“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
– T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 1942
I came to New York City in 2018 partly for a narrow professional reason – to pursue a PhD in Philosophy – but also with a broader, more inchoate set of political aspirations. My political outlook was at once incredibly well-developed, while at the same time it was undeniably immature. Well-developed, in that it was historically and emotionally rich, wide in its theoretical sources, and the product of a deep existential commitment. Immature in that its formative context was a deeply felt loneliness, born out of a specific immigrant history and the need to form an identity on social media platforms. I came long on reading lists and references, and short on real-world connections.
I quickly found others like me in the city’s ‘left circuit’ of reading groups, magazine launches, and author panels. I developed what might charitably be called an ‘insurgent practice’ – turning up to reading groups prepared mainly to at the last moment make a long speech about how only I had the right theoretical categories to approach the issue at hand.
After a year in the city, I had begun degenerating into an alienated party bore that is a dime a dozen here – a grad student with an aversion to discussing anything he studied, a ‘left-wing’ politics defined more by qualification than substance, and a conversational repertoire which often extended little further than expressing various personal grievances. In retrospect, I was looking for a space that offered sustained intellectual community without the restrictions that often came with traditional organizations – parties, unions and the like.
It is in this state of mind that I was introduced to Woodbine. I first went in 2019, in its original incarnation at 1882 Woodbine Street. I had little understanding of the space’s organizational ambitions as distinct from the specific events it hosted. I recall visiting with friends for discussions on some classic texts – Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History, Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle, Adorno’s Minima Moralia, and Judith Butler’s ‘Precarious Life’.
The discussions were different from the academic seminars familiar to me. The groups were mixed – political colleagues old and young, journalists, random people from the neighborhood. I was intrigued. I was also introduced to the model of social life associated with Woodbine – the weekly dinners and barbecues after the reading groups, a community of people socializing with each other after having debated their takes and so on.
I was lucky enough to host an event on one of my favorite texts, Raymond Geuss’s ‘Loss of Meaning on the Left’. The discussion took place just days before the pandemic lockdown, but even then I could detect a passion for the big ethical and existential themes I presented.
I’m afraid the deeper political roots of Woodbine were lost on me back then. I saw it as ‘yet another E-Flux’, with the community aspects largely for people who happened to live in the neighborhood. I was also trying to flap my academic wings, and so did not really understand the lifestylist and autonomist aspirations of the project.
My relationship to Woodbine changed after the onset of the pandemic. By Fall 2020, I was living in Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx, and I found myself with no readymade intellectual or personal community. I heard that Woodbine had moved into a new larger space in Ridgewood, at 585 Woodward Avenue. As I found Spuyten Duyvil a little bit of a social desert, I was more than happy to take the two hour subway journey to the new location.
The new space was much larger, and imbued with an infectious spirit of experimentation and political joy. I did not know quite what to do with it, but I was lonely and unhappy enough to throw myself headlong into the social life of the space – commute be damned. I was not part of the initial post-pandemic surge in community at Woodbine, but I could see its after effects – a food distribution co-op that allowed people to distribute fresh produce to members of the community disadvantaged by the pandemic, a makerspace that generated a community mesh network, and a number of visual art and workshop-based projects, a yoga studio, a space for film screenings and so on.
Most importantly for me, it became more of a space I could live within. Despite living in the Bronx, I regularly took treks during the Spring of 2021. I began helping out with programming more enthusiastically – hosting a screening of the Foucault-Chomsky debate, and participating in reading groups around the work of Heidegger and Foucault. A particular highlight was recording a review of Adam Curtis’s just-released series ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ in collaboration with the Antifada crew.
I was also increasingly conscious of the effects of the slow-paced, lackadaisical spirit of the place. Artists, journalists and organizers from any part of the world would walk in and out of the space at a moment’s notice. I am sure this created organizational nightmares, but as a ‘consumer’ of the space, it was an antidote to the overstimulated, frenetic energy of the city.
The city can often feel like a series of toll booths – pay to sit, pay to relax, pay for comfort, pay to go to the bathroom, pay to get restimulated, exit these spaces to be hit by the overstimulation of your devices. Most days can pass by in a blur in the ‘enforced amnesia’ that this rhythm engenders. Woodbine 2.0 was not like this – you could come in, lie down, relax, yawn, stay for as long as you like. The financial leash on your time, body and attention was loosened.
I took full advantage of this. I took dates there (disastrously). I briefly moved to Bushwick to try and make myself a ‘neighborhood member’, which didn’t work out for complicated personal reasons. I briefly stored luggage at the space between moves, and was a frequent if irregular attendee at the various meals and community events they hosted.
For all its social benefits, I look back on that period with regret. The libertarian air seemed to bring with it an increased directionlessness and disconnection. Despite the success of The Reservoir journal, I wasn’t able to follow through on any big intellectual projects at the Ridgewood space. In retrospect, the explanation is clear – I had not made for myself a clear distinction between Woodbine as a workspace, a hanging out space and a rest space, and I mistakenly wanted it to be one or all of the three as it suited my moods. It ended up being little more for me than an aspirational co-working space.
I would refrain from publicly affiliating myself with Woodbine to other political friends for fear of guilt by association – as something of a half-participant, I worried about getting caught between insiders and outsiders. I wasn’t ‘inside’ enough to be hands-on at the neighborhood level for any meaningful length of time, but I wasn’t ‘outside’ enough to be free of any potential concerns about its amateur lifestylism.
All of these concerns were really projection on my part – born out of a frustration with my inherited impossibilism. At some point in 2022, I felt the need to ditch my outlook, and its canon, entirely. I felt the generic urge to ‘do something’ – to intervene in ‘real social life’ without the slightest clue about how to go about this. Any project I tried to formulate seemed either naive, incredibly ambitious or unhelpfully abstract. This was unsurprising, as I had spent much of the last decade working to divest myself of any affirmative positions.
I did little until the more prosaic rhythm of graduate student life pulled me back in. Regular teaching duties and the attendant preparations made it too time-consuming to participate, not to mention the spectre of completing my dissertation. It can take an evangelical commitment to resist these rhythms, and 6 years of rationalized procrastination had sapped all of mine.
Absence and time had a healing effect here. The distraction of work made it easy for me to discard some inherited psychological baggage, and I was able to find my way back to Woodbine 3.0 at its inception in Winter 2025. I was fortunate to help build-out the new space physically, as well contribute to the first few meetings of the reconstituted Research Group.
As of this summer, for a number of contingent reasons, I am now relating to the space as its first designated Research Fellow. To that extent, I have the privilege of defining the role for myself and potential successors, in what I hope is a research practice both cognizant and respectful to what I understand to be the ethos of the space. Woodbine has always been autonomist – not just in the narrow Italian sense, but as a broader ethics of ‘standing apart’: of relating to institutions in a deterritorializing way, and of framing difficult questions over formulating programs.
In this respect, you can see Woodbine in continuity with a strand of left-pluralist libertarian thinking that dates back to the 1960s. Of course, an ethos alone is not enough to motivate a research group. There are other necessary points of unity – the aesthetics of the place, a shared desire for novelty and creativity, of doing politics with an awareness of both the metacrisis and the polycrisis, and an attachment to what I want to call a pluralist politics.
For the next few months I hope to continue on in this tradition, along the general lines of the curation as research model. I am interested in the way that information overload, overstimulation, constant fight-or-flight unclarity create a cultural climate hostile to deep reflection. I am also interested in how this feeds into a crisis of loneliness – an inability to reflect worsens the crucial task of forming the thick bonds of solidarity necessary for meaningful political life.
These are in part psychological problems that can have individual solutions, but they have a larger social and cultural background. All of the above can be fitted into a larger cultural preoccupation with attention depletion, burnout, the atrophy of social skills, and the crisis of reading. The obvious social foundation is the much documented decline of third spaces, and the broader phenomenon of American civic decline.
I am not alone in seeing political implications in these problems. Yet they are often tackled by those who suffer least from them. Seasoned activists and theorists are, by definition, effective and productive, confident and social, focused and goal-driven. These very qualities mean that they have – to varying extents – found ways of overcoming conditions hostile to productive theorizing. In some way, this disqualifies them from fully grasping the problems, or at least their depth. There is a necessary place here for those understandably silent about their own experience. My dilettantish autobiography is in this respect my best qualification.
“To articulate what is past does not mean
to recognize “how it really was.”
It means to take control of a memory,
as it flashes in a moment of danger.”
– Benjamin, Theses on the Concept of History, 1940