate from bitter experience with the convolutes of instrumentalising rationality. 

And yet, prefigurativism has retained in its analysis and argument, the essence of The Party - it still cultivates the same pathologies that all ideal based rackets harbour. Then it is a matter, for those who come after the prefigurative, of refusing both the Party and the received critique of the Party. But that is no easy manoeuvre. 

In the recent past, I gave the code-name 'honeymoon' as a placeholder or metaphor for that which does not prefigure, but which equally does not slip back into the instrumentalist rationality which prefiguration is intended to counter. 

How is it to be articulated, this condition that is both not the example and also not merely an expediency? It seems, as we contemplate the white space/safe space, the protestant interior (stripped of representations) which is our inheritance, that we cannot positively formulate either this 'we' nor even the substance of a ‘what’ that we are in relation to. 

It is difficult to grasp what ‘the honeymoon’ refers to: it is at once a loosened moment, and also a set of more uptight constraints directed against those constraints that are already in place, the fixtures and fittings of radical consciousness. 

And nor can we say how the various layers of relationship, as a net, as a complex of paths, should be when they are laid out under this rubric. 

In the carving of the block that has been assigned to us, we have succeeded in revealing no discernible sculpted form, and have nothing to show for our efforts but this carpet of chips and shavings.