Pere Lebrun

Lit Brut

2012-02-08T04:20:00.013Z

I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I am in a world of shit, yes. But I am alive, and I am not afraid.

The other Joker

Around the same time I started blogging, I attended one the most striking, memorable exhibitions I've seen for quite a while. It was of 'outsider art' or 'art brut'; an unschooled non-movement, commodified as a niche market for those very reasons during my adolescence. Largely of medical interest in previous decades, its aesthetic - or rather commercial - aspects became foregrounded in the 80s and 90s. Like so much else once 'outside' the bourgeois mainstream, it was rebranded and gentrified for 'alt' audiences; that supposedly elusive 'Generation X' demographic, quickly proven to be as susceptible to market manipulation as any other (arguably more so - we see the results all around us. You're reading one right now). From Daniel Johnston's troubled home recordings, to obsessively paranoid investigations of the 'cryptocracy', to deluxe editions of cosmological exegesis from drug-addled cartoonists, to Tim Burton's big-budget tributes to bubblegum cards and tragically deluded film-makers; neoliberal culture shamelessly dug up anything to display in the shop window. From the 80s onwards, our culture sifted through its dead letter office, to grab the interest of a potential market in danger of zoning out. Capitalism's panopticon kept widening its field of vision to sustain hegemony; surveying labours formerly on the periphery of its radar, to extract value accordingly.

Deeply disturbed obsessions of janitors, dying alone in grinding poverty, became the lucrative focus of posthumous attention. Patients' therapy within the confines of state institutions could be granted an awkward place in the spectacle. The internal ciphers of schizophrenics, vagrants, pariahs and prisoners could be recorded, catalogued and valued for the discerning buyer; pandered to by publishers, journalists, curators, record labels and video distributors. At around the same time the 'western canon' was being seriously questioned in academia, any number of arbitrary 'canons' cropped up around the margins of accepted taste. It probably played a role in fueling a common misrecognition we have today: when post-structuralism, post-communism, post-colonialism and post-modernism are lumped together as symptoms of the same malignant epoch. However this is a lazy, simplistic view of the recent past. The gloss applied to what's marketed isn't a proportionate reflection of how it's produced. This was certainly the case with 'outsider art'. In retrospect, it registers as a kind of prelude to Capital's confiscation of respite, security and privacy from the most vulnerable; as they're marched into a hostile and bewildering labour market. The banal cruelties of reality TV - desperate, intrusive auditions for elusive rewards - are an ideological caricature of this process. Funny peculiar profitably enclosed with funny ha-ha. Game show verite; engineered to emphasize weakness, embarrassment or failure. It could be you; but while it's not, we can always gawk at them.

Yet despite enclosure, not everything can be contained. At the exhibition mentioned above, certain imagery reoccurred; despite a dizzying variety in style, form and medium. Sexual pathologies (no doubt intensified by sexual frustrations) felt as though they communicated from one sculpture or painting to another. Indeed, these pathologies were repeatedly represented by circuitry, networks, crossed wires and communicative deferrals. Routes extending out of genitalia, sometimes directly plugging into heads (or the other way round). Faces, indistinct and blurred in a representational sense, aggregated by mysterious patterns and attempts to visualize invisible energies; or bodies orbiting around obsessively filled in spaces. In a fair few, there was a peculiar focus on brands; totems to the everyday products, logos and junk that surround us everywhere. Strangely resigned, melancholy attempts to involve the familiar and banal in disquietingly raw visions. There was probably more focus on this than religious imagery, but just as ambivalent in its yearning to connect. Although proving Warhol's famous dictum up to a point, these outsiders weren't using their fifteen minutes to celebrate corporate landscapes as much as pop art (or the hucksters it continues to inspire). Traumatized codes bled out of the most rigidly 'systematic' works; internal mythologies with too many 'remainders' to be fully diagnosed. Applying standard critical frameworks to any of it could be to miss 'the point' entirely.

Anyway. Anyway. Maybe I should get to the point here. Regular readers have probably noticed that posts consisting of actual 'writing' have been few and far between lately. This isn't one of those 'grand announcements of my resignation' posts. I'm not 'famous' enough to warrant that kinda shit, and this blog isn't being cancelled anytime soon (I can't go on. I must... etc.). However, I've become incredibly self-conscious about what blogging 'is', and what it's actually 'for'. As a relatively silent reader of them, I came to them from a false premise that still lurks behind the format; a premise that's more of a forgotten, lost opportunity (?) than a manifesto or theory of what they 'should be': They're a form of outsider art. Of course, this is far from being their universal use. Unlike the artists discussed above, personal mythologies and private obsessions in blogs are subject to instant feedback, loops of mutual approval, and - far more than a need to be understood - the aching need to be recognized. Like any cultural practice, the format is best utilized if armed with cultural capital that comes with careers (and contacts) in media, academia, printed literature and political groupings; the scaffolding required to raise and maintain a profile. There are ghosts in this machine - mysterious avatars and sites that suddenly stop, without announcement or fanfare, frozen at given dates with no more statements forthcoming. It's unlikely those defunct blogs will be unearthed for the delectation of future connoisseurs. If they haven't been relegated to some invisible cache, they're already simply there. Enough time has passed to view their inert data as remnants of a world that has now passed.

Those who could 'play the game' in meatspace knew how to play it in cyberspace, even if they learned the former from the latter. A format now in decline, blogging was one of neoliberalism's last scraps thrown into the bowl labelled 'opportunity'; before the whole ideological edifice began to rapidly crumble about four years ago. Around the same time, this corner of blogosphere (there are hundreds of millions of blogs - I mean those aware of each other) had established an 'aristocracy' of sorts. Some are on my blogroll. Some are on the blogroll of 'everyone' (but not necessarily mine - heh). Some went where they really wanted to go - to journals, newspapers, books, conferences and broadcast media. Not necessarily Darwinian, but the process has been as 'capitalist realist' as anything else; another transient, ephemeral stage before the Great Enclosure. Now is a time of pulling up drawbridges, stationing the archers, and preparing boiling pots for pesky barbarians outside. Let them eat Twitter. If they manage to cultivate themselves enough, they can get a Tumblr to play with. As for heretics, dissenters, and ominous, mythical creatures like grey vampires or trolls - the best they can expect is exile. We can occasionally mention them in hushed tones, to scare children and visitors; even if the blogosphere's 'aristocratic' priesthood would largely deny their existence at this stage.

Yes - crude, gross generalisations; but I can only comment on what I bother paying attention to. I expect most readers will get what I mean. That I have expectations of an assumed audience may be part of the problem, especially since this blog is just over a year old. I get the impression that 'most readers' are bloggers themselves, which was once quite flattering. Now it's rather frustrating, for reasons I can't quite articulate. I've seen this blog listed elsewhere as 'politics' or 'current affairs', which wasn't really my original intention here. I was (kinda, sorta) sidetracked: Mostly by 'current events' directly affecting my life; and in second place, becoming ever more conscious of who was reading, what kind of conversation could hold their attention (not really all that consciously, more where my line of thought was led through). The word conversation is important in realizing why blogging never really could have been an art, 'outsider' or otherwise. There have been attempts, certainly, and some (a distinct minority) have achieved a kind of mastery of the form. However, they are the most old-fashioned; using blogs for the centuries-old arts like the essay, political pamphlet, graphic agitprop, or the confessional. But even there, instant feedback corrodes the 'purity' of those genres. Within a network within a web, entanglement is unavoidable. The emergence of blogs alongside reality TV is important to considering their respective roles as panoptical devices. Or, as someone (what happened to his blog, I wonder?) more articulate than myself on these matters put it:

Writing on the Internet immediately threatens ‘authors’ with their ‘audience’ — the moment one stops thinking of oneself as an isolated performer on stage is when conversation can begin, but doing this requires the abandonment of all concern for developing one’s ‘craft.’ When language fully enters a sphere of universal equivalence as text, (and can be translated, quantified, plugged into search algorithms); then communicability and transparency of meaning are finally God; one retires from the divine the more readily one can define one’s addressees against the universal, ‘common reader’ (which is not to say that there is such a thing). I should add that putting writing on the Internet is not quite the same thing as Internet writing. The former is frequently the object, but never the subject of the latter, and can always be skipped.

Some become more threatened the more aware they are of their audience. The closure of comments on blogs - or how they became rather unfashionable - gave lie to bloggers' confidence in their own words. Those with sufficient character armour worked hard to immunize themselves from too much entanglement (often too hard - the fronting, self-branding, feuding and dissing of hiphop is arguably as influential on blogging as reality TV. I'll readily admit I've been influenced by both, albeit reluctantly. Like it or not, we are all adverts now). However, like outsider artists, vulnerabilities of personality or emotional health bled through the most 'rational' of theories; the fear of being 'voted off' kept the tongues of many in check. Even around seven years ago, it was apparent who bloggers were writing to (not so much for or with). The tyranny of links and citations - especially when generated by 'radical' theories or 'controversial' opinions - revealed the mundane influence of mainstream media reviews, op-eds and academic writing. There is also the continuous pressure to remain 'relevant' and produce, lest that cultivated profile quickly ends up ignored and forgotten. Every post used to update the curriculum vitae. As above, so below.

Those slipping down the attention ladder appeared unsure of their audience, only able to write in confidence to a handful of them. The emotional pratfalls of that approach requires no elaboration here. There's evidence of it all over the place. Like those awkward, rowdy or rude comments that led to vicious feuds, themselves consigned to the dustbin of triviality. It is perhaps appropriate that Tumblr has become so popular now. The format limits possibility of these convoluted games, which largely distract us from looking clearly at a society sinking ever deeper into crisis. Or exiled to Twitter; a much more efficient machine for generating complaints, empty controversy, or playground offense (a boon for lazy journalists everywhere). Exile can be far more immediate there, without waiting for consensus. You can hijack your chances of a print byline, book deal, or respected masthead above your name with 140 characters, without a choice of font - a format reflective of the accelerated, austere, cut 'n' thrust brutalities of our current job market. Live or die by your one-liners, or perhaps shelter oneself behind beautiful objects and the reassuring words of others. Tumblr's emphasis on quotes or images has the peculiar effect of being more directly personal than Blogger or Wordpress. Not as subject to heated reaction, it's more calm - or dare I say, more nurturing? - than formats demanding more engaged attention. You may not have noticed, but when this blog gets more 'Tumblresque' is when I'm trying to 'say' something a little more personal. Go figure.

So am I trying to present myself as an 'outsider artist'? Don't count on it. Education, vanity and inescapable self-consciousness prevents that. However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with 'branding' myself at all. Though I suspect some of you have done that for me. By now, I've probably entangled myself into some kind of routine, schtick. I've watched it happen, as though I'm slipping into a fictional character despite, and outside of, myself. What I write isn't 'me' and what I write on blogs definitely isn't 'me'. This is not to say I'm lying, but performing is unavoidable to some extent. We should bear in mind that if blogging isn't an art, it can still be a considerably ludic exercise. I'm quite aware of my own silliness and idiocy when it occurs. Those who personalize this whole scene too much could have problems in need of further diagnosis. Few of us behave the same way with our grandparents as we do with our drinking buddies. Nor do we address work colleagues the same way we would children. If we talked, thought, and revealed ourselves in exactly the same way with everyone, we'd be prime candidates for art therapy within the confines of a state institution. I'm sure you can find evidence of my occasional depressive episodes here, there or elsewhere ("oh, you're all just SO WRONG" etc.); but I'm not ready for the 'funny farm' until the fat lady sings the complete works of Wagner. Without pausing for a glass of water. While balancing on her head.

Anyway. Anyway. David W. Lebrun will be taking a break for while. I have life to deal with right now ("Oh wow! Remember that? What a concept!"). I expect to return some time around early March, probably with some long promised (at least to myself) posts for the 'decades' blogs. I think I've finally worked out what the point of all this is. Not to provide low-rent op-eds, adverts for corporate products, half-arsed theorizing, knee-jerk reactions to other blogs, or manifestos that would probably change within months anyway. I want to use this for the more traditional avenues mentioned above: to write. If you want self-branding, I'm hoping to get all 'TL; DR' on your asses. I don't really give a shit if blogs are going out of fashion. Sure, it would be nice to see the return of those I once enjoyed reading (where is everyone?), but I've always had a soft spot for doggedly archaic practices. There's something lamely heroic in persisting with what the fashionable no longer pay attention to. Let the hipsters gentrify the upper tiers of the blogoverse. Let the lefty-liberal press tame the fist-raisers. Let the academy render wild intellects as predictable and settled as the teachers they once challenged. Let the rabidly ambitious crowd-surf the heads of supporters who should have known better. Let the conformists all follow this month's meme. I don't care. Right now, there's far worse enclosures than that to worry about. I've got to survive in it all too, y'know; and it's not getting any easier. I have far more pressing matters to attend to than Shit People Say On The Internet. So by all means feel free to hover around, just don't expect me to be saying much of anything over the next few weeks. Even if we're not in 'conversation', your attention is always welcome; and I hope to honour it in the near future. I shall return.

Sell The Rights To The Networks

2012-02-06T04:42:00.001Z

R.I.P.

2012-02-01T22:05:00.007Z

R.I.P.

2012-01-20T18:30:00.000Z

Outside In The Cold Distance

2012-01-19T00:00:00.008Z

(from between concrete walls)

As for the rest of you: Anyone who posted blog "content" yesterday IS A SCAB. We know who you are, self-promoting running dogs of the petit bourgeoisie!

A Bullet For The Continent

2012-01-17T07:00:00.002Z

Thus, both in the internal and the external spheres, the new Congo being created by my government will be rich, free and prosperous. But to attain our goal without delay, I ask all of you, legislators and citizens of the Congo, to give us all the help you can. I ask you all to sink your tribal quarrels: they weaken us and may cause us to be despised abroad. I ask you all not to shrink from any sacrifice for the sake of ensuring the success of our grand undertaking. Finally, I ask you unconditionally to respect the life and property of fellow-citizens and foreigners who have settled in our country; if the conduct of these foreigners leaves much to be desired, our Justice will promptly expel them from the territory of the republic; if, on the contrary, their conduct is good, they must be left in peace, for they, too, are working for our country’s prosperity.

The Congo’s independence is a decisive step towards the liberation of the whole African continent.

Our government, a government of national and popular unity, will serve its country. I call on all Congolese citizens, men, women and children, to set themselves resolutely to the task of creating a national economy and ensuring our economic independence.

Eternal glory to the fighters for national liberation!

Long live independence and African unity!

Long live the independent and sovereign Congo!

That speech sealed his death warrant. Only three months later, after being arrested, beaten and tortured, Patrice Lumumba, was shot and killed by firing squad – an act that was committed with the assistance of the governments of Belgium and the United States. The Belgian government officially apologized in 2002, but the United States refuses to this day to admit wrongdoing.

U.S. Africa Command has dispatched special forces to train 1,000 Congolese troops in the north and east of their nation, where Congo borders Uganda. Former U.S. diplomat Daniel Simpson was quoted above as to what in part is Washington’s motive in pursuing a new war in and around Somalia: To test out AFRICOM ground and air forces in Djibouti for direct military action on the continent.

A United Press International report of March 10, placed under energy news, offered another explanation. In a feature titled “East Africa is next hot oil zone,” the news agency disclosed that “East Africa is emerging as the next oil boom following a big strike in Uganda’s Lake Albert Basin. Other oil and natural gas reserves have been found in Tanzania and Mozambique and exploration is under way in Ethiopia and even war-torn Somalia.”

The region is, in the words of the Western chief executive officer of an oil prospecting firm, “the last real high-potential area in the world that hasn’t been fully explored.”

“The discovery at Lake Albert, in the center of Africa between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is estimated to contain the equivalent of several billion barrels of oil. It is likely to be the biggest onshore field found south of the Sahara Desert in two decades."

Good Night And Good Luck

2012-01-15T07:16:00.002Z

They Were Asking For It

2012-01-13T14:20:00.003Z

This Winter Is Warm, But It Still Leaves Us Cold

2012-01-12T02:50:00.000Z

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were ... thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly, and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and anti-natural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.

Frederick Engels Dialectics of Nature

Behind Anomie Lines

2012-01-09T18:28:00.004Z

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

The mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC's again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.

Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

Philip K. Dick How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

We begin with a table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problematic. You are becoming tense; it is becoming tense. How hard to tell the difference between what is you and what is it! You respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel "wound up," recognising with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. In speaking up or speaking out, you upset the situation. That you have described what was said by another as a problem means you have created a problem. You become the problem you create.

To be the object of shared disapproval, those glances that can cut you up, cut you out. An experience of alienation can shatter a world. The family gathers around the table; these are supposed to be happy occasions. How hard we work to keep the occasion happy, to keep the surface of the table polished so that it can reflect back a good image of the family. So much you are not supposed to say, to do, to be, in order to preserve that image. If you say, or do, or be anything that does not reflect the image of the happy family back to itself, the world becomes distorted. You become the cause of a distortion. You are the distortion you cause. Another dinner, ruined. To become alienated from a picture can allow you to see what that picture does not and will not reflect.

Sara Ahmed Feminist Killjoys (and other Willful Subjects)

We own ourselves, therefore outsiders have no right to trespass on us. Again, this might seem an innocuous, even a positive notion, but it looks rather different when we take into consideration the Roman tradition of property on which it is based. To say that we own ourselves is, oddly enough, to cast ourselves as both master and slave simultaneously. "We" are both owners (exerting absolute power over our property) and yet somehow, at the same time, the things being owned (being the object of absolute power). The ancient Roman household, far from having been forgotten in the mists of history, is preserved in our most basic conception of ourselves—and, once again, just as in property law, the result is so strangely incoherent that it spins off into endless paradoxes the moment one tries to figure out what it would actually mean in practice. Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves. The most popular solution - to say that each of us has something called a "mind" and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call "the body," and that the first thing holds natural dominion over the second - flies in the face of just about everything we know about cognitive science. It's obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it.

David Graeber Debt: The First 5000 Years

The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present's afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon.

Emile Durkheim Suicide

Later the old subject of 'logical positivism' came up. I adopted a somewhat intransigent attitude and the conversation threatened to take a disagreeable tum. This was avoided by Brecht admitting for the first time that his arguments were superficial. This he did with he delightful formula: 'A deep need makes for a superficial grasp.' Later, when we were walking to his house (the conversation had taken place in my room): 'It's a good thing when someone who has taken up an extreme position then goes into a period of reaction. That way he arrives at a half-way house.' That, he explained, was what had happened to him: he had become mellow.

Walter Benjamin Conversations With Brecht

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

There's No Business Like...

2012-01-08T20:34:00.009Z

COLONIALISM

TERRORISM

WORLD WAR

COLD WAR

COMMUNISM

FASCISM

MODERNITY

POSTMODERNITY

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

CONSERVATISM

FORDISM

NEOLIBERALISM

GLOBALISATION

AUSTERITY

R.I.P.

2012-01-03T12:25:00.003Z

2012: Already So Over

2011-12-31T01:13:00.000Z

With the sweep of his scythe, he creates bubbles in which are beginning to take shape the new forms he creates in his dance; and these forms dance also.

(...)

The Universe is Change; every Change is the effect of an Act of Love;
All acts of Love contain Pure Joy. Die daily.
Death is the apex of one curve of the snake Life.
Behold all opposites as necessary complements, and rejoice.

The Master Therion The Book of Thoth

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gilding wrapt in brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

T.S. Eliot The Waste Land

Home For The Holidays

2011-12-23T17:30:00.001Z

Lumpenproleprecariat (The Final Countdown)

2011-12-22T09:26:00.029Z

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

(The lumpenproletariat:) This scum of the depraved elements of all classes ... decayed roués, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel keepers, tinkers, beggars, the dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.

Karl Marx

Have to say I've always found the above quotes to be, well... bullshit. Offensively dangerous bullshit even. Variations of both ideas have served to dismiss the historical agency and experience of billions, and continue to do so amongst many a 'vanguardist'. Reading both, and whatever their original intention, I see the seeds of justification for the worst atrocities carried out in the name of 'revolution'; and with that their eventual failure (and does Marx - endlessly on the run, on the bum, one of the greatest 'trolls' in history - himself escape the above definition?). Betraying doubts within their own formulae of thought, Aristotle and Marx presented somewhat lazy answers to questions that history stubbornly, continually, poses. That lazy answer being: Fuck 'em. Predictably, the right can always apply their customary flexibility to the above with more profitable vigor. To mythologise history via the 'superiority' of poetry (in the form of propaganda, for example), or disparage social 'remainders' in equations of class war; this has also been a modus operandi of reaction - from Burke to Goebbells to Cameron. Yet the left frequently has to be reminded - and not without some resistance - that human history isn't as graceful or cohesive as an epic poem. The 'lumpen' could have more 'revolutionary' potential than any number of job descriptions, labelled campaigns, parties or institutions.

Social pariahs, slaves, prisoners, immigrants, sexual 'deviants', fanatics, deserters, petty criminals, the unemployable, the visibly dependant, the transient, the unaccountable, those brutally disenfranchised remnants from archaic ways of life: Maybe they were always at the 'vanguard' of deeper social transitions, exceptions capable of overwhelming the rule. From maroons to pirates to mutinous soldiers to religious dissenters - they were decisive factors from the decline of empires to the rise of capitalism; while also being a consistent threat to its power. Now and again they've formed the social base of reactionary forces, but more frequently they've continued to threaten its hegemony. Look around any district where traces of life continue against the odds; beyond the mores of institution, policy, security, spectacle or 'aspiration'. These are the people who Capital assaults with its most direct violence. As finance enforces its claim to every layer of life, the 'rotting mass' of the dangerous class grow, and grow angrier; presenting far more of a threat to global enclosure than any trade union or political party (parliamentary or otherwise) currently operating within 'western' societies. Nationally and globally, accelerated, conscious disengagement from the 'normative' could be emerging as the norm. Demanding yesterday's basic entitlement can easily be rebranded as tomorrow's 'sheer criminality'.

This is not to romanticise 'renegade' elements that have undermined Leviathan. Those whom mainstream media (be they openly fictional or otherwise) constantly demonize, in the interests of disempowerment and containment, are not as dormant in their collective power as many like to think. Working-class women, the disabled, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, LBGTs, the chronically unemployed, the 'unschoolable'. In this country at least, over the past forty years they've challenged Capital in ways less easily managed or compromised than trade unions largely have. I strongly disagree they've undermined the working class as a collective force (and who decided the above formed distinct, separate units outside the working class?). More often than not, despite repeated attempts to silence and belittle them - from both wings - they've maintained levels of dissent that have become sorely lacking in more 'traditional' formations. Indeed, they've frequently been excluded from what trade unions have aimed to conserve. I must emphasise I'm not downplaying the relevance of civic institutions or unions here. I'd recommend that all workers join a union, should the opportunity present itself. However, their promises to fight for security remain based on an assumed social democracy that's already vanishing, and simply won't be revived within the confines of capitalism.

As the economic tide changes, one man regards his precarious situation as unbearable. He starts a blog; ranting and griping about whatever he feels like ranting and griping about. Despite all that's happened this year (when the bleakest of dividing lines are now impossible to ignore), it ends up a kind of digital novacaine; dulling the sharp jabs of personal and social reality. Elsewhere in the world, another finds his precarious state so unbearable he immolates himself; leading to a chain of events that still can't be adequately quantified or accounted for. It would be more than tasteless to account for his agonising death with Theory or Symbolic Meaning, but its significance cannot be dismissed. Closer to home, the state murder of another man reverberates nationally; unleashing so much of what society tries so hard to suppress and deny. So much that even now we remain subject to a torrent of disinformation, propaganda, social ventriloquism, and exercises in theoretical branding. If people apply this to what happens down the road, surely it applies to how we assess the wider world. We sit and watch and, even when participating, feel compelled to reply with interpretation, opinion, theory, slogan, promotion, dismissal or condemnation. And like it or not, we are almost all the 'chattering class' now. The plurality of voices can be as bewildering to those inside, as much as it is to those on the outside looking in. The aggregate of needs, of dizzyingly diverse discontent: It's building into a global tower of noise. Whether or not that noise can harmonise towards a common cause remains to be seen. It keeps moving, responding, having more to say - and do - to a power that has (by now) took absolute victory for granted.

One thing that's been striking this year is how even the most perceptive, knowledgeable commentators have frequently struggled to explain the volatile, worldwide responses to the collapse of neoliberalism and its bromides. This is not to snark, or say "they were all wrong" - far from it; but it may be time to accept what was missed or obstruficated for it's own - or 'our' - interest in the preceding years. History (the antithesis of 'bunk') has stared down Theory; laughing ominously as the latter crawls away, hoping it can save face with a smart comeback when History has enough time to hear it. The small, but significant, wave of 'bloggerati' disavowals this week have themselves acknowledged the limits of theory, agitprop, and the channels by which they circulate. Not to mention the many left-wing blogs that have almost ground to a halt, barely posting since 2009-10. Then there's those doggedly staking a claim to co-ordinate the volatile ebb and flow of current activity (and catastrophe) with prescriptions of What Is To Be Done, arguably begrudging their own response to what is actually being done. If you think that's a gross simplification of 'the left', well some of the left (in the UK at least) could be in danger of accepting grossly simplified histories; and following that, limiting the potential of what it wishes to represent.

Reading Theory during the opening years of the century, it sometimes read like a jazzier variation of management consultancy; a series of administrative proposals pitched to Head Office, hoping for a thumbs up from whoever that Head may be. The vain (in both senses of the word) struggle to interpret and enclose this society's ever more urgent nightmares (and indeed humanity, when this most parochial of nations can compel itself to look that far); with an excesses of terminology and classification, superfluously trying to make new what may have already been obvious or cliched. Or complementing that, superficial audience-friendly attempts to simplify and repackage what is always (always) a reciprocal, fluid social dynamic. Both approaches are in danger of blinding themselves to what their own paradigms unwittingly (?) render irresolvable; or even make worse. Our previous government had its own brand of 'speculative realism': Blue Sky Thinking, a term that sits frozen and buried within the series of fraudulent promises - or rather threats - that kept Capital, and its governments, afloat beyond any plausible mandate: The dotcom boom, urban regeneration, ethical foreign policy, flexible employment opportunities, the war on terror, housing speculation, stakeholder society, knowledge economy, humanitarian intervention, carbon trading, credit crisis, post-racial government, austerity emergencies, market solutions. All manufactured 'blue skies' that have only served to gather more devastating storms.

In the post below this one, I listed a bunch of bad ideas, remnants of a time when 'ideas' were all the rage. It was like everyone of a certain age and education had some 'idea' of what they wanted to do, or what they wanted to be, a decade or so ago. 'Icebreaking' could consist of the (mostly terrible) 'creative' ideas of those insisting they were anything but what they actually were. For example: "I'm a film-maker currently doing some teaching", "I'm in a band, but I work in a care home to pay the bills" or even "I'm living with my parents - while I save up to invest in that dream flat". The internal groan one felt when yet another date felt compelled to inform you of their great idea. It stopped being sexy or interesting way before it got numbingly irritating - a background hum of common denial, a frail belief in what neoliberal ideology promised its more privileged subjects. Or more succinctly, delusion. A bunch of sheds-in-progress you constantly heard about, but rarely saw completed. A willfully precarious sense of self. Backing this up was an almost fanatical faith in one's own taste, itself in denial of contemporary culture's ever more suffocating banality. The emptier cultural product became, the more people seemed compelled to import personal identification and deep meaning into it. And I'm not mocking all this from a distance. I was as guilty (?) of it as anyone. It's one of the more solid legacies the baby-boom generation bequeathed to us.

Some of you may dismiss the above as mere 'hipster indulgence'. First off, ditching the pejorative use of 'hipster' is long overdue. It's become as childish and meaningless as calling something 'subversive', 'cool' or 'dark'. It's gone from signifying (mainly) white middle-class people of 18-35, with educations that (they hope) will equip them for cultural work; to becoming a lazy blanket term of abuse, used as a scapegoat for what are actually global, impersonal class forces emerging long before they were born. It seems that a lot of this resentment comes from those significantly older than 35, anyway (and how that generation loves to hark back to its own trashy youth). I've met a lot of supposed 'hipsters', but very few of them were the deciding factors in housing, finance, education or employment policies (enablers perhaps, but to - understandably - try and maintain one's own position is to unavoidably maintain class antagonisms). They didn't instigate neoliberalism, and their parents didn't 'steal their future' either. Talk of a generational conspiracy is as crass as blaming the pastimes of a poorly-defined subculture.

Secondly, what was striking in this former life was the social proximity of the educated 'precariat' to 'the lumpen', and with that margin-walkers with a foot in both sides of that interzone. Perhaps one side embraced neoliberal insecurity as a 'creative' opportunity. Maybe the latter was resigned to that insecurity before 'neoliberalism' was common parlance (using a more urgent kind of creativity to survive). What mattered was that the 'criminal' or 'under' class interacted with the educated precariat more than either side was willing to openly acknowledge. The increasing madness of the property market forced through one of its key dividing lines. The severity - and contradictions - of enclosure that took place in recent years could now mean that reciprocation is being pushed into the limelight (in the U.S.), or continues to be largely denied (in the U.K.). With the austerity consensus, goalposts have shrunk so much that corporate government has made its message loud and clear: You will all be precarious, and you can all be lumpen.

We'll now return to the pop-cultural reference of two posts ago (and if you find that offensively indulgent, may I remind you this is a blog). In the clip posted in the first part of this 'trilogy', it wasn't Fonzie's stunt I found most absurd. More that he insisted on keeping his jacket on. To me, that's a more significant metaphor than the decline of a show that was crap to start with. The ultra-formulaic consistency of the character was basically his entire 'joke'. From homeless delinquent to schoolteacher, his catchphrases, stock responses and mannerisms remained the same; while Richie Cunningham vanished to college, found fame as an overrated film director, and lost his hair. But then Richie was a considerably less popular image for posters, t-shirts and dolls. Fonzie's closed dreamworld of three or four locations, viewed through the same three or four angles, carried on regardless. A fixed formula that nevertheless had to introduce alien elements - or desperate gimmicks - to hold the attention of its audience (and it's perhaps no coincidence that "it was all a dream" became a regular TV plot device from the beginning of the 1980s). It kept it up for a surprisingly long time, even longer than its unlikely spin-offs:

The above episode is a very early memory. It stuck in the mind as one the few occasions when Fonzie wasn't so cool. As disorientating as the rare time Bugs Bunny lost control of the situation. It's now obvious that it was just a cut-price pilot for a completely different show. But by now, both of them have receded into the past; occasionally rerun, to remind us neither of them were as good as some of us like to remember. They were far from 'poetic', and far less 'universal' than their popularity indicated. Actual living history has granted them very different meanings - but much less significance - in the decades since passed. How we absorb the world, our position in it, and the images and words that mediate these relations, are as precarious as any other aspect of our lives. Capitalism has now moved on from neoliberalism. Hopes that its crisis would mean reversion to a more stable social contract quickly proved to be short-lived. Capital's moving to a newer, more overtly aggressive stage of accumulation and enclosure, far more vicious, callous and oppressive than the relatively cautious (!) steps taken by Reagan and Thatcher. Or, to quote the unavoidable Marxist cliche: Now is a time of monsters. So maybe it's time we responded with a re-emergence of the human.

The slogan "we are the 99%" certainly has resonated. A necessary intervention to redefine, and focus, notions of 'inside' and 'outside', 'them' and 'us'. I'm still pessimistic about how the UK will adapt to this, but only time will tell. I'm not as pessimistic as I was this time last year anyway, so there's some grain of hope. Perhaps we all need to acknowledge the 'alien', including what's alien in ourselves. Confront it for what it is, try to avoid redefining it, in ever more self-serving - but ultimately destructive - formulations. In its various forms, our shared alienation simply can't be denied. Not now. That I bother writing this blog is my own proof. That you bother reading it may be yours. What emerged as something very much outside of me is now feeding back into something else. What that may be, I'm not entirely sure of; but it's certainly something different (and one must be vigilant not to divert it into more mere novelty). It's been a very difficult balancing act to ensure that 'ideas' don't just end up as yet more silly, stillborn stories. I'm the first to admit my balance hasn't been well coordinated, but hope I haven't completely fallen off. Yet. So please excuse my indulgences, both above and below. I appreciate your patience. I've spent over a year vomiting up various rants and gripes, and now this headache is finally subsiding. Time to get my head away from the toilet, clean my teeth and rest.

With at least one eye open.

Lumpenproleprecariat (Slight Return)

2011-12-18T23:29:00.012Z

(Part 1 is here.)

Here's some bad 'creative' ideas I had about a decade or so ago. The worst. I'm relieved none of them reached completion, even at the scripted stage. So bad, I must apologize in advance for them. No one needs to tell me why they were (?) wrong. They're not the only ideas I've had, so that's some consolation. Anyway, it's best I keep good ideas to myself, no? It's not like I'm just going to throw 'em out there for free.

Never Had It So Good

A prime-time sitcom, broad and farcial. A remote nursing home for disabled veterans in rural England, during the 1950s. Running this home is a former Wing Commander, very patriotic, stern and pompous. He loves to bore residents with tales of wartime exploits (many of which are made up). He was in both of the big ones - a 'flying ace' in the first, proudly involved in the destruction of Dresden in the second. However, he found that his wife chose to stay in India after the war, leaving him for a 'native' (his words, not mine) involved in the independence movement. The head nurse is a disciplinarian Russian, herself involved in aerial combat during WW2. She has a large shrine to Stalin in her quarters, and always takes the opportunity to promote the wonders of Soviet communism to the residents; often coming into conflict with the Wing Commander. However, due to a bureaucratic spelling mistake, she was falsely labelled a Nazi spy by the KGB; so has to remain in England for her own safety. She would be played by a Bella Emberg-type (look 'er up). The third character is a notorious Nazi war criminal, posing as a Norwegian (a stolen identity). Severely wounded in the closing stages of the war, he's found himself trapped in this nursing home; wheelchair-bound and pining for the glory days of the Third Reich. He is of course appalled to be living amongst infirm enemies (from all over the British Empire too). Many plots would be based on his vain attempts to escape to Argentina. The British sitcom tradition, of muted rage and desperation about to burst, applies to the dynamic between all three characters.

Reilly's Interest

An extended TV drama pilot, followed by six stand-alone episodes. Michael Reilly, former IRA gunman released from the Maze prison, is determined to go straight. He moves to London to work as a security manager for his brother. His brother, younger and more spoiled than him, took a very different path in life. After graduating from university during rave's peak, his success in club promoting led to him owning a trendy nightspot. Outwardly successful (the kind featured in broadsheet newspapers or TV), the younger Reilly is actually a wayward, reckless sort; owing vast amounts of money to the gangsters that kept him afloat. The pilot will be a twisty-turny noir plot, leading the elder Michael to come to a reluctant agreement with the gangsters: To spare his brother's life, he agrees to assassinate seven 'enemies' of their choosing. The first (and by far most difficult to kill) will be dispatched in the pilot. The following six episodes will each deal with the remaining six. However, Reilly will be a background character in the following episodes. The plots for them will be the stories of the targets, and how they come to meet their fate. They could be mistresses, greengrocers, politicians or gambling football players; at varying levels of 'innocence' or 'guilt'. Of course, they would all be played by famous guest stars; giving them a shot at a BAFTA award.

A ten minute TV show, for pre-lingual children. Animated. There are three characters: A circle, a square and a triangle. They have very simple outlines for faces, but no torsos or limbs. None of these characters speak. Their 'voices' would be three different musical instruments (can't remember which, but they would represent the same instruments in every episode. None would be percussive). The triangle would only move diagonally, the circle would bounce vertically, the square horizontally. Very 2-D, kind of like a primitive videogame. In each episode, respective shapes would begin by representing a 'mood' at odds with the other shapes. The background would consist of a very basic pattern, different in each episode. As the 'voices' of each rub up against each other, building into a cacophony (and the shapes' movement becomes more erratic in rhythm etc.); the pattern in the background would gradually fade into an actual landscape. This could be a forest, under the sea, a desert, anywhere. A relatively long, quiet interval where the camera slowly wanders around; seeing what's there. Then gradually, the shapes and the pattern return until the landscape has faded out of view. At this point, our friends gradually adjust their movements and sounds to build up into a pretty, simple tune. The expressions on their faces may not change, but they'll still work together to sing and dance in perfect harmony. The end. This would be the 'plot' of every single episode.

The Wisest Guys

This could be a comic strip or animated sitcom, preferably in the stark, grotesque visual style of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. But I can see it happening with live actors too. All the plots would centre around an extended family of gangsters, with two or three recurring police characters. It would be as brutal as The Sopranos, and they would be just as nasty and unpleasant. But here's the running 'gag': Every single character (including the cops) would have a learning or emotional difficulty of one kind or other. This would be reflected in the names, like Joey 'Dyspraxia' Gamboni, Frankie Bipolar, Colour-blind Chris Cappucino etc. etc. Basically a cheap, lazy excuse to throw in a bunch of distasteful pub jokes; to undermine the ultra-violent plots. Lots of farcial misunderstanding and pratfalls based on their cognitive limits (which, despite being able to identify them in each other, they're unable to acknowledge in themselves). A kind of comedy of misrecognition with icepicks. Another running gag is that their escapades are always ultimately successful, no matter how much silly confusion takes place.

T.W.A.T.S.

Trumpton Work and Training Solutions. A sitcom based in PFI-funded college for unemployed youths, in a generic medium-sized city. Nominally devised to provide opportunities (in the Blairite hi-tech phantasm known as 'creative industries'); it's actually a mismanaged mess, run by self-absorbed careerists half-assedly teaching worthless, rapidly-dated 'skills' to jaded youths. The staff consists of various failed 'creatives'; relatively young and either resigned to their fates as middling civil servants, or carrying the torch for that big break that never arrives. This could include: Piss-poor singers making repeated attempts to enter X-Factor, pseudo-intellectuals deluded that their blog commands the rapt attention of political movers 'n' shakers, talentless film-makers saving every penny for the Cannes Film Festival, or indeed depressed writers of dreadful sitcoms. Defeated failures or full of vain hope, their narcissism will overrule the interests of the actual students; who largely fade into the background, unless enlisted into the extra-curricular agendas of the staff. The manager will be very much a smiling 'Blair babe', a Hazel Blears-type terrifyingly evangelical about every moronic management theory thrown her way. This will be a weekly running joke, and the theories she tries to impose on her self-absorbed staff or alienated students could range from Neurolinguistic programming, to Tantric Yoga or Feng Shui. She will have a ruthless assistant manager. Desperate for approval from authority (often referring to the manager as "Mum"), but with malevolent designs on everyone else, he'll be the immediate 'villain' of the show. As episodes progress, T.W.A.T.S. itself will be in a visibly advanced state of decay, but all the lead characters ignore this. So blinded are they by self-promotion (or self-loathing), even fires or floods remain unnoticed until the third act.

All of the above are 'autobiographical' in one way or the other, as metaphor, anecdote, reaction, or otherwise. Some are just knee-jerk expressions of inarticulate emotional states - at different levels of remove - now very alien to me. Although not even attempted to be produced, they are very much products of their time. Despite being idle thoughts that hardly made it to idle activity, they sit like inert stones; all slimy and weather-worn from the climate that followed. So what does this have to do with the post below? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Did I forget to mention that this is actually a three part Christmas special? Oh, I'm spoiling you people. I really am! It's like an electronic Advent Calendar.

Please stay tuned...

Lumpenproleprecariat

2011-12-16T18:35:00.010Z

Back in the day, there was this guy I used to kick about with. Really nice bloke, funny, intelligent, sociable. Always pleasant company, and far more trustworthy than most. He had a fun, interesting hobby: With like-minded enthusiasts, he'd re-enact famous battles from the past. They'd get together, pore over the historical tomes, examine the strategies and the weapons used. Study the great generals and leaders, to investigate how they achieved victory (or defeat) and how they could emulate the same. Getting it exactly right could be a somewhat fraught process. Obsession can demand a lot of attention to detail, and no small amount of skill. They'd build facsimiles of archaic weapons for their re-enactments, with strict fidelity to the original designs. Of course, they were careful to make sure these weapons couldn't actually hurt anybody. It was all above board. They were quite reliant on archival and academic expertise, to keep it authentic. With all the right equipment and choreography in place, they'd gather together at key landmarks at weekends; replaying legendary strategic moves in an audience-friendly manner. They were happy for people to come along and watch, maybe ask some questions about the subject. They studied enough to have the right answers most of the time. Putting so much gusto into their pursuit, they gave some pretty exhilarating performances; my friend included. But he eventually left the Socialist Workers Party. Bum-bum-chah!

But seriously folks, if you didn't see that coming a mile off, you need to keep up. I'm aware this isn't the best medium for paying close attention, but we can try. I know making demands isn't quite the done thing at the moment. It's not my place to point the finger at anyone (certainly not at yourself, o best beloved). I'm not the sharpest blade in the drawer by any measure, and I often wonder if I can keep up with what I write. I've been lulled along by some peculiar notions; when put across with conviction and enviably seductive writing skills. Or rather, when I assume an act of speech or writing has positioned me in a - how you say? - flattering proximity to the statements made. This occurs most obviously in direct social life. Opinions and rules, if bounced between the right people at the right time, can congeal into a consensus so strong you forget no-one actually agreed to them. When I read about horrific crimes carried out by groups or couples, when they wouldn't consider anything of the sort had they not met, I'm rarely shocked. I'm not bougie enough to put it down to 'human nature', but mild misanthropy can be useful for observing delusion and groupthink. Even in the throes of true love, you find yourself puzzled by what can hover between two minds. When things go badly wrong, you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here?

It's not just regrettably bad ideas either. The most convincing grand theories - the kind observed and vindicated in the material world - have to seduce to make a splash. For example, Marx was a grand stylist. For all his 'scientific' strengths, he was no slouch in the 'literary' department either. Well-timed jokes, little asides pulling the rug from under your feet, mirror images bouncing illumination onto what it reflects, frictions rubbing up against each other, creating further flows in another direction, or back to enhance first principles; all the while sustaining this process for the reader, so the whole cycle keeps growing into an all-encompassing scenario. Let's face it: Marx is sexy. Just look at his photograph. That sly, self-assured smile surviving underwhelmed by his beard. The twinkle in the eye you can detect in a faded 150 year-old image. Compared to the frowning impatience of Trotsky, I'd say the old boy had some moves. I should read him again sometime. It's been a while...

We're a few paragraphs in now, and some - some - of you may be thinking: Get to the point! If you are, what 'point' would you be demanding? Why would you expect that here? Could you be one of those people looking for theory? You can get that all over the place nowadays. Like opinions, they're as ubiquitous as nostrils. Over this weekend, chances are you'll be hearing or expressing theories all around you. You may be humble enough to simply call them opinions, but the motives for exchanging them will be similar. If you saw them as lies, it's likely you'd keep that judgement to yourself (especially if British). Crudely put, in any social situation, you'll want to make your presence known with what you have at your disposal. If literal seduction is on your agenda, I expect you'd be more economical with your theories than usual. You could call it a 'libidinal economy', if you insist upon getting all theoretical about it. You do? Oh, OK then. I'll give it a shot, but I'm not promising anything. It's not like I'm being paid for this shit.

Three posts ago, I appear to have given the impression that I was offering a blanket dismissal of certain texts; using other articles as convenient sock puppets. "Having a go" at selected people, while tarring them with the same brush, as confirmed by the comments below the post. Maybe the title prevented it being viewed as an open question. The occasional lazy cut'n'pastes you see here are often posted with that intention: You say something, I respond. Ask a question, I'll try to answer. When I started wasting time on this blog, I didn't expect it to 'operate' like it has. The expected rant-platform, articulation of taste, or soapbox for Big Ideas: It didn't quite map out that way. If anything, it's caused me to question previously-held convictions I've had about a few things (and every response matters, even if they're not equally useful). Sure, I may disagree - at varying degrees of intensity - with what texts 'say' (or rather what they propose). But I've detected wider factors at play here, regarding the medium rather than the message. The channels and methods of exchange by which theories circulate, gain prominence and find a receptive audience; who in turn sustain said theories, until they form a kind of closed circuit. The kind of self-perpetuating feedback loop that some call 'communicative capitalism'; as though it were a phenomenon unique to the turn of this century, or indeed universal to the experience of society as a whole. A net trying to form around a supposedly sealed box, within which we can't be sure how long the cat inside can breathe.

I admit the above image is somewhat corny; so let's add more corn to back it up: You have a freezer unit on the table. Within it, you have a block of ice. Within that ice sits a perfectly preserved extinct species. You hope it can be revived and reanimated one day. You could be on the brink of a major breakthrough after years of hard work. However, the freezer unit has shut down; about to melt the ice, spoil everything, waste all those years. The good news is that there's a working freezer just over the road. The bad news is that you're in the middle of a heat wave, so hot the ice would melt even faster if you try to move it. Either way, your experiment will end in failure. What do you do? Just sit and wait for the ice to melt inside the first freezer? You were about to make a breakthrough, so there's a very, very remote possibility that you could make it at the last minute. Or do you make a vain-but-heroic effort to carry it over the road, at risk of looking like a fool while ice melts into water all over you? Have you paused to ask why you need to revive that species anyway? Was it that important? No point asking me for an answer. I find pop-philosophy annoying at the best of times. I find it more useless than Theory.

But theories we all have, in one way or the other. We can begin with assumptions, powerfully argued by forces external to ourselves, only to find that our experiences and activities consistently challenge them. Many have found this to be the the case with their own educations. I don't just mean religion, or the ideologically-driven content of 'facts' (imagine Niall Ferguson and Michael Gove stamping on a human face forever). There are also the promises - explicitly or otherwise - made if you adhere to its organisational forms. Not just institutionally, but intellectually too. That if you subscribe to its codes and structures of thought, it will socialise you accordingly; and keep you in the loop. This loop could be economic or communicative (same thing), offering a sense of security within a given social relation; be it 'macro' or 'micro'. If you have enough confidence in your thoughts and abilities, you could end up viewing a loop wider than most people do. It could be in terms of qualifications, influence or opportunity; where you feel your own theory (coherent or not) can cast the loop wider, or at least keep it together when it doesn't feel so secure. Or realising your influence is minimal - even on your own life - you can remain inside the loop by maintaining faith in its shape. Look at the media, for example. It's had one central message for a long time: Keep paying attention and carry on. The world it depicts may be nightmarish; but it wants the world it addresses to feel coherent, never too distant from its ideology.

Am I making any sense? Maybe I will eventually. I should have mentioned this post is a two-part Christmas Special. Apologies if I've misled you; but I'd appreciate if you returned for the (?) conclusion. For now, I'll leave you with a famous clip. It's come to 'represent' something way beyond its original intention. The currency which the phrase 'jump the shark' was exchanged in could be collapsing. As pop-cultural shorthand, it could end up stranded within a culture it was unprepared for. But more on that later. Just play the clip. Try to watch it as a straightforward scene within a story. With the all the connotations it's unwillingly accumulated, would watching it as a straight narrative be impossible? Do you find yourself narrating a different story back to it? Will you accept it as a video review of what I've written above? Never mind what it means to 'us'. Maybe we should ask what it all meant to Fonzie.

R.I.P.

2011-12-15T06:16:00.000Z

Theory Is Bunk

2011-12-11T04:55:00.011Z

[T]heories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used if they are on hand when they’re needed. They have to be replaced because they are constantly being rendered obsolete—by their decisive victories even more than by their partial defeats. Moreover, no vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with a game, or a conflict, or a journey. What Jomini said of war can also be said of revolution: “Far from being an exact or dogmatic science, it is an art subject to a few general principles, and even more than that, an impassioned drama."

Guy Debord

These two kinds of cascades provide a model for why political debate and dialogue take place online in the manner they do. Bikhchandani, et al. (1992) started studying information cascades 20 years ago, arguing that individuals tend to follow behaviors of other individuals rather than relying on their own information. Anderson and Holt (1997) confirm this trend. Cass Sunstein has written extensively on the concept, explaining that people will “end up believing something — even if that something is false — simply because other people seem to believe that it is true”. These cascades happen when people lack firm convictions of their own, and are therefore more willing to agree with the convictions of trusted individuals. This theory has since been examined by Hung and Plott (2001), confirming that while cascades do not occur in every situation, they do happen under certain circumstances. In cases where informational cascades take place, people rely on others as heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, in their decision–making processes.

Reputational cascades are a particular kind of cascade where social desirability takes precedence over information itself. Reputational cascades drive individuals to “speak out, or remain silent, or even engage in certain expressive activity, partly in order to preserve their reputations, at the price of failing to say what they really think”. The Asch experiments are the most famous, and disturbing, confirmations of reputational cascades. Essentially, these studies demonstrated that individuals are much more likely to outwardly endorse incorrect answers to questions about simple observations when others around them were endorsing the incorrect answers. These studies showed that individuals, unwilling to contradict the group, will conform to the group’s incorrect assessments. The implications of this study are profound: if individuals are surrounded by a certain opinion, they will often override their own thought processes in order to fit in with the group. As more individuals outwardly align themselves with that particular opinion, more reputational pressure mounts on those who have not decided, thus extending the cascade.

A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand crosses the English Channel from Paris, and then, in an instant, the trees, the orchards, the hedgerows, the field of wheat, are black with locusts. When at length they rise to fly on to the next parish, the boughs are bared of all culture, the fields have been stripped of every green blade of human aspiration: in those skeletal forms and that blackened landscape, theoretical practice announces its ‘discovery’: the mode of production. Not only substantive knowledge, but also the very vocabularies of the human project – compassion, greed, love, pride, self sacrifice, loyalty, treason, calumny – have been eaten down to the circuits of capital. These locusts are very learned Platonists: if they settled on The Republic they would leave it picked clean of all but the idea of a contradiction between a philosopher and a slave.

E.P. Thompson

Pimp Burns Down His Brothel, In A Village Largely Populated By Wealthy Desperate Johns

2011-12-09T23:44:00.003Z

And Experience

2011-12-08T06:14:00.007Z

Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to Thought
A greater than itself to know.

And Father, how can I love you,
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.

The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seiz'd his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admir'd the Priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,
Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:
One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy Mystery.

The weeping child could not be heard.
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They strip'd him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain.

And burned him in a holy place
Where many had been burn'd before;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such things done on Albion's shore?

The Tao of Kasper

2011-12-06T02:11:00.000Z

R.I.P.

2011-12-04T18:25:00.000Z

Threat Level 99%

2011-12-03T21:32:00.007Z

Those in charge of running security at the Olympics are reluctant to comment publicly on which extra surveillance devices and defence weapons will be available to them for the event. Last week, the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, suggested in Parliament that surface-to-air missiles could be deployed. It has also been reported that RAF snipers will keep watch over events in Lynx helicopters.

Those facing riot-related charges are receiving sentences of up to two or three times longer than the normal term for similar offences. Those convicted of theft are going to prison for an average of 7.1 months, compared with the normal going rate of 2.4 months; for burglary, 14.1 months (normally 8.8 months); and for violent disorder, 10.4 months (normally 5.3 months).

Julian Young, a solicitor in west London who has defended numerous clients on riot charges, blames "mass hysteria" for the judiciary's apparent determination to "imprison as many people as possible for as long as possible."

Former Metropolitan police assistant commissioner John Yates, who resigned from his post in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, has been appointed by Bahrain to oversee reform of its police force after reports of human rights abuse.

Yates has been asked to overhaul Bahrain's police service to ensure it meets international human rights standards, after a report found evidence that excessive force and torture were used during the Pearl revolution this year.

Yates told the Daily Telegraph he has agreed to take on the duty alongside John Timoney, a former head of Miami police. Bahrain's ministry of interior notes that while in the Miami job, Timoney "succeeded amongst other things in reducing crime and implementing proper practices for the use of force".

By 2017 the last council-owned social housing properties in Westminster were sold under the 2011 right-to-buy scheme. The local authority also annouced the sale of half of its public parks and libraries, Sure Start children's centres and school buildings, for which there was no longer significant public demand – due to the borough's changing economic and demographic profile. Outside the wealthy centre, things were less serene. Riots sporadically broke out and right-wing bloggers increasingly warned about the suburban menace of unemployed young people. Health officials worried about the tuberculosis epidemic caused by overcrowding in Tower Hamlets. In Barking, the BNP launched a campaign against "Westie scroungers" dispersed from central London in the 2012-13 housing benefit exodus.

This is certainly a very important shift. Along with the portrayal of the ‘internal colonies’ of inner urban cores in U.S. or UK cities, or the Parisian banlieus, as Hobbesian spaces housing the dangerous, racialised other, military and security discourses about global south cities depict such places as essentialised, Hobbesian places of anarchy. One influential article by Richard Norton, for example, calls such places “feral cities” which threaten global capitalist order because they house massive populations, create social and political unrest, are often not governed in any formal sense, and provide breeding grounds for extreme ideologies. Fear of ‘failed cities’ thus seems to be even more powerful than fear of ‘failed states.’

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We're in a global war.”

Cons, Piracy

2011-11-30T12:53:00.003Z

Via Mayor Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

R.I.P. (X 2)

2011-11-28T17:24:00.001Z

Top Tip For Xmas No. 1

2011-11-27T08:52:00.000Z

Mistrusting Political Movements That Name Themselves After People Who Commanded And Exploited Several Hundred Million People Almost As Much As Brands That Command And Exploit Global Resources

2011-11-26T13:15:00.004Z

Laying to rest any doubts regarding the West's real interests in fostering the destructive civil war in Nepal, which included funneling substantial financial resources through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) into "minority groups" which coincidentally made up the vast majority of Nepal's Maoist rebel forces, the move to now cash in on this "good will" by infiltrating and overrunning Nepal's economy through USAID's and Monsanto's latest initiative provides a glimpse into the future of nations facing similar US-fueled unrest throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Quite clearly the predictable public outcry that accompanies Monsanto and its agenda as it spreads to the four corners of the globe illustrates that "democracy" and respect towards the will of the people is nowhere on the cards and conveyed to the public only through an increasingly unconvincing poker face.

Such "humanitarian" concerns regarding "democracy" and the "will of the people" are meant only as leverage when prying nationalists from power and either replacing them with a pliable stooge, or a vulnerable, perpetually squabbling political system too busy buying votes to actually competently run a nation.

Two Minutes Hate

2011-11-25T17:31:00.015Z

Mustachium wifebeatup, freeburger obesium and runtratticus rookivigus. Commonly found in urban areas; harassing Romanies, murdering black people, bludgeoning students, humiliating Asians, choking the mentally-ill to death, having high-speed car chases past primary schools, and guaranteeing that only a tiny fraction of rapes ever get reported. Then endlessly whining as though they're the life-risking, persecuted, misunderstood saviors of civilization.

They're not public servants. They don't stand up for 'decent people'. They're not the working class. They aren't part of the 99%. In more sombre moments, I doubt they're even homo sapiens. However, to call them animals would show great disrespect to nature's own wondrous creations. I'd shed more tears over a squirrel with a splinter than any of them with a machete embedded in the skull (OK, maybe mild disappointment if they're not fully aware of their agonising demise). But I'm kinda sentimental like that.

And if I hear any more arse-kissing 'anti-cuts' speakers appeal to their (cough, spit) sense of 'solidarity', 'duty', 'job security' or 'emotions', I'll have to heckle and boo more than I did last time (yep, that was me if you were there). Don't appeal to their 'humanity'. To them, it's an unwelcome attribution. Something to be 'forced' on them by the CPS, Guardianistas, red tape and 'the PC brigade'. Regard them as the species they want to be. While you do, spare a thought for the humble squirrel; just to keep things in perspective.

Even More Older

2011-11-21T01:18:00.000Z

Elvis must have ripped this guy off.

More Older

2011-11-20T11:16:00.002Z

Older

2011-11-19T10:23:00.000Z

Total Prestation

2011-11-18T10:38:00.007Z

The working class do not have a culture. There is no Asian culture, there is no black culture, there is no `people’s’ culture. All culture is bourgeois culture and its products are fashioned for specialised markets. Into its very refinement is folded its barbarity. How much suffering of others purchases one unit of freedom for a patron to feel rich enough to pass it on to the artist so that he may create? All artworks are bought with blood and sweat. The special freedom of the artist is an ugly thing when considered in context of the slavery of others, and yet it is a freedom, the freedom of the dirty face pressed up against the window of opulence, there is beauty and fascination in it. The very best capitalist society may produce is mired and dragged down by its basic structure. No matter that our first instinct for our favourite pieces is to defend them, preserve them, involve ourselves in them. We have had our say about DaDa and pop music but we must, in the end, admit to their ultimate worthlessness and declare that we are prepared not to raise a finger in their defence or their salvage.

— Monsieur Dupont, Communist Nihilism (2003)

(via Cryptomnesis)

It's Mr. Kasper's birthday (it'll be Pere Lebrun's first one tomorrow, which should tell you enough about how the last birthday went). What does that have to do with the quote above? Well, not to be insensitive or ungrateful or anything, but it's incredible how people I've known since birth, or as long as a generation, are so keen to surround each other with so much junk. Past a certain age, I've sometimes wondered if birthday (or Christmas) gifts are actually disguised celebrations of death instead of birth: Smiling rituals in praise of built-in obsolescence, uselessness and waste. We all need at least a day to reflect on the absurdities of how we exchange products, or ourselves. A brief chance for the proles to simulate some capitalist nihilism.

Thankfully, very few trees have died to inform me of my age over the years. So that's some consolation...

A View Of The Dust Yard

2011-11-16T20:50:00.011Z

Thanks for contacting us regarding ‘Panorama: Britain on the Fiddle.’

We have received a wide range of feedback about this programme and feel it is worth highlighting that considerable correspondence to us has been generated by online lobby activity. Bearing in mind the pressure on resources, the response below strives to address the majority of concerns raised but we apologise in advance if not all of the specific points you have mentioned have been answered in the manner you prefer. Please be assured we have raised your concerns with the programme and have done our best to issue a substantive response.

Panorama's ‘Britain on the Fiddle’ looked at a number of issues surrounding public sector fraud, including benefit fraud, the nature and extent of the unlawful subletting of council properties, the issue of identity fraud and the misuse of blue badges. The programme also followed the work of some local authority fraud investigators and by doing so revealed how time consuming and costly inquiries into suspected fraud can be.

The programme made it clear that fraud effectively takes money from all of us, especially those in genuine need. On benefit fraud, including incapacity benefit specifically, the programme stressed that most people on benefits really need them and don't cheat the system.

Far from concentrating on the economically deprived, the programme featured, for example, the case of a man claiming benefits to pay for a council flat whilst owning and running a pub business many miles away - travelling between both destinations in a luxury car.

Furthermore, the film featured fraud investigators tackling the misuse of blue badges. Many people have since written to Panorama to express their gratitude to the programme for highlighting the problem which causes them distress and much inconvenience.

We don’t agree that the cases featured in our film were extreme or were not broadly indicative of instances of benefit fraud. That is not the experience of the local authority fraud investigators who were kind enough to allow us to film their work. Dr Mark Button, from the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies said in the programme:

"I think a lot of organisations are not realistic about the levels of fraud that they face because in any organisation there are large levels of fraud that are undetected. So if they rely on detected levels of fraud they are not getting the picture of the levels of fraud within their organisation."

Emphasising this, it is important to note that just recently the Audit Commission released its most up to date figures for detected fraud against local government which explains that these figures are only the tip of a very large iceberg.

We believe the programme explored a subject which is clearly in the public interest and did so in a fair and impartial manner.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.
Kind Regards
BBC Complaints

Jobless people who are fit for work will effectively be given a two-year ultimatum when they take a council house. The move has been criticised by housing charities which say a roof over someone's head should not be conditional on having a job.

But the man spearheading the "Housing into Work" pilot project at the Tory-run council defended it saying: "We need to give people a hand up, not a hand out". Wandsworth's housing leader Paul Ellis said: "We have really got to end this dependency culture that has gone on for successive generations. On some of our estates, a third of people are not in work."

"We're in a dreadful time at the moment but there are 1,500 vacancies in Wandsworth. If you are coming to us for a house and you are capable of working but not working, you could lose your home."

He described one council estate he visited as "like the Oxford Street sales". "There were so many people in their twenties, thirties and forties, clearly able-bodied, who were popping out to the shops."

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue... That was the attitude towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which happened to you as an individual and for which you were to blame.

George Orwell The Road To Wigan Pier

The people above are dead now. Maybe Ricky Gervais could base his next sitcom on their experiences. If not Ricky and his chums, some other tired Blair-era detritus; as short on ideas as they are fat with ego and money.

Though, For The Noyse Of Drums And Timbrels Loud

2011-11-15T09:17:00.006Z

Like a bull in a China shop and seeing red.

(Pause)

2011-11-02T02:32:00.003Z

Gothic Governance

2011-11-01T01:29:00.006Z

Above all, at home and abroad, we must counsel against the pessimism and fear that can become self-fulfilling prophecies in global markets. For Britain, there is much to be inspired by. Last year bilateral trade between the UK and India grew by 20 per cent. Our exports to China are up 40 per cent – and we recently signed £1.4bn of trade deals with them. Whatever the obstacles to growth today, we still boast some of the best universities in the world, the most favourable timezone in the world, and the world’s first language. I passionately believe that the global economy is presenting us with opportunities, not threats – and we must seize them.

(...)

Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it beyond the ego and social convention; Post-Modern horror belongs to an epoch in which horror itself has become conventional, and so must be suitably self-ironising. It is the culture of an era too calloused and streetwise to be shocked, and so reaps its wry humour from the pointlessness of any such attempt. Gothic, by contrast, is funny in the way all excessive intensity is, as well as in the manner of an obscene joke. It allows us to indulge our repressed fantasies so unashamedly that we laugh at its very bare-facedness, quite independently of its content.

Any terror put into an accomplished enough artistic form becomes enjoyable, and so self-contradictory. To this extent, Gothic is sado-masochistic in its form as well as in much of its content. We take pleasure in being terrified, not least when the terrors in question are those of others. As Schopenhauer knew, we reap pleasure from fictional frights partly because we relish our own immunity to the injury they threaten, and thus, as Freud might have added, we allow Eros its momentary triumph over Thanatos. But since the death wish means that we are gratified by destruction in real life, the enjoyment we gain from horror stories is also a heightened version of how we react to real-life alarms. Like the Freudian unconscious, Gothic is at once intense and mechanical, a realm of noble passion full of creaking machinery, hamfisted gambits and crude stereotypes. It is a world of trompe l’oeil, in which bookshelves conceal instruments of torture and nothing is as it appears; but if it distrusts appearances it is also allergic to depths, preferring to stage emotion and externalise its conflicts.

Oh, God! Give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!

William Godwin Caleb Williams

Occupy The Patch

2011-10-29T22:43:00.015+01:00

As his friends blindly pursue the tradition of white supremacist primitive accumulation (surplus being amassed under threat of violence or vandalism) known as 'trick or treat', Linus risks his own health and comfort to make a bold claim for the commons. However, despite his optimism of both intellect and will, Linus has blind spots regarding his own privileged point of view; neglecting the clear and present demands of Sally. Failing to subscribe fully to the principles of the general assembly he himself initiated, he is unable to secure her support in nonetheless sincere efforts to develop an alternative to alienating modes of exchange based on disguise, manipulation, intimidation and imperialist triumphalism.

This leaves Linus at the mercy of plutocratic tyrant Lucy; and subject to the weakest form of solidarity with compromised, ineffectual liberal Charlie Brown. It remains to be seen if Peppermint Patty and Marcie can overcome their dogmatic sectarianism to consolidate a united front that will finally herald the Great Pumpkin's arrival, thus breaking the suffocating enclosure of bourgeois ideology that has kept them all the same age for about sixty years. However, enlisting the support of libertarian fantasist Snoopy could hijack the cause entirely, unless they work together to unravel the contradictions of the master/slave dialectic that exists between him and Woodstock. Moreover, their entire campaign will amount to peanuts if they continue to allow Franklin little more than the occasional token cameo in their general assembly.

Parents and teachers remain unavailable for comment.

That Old Train Be Late

2011-10-27T01:32:00.000+01:00

This pops up on the radio, and despite hearing it x amount of times in the past, it's still as perfect as ever. I've been hypnotized by the way he sings (the phrasing), plays it (the space) and the rhythm (the funk) since my age was a single figure. Think I'll dedicate it to the new house of Dr. Dee, as I'm sure he'd appreciate it. Oh, and to the 99% yet to be satisfied...

Pictures That Could Have Been Taken Anywhere

2011-10-26T11:13:00.007+01:00

That, after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat, this unparalleled event does not indicate, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society up heaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform. The national governments are as one against the proletariat!

The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International Working Men's Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different countries. Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilized world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our Association, should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the governments would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labor: The condition of their own parasitical existence.

That angry bloke with the huge beard, May 1871

The Great (End) Game

2011-10-24T15:30:00.003+01:00

2011-10-23T19:54:00.000+01:00

Soul On Ice

2011-10-21T08:11:00.000+01:00

Brought to you by...

Then As, First As

2011-10-20T05:00:00.006+01:00

Click to enlarge.

We are divided, in America, into two classes: The Tories on one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 per cent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came. That class hasn’t any privileges except to die when the Tories tell them. Every war that we have ever had was gotten, up by that class. They do all the beating of the drums. Away the rest of us go. When we leave, you know what happens. We march down the street with all the Sears-Roebuck soldiers standing on the sidewalk, all the dollar-a-year men with spurs, all the patriots who call themselves patriots, square-legged women in uniforms making Liberty Loan speeches. They promise you. You go down the street and they ring all the church bells. Promise you the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth,—anything to save them. Off you go. Then the looting commences while you are doing the fighting. This last war made over 6,000 millionaires. Today those fellows won’t help pay the bill.

All of these things you must be told so that you can present your case. Remember, we can’t win this alone. We have got to have the sympathy of all of our class of people. Go out and make friends with the farmers; they are a scrapping outfit. Be able to argue intelligently; know what you are talking about. Get all these people to join and then go after the enemy in the way that is provided for in your constitution. That is, go to the polls. Before you go to the polls, make every public office seeker state where he stands. Don’t take any alibi. A man who is not for the soldiers is against them. There isn’t any middle course. If he hasn’t got the courage to say yes for you, then lick hell out of him.

Obviously, what happened is exactly what we hoped would happen. The politics of direct action is based, to a certain degree, on a faith that freedom is contagious. It is almost impossible to convince the average American that a truly democratic society would be possible. One can only show them. But the experience of actually watching a group of a thousand, or two thousand, people making collective decisions without a leadership structure, let alone that of thousands of people in the streets linking arms to holding their ground against a phalanx of armored riot cops, motivated only by principle and solidarity, can change one’s most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that matter, human life, could actually be like. Back in the days of the Global Justice movement we thought we might expose enough people, around the world, to these new forms of direct democracy, these traditions of direct action, that a new, global, democratic culture would begin to emerge. Of course it didn’t quite happen that way. Certainly, the movement did inspire thousands, and played a major role in transforming how activist groups in Europe and North America conducted meetings and thought about politics; but the contagion was largely contained within pre-existing activist ghettos; most Americans never even knew that direct democracy was so much of what we were about. The anti-war movements after 2003 mobilized hundreds of thousands, but they fell back on the old fashioned vertical politics of top-down coalitions, charismatic leaders, and marching around with signs. Many of us diehard kept the faith. We kept looking for the moment of revival. After all, we had dedicated our lives to the principle that something like this would eventually happen. But, like my Egyptian friend, we had also, in a certain way, failed to notice that we’d stop really believing that we could actually win.

Click to enlarge.

Tintin's List

2011-10-18T21:49:00.001+01:00

From Hegre's gracefully clear line to the wonders of Imax 3-D...

Sans Papier

2011-10-17T10:26:00.013+01:00

More than ten thousand Algerians were subsequently arrested and detained in various pre-planned locations (the Palais des Sports, the Parc des Expositions, the Stade Coubertin, the Centre d'Identification at Vincennes) for nearly four days. During their detention they were subjected to yet more violence. On their arrival at the custody centres, the protesters were made to run the police gauntlet. The victims of this were perhaps the more fortunate. A considerable and to this day still unknown number were summarily executed and many people died of untreated injuries.

The day after the protest, under conditions of a media conspiracy of silence, the official announcement stated that two Algerians had died and reported that there had been "gun fights" between the police and anti-curfew demonstrators.

The precise death toll remains unknown but it is now generally accepted that between 200 and 300 people were killed, 50 of whom were shot or bludgeoned to death in the courtyard of the Paris police headquarters.

The French government rigidly controlled information about the events from the outset. Newspapers and film footage were censored, cameras were confiscated, access to the detention centres was forbidden to journalists and eyewitnesses were silenced with threats of prosecution.

Despite the efforts of mainly Communist MPs, the government was able to block any attempt to establish a Commission of Inquiry and all official complaints lodged by Algerians were quietly rejected. In an age before computers, the internet, mobile phone and even mass television coverage, the French authorities were able to get away with murder.

Ahmed Ben Bella also argues that the French committed a genocide against the people and Algerian culture: "Algeria's indigenous population was decimated in the early years of French settler colonial rule, falling from over four million in 1830 to less than 2.5 million by 1890".

(...)

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has repeatedly called on France to apologise for crimes committed during the colonial era to help improve bilateral ties with his nation of 33 million. He has focused on the demand that Paris admit its part in the massacre of 45,000 Algerians who took to the streets to demand independence as Europe celebrated victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.

(...)

Visiting a genocide memorial and museum in Yerevan, Armenia, with Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan, Sarkozy challenged Turkey - which is seeking membership of the European Union - to face up to its past." The Armenian genocide is a historical reality. "Collective denial is even worse than individual denial," Sarkozy told reporters.

(...)

"This is an important day," said Jean-François Copé, who heads the parliamentary group of President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party. "We have an important rendezvous with the values of the (French) republic. The resolution is to explain, the law is to decide."

The resolution states that "radical practices which violate the dignity and equality between men and women, such as the wearing of the full veil, are contrary to the values of the Republic".

Geistanzen

2011-10-16T23:04:00.007+01:00

First, authentic aura appears in all things, not only in particular ones as the people (Theosophists) imagine. Second, the aura changes thoroughly and fundamentally with every movement which the thing makes, and of which it is the aura. Third, authentic aura can in no way be thought of as the clean and tidy spiritual beam of magic, as the vulgar mystical books portray and describe it. The ornament is much more the distinguishing characteristic of authentic aura, an ornamental envelopment in which the thing or essence lies sunken as if within a case.

Walter Benjamin Uber Haschisch

Much A Blog About Nothing

2011-10-14T00:23:00.002+01:00

A post about me, you, something or the other over at the 90s blog.

It Takes Place Every Day

2011-10-13T02:11:00.005+01:00

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

Pronounce to yourself the words that years later haven't ceased to resound through my nights, and which I will speak at last through your mouth: "O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! The water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!

American Occupations

2011-10-11T04:07:00.002+01:00

R.I.P.

2011-10-08T10:27:00.001+01:00

For Mr. Green.

Fuck Steve Jobs.

Plumbing For Depths

2011-10-05T20:09:00.003+01:00

I like, I don’t like.

I like: Salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay, roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, beer excessively cold, flat pillows, toasted bread, Havana cigars, Handel, measured walks, pears, white or vine peaches, cherries, colors, watches, pens, ink pens, entremets, coarse salt, realistic novels, piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Jules Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc, having change, Bouvard et Pécuchet, walking in the evening in sandals on the lanes of South-West, the Marx Brothers, the Serrano at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, et cetera.
I don’t like: White Pomeranians, women in trousers, geraniums, strawberries, harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, afternoons, Satie, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin concertos, Renaissance dances, pipe organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and his kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, et cetera.
I like, I don’t like: This is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means is: My body is not the same as yours.

Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes

Identity Politics

2011-10-04T17:54:00.028+01:00

United Kingdom A.D. 2015. Call me a cynical old grouch, but I doubt announcing "Owen Jones is the author of Chavs" for the 2020th time this year will do anything to prevent it, either. Good luck with your academic, pundit and media careers or whatever, but please cut the bullshit. The scum are still owning and winning, they want to own and win more, and they make the rules. If you're playing by said rules, don't pretend it's your way of rescuing the working class, or even the middle for that matter. We'll take our own chances, thanks. Apart from the fact that Redbluenew Ed 2.0 won't win fuck all in 2015, he wouldn't do anything to alleviate the rotten situation even if he did. And if you think studiously footnoting Hegel is much help, I'll threaten to throw your treasured copy of The Phenomenology of Spirit down an unflushed toilet until you give us the truth. If you still resist, we may make you eat it too.

UPDATE, ELABORATION:

Someone just asked me if the Hegel reference was directed at them. To which I answer: No, it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. Philosophy's cool by me, but then so is pop music, fiction, comedy and sport (well, now and again). However, to firmly base a political position around any of them may be at best eccentric, at worst a counter-productive distortion. History can pass it all by very quickly. My main point is that a huge international uprising is taking place (or is on the brink of doing so), that may have more in common across borders than the 'official' left have with those they claim to represent within respective nations. There are doubtlessly many committed, sincere people still involved with the Labour Party (or even Democrat Party, with regards to our American friends). They still try and maintain faith in it acting as the democratic voice of the working class, pushing their case for greater representation. Personally (well not 'personally' as I assume millions would agree) I seriously doubt the Labour Party wants much to do with the working class anymore. Ed seems determined to endlessly chide his voter base for breathing (that should knock a few million more off the electoral roll then), pledged to maintain Tory cuts, be a trusted 'party of business', and has already made noises about cutting trade unions loose. The upper echelons of the party have learned nothing from the New Labour catastrophe, except that they have to keep being felched by financiers and other sub-human oligarchs to stay afloat. The Labour Party is becoming a dead zone, caring mainly for the ravenous vampires that got us into this mess.

However - and this is where I wear my big cardboard hat saying TROLL across the front - I'm afraid trade unions have been dong a pretty weak-ass job of mobilising the discontented, in this country at least. Under the circumstances, I'm afraid even general one day strikes could be pissing in the wind. Yeah, we can feel good taking part (those of us with jobs that is), but it's clear from Osborne's 'performance' that him and his pals couldn't give a flying one about 'damage to the economy'. They'd happily flush it down the toilet faster than a Hegel book, as long as their own wealth remains protected. The big boys know how to profit from disaster and unrest, that's for sure. Most trade union leadership is on its way to being unfit for purpose, if it isn't already. They readily accepted new rules (after 1985) during the Thatcher years, and played ball with a minimum of fuss under New Labour. The TUC's proposed 'candlelit vigil' for the NHS sell-off was but one of its toothless gestures of late; as weak and empty as Aron Porter's candlelit answer to the student fees assault. The unions' general avoidance of the growing legions of the 'precariat' has proven to be a huge, atomising mistake.

Groups further to the left than your average union have been somewhat sluggish too. Maybe its relatively lively in London - even if parts of London have the tendency to view themselves as the centre of the universe - but from where I'm sitting, left 'leadership' is gravitating towards a bubble of increasingly enclosed compromise, self-reflexive media memes, and an academic world largely distinguished by the massive amount of people being actively excluded. Recent events should remind them where that exclusion leads to. Reactions to said events may reveal how lessons still aren't being learned. If the self-elected left is so willing to stop short at civil disobedience, well expect disobedience to get decidedly uncivil. That's how the cookie crumbles.

A huge gulf continues to grow between the 'official' left and 'the masses'. I'm seeing a lot of punditry claiming that current U.S. occupations are incoherent, confused or rudderless. Between the lines, it reads more like a gripe that the 'right' people aren't leading it, with us the formless masses sitting in rapt attention to their own rehearsed scripture quotes and passionate self-advertisements. I've said it before, but the narcissism that makes one feel suitable to lead, or provide 'theory' for our enlightenment, could lead to a lack of self-reflection or awareness. Those moving 'up' the pundit/pseudo-leader ladder are moving closer to the mores of the ruling class than they are towards working/not working people 'on the ground'. If you're writing for New Statesman, you're basically writing for New Statesman. Not me, not 'us'; but your editor, your proprietor, and the clearly-marked ideological boundaries that necessarily entails. Maybe the pundits aren't seeing this because they're so dazzled by the attention, hit counts, bylines and respectful citations. Whatever. I don't really care. That's one little world, but it ain't this world. Not anymore, and in all likelihood it never was anyway. The Faustian bargain that comes with entering that world is to leave a much greater reality at the doorstep, then making sure you lock the door behind you upon entering. Maybe it's time to look outside once in a while. You may find that a mighty big crowd's been gathering out there in the meantime.

It may be premature to give 2011 a general overview. However, if there's been a 'theme' it's watching so much bullshit rapidly unravel from all corners. Not just government propaganda, neoliberal pieties and the mainstream press - I also mean excitable concepts that have developed in the previous decade, with the rise of 'alternative' media. The (sometimes successful, sometimes clumsy and transparent) need to embed these concepts as orthodox, innovative or consensual; with an eye to downplaying their weaknesses, contradictions, and all too personal agendas. What those still clinging to these concepts, as they construct careers upon them ever more blatantly, is that they're not going anywhere. They may be entering the academy, squarebound journals or the polite spaces of CiF as 'topics of discussion', but try filtering them down to society at large and you'll likely be met with a blank glare, a grunt or an embarrassed giggle. Not only has a lot of it badly dated already, what's left of it could be coming down fast, as they said in the 60s. Maybe it was just a huge distraction in the booming 'attention economy' (yet another form of exchange built on shaky foundations, waiting to crumble). Little more than an entertaining non sequitur that mistook itself for a path to liberation. It may have all just been by-product of the ideological mangling that ensued after 9-11; complementing that tsunami of bullshit we've been drowning under for a decade.

The anti-globalisation movement, that was rapidly gaining ground before the 00s, has faced a serious crackdown over the past ten years (directly or otherwise). The global focus of it also retreated into parochial gripes, usually with an attendant attack on 'identity politics'; or rather, the anxious, resentful maintenance of one particular 'identity'. With that, came some peculiar rebranding of left politics, as a kind of niche market of the heritage industry. I don't just mean pop nostalgia either - also the 1917 fetish endlessly attempting to update itself year on year, often as part of an argument for an enlightened vanguard (and guess who they argue should be in that vanguard? Correctumundo!). To me, it appears that the global focus is forcing its way back into the arena, after years of ressentiment, retromania, distraction, diversion, or profitable despair.

It may be time to consider how much you/we/they/I played a part in sustaining all that over the years, and then find a way to finally let it go. A necessary process of dis-illusionment, as resolute as the the outcome to the Great Obama Story, faith in 'the market', or any remaining notions of media integrity. Call it childhood's end. But then, kids tend to be pretty sharp at spotting glad-handing phoniness and hollow pomposity. You can see it in many an infant's eyes, when 'the shady one' at family gatherings unconvincingly tries to play cute, make big promises. All too often, getting the little darlings to look the other way has to be beaten into them. Yet the repressed always has ways of returning to the surface. Ideas, careers and fads can die overnight; but as long as it's here, humanity always makes a comeback. That's as optimistic as I can be right now; and cynical is as cynical does.

Occupied Entry

2011-10-03T11:24:00.001+01:00

Some musings on neoliberalism's awkward chickens coming home to roost over at the 80s blog.

Gilad To Be Of Help

2011-09-29T00:28:00.006+01:00

Early on, the Guardian saw the potential, as well as the threat, posed by this revolution. It responded by creating a seemingly free-for-all blog called Comment is Free to harness much of the raw energy unleashed by the internet. It recruited an army of mostly unpaid writers, activists and propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic to help brand itself as the epitome of democratic and pluralistic media.

From the start, however, Comment is Free was never quite as free – except in terms of the financial cost to the Guardian – as it appeared. Significant writers on the left, particularly those who were considered “beyond the pale” in the old media landscape, were denied access to this new “democratic” platform. Others, myself included, quickly found there were severe and seemingly inexplicable limits on what could be said on CiF (unrelated to issues of taste or libel).

None of this should matter. After all, there are many more places than CiF to publish and gain an audience. All over the web dissident writers are offering alternative analyses of current events, and drawing attention to the significance of information often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media.

Rather than relish this competition, or resign itself to the emergence of real media pluralism, however, the Guardian reverted to type. It again became the left’s thought police.

Via here. But it's not like it's any news to me.

Shock Down Below, Drones Through The Roof

2011-09-28T01:45:00.002+01:00

Steal This Post

2011-09-27T00:44:00.001+01:00

My (unlikely?) tribute to a cultural mover'n'shaker over at the 80s blog. Don't half feel like ~~illegally~~ downloading some strange music at this time of night, lemme tellya...

And It's Bound To Forsake

2011-09-26T10:20:00.000+01:00

Cruel And Usual Punishment

2011-09-22T00:16:00.006+01:00

The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worthwhile to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality I had not seen was a more effective control of my behaviour than that which I knew. The actual experience would have let me see the realistic outlines of what was really happening, but as long as it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was compelled to give my entire imagination over to it, an act which blocked the springs of thought and feeling in me, creating a sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived.

Richard Wright

But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country - to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world - and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or woman who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed. This is no place for love. I know that I am now expected to make a bow in the direction of those millions of unremarked, happy marriages all over America, but I am unable honestly to do so because I find nothing whatever in our moral and social climate - and I am now thinking particularly of the state of our children - to bear witness to their existence. I suspect that when we refer to these happy and so marvelously invisible people, we are simply being nostalgic concerning the happy, simple, God-fearing life which we imagine ourselves once to have lived.

James Baldwin

All I Want For Xmas Is A Freely Improvised Waltz With A Funky Vamp And A Virtuosic Horn

2011-09-21T04:43:00.002+01:00

The Usual Gang Of Idiots

2011-09-19T17:37:00.004+01:00

This is about much more than textbook diagrams and survey data about declining trust—it is about a fundamental shift happening in our world: the spectacle is that of governments that no longer know how to govern; regulators who no longer know how to regulate; leaders who no longer lead, and an international press in thrall to all those hapless powers, as are the police. Political parties as vehicles for representation no longer represent, banks no longer lend, scientists no longer predict (or worse: their disagreements resonate across chat-rooms and blossom, like Climategate, as conspiracy theories). And in a bizarre, though rather jubilatory, turn of events even despots and corrupt media editors seem to be losing the plot somewhat. The breakdown of authority based on expertise and professionalism, combined with the spectacle of apparent ineptitude flashed across the world, have led to the shunning and ridiculing of experts and resulted in a vacuum of authority across all sectors.

This is a long way of saying that our institutions are vanishing before our eyes; hollowed out by doubt and cynicism regarding their very foundation—expertise. In part this is simply because they are no longer able to perform some of their functions (maintain stability, regulate, regenerate the existing order). But mainly it is because no one believes in the idea that those who run them are particularly qualified to do so.

This collapse of hierarchies, the suspension– quite literally – of the order and relevance of things is a change similar in magnitude to that identified by Anderson and brought about by the print capitalist revolution. Its consequences will be just as profound as those of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. They will be just as exhilarating and just as painful—as reformation-moments also give rise to counter-reformations and progress also unleashes new forms of barbarism.

To The Terrordome

2011-09-19T13:22:00.001+01:00

Snake Oil, Venom

2011-09-18T17:02:00.002+01:00

Or Against Us

2011-09-11T12:14:00.018+01:00

Believe it or not, I was in the middle of 'doing it' when I heard the big news. When the phone rings as much as it did that day it's impossible to ignore; if only to tell the caller to fuck off.
The irritability that results from coitus interruptus wasn't exactly tempered by the tone of news coverage: panicked anchors exchanging apocalyptic rumours based on guesswork; along with a news medium formatted to supply drama in the absence of facts. Indeed, I often wonder if that irritability was imprinted in my mind as a kind of permanent background 'static' for the decade that followed. Or maybe I've just been waiting for the fun to start again.
"Oh - so it's not just a plane crash. Suppose I'll have to put my pants on now. We got mass murder - an historical event - live on TV here!" (As if I'd watch the rest of the show naked. What do you think I am? Some kind of weirdo?)
Despite the emotional response demanded from the viewer, it was as memorable - and entertaining - a spectacle as any other I can recall. Well, it was on this side of the Atlantic anyway. Any real sense of dread wasn't felt until Bush emerged from his bunker, to issue his threat to Planet Earth. The rest of the week's narrative was devoted to covering his back, with a claustrophobic use of emotional blackmail. It's been fascinating to witness how well it worked on so many people.
I don't care what the 'official' line emerged as (Right or Left). Everyone I spoke to over those next 48 hours assumed Bush et al at least knew it was going to happen. Some of us were paying close attention to his gang as soon as they were - ahem - 'elected'. Just bear in mind they cared as much about 'American lives' as they did anyone else's.
I'm still pretty agnostic about the whole thing, but if you're willing to believe an insultingly convenient report that Henry Kissinger had a hand in, I'm afraid you could be an idiot. Detecting an outrageous lie doesn't mean I claim to be a bearer of 'the truth' either, before any dimwits try and annoy me in the comments box.
I never once felt 'under threat' from Islamic terrorism. However, after London was bombed I felt awfully threatened by New Labour and its Enlightened Ideologues: contempt numbed by fear. I'm sure that's how they would have wanted it. Consider me punk'd.
At the time, I was involved in anti-globalisation activities, at varying rates of commitment and interest. Over the years immediately following, I witnessed (and felt) enthusiasm and faith in those activities dwindle into scattered, atomised grumbles; occasionally stirred up when protests attracted attention from the liberal media, giving them a chance of a cameo in the mainstream spectacle. Sure, activism continued; but in my neck of the woods its focus tended to go from international, to national, to local, to a few blocks away from the front door, to arguing with a screen in your own living room. Whatever influence these regressions may have had on newer waves of protest remains to be seen.
That many anti-globalisation activists I knew weren't averse to New World Order/Big Brother/Prison Planet alarmism before the attacks, but found themselves ever more marginalised as their fears became actively celebrated by mainstream media, is an irony I'd rather not dwell on too much. The hegemony of the 24 hour news cycle - and the attention economy that sustains it - confirms one simple, contemptuous message: Yeah, all your nightmares came true - so watcha gonna do about it?

For many, the response to that message may have been doing their bit for the enclosure process. Just my own impressions, but in the years following 9-11 I found that people of different places of birth, race, religion, class and sexual orientation became less likely to mix with each other. Of course, that was probably exasperated more by other factors (recent riots should remind us what those factors are) but the emergence of the Permanent Fear Economy didn't exactly help matters.
Immediately following the attacks (or moreover, the military response), an overwhelming sense of unreality complemented a rapidly diminishing interest in popular culture. Sure, like many others I tried to 'engage' with both; but it really was a case of one bubble popping after another. Everything from giving a shit about the latest Hot New Band (TM), to the delusion that access to Easy Credit (R) constituted an 'income', to the notion that the Black President (c) represented a giant leap in progressive politics. Or indeed that my 'way of life' was under attack from anyone, apart from those passing the laws and making the deals.
In 2011, attacks from the lawmakers and deal makers just keep on coming. Their fanatical violence still has the capacity to shock its most jaded victims. The saturated media cycle doesn't make it any easier to keep up, but it appears life is considerably worse for many of us than it was ten years ago. Outside the imperium, it's inconceivably worse. Today, I'm still stuck on the same question I was asking on September 11th 2001: What the fuck just happened then?

2011-09-09T01:41:00.000+01:00

My Grandmother loved Sarah Vaughan as much as I do.

Recommencement

2011-09-07T14:43:00.000+01:00

Knights On Shining White Horseshit

2011-08-31T12:58:00.017+01:00

Here's a wee "thought experiment":

Maybe Gaddafi's overthrow had little to do with anything remotely 'revolutionary'. Maybe it wasn't just a case of noble 'revolutionary' elements being perverted once big naughty NATO got involved. Maybe all along a rabidly racist, bloodthirsty falange started getting all free and easy with the guns and rocket launchers; and NATO saw it's chance to capitalise on the chaos with a tried and tested regime change. Maybe it's a militarily tidy - but socially very messy - means to 'gentrify' the potential of the Arab Spring into something more conducive to imperial agendas. Maybe unleashing endemic racism in a highly volatile situation serves the purposes of the usual fuckers making a killing, while their 'revolutionary' servants in the NTC enjoy a lot of killings (and rapes) of their own. Maybe Libya's catalysts for change are happy to pursue more aggression. Maybe comparisons shouldn't be made with Tunisia, Egypt, or even Iran three decades ago; but rather El Salvador in the 1980s. Maybe those quick to point the finger at the "anti-anti-Gadaffi Left" have been reluctant to point at their own worrying propensity to be somewhat evasive regarding other big issues in recent months. Maybe an awful lot of people's thinking is so influenced by Hollywood good guys vs. bad guys hogwash (even if that thinking incorporates influences from ol' Vlad and Leon) that they're heads are getting worryingly close to their arses lately. Maybe a naive belief in the benign forces of Libyan trade unionism or whatever echo fraudulent propaganda spouted by the likes of Johann Hari eight years ago.

And no, I'm not talking about 'liberal' outlets like the BBC or The Guardian's usual gang of idiots either. I'm beyond paying much attention that shit anymore. That's beyond question, as much as their ideologues are beneath contempt. I don't really care how authentically ill Megraghi is, because he didn't bomb any planes in the first place. Nor do I care about the spectacular hunt for our latest Injun renegade and his family. What I do care about is what the sub-Saharan perspective might be; but of course the western narrative - of whatever badge - works awfully hard to keep that on the margins. There were certain videos on Youtube, that 'mysteriously' vanished over the past few days (sometimes for "copyright infringement"); as have many comments beneath the ones that remain. But despite her fantasies, Hilary isn't completely omnipotent yet. More here, here, here, here, here, and especially here. I should warn you that the last link is incredibly graphic and unsafe for public viewing or work. Unlike the comforting, self-confirming stories that the media and its pundits (mainstream or otherwise) like to tell themselves and each other, they're only unsafe for the viewer; not the victims they depict. Life isn't a movie, for most of the world at least. Reality offers its sincere apologies to all concerned.

Nothing Is Private, Everything Is Profiled

2011-08-29T21:56:00.003+01:00

Officials implementing the government's revamped Prevent strategy are training frontline university employees in how to spot students vulnerable to extremism. Documents handed to staff claim that students who seem depressed or who are estranged from their families, who bear political grievances, or who use extremist websites or have poor access to mainstream religious instruction could be at risk of radicalisation. The National Union of Students has told its officers that they do not have to provide police with details about students unless they are presented with a warrant.

Local authority workers and police officers have been introducing the new strategy over the last month. Inquiries by the Guardian show that colleges in Lancashire and London have been approached by police and local authorities. James Haywood, president of Goldsmiths college students' union in south-east London, met two Prevent officials last week. He said they began by asking about Muslim students and whether the college had problems with its Islamic Society.

"We were appalled to have Prevent officers asking us to effectively spy on our Muslim students. To pass on details of a student who the police consider 'vulnerable' is not only morally repugnant but is against the confidential nature of pastoral support. After the rise of hate groups such as the English Defence League, and the recent massacre in Norway, why are Prevent not also telling us to refer on students who have an irrational hatred of Islam?"

Then They Published A Book By A Holocaust Revisionist (And They Did Not Speak Out)

2011-08-28T04:51:00.007+01:00

"Stating its commitment to ‘the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual’, Zero's roster of authors have produced a set of arguments which rail iconoclastically against the vision of good living shilled by liberal governments since the end of the Cold War."

(...)

Since it was founded in 2009 Zero Books has enjoyed a strong relationship with the left. It has published the work of Laurie Penny and of Richard Seymour. In return, its books have benefited from a lot of free publicity from the progressive press and the left blogosphere.

This autumn Zero books will be publishing a book on “Jewish identity” and “Jewish culture” by the anti-semitic writer Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon’s attitudes towards Jews are by now well known. He believes that the Protocols of The Elders of Zion was “prophetic”, that it “describes the political reality in which we live”. He believes that “American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy”. He believes, bizarrely enough that the credit crunch was a “zionist accident”.

I would really love to get an insight into the conversations that surrounded the decision to publish this. What planet were they on when they decided Gilad Atzmon was the right man to be writing a book for them about the Jews. What’s next? Robert Kilroy discusses the Arabs?

(...)

Was Behring Breivik a follower of FrontPage Magazine or the equally inciting and hateful Harry’s Place? We cannot know for sure yet -- but hopefully we will find out soon.

However, the message should be urgent and clear to all of us: police, intelligence and home security services around the world must surely investigate, and clampdown on these hate inspiring outlets, immediately. Their motivations, aims and activities must be brought under scrutiny and questioned. For the sake of peace and our general safety, law makers in Europe and America had better quickly put into place the necessary measures to restrain the activity of these Zionist warmongers in our midst.

(...)

Dear Gilad (...)

I am a European who respects all other peoples and who wants, nay demands, that my own people are allowed to live and flourish in its unique expressions of form, and life and culture; in a harmonious society reflective of our people’s soul and spirit. Jewish Supremacism, under the banner of Marxist Egalitarianism such as the mass murderers Lenin and Trotsky, and the their Jewish ideological descendants in the cultural Marxist movements of today – seek to rule over all the earth and end independence and all real freedom.

The true patriots of our people don’t see any Jewish extremist “good cops,” only bad ones, and the sad truth is that very few people of Jewish descent, such as yourself, dare to carve out a moral platform dedicated only to truth and fairness that goes even beyond the flesh and blood.

As you have pointed out so well with the Jewish corruption of the so-called Anti-Zionist Movement, please understand that for these radical Jews, destruction of European heritage and loyalty is a weapon they use to divide and conquer. Multiculturalism is a weapon for Jewish supremacism. Immigration is means to divide and conquer ,and they are already using its bad effects to garner support for Israel from unsuspecting European people.It is my task to warn the world of this Trojan Horse before there are many more Breiviks and the immense damage and evil they cause our people.

Best to You,

David Duke

Ringfenced

2011-08-27T19:39:00.003+01:00

The scathing report from Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS), which has now been lodged with the Work and Pensions Committee of the House of Commons, says some disabled people are having to wait up to nine months to appeal decisions to strip them of cash.

Disabled rights organisation, charities, pressure groups and politicians have also rallied together to condemn the “chaos” that the new system of is causing. Figures have also come to light showing 120 people each day successfully appeal against rulings that they are fit to work.The Government has hired French company Atos to assess if disabled people claiming incapacity benefit and employment support allowance are entitled to payments or fit for work. Assessments are finding roughly 40% of claimants fit for work.

Some 1.9 million disabled people are due to be assessed in the next three years. From this week onwards the system will accelerate to assess a total of 11,000 people a week.The CAS report shows the system of welfare reform is leading to a huge bottleneck of appeals and a delay in cases reaching tribunal of around six to nine months. CAS says this is “causing considerable financial worry and stress to claimants”.

(...)

At the protest outside Atos's headquarters last month, one young man, nervous and clearly not accustomed to addressing rallies, took the microphone to explain how his uncle, who had severe mental health problems, committed suicide after the test gave him zero points and found him fit to work.

Dismayed to find his benefit claim rejected, he had appealed against the decision, and won at tribunal. But shortly after that decision, he was called in for another assessment, and for a second time scored zero points and was told he did not qualify for the benefit. He began appealing against the decision again, but a few days before another tribunal date was set, he hanged himself.

(...)

Parasitical corporate cripple-kicking scum Atos (see SchNEWS 767) don’t like any criticism - this week they’ve censored the website of Carerwatch - a small charity catering to the needs of sick and disabled people and their unpaid family carers. Atos didn’t even bother threatening the charity, they just went directly to the server host and demanded that they shut down the site’s forum, in one fell swoop severing a lifeline for vulnerable people. They won’t even disclose which posts they deem libellous or legally actionable.

The Carewatch forum had been used by its members to share stories and vent about their mistreatment at the hands of the Atos-run assessments, where vulnerable people are regularly chopped off from their only means of support after a curt meeting and some box ticking. In a letter written by Carerwatch in protest: “We have many members who are very fragile and the sudden disappearance of a support group has caused a lot of distress and fear. Some are ringing us in tears. We cannot get in contact with all of them though as we have lost their contact details through the closure.

“This is the third website run by disabled activists to have been forced offline after heavy legal threats from Atos, without the company ever having to have their supposed evidence tested in court (or held up to ridicule more like). Some of the things the sensitive company has found unbearble in the past include subverted logos, the website name ‘AtosRegisterofShame’ and the phrase ‘Atos Kills’.

Revolting (As Opposed To Being Somewhat Tacky)

2011-08-27T03:49:00.004+01:00

2011-08-22T02:10:00.003+01:00

Europe After The Rain: The Fourth Way

2011-08-20T23:22:00.015+01:00

Starting with England, always a pioneer in these matters, the state passed new, far harsher anti-vagabond laws prescribing enslavement and capital punishment in case of recidivism. But repression was not effective and the roads of 16th and 17th century Europe remained places of great (com)motion and encounters. Through them passed heretics escaping persecution, discharged soldiers, journeymen and other "humble folk" in search of employment, and then foreign artisans, evicted peasants, prostitutes, hucksters, petty thieves, professional beggars. Above all, through the roads of Europe passed the tales, stories, and experiences of a developing proletariat. Meanwhile, the crime rates also escalated, in such proportions that that we can assume a massive reclamation and reappropriation of the stolen communal wealth was underway.

Today, these aspects of the transitions to capitalism may seem (for Europe at least) things of the past or - as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse - "historical preconditions" of capitalist development, to be overcome by more mature forms of capitalism. But the essential similarity between these phenomena and the social consequences of the new phase of globalization that we are witnessing tells us otherwise. Pauperization, rebellion and the escalation of "crime" are structural elements of capitalist accumulation, as capitalism must strip the work-force from its means of reproduction to impose its own rule.

Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch

He explains his new theory on Algeria: "Big Wall Street syndicates found incredibly rich oil deposits in the Sahara, but instead of exploiting the discovery they capped the wells and turned the Algerians against us." He discourses on France's alliances: "All this is a great diabolic scheme to dismember France. Already the Saar is gone, and soon the Italians will want Corsica." He adds slyly: "As for those who are against us, I need only say: let them go back to Jerusalem. We'll even be glad to pay their way."

About the collaborators and ex-fascists on his staff, Poujade is abrupt: "I'm tired of people looking for lice in my hair. I fought the Germans and I know what resistance is. I don't need anybody to give me lessons in patriotism." Asked one man at a recent Saint-Céré meeting: "But what about tax reform?" Snapped Poujade: "That's precisely what we're fighting for, but to achieve real basic reforms we must reform the whole system."

Widening the Front. The truth is that Poujade has not mentioned tax reform since election, and he no longer talks of hanging. He is now intent on winning more moderate Frenchmen who are disgusted with the regime but dismayed by violent methods. He wants to live down the nickname hung on him in the campaign: "Poujadplf." Cagily, Poujade refused to join patriotic groups in a display in support of the Algiers demonstrations against Premier Guy Mollet. "They wanted Poujade to march on the Champs Elysées so that they could provoke the crowd and smash a few faces. The next morning every newspaper in France would be screaming, 'Poujade, fascist!' I'm not as stupid as I look."

Poujade now aspires to create a new "authentic French fraternity" which ranges far beyond shopkeepers. He has been assiduously wooing labor, dines union leaders 40 and 50 at a time. "When the workers listen to me, they say: 'Poujade is not so bad; he is not against us at all. He is against our enemies, the big trusts.' " The big trusts themselves are interested. Textile Tycoon Marcel Boussac, biggest of French businessmen, owner of race horses and the fashion house of Dior, sent an emissary to sound out this new political phenomenon. "He tried to pull the worms out of my nose," was Poujade's characteristically inelegant reaction.

At the same time immigration does impact on jobs and wages. One 2008 study by economists from Oxford University and the Bank of England found that it was those in the semi-skilled and unskilled service sector who felt the squeeze. According to their estimates, a 10% rise in the proportion of immigrants would take their wages down by 5%. But rather than sealing our borders, we can deal with this by introducing a living wage and preventing foreign workers being hired on poorer terms and conditions.

While most leftists would not accept the argument put out by some that migrant workers are today's equivalents of industrial scabs, helping the bosses break the 'indigenous' working class, there is a seemingly powerful motivation for (usually white) leftists to accept parts of the right-wing orthodoxy about immigration. Unfortunately, what this does is externalise a problem that is constitutive to capitalism: that being the necessity for a reserve army of labour*, and enforced competition for resources among workers**. It misreads symptoms of neoliberal capitalism as effects of migration. As it is particularly bound up in the British context with EU expansion, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of workers from A8 and A2 countries, it also involves a particular mis-reading of the EU itself, which has to be understood as part of the global regionalisation of capitalism which is also evident in North America and south-east Asia, for example. That regionalisation, its institutionalisation (the EU Treaty), securitisation ('Fortress Europe') and militarisation (through NATO expansion and various attempts at building an EU defence force to suitably manage crises like that in the former Yugoslavia), has been the basis for all of the elegiac tributes and militant screeds concerning Europe and its Enlightened legacy.

But it is the combination of inequality and consumerism that lies at the heart of the August riots. Britain is a hyper-consumerist society in which status has much to do with what you possess. Young people in deprived communities are as desperate as their richer peers to be part of a consumer society that is increasingly out of reach. These ‘consumerist riots’ could be seen as a perverse symptom of this.

It would be wrong just to look at the bottom, however. Britain’s Establishment has been rocked by a series of scandals since 2007 that has undermined its legitimacy. First, the widely reviled bankers brought the economy to the verge of collapse with their own greed; then politicians were found to have embezzled taxpayers’ money – sometimes spending it on similar widescreen TVs to those seized by the looters; and recently police officers have been exposed for taking bribes from journalists. Last week’s looting was more disorderly, but the example had already been set.

This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

(...)

The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

The riots were a failure of, or perhaps some sort of expression of, Britain’s two laissez-faire liberalisms—the right-wing economic one and the left-wing cultural one. The economic-social one has not provided the apprenticeships and vocational training for the urban working class, and preferred to open the door to nearly one million east Europeans before sorting out the training and employment prospects for the inner city hard core. And the left-wing cultural one has seen the withering of many old structures of meaning and restraint—the church, the two-parent family, the teacher, the bobby on the beat—and replaced it with personal autonomy, equal rights and hedonism. For many people that has been a liberation, for others it has been a disaster.

The first liberal failure is the one that the left focuses on—”society is still to blame.” This is about economics but is also, at least for young blacks, about racism. How much racism is there in British society? Is it too complacent to see it as largely a thing of the past? Are the black kids who still complain about it seeing something that isn’t really there? How many of the obstacles are in their own heads and how many in the real world? How can you measure it?

Like all the other European national revolutions, the national revolution in France did not appear out of a void. The Vichy regime was heir to a long tradition that was both indigenous and European: it represented the revolt of an intellectual and political France that had never accepted the philosophy of ideological modernity. In concrete terms, this revolt, as expressed at the turn of the century, in Boulangism and anti-Dreyfusism, took the form of a rebellion against liberal democracy. As in Italy and Germany, this rebellion against the "materialism" of the Enlightenment, whether in its bourgeois or proletarian form, had an undoubted attractiveness for a large section of the educated classes. It was the seductiveness of this anti-materialism, very often amounting to a real fascist temptation, that explains the sympathy of the majority of Italian intellectuals for the young movement led by Mussolini, and of a great part, of the German academic world first for the Conservative Revolutionary School and later for Nazism. A large number of French intellectuals did not behave very differently in 1940. The new regime immediately gained the support of the elites: those elites who, through up the 1930s, had been favorably disposed to the great "anti-materialist" revolt and proclaimed their rejection of what in certain nonconformist circles was called "the established disorder," which was nothing other than democracy.

Zeev Sternhell Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: War.

Walter Benjamin

(Beaucoup mercis a Fake Daniels)

Say Hi To The Bad Guy

2011-08-17T22:53:00.042+01:00

Only Mr. Hyde can see the Invisible Man, but he keeps that ability secret.

Interpret that metaphor in accordance with your own prejudices.

As the dust settles, or is rather 'cleaned up', with the most repressive state action since the glory days of post-7/7 hysteria (just as racist and potentially far worse), it becomes painfully clear where the government's head was always at. They were clear about their determination to 'free up' the London housing market; with many Tories pointing to the 'unfairness' of wealthy homeowners living side-by-side those dastardly renters in subsidised housing. It can be a district-by-district process; extending to any city sitting on golden real estate with a heavily tooled-up police force. To basically criminalise the existence of the poor en masse serves this agenda well. After all, now is not a time for namby-pamby concerns over human rights and due process of law. Throw in the evils of health and safety, single parenting and freedom of speech for good measure. It'll keep the police sweet anyway. They love the chance to kick in doors and bust some heads, giving the chavs and darkies what for; preferably while TV cameras are rolling. Dave has to make up for his characteristically slimy, backstabbing and incompetent handling of the News Corp. scandal. He doesn't have the Great Old One on hand anymore to pump out propaganda, so he's taking a leap of faith into the more base instincts of his voter base (or rather, Paul Dacre and Richard Desmond). Give the local newspapers a sense of purpose in reinvigorating local identity politics, like the EDL and vigilante gangs. Even the Football Association is in on the act. Throw up some images of fourteen year-olds for nouveau-yobs enjoy a jeer and shop a lifter. Indeed, shop 'em all! Mum, Dad, Bro, Sis and Grandma. Throw 'em all out on the street, kick 'em out of school, withdraw all benefits. The honour of Top Shop, Vodaphone, property values and white supremacy is at stake. We must still spare a thought for the real victims of all this, mind. Erect some touching memorials to broken windows. Leave a message of condolence to show how big-hearted you are.

There's enough on-message morons in the suburbs, business parks and the gentrified inner cities to cheer them on. They've always walked among us. They eagerly voted for this shit, and then wasted no breath informing us - time and time again - how there's no money left. Except for themselves, of course. That's their birthright. They worked hard to earn selfish, vicious wanker credentials. Now they're getting a chance to stick the knife even deeper into the dispossessed, with a smile, a snarl, an e-petition or two. Lily-livered multicultural liberals in City Hall (like... er... Boris Johnson) had them pursuing their grubby little agenda with one hand tied behind their backs. Don't they know there's a war on out there? I'm sure they'll demonize any objections to this as the work of meddling Eurocrats, politically correct feminazis, cultural Marxists, Sharia Law invaders or "the politics of envy". Who knows? I'm having trouble keeping up with their insanity and hate. Hard to read or watch anything that makes you throw up every five minutes. The extended hangover of the credit crunch gets worse, no matter what remedy is prescribed. The Nation of Shopkeepers cries out for tuff solutions, in the absence of braincells. They don't care for the small print. They're too illiterate. They only read bank statements and the latest Jeremy Clarkson bestseller. They want it bigger, faster, harder. Give it to 'em Dave. Ask 'em who's the daddy while you go at it. But enough ignorant hate-mongering. I doubt you need telling about that sort.

However, recent events highlighted something else: The continuing failure of what passes for a 'Left' in this country. During the riots, it became a little clearer why this may be. As with the Right - its propertied enablers, whatever their party political tastes - reveal their very clear and present phobia of a class and/or races willing to combust and lash out under given circumstances, it's largely a matter of ownership. Not just with regards to housing, business and space; but also an enclosure of the boundaries of discourse. Although the gentrification of the physical commons is all too apparent in its barbarity, it's also created a severe mental enclosure of those maintaining this process. As usual with property relations, gentrification is also maintained by ideological apparatus. Not just in terms of how one class defines or discusses another, but also in the way we manufacture critique of these relations; even when our political affiliations insist otherwise. It goes without saying that MSM has corporate considerations (to say the least) - but I detected that too many supposedly 'alternative' sources spoke from within its boundaries; or at least in accordance with its milder (?) prejudices.

The Left haven't exactly remained immune to intellectual enclosure. It may be the case that they themselves present some liability to the well-being of the dispossessed, albeit far less violently accumulative than Capital, the state, and the civilian foot-soldiers of petit bourgeois ownership. By no means am I assuming this liability to be intentional - far from it. However, the ideological blind spots that supposedly create social coherence may be inescapable; becoming apparent at times of crisis (or perceived crisis). We'll take a short and generalised survey of what I've read over the past week or so; from those claiming to represent, or speak to, the Left and/or the interests of the working class. Interestingly, I've found foreign observers (those speaking from a Leftist perspective) to be more clear-headed about what's going on here; so my focus is on British commentators. I won't link to anyone, nor will I name names. I'm really not in the mood for supplying adverts or personalised snark at the moment; but hopefully that won't prevent recognition. If you feel what I say below offends your vanity, then there may be something to it.

To varying degrees during the riots, a response unraveling among the Left was fear. Some of it in far more melodramatic and/or distancing language than those same commentators would apply to the venal, vicious, and basically fascistic clampdown now occurring. This was palpable in the laughably offensive apocalypse porn of certain widely-read pseudo-Left pundits (unlikely to be reading this, but many readers will know who I mean). Their commentary served only to illuminate how they preserve their own class interests. It was small relief that zombie movie scenarios weren't invoked (sooo last decade, I suppose). Similarly, smug comparisons of feral venality of rioters with that of banks and corporations. It carried unfortunate echoes of Nu-Blu-Labour's crass, offensive conflation of growing legions of unemployed with the growing power of international finance Capital; as being equally responsible for the erosion of national morale. Both spiels implied that only the petty bourgeois middle-class - morally sound guardians of property and public opinion - are the only ones entitled to redeem both the top and bottom. Their own active role in the Decline of the West was conveniently ignored, but hypocrisy has always been one vice they've enjoyed without guilt. I also suspected a much more widespread fear of confronting what the riots meant, potentially could mean - or indeed could have been. It's all too easy to have a collective circle jerk over the overthrow of a faraway dictatorship. Similarly, it's easy to celebrate the uprising of those you feel more, well, at home with. Students for instance: Those good kids that so many pundits depend on to sustain a livelihood. The kind of young people less likely to make you cross the road as they approach. Those receiving far more lenient sentences for their insolence, even if those sentences are themselves excessively harsh.

Recall how significant vandalism (or in MSM terms, "violence") occurred at the student protests; for which many have been jailed. I don't remember any Left commentators describing them as 'mindless', 'incoherent', 'anarchic' or 'inarticulate' (apart from a handful of careerist buffoons). Indeed, language used then often bordered on sanctification. The injured or abused martyrs. The heavily-linked young spokespeople. And most tellingly, the degree of personal investment and/or involvement of those celebrating and encouraging the protests. Let's just say the purity of that cause was celebrated with much less reservation. No surprise there, as that cause may represent echoes of one's younger self. After all, a mental disorder we all share is chronic narcissism; the ideological oxygen component of a neoliberal air we all breathe (however toxic that air is). Particularly when presented with a flattering youthful mirror image. The voices of protestors last year were given the respect and space (a key word here) rarely accorded to the (supposedly) less educated rioters of last week. Was it due to the recent uprising being unlikely to share your language? Even if it did: Could it be the niggling possibility that rioters were saying something you were reluctant to hear? It's funny how I rarely heard the word "solidarity" this time round; being quietly brushed aside. Although they were frequently associated with government cuts, our most recent riots were hardly viewed as an approved mode of resistance.

It's not just a case of compare and contrast. Apparent in much Left commentary was adherence to party lines, personal hobby-horses, career interests, interpersonal loyalties, or if discussed in more mainstream media channels: mandatory lip-service to condemning "the violence". The last was pretty much across the board if discussed in newspapers or on British TV. Sure, more attention may have been paid to conditions leading to riots, but there seemed to be a clause requiring one to perpetuate a meme of "mindless, criminal" vandalism and looting. Those refusing to sustain condemnatory cliches - even if they spoke from direct experience - found themselves slandered live on air. It served only to sharpen my mistrust of mainstream media platforms (in which I include niche publishers and universities). Or at the very least, to take it with a bigger pinch of salt. Of course, hobby-horses were/are tied closely to long-term career interests. If a commentator specialises in a certain subject, then events would be filtered through that subject as a matter of course. I take no issue with that per se - it can be very a useful contribution, if one utilises their relevant field of expertise regarding the issue at hand.

However, it can also be a problem if said expertise or affiliation contributes to clouding, or diverting from, more immediate problems. So for example, if one's raison d'etre is fighting government cuts, that particular hobby-horse became the point of focus; arguably to the detriment of factors pre-dating them by decades. Or, if feeling more at ease with matters of class than race, the institutional racism of the police receded into the background. Some commentary almost obscured the racist murder, and subsequent police violence (and violent, lethally racist policing in general) at the protest that ignited this uprising; as though certain feathers needed to remain unruffled. We should also consider the undeclared demands of personal networks, themselves going some way to 'policing' limits of discussion. The mutually affirmative panopticon of debate; in which subjects are discussed with an eye towards approval from the right channels. The kind of commentary that says far more about commentators than what they're commenting on. In any case, all the above was subject to varying degrees of denial or disavowal, be it conscious or otherwise. Either way, it suggests an unhealthy - if not potentially dangerous - structural precedent. Under current social arrangements, I can't say I'm surprised by it.

There was, however, some surprise to be found in statements from those claiming to be 'revolutionaries'. As with the above, they highlighted social, economic, political, judicial and (more than most Left commentators) racial factors. Yet outside shooting barrel-fish like idiotic newsreaders, government bullshitters, fascistic columnists, corrupt police or bigoted 'public intellectuals', the response - official or otherwise - was somewhat tepid. Calls to maintain faith in established 'frontlines' like opposition parties, activist networks or trade unions also confirmed a grand denial all three continue to share: They are failing to represent, or protect, the class for which they claim to speak. The riots demonstrated a clear vote of no confidence in the role politicos have elected themselves to perform. I'm not going to quote historical figures already over-quoted during the past week (namely, Guy Debord and Martin Luther King). But I think we can agree that riots are usually a desperate last resort for those brutally denied means of expressing, or acting upon, urgent discontent. Responses from supposed revolutionaries only confirmed the widening gulf between the organised Left and the vast majority of the working class. But then, it may be difficult to engage with a community one abstracts into everything except one's own self-definition. This may be unavoidable, in a society maintaining notions of coherence via a fragile hall of mirrors; particularly among classes or professions putting so much effort into finding their most flattering reflection. You can always look sideways to another mirror, to mock the next punter's distorted image.

To point out press or TV bias - how useful is this to communities under grave, urgent threat from all corners? Do we really think the most oppressed sectors of society need informing that Newsnight or Question Time are nothing more than contrived spectacles of offensive bullshit? If not, are we just talking over said sectors' heads; to reach an audience we're more at ease with? And besides, are glorified TV reviews all that relevant to the matter at hand? There were voices more than ready to be heard from areas usually ignored; not least the initial protest that preceded the riot. Instead we participated, or at least indulged, in a game of discursive ping-pong. Meanwhile an uprising went about its merry business, making society take notice of the initial outrage that sparked it; along with the ongoing barbarity to which they are subject. The most demonized, vulnerable members of a class enacted a collective, co-operative, disruptive and politicised event. Those asked were quite clear about what led them there, and why certain targets were selected (I'd link quotes, but I'm not doing my bit for the national lynchmob). Using their own initiative, rioters bypassed a Left more concerned with talking over, covertly dismissing, reinterpreting, or promoting through their actions; in accordance with one's personal or organisational brand. It may be a case of self-interest heralding political failure, but that too offers no surprise.

I grew up in the 1980s, entering and exiting them witnessing historical riots. The first in 1981 have been widely documented. Among Left circles, they are now recognised as an insurrection (sometimes inaccurately described as "West Indian uprisings". Depending on location, they were an integrated activity; even if black people largely led them in reaction to police abuse). Despite media dismissals of participants as little more than feral criminals, they had spokespeople who found representation via local eruptions that rapidly grew into national crisis. Looting was little more than a collective bonus for those involved; a minor extension of comfort while subverting the laws of profit. That took nothing away from their political immediacy. Riots forced a supposedly 'iron' right-wing government to head out of Westminster and enter some form of negotiation. Resources useful or inadequate, along with changes in procedure and policy, resulted. Many participants went on to work in, or lead, certain organisations and institutions, ostensibly on behalf of the community from which they emerged; advocating, educating, employing, representing. Some 'ringleaders' eventually found themselves on the Queen's Honours list. There were failures, and compromises were inevitably made along the way. What was fought for over decades could now be vanishing, if it hasn't already. Those riots' longer-term success during the rise and fall of neoliberalism are not really my concern here. However, the standard narrative of Left-wing decline during the 80s didn't apply everywhere. For many, full employment in the industrial heartlands was never guaranteed. It was clear then - and even more clear now - that communities had to take matters into their own hands; for want of effective representation from more 'approved' channels. The flames I witnessed from my window were the only remaining means of making demands.

As for the end of that decade - well, what I have to tell you may relate to some of the above. Following the 1981 riots, a certain political organisation took the opportunity to call at nearby homes with the galvanising news that racism needed to be fought. The sound of black people being knocked down with feathers could be heard throughout the land. After a dose of smelling salts, they generally told these Hermetic truth-bearers to fuck off. Nine years later, that same organisation - among others - provided cheap buses to London to protest the implementation of the Poll Tax. In between the relentless hawking of publications (and sandwiches made of budget ham and Sunblest), said group's designated 'thinker' took the time to inform my friends and I that Poll Tax was yet another assault upon the working class; because the ruling class tended to do that sort of thing. Again, the proverbial waving of feathers created a resounding thud in our corner of the coach. That he addressed us as "lads" after every sentence hummed like a lead balloon in our callow ears. Even then we doubted he addressed sociology postgraduates in the same manner.

To everyone present, he gave an impassioned speech about the evils of "violence" and "pointless" criminal damage; lest we compromised the message we were sending to Maggie. He was wrong. Following a very festive protest, in vast numbers none of us saw before or since (and of course absurdly underestimated by the media), police took it upon themselves to ram vans into opposite sides of the procession. No warning was given of this movement, and protestors were run over. For a crowd of such vast numbers, the sudden rearrangement of its shape could have been catastrophic (the police's role in the Hillsborough disaster was fresh in our minds). This didn't deter the police from ramming even more vans into us, as their militarised (way beyond 1981 standards, but nowhere near as much as the present) infantry tried out some shiny new truncheons. With this, barriers were quickly erected to pen in those unprepared for a rumble. A huge crowd under immediate, violent threat responded the only way they could: They rioted. I'm sure many of you heard lies told on TV in the days that followed. News sources inevitably favoured images of punky anarcho-crusties; to reinforce a stereotype that in no way reflected a highly diverse, mainstream crowd (ie. the real United Kingdom). Yet within months the Poll Tax was abolished. The Iron Lady herself tearfully exited Number 10 by the end of the year. To call it a 'U-turn' would be an understatement.

I originally intended to elaborate more on the riots cited above, for the 80s blog. Then say no more about any riots. However, that felt perverse under present circumstances. A riot isn't anything if not immediate. As I write, the mainstream response stands in stark contrast to what followed in 1981 or 1990. Indeed, a Rip Van Kasper falling asleep for two decades would be shocked to awake on a mattress of rusty nails, with surrounding social relations and attitudes to match. What passes for 'centre' or 'mainstream' is now far more enclosed, reactionary and exclusionary than it was in the dying days of Thatcherism. In line with the closely guarded enclaves of property or public discourse, the attitudes of the anxious affluent have swung ever further to the Right over the past twenty years. Aggressive loyalty to their masters stands revealed as they bare their fangs; encouraged by a volatile housing/education market and a monotonous, but no less rabid, media. A racist, quasi-legal, accumulative pogrom is now occurring. The process of gentrification and enclosure has discarded its polite veneer. With violent acceleration, it's revealed the savage, hateful impulses they use to justify 'aspiration'. It's as though a huge line has been drawn between two halves of the country. Except this time engraved with truncheons, tasers, guns, kangaroo courts and prisons; embellishing the diagrams and profit forecasts of property developers and city planners. Or indeed the fever dreams of right-wing think tanks, middle-market newspapers and ministers. Economic brutalisation isn't enough anymore - hard to enjoy as a spectacle. They want it officially sanctioned with more state violence, life-ruining convictions, new prohibitions and eviction notices.

As the illegal execution of Mark Duggan retreats back into being a local issue, the national silence of those repressed has become deafening. Many claiming to speak 'for' them - or, rather rushing to claim their timely place in the Spectacle - appear to have forgotten a maxim of one of their less cited philosophers: Wherof one cannot speak, therof one must remain silent. With too few exceptions, the opportunity to grant space to voices outside the enclosure was missed; either by intention, osmosis, or recent developments converging into some invisible consensus. Those excluded from the national platform have withdrawn into an increasingly fragile commons, as local issues - or desperate pleas in conveyor-belt courthouses. The ranks of the disenfranchised (in every sense) were rapidly expanding before Cameron pitched his bid for Tory leader. As far as political punditry is concerned, who they are, how they live, and what they have to say brings new meaning to the term "speculative realism". Whatever it is, it's not necessarily reality anyway. Peculiar definitions have emerged, but looking at those accused, convicted or 'wanted' sends me a clear message: The angry poor are far more diverse and varied in their backgrounds and ways of life than many pundits - Left or Right - are prepared to admit. In age, race, education, employment and family arrangement. Probably more than any blogroll or twitter feed.

Meanwhile a weak, incompetent government finds its mojo: feeding on panic with a sharply repressive turn. A shock doctrine to replace quaint notions of democracy, debate or argument. They entered government with a fraudulent deficit emergency, and are now in the process of rebranding their "vision" as a State of Emergency. England has never been short of idiots keen to believe this kind of propaganda. They all too often confuse their mental shortcomings with being "law-abiding". The police - igniting this disturbance in the first place, then willfully failing to deal with it as it happened - now emerge with a lot more power. That levels of unrest outside London were wildly overstated is neither here nor there. We have hype to do the talking. The police's petty beef with the government is the one now being granted room in the Spectacle. We are invited to share their pain, as they brutally abolish any notion of sharing as a social principle. This is where the militarisation of everyday life leads us. Imperialism doesn't just happen abroad. It moves further inland too, terrorising the already colonised with powers of confiscation, emergency laws, state violence and demonization of the 'natives'. "Tearing up the rulebook" while providing equally violent rhetoric to select, useful constituencies; to offer illusions of unity. You know - the hard-working, politely-consuming, property-owning decent people.

Were I to suggest we're witnessing one giant step towards fascism, I expect many would accuse me of melodrama (or an inappropriate hobby-horse). Comparisons with the 1920s and 30s would likely be made to dismiss my anxieties. That those fascist societies had far less diversions to amuse and flatter themselves would be considered neither here nor there. Being able to publicly discuss this should be proof enough of our freedom (give or take four year jail sentences, for kids expressing themselves the wrong way. God forbid they'd extend such punishment to serious activists). After all, us level-headed Brits are above that kind of extreme reaction, aren't we? We just want to get by and get along. That's why our Left spends time on Blogger, Twitter and Facebook patting each other on the back: resistance as a way of saying "excellent piece!" or "nice one geezer!" or "did anyone catch me on TV?" Can't allow any room for trolls or splitters, can we? The survival of the working class, nay humanity, is at stake. In any case, our oppositional voices would come together to protect us, when push comes to shove... wouldn't they? Especially if it was a cause they could feel at home in, safe in the knowledge that some causes are more productive than others. Whatever you do, avoid mirrors that fail to distort. If you don't, you could expose yourself to some troubling images. Keep calm and carry on. Return to your posts. Let's create more shadows for the cave.

That's entertainment.

(Note: Just as I was finishing this post, my erratic ISP failed to perform, forcing me to return to the cafe discussed here. The circular, narcissistic ironies of this aren't lost on lost on me right now. Of course, the clientele remains exactly the same.)

Up Against The Wall(s)

2011-08-10T17:23:00.017+01:00

To disregard the rules of property relations. To blatantly oppose and humiliate the repressive presuppositions of 'law and order' and its monopoly on state murder. To acknowledge 'journalists' as a wing of the same repressive mechanism (fuck what paper they write for). To ditch the flags, badges and blogs to actively demonstrate solidarity with faraway cities in recognition of - and opposition to - nationwide repressive apparatus. To bypass what passes for 'leadership' and co-operate on fairly equal terms (I doubt society's approved gender and racial hierarchies were reflected here). To temporarily deterritorialise gentrified and suffocatingly exclusive space. To utilize whatever technological means are available to co-ordinate this action effectively. To time this to happen when it's impossible for the media to look the other way, and the 'government' were too busy fucking rent boys and/or drinking champers on plutocrat's yachts for a swift response. To force the police to admit they murdered and lied instead of cobbling together the usual fraudulent stitch-up. To force the attention of a (still) complacent nation towards the institutional racism and violence of the police (entrenched long before the cuts, or indeed neoliberalism), the government, and those who support both. To organise in a way that maximum damage is caused to the same commons-enclosing, low-paying, over-charging, tax-avoiding, law-drafting scum who would happily convict you of a 'violent' crime had you attempted something more peaceful (even an over-emotional customer complaint). To use one's own initiative to contribute to the basic comfort that society has denied you, all the while rubbing your face in it. To seriously risk your own liberty, safety and life to make sure that all the above goes ahead; in the face of relentless ideological, economic and judicial pressure. To make them pay.

And you turn round and tell me that's apolitical?

If that's the case, I would be interested to know what was authentically 'political'. Blogging? Selling newspapers? Books? Comment is 'free' (and usually hegemonic drivel)? Organising conferences to build the profile of you and your friends in the education/publishing/media market? Endlessly whining about the diminishing prestige (and entitlement) of your relatively comfortable profession? Complaining that the Labour Party is run by an android two balls short of a full scrotum, instead of a poptastic mass murderer like the good ol' days? Lecturing us on our passivity and the nihilistic evils of 'consumerism' while also endorsing football teams, trendy CDs, niche-market publishers, self-promotion software and fascistic movies financed by hedge funds? Lurking round the edges of oppressed communities or autonomous collective activity to convince those present you have the answer?

Here's a modest proposal: If you insist upon an arrogantly 'colonial' interpretation of events, from the Fascist ("Bring out the tanks!") to the Fabian ("I understand, but..."), how about taking a long hard look at your own Heart of Darkness? Or rather, the ever-widening void that lies between you and those you're struggling to interpret ('representation' no longer being an option); and in so doing, predictably despair of? Ask yourself how 'they' may feel about 'you'. Ask why what was designated, nay celebrated, as a 'generation' last December is conveniently filed away as an impenetrable 'community' this August. With the good community - and by extension the real England, the big society - paraded as voluntarily wielding brooms and shovels in the name of Corporate hygiene; with smiling white property owners paying tribute to their initiative. I see no self-elected spokespeople pushing themselves to the forefront of this uprising (I'm sure it has its 'inside voices', albeit unlikely to grace the pages of New Statesman or The Guardian anytime soon). Maybe it's the discomfiting realisation that said community demonstrated an articulate, motivated and organised dissent; extending way beyond matters of higher education, and not easily explained away by recent policies. It's not just The Tories that are pissing off rioters, so try not to fool yourselves.

You may find those participating had a fairly clear picture of society's mechanisms before entering secondary education, leading them to conclude that there was no other option available, and so acted accordingly. So why do you remain mystified, even after completing a PHD? Why may your own thoughts be so shallow and media-formed that you fail to avoid that little dance between condemn or condone; failing to see the gradient sliding you towards a preconditioned response? Is your intellectually impoverished class or race now lacking critical faculties and a moral compass? Can we blame your parents for spoiling you, or leaving you to your own narcissistic devices? Or should we blame a media that gets ever more feral; confirming your entitlement while aggressively identifying the 'naturally' unentitled on your behalf? Or an education system that continues to mark the division between theory and action as a kind of ideological moat, implicitly promising to keep the barbarians at bay if you agree to uphold this division? Does it worry you that 'the underclass' may be oblivious to this arrangement? If so, are you at all capable of offering them the answer?

Broken Britain Rolls Up Its Sleeves And Offers A Big Society Solution: Hipster Interns And Child Labour Supervised By White People

2011-08-09T18:11:00.010+01:00

Cry God for England, David and Tesco! Apologies for the gross generalizations. I did find these photographs (on rotation) at The Guardian. Can't imagine why they would select photos of the "real community" as represented by white managerial know-how and entrepreneurial get-up-and-go. They may be cleaning the storefronts free of charge, but that's a more civilized consumer frenzy; where you're willing to put in some extra graft for an honest day's dishwasher. I doubt there's many business or home owners among the looters, and I'm sure their credit ratings are simply dreadful. I hear they were just troublemaking outsiders too - inarticulate, faceless, avaricious, corrupted by Blackberry adverts (or indeed the initial victim; becoming ever more 'gangsta' as riots grow). Or something. May as well throw in some positive messages while awaiting the police memo.

It's not all mindless violence, y'know. Richard Curtis' England still hobbles among us, and anyway: we liked it there, didn't we? Perhaps we could do with a third chamber of its brightest luminaries. To get on message with the Milibot, they only need to prove the top is as 'feral' as the bottom. Once the Bullingdon Boys overcome jet lag, we can expect some good old morale-boosting, police-erecting demonization. The last thing they want is to put our minds at rest. At least Andrew Rawnsley will be impressed by Cameron's renewed sense of purpose. It helps if Cam can pretend he's bestowed this upon 'the public' too. Although not necessarily employed, a broken Britain can be re-branded as a very busy Britain.

2011-08-09T02:32:00.004+01:00

Volklore

2011-08-04T00:02:00.003+01:00

Since the West faces no obvious threat of such existential scale and significance, one must be fabricated. It is here that the unlikely alliance of left wing parties and Islam plays its role, purportedly importing on a mass scale Muslims to colonise Europe. In Norway, Muslims account for less than three per cent of the population; in the UK, less than five per cent. Even so, the fantastical fear of the "loss" of Europe to Islam animates many on the right. It is part of mainstream electoral politics in Europe, and has long been an element of right wing discourse in the US.

In this vision of danger, multiculturalism plays a key role. Many will have noted Breivik's odd invocation of "cultural Marxists", folks I have only spotted in small numbers in university departments and cafes frequented by graduate students. Breivik's reference is in part to the Frankfurt School, a group of German Jewish scholars who fled Hitler for the Western cosmopolis of New York.

The idea is that "Jews" have encouraged cultural mixing in the West, fatally compromising its purity and thus its values, while Muslims and Jews retain their cultural strength and identity. Europe must therefore declare "independence" and fight the Muslim-Jewish-Marxist hordes, apparently starting by killing their children.

We can only assume that Breivik has confused the computer fantasy games he played - using a busty blonde avatar named "conservatism" - with political analysis. What is truly frightening, however, is that the core of this vision of multiculturalism as a threat to the West is shared by leading political parties in the France, the UK, Germany and Italy, among others. This is why there is every chance that Breivik's murderous and cowardly rampage will achieve some of its aims. Immigration, it will be argued, has unbalanced "our" people. It is already being curtailed in all the leading Western powers.

2011-07-30T14:06:00.001+01:00

It's Kate Bush's birthday (thanks BDR).

A Republic Serial

2011-07-28T00:34:00.076+01:00

Movie of the week. Currently playing at a political speech, street demonstration, conference, think tank, social network, blog, newspaper, magazine, radio or TV show near you; with a novelization to follow shortly. I'll offer a synopsis:

He starts out as a Muslim terrorist, but then he's an enraged Libyan, and then a lone gunman, assassin of socialism, critic of multiculturalism, martyr of Spenglerian decline, paramilitary wing of white identity politics, vanguard of holy terror, Islam's chickens home to roost, wake-up call on immigration, Marxist Supernanny served with a redundancy notice, anti-semitic Zionist, green paleoconservative, avatar of virtual volk, student of the Euston Manifesto, graduate of finance, lapsed liberal, Richard Desmond's target audience, argument for parliamentary virility, deviant product of matriarchal upbringing, Al-Qaeda minstrel, proposed amendment to the social contract, Nietzsche's blond beast, harvester of Glenn Beck's Hitler Youth, disavowal of sexual insecurities, inventory of status anxieties, anti-globalization protestor, the Unabomber's pass notes, Bin Laden's white spectre, reterritorialization in action, the sublime interzone of ideology, Manchurian Candidate of the EDL, object-orientated gynophobic, axis facing north, bailiff for the borrowed kettle, revivalist of colonial subjectivity, guilty conscience of the welfare state, crushed romantic, a farm shriek, upholder of family values, King Herod's Christ complex, Being as Event, exile from Plato's cave, defender of Christian heritage, constitutional dissident, Hypatia's accuser, imperial praxis brought home, counter-insurgent against the Caliphate, anti-Oedipus, secret agent in the heart of darkness, sheriff of the walking dead, militarised narcissist, the possibility of an island, the colour out of space, shrugging Atlas, self-promoting churnalist, Berlusconi's coalition, Dawkins' selfish genetic entitlement, fragile absolutist, left-brain affirmation, talisman to the precious bodily fluids of petrochemical hyperstition, Middle Earth's last stand, transcendental nihilist, final solution of Fight Club, the meaning of Sarkozy, the meaning of David Cameron, advocate of the Hobbesian sovereign, outcast of the feminized workplace, Europa's rapist, Europa's rescuer, self-made Homo Sacer, reincarnation of the Spartan warrior caste, boiling pot of the Mediterranean moat, herald of the Last Man, missing link between Kierkegaard and Schmitt, open question to the contradictions of liberal democracy, the Dark Knight's dark night of the soul, the vampire slayer, Geert Wilders' homunculus, Melanie Phillips and Pamela Gellar's golem, animus of the motherland, amateur architect of fortress walls, ethnic cleanser by proxy, the ninety five theses expanded to fifteen hundred page manifesto, side-effect of the Eurozone crisis, homophobic misogynist, Merkel's silence in response to Ahmadinejad's letter, mad man pining for Mad Men, the Pope's inner child, guerilla Euro-skeptic, mad as hell and not taking political correctness gone mad anymore, postmodern untermensch, neomodern ubermensch, prophet of the End Times, raider of the lost ark, facebook freikorps, St. Paul's social Darwinist, sentry at the gates of western civilization, antenatal avenger, patriot in search of a flag, chivalrous crusader jousting with windmills, radical Leitkultur theorist, ressentiment into jouissance, nation-state nostalgist, superego of the credit crunch, consumer fatigue consumed, initiate to celebrity culture, gladiator restoring the honour of the Empire, militant of modernity, Lacanian mirror image of Hollywood genre motifs, feminism's blowback, full stop to the culture wars, Canute holding back the red tide of oceanic femininity, lost boy of permissive society, Viking racial memory, western masculinity's howl of pain, the One, Ground Zero, failure of the Left, failure of patriarchy, Zizek's theories in practice, history written with lightning, zeitgeist drenched in blood... and a mass murderer.

Parental guidance is advised for scenes of a violent nature. However, the F-word is suitably restricted for family audiences, so you can avoid having to explain what it means. Anyway, wouldn't that be like trying to describe the colour of air now?

Enjoying Your Symptom

2011-07-25T18:24:00.025+01:00

Call me nuts, but read this and ask yourself:

Does it remind you of Slavoj Zizek? I should emphasise that I'm not joking here, either.

Some other questions:

Is not the only real distinction the use of lethal weapons vis a vis the cunning dissemination of a brand? Or is that question too perversely 'Zizekian' for an unambiguous answer? Have you fooled yourself over what "holy terror" may actually mean in reality? If we consider his chosen victims, was not Breivik's mission to restore the 'natural toxicity' of the 'decaffeinated', pointing his weapons at those he viewed as 'decaffeinating' those (supposedly) compromising his status in the hierarchy? Compare this with Zizek's continuing castigation of "we white leftists" and their (supposedly) 'effeminate' and 'impure' guilt. Or indeed the notion that "liberal multiculturalism" is (supposedly) hegemonic in Europe to the point of totalitarianism. As public 'positions' based on fraudulent premises, both phenomena are, after all, direct results of 9-11; or rather its response.

Both have their means of attracting responsive audiences: carving their 'niche' in relation to the Spectacle - and its contrived 'talking points' - while having a much more tenuous relationship to reality than either would concede. Both sought to caricature false conflicts thrown up by media discourse, in order to make their mark within them. The public reaction, or rather attention, is far more important to both of these posing sociopaths than any ideological consistency or (God forbid) leadership. Consider also how, despite convenient self-definitions, narcissism overruled solidarity with any wider cause. Be it Left or Right, neither approach is "violent enough" to satisfy Breivik or Zizek; avenging angels of the (supposedly) fading white Christian European time-spirit. All that remains is celebrity uber alles. Both of them have generated confusion and/or false flag posturing. One sought this via tragedy, while the other continues to pursue it through farce.

In defense of lost causes indeed...

Racial Profiling

2011-07-24T13:28:00.008+01:00

It's a matter of definition. From 'terrorist' to 'gunman' within 36 hours. From an abstract concept to a living person. So that's alright then. Note how intimate his crimes have become by Sunday. Let's accept that - for some - it took time for his photo to emerge (did they fill up space with those Danish cartoons that the BBC suggested they must have been raging over? Different country? All these 'Scandis' look the same to me. Just one big tall blond mass on the brink of a Nazi salute). Aryan murderers are individuals, but they are a fanatical herd who wouldn't know the meaning of individual choice if we tortured it into their corrupted souls. A lone gunman? What can you do, eh? Disregard his documented affinity with the English Defence League and other European patriots (but not the EU). They don't hate our way of life. Uh-uh. No sir-ee. They just love our freedoms, and continue to fight for their preservation. Like the freedom to act upon one's own initiative, fulfill your destiny. It's those swarthy preachers of hate we need to worry about. Putting all kinds of dangerous ideas into deluded people's heads...

However, it's nice to see the Express take a breather from alerting us to the dangers of bloodthirsty extremists. Two days in a row! Not even a mention of immigrants or foreigners on either front page. Is that a record for them? Obviously, the above stories have been on everyone's lips since Friday. They're matters of great public concern. They had no other option but to wade in. What else could they dig up to... oh. What a relief. Amy Whinehouse has dropped dead. Pick the bones out of her for a few days. Rifle through those sneaky hospital photos. In and out of rehab looking tired and emotional. Maybe some text messages they haven't got round to deleting yet. Then we can tastefully return to Muslims and their homicidal hatred. Don't you know there's people at large in our society with different values? They'll be massacring our children if we're not vigilant...

Last question: Has anyone heard from Dave this weekend? What about Sarkozy? Burlusconi? The Pope?

R.I.P.

2011-07-22T14:41:00.001+01:00

And On The Seventh Day, He Was 'Humbled'

2011-07-21T17:11:00.000+01:00

Foggy Days (In London Town)

2011-07-20T02:19:00.012+01:00

Old Left:

Who did what, when and who knew what and when is, of course, extremely important and it is in the dogged pursuit of those facts that this scandal has unfolded as it has. But take a step back and there is a bigger and far more corrosive threat to the popular understanding of how power in Britain works.

The ruthless disdain with which News International treats its enemies is well known. Its attacks on trade unionists, socialists, anti-war activists, Muslims, asylum seekers and so on is there for all to see. If recent allegations are correct, they reveal the utter contempt with which they treated those they claimed to be supporting. While running the campaign for Sarah's law, named after a girl who was killed by a paedophile, they hacked the phone of Sarah's mum. While bellowing their support for British troops in battle, they were hacking their families' phones when they died. While professing outrage at the 7/7 terrorist attacks, they were hacking the victims' families phones.

The collusion between politicians, police and News International took place on such a scale and with such a degree of blatancy that one can only assume that, on the level, those involved seriously believed they were doing nothing untoward. Their gravitation towards power was, of course, conscious. But the sense of entitlement and impunity that went with it was likely unwitting. They keep insisting they haven't done anything wrong because their moral compass is set to a place where what they did was OK.

New Left:

It is perhaps appropriate that education was the issue that finally mobilised the Harry Potter generation into political action. Many young people on the demonstrations against education cuts this winter held placards that read, "Dumbledore wouldn't Stand for This", or, more incisively, "F**k this, I'm going to Hogwarts".

Over the past six months, several groups of students and schoolchildren who attempted to camp out in Trafalgar Square for less Potter-specific reasons were all evicted by police. On the 26 March, I was here when 200 young protesters, mostly school pupils who had gathered for a picnic after the TUC demonstration, were kettled for hours in the freezing cold. Nathan Akehurst, 18, was also there. "A riot cop pointed his baton at me, and I don't know why, but I grabbed whatever was in my hand – a water bottle, I think it was – and I shouted: 'Expelliarmus!'. The policeman just laughed."

Harry Potter is not just a corporate racket, or a cheesy public-school fantasy in clunky prose. It's also about decency, and fairness, and courage. That's why young anti-cuts protesters carried placards declaring themselves members of 'Dumbledore's Army'. This particular fairy tale is coming to an end just as young people are learning that sometimes good does not automatically triumph. Sometimes the stupidest, meanest adults wind up in charge, and they can't be defeated simply by going on a quest to destroy Horcruxes, or finding an unbeatable wand.

Left For Dead (in more ways than one):

When I've been wrong in the past – as I shamefully was over the Iraq War – I have admitted it publicly, tried to think through how I got it wrong, and corrected myself. So I've thought carefully about whether I have been wrong here. It's clearly not plagiarism or churnalism – but was it an error in another way? Yes. I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn't do it again.

Left Hand Path:

Yesterday, Laurie Penny published a piece about the sentencing of Charlie Gilmour on the New Statesman website (http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/07/charlie-gilmour-months..., which was chiefly a character assassination. Gilmour is accused by Penny (a journalist who considers herself not only part of the movement but the authentic voice of his generation) of being a “spoilt, selfish, drug-addled neo-aristocratic nihilist with daddy issues”, a “posh tosser”, a “massive prat”, and a “messed-up young idiot”, not to mention her implication that he has an alcohol problem.

One of the most awful aspects of criminal sentencing is objectification: that your entire person is forced to submit to authoritarian institution, and in Charlie’s case this has been made worse by the media coverage, ever intent on portraying this young man as a mere set of supposedly despicable attributes rather than a person. The job of the radical journalist should be first and foremost to remember that he is human, that he as a human is suffering at the hands of an oppressive state, and to give voice to that suffering and oppression. The job of the activist-journalist is not to join in with the degrading games of the bourgeois press.

Left To Rot (Your Brain?):

His performance with Assange and radical American journalist Amy Goodman at the Troxy theatre in east London proved better – part pomposity-deflating vaudeville turn and part devastating critique of contemporary capitalism. "I have to subvert these events," he tells me afterwards. "The pious questions, the solemn speeches. My God, how can you sit through these things without wanting to make a joke?" About 40 minutes into the event he yielded to temptation and mutated briefly into Frankie Boyle: there is some good news and some bad news, a doctor tells a husband. Your wife is alive. The bad news is that she has anal and vaginal leakage so bad that she cannot have sex. The husband is revolted. The punchline? The doctor is only joking – the good news is that his wife is dead. It's worth watching the scene on YouTube just to register how Goodman and Assange heroically contained their disgust. Assange, to his credit, also kept his composure when Žižek called him a terrorist. "You are a terrorist in the way that Gandhi was. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He tried to stop the normal functioning of the British state in India. You are trying to stop the normal functioning of information circulation."

Left Out:

As America has de-industrialized, it has shifted production abroad, so it now is importing more consumer goods. Its exports are primarily food and arms. It’s now trying to raise the price of world grain by using corn and other crops for gasohol. This creates a shortage of world grain, driving up its price – and hence, U.S. export earnings – while driving down the price of oil. This changes the terms of trade in America’s favor, against food-exporting countries. Now that America is using its grain to make alcohol and gasoline, there’s much less available to feed people. The result is African starvation as official American policy.

(...)

For the last fifty years the mainstay of the U.S. balance of payments has been agriculture, not industry (except for arms sales, mainly to the oil-exporting dictatorships). The oil exporting countries are permitted to charge as much as they want for their oil, as long as they agree to spend it on American tanks and warplanes, and keep their savings in U.S. banks and securities. Saudi Arabia is now using U.S. tanks against local populations, especially in Bahrain. So the United States balances its payments with these countries by arming them to prevent their populations from bringing about a democratic government that would be less “dependable.”

The Arab Spring is a reaction against this policy of wasting their economic surplus on buying American arms and agreeing to buy American food. That’s the role of the World Bank and IMF – to make other countries dependent on the United States.

I Like Harps. So Sue Me.

2011-07-18T14:44:00.000+01:00

2011-07-16T13:49:00.000+01:00