Name changing; I constantly do that. I change the way I call myself. I changed my social media’s account names (from @/eunikeglr to @/quotidianemot to @/niksetiadarma to @/tukangmikwir). I changed my blog’s name and title (used to be a cringe “happyloner”); and by this second, I want to throw the name of this blog “quotidian amateur” to trash. Names. Don’t mention Shakespeare or Dickens for me. Listen, I’m currently thinking about pseudonyms in the history of print culture: what did it does, what did it mask, what did it reveal, what did it conceal. I’m reading the works of Sino-Malay pseudonymous writers together with Foucault’s question of authorial function and the limit of proper name. That definite noun phrase needs some wriggle, dance, shake. Trans-persons know this well. I am one trans who tries to ground a principle: changing name is transitioning, and transitioning is partly about making promises that this body-spirit is always in the making, always becoming.

But I also want to carry this name-changing stuff with me and dwell with it in Gramsci’s hatred against the chronological temporal break. He is specific about New Year; that date is an obstacle, no abrupt stop in history. History is not like a movie, ended as “the film rips and there is an interval of dazzling light.” I am trained as a historian; his temporal inquiry, I grapple with that as well. It is part of my method of approaching thinking/feeling as a continuous unfolding. In verbs verbs verbs. The “New Year” Gramsci hates is a secular time in which the “end” and “beginning” are coalesced in forceful, linear yet also cyclical duality. Here is Gramsci’s solution:

That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigour.

Antonio Gramsci, Alberto Toscano (tr.), I Hate New Year’s Day

The passage is a manifesto. Making new and renewing, that “myself” is a subject and object of intervention. I answer this call of reckoning with self, everyday. Reckoning as a daily task; not an event. And we also pause, plunging into the spirit and fervor, stepping back from an unbearable, nauseating hangover. And here’s the temporal dialectic at work:

No spiritual time-serving. I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed. No day of celebration with its mandatory collective rhythms, to share with all the strangers I don’t care about. Because our grandfathers’ grandfathers, and so on, celebrated, we too should feel the urge to celebrate. That is nauseating.

Connection to the ones that have passed and refusals to the elders’ celebratory tradition–two things true at once. Thus history is not about continuing a practice but about linking through continuous time. Gramsci’s new year is hourly–minutiae of life in which every second are perpetual openings to things possibly change.

Edward Said, in his Beginnings, writes “beginning is making or producing difference; but—and here is the great fascination in the subject—difference which is the result of combining the already-familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language.” Reading Gramsci’s “new year” in Said’s inquiry, it looks like a mark of re-beginnings, a positioning of meanings which is not about origin but about multiple novelties and rehearsals. “Everyday as a new year” then is part of pinning down the subject of beginnings. The task is daunting though not impossible.

We find ourselves retorting that we know now and always have known how to begin—whether in terms of speaking, feeling, thinking, or acting in one way rather than in another—and that we will continue to know and to do so. if that is beginning, then that is what we do. When? Where? How? At the beginning.

Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method

Back to names. So is a new name a Gramscian new year and a Saidian meditation at the beginning? The biblical apostle once wrote: “… for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” But names, new names, new hours, new beginnings are beyond salvation. They are the work of being freed from the oppression of proper names; new names are about making flesh, reckoning with the broken body and life, not to fix nor to repair it, yet to make things new. But newness also bears the burden of proving things within those temporal thus qualitative differences. In the early twentieth century, indigenous and migrant intellectuals in what we now know as Indonesia made clear demarcation between kaoem toea and kaoem moeda as they thought about liberal project of enlightenment. We cannot repeat this failed project.

So we go back to Gramsci’s proposition about connecting to the past and things passed but also refuse indulging in tradition. I want to offer a proposition to see “new” less in a language of “innovation” but in a language of “saying what’s (im)possible.” The hope that is not cruel optimism but that organizing pessimism. Yes, let’s wonder about more modes of acting speech, meditating subjects and concepts, touching skins through stories and stories through skins until we shout our names in plurals. we we we they they they us us us. Under the sky, we will make new names.