Epistemic break
As you can see, there have been some changes around here. I hope you like the new design (and I hope it works on your browser – let me know if not). Apart from that, I’ve also changed the software that runs the site, meaning excitingly, people apart from me can post stuff. I’ve lined up a couple of people already, so if they’d like to post something over the next few days introducing themselves in whatever way they see fit, that would be splendid.
I’ve added lots more links: if I’ve missed your site, or you don’t like your categorisation or description, obviously I’ll be happy to change it (I wrote a lot of them late at night, when my inspiration was definitely running out).
Wouldn’t have pegged him for a Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel fan
I was listening to Nick Cave do his last single ‘Nature Boy’ on Jools Holland last night; it’s a good song, I thought. Also, is it just me, or, as his hairline recedes, does he look more and more like Phil Silvers?
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Sitting at work, reading Capital
Isn’t this:
It is generally by their imperfections as products, that the means of production in any process assert themselves in their character of products. A blunt knife or weak thread forcibly remind us of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B., the spinner.
spookily reminiscent of the argument in Being and Time that it is abscence or breakdown that discloses the being of the world?
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Against utopia
I’ve written on a number of ocassions about utopianism without really considering the concept of utopia itself, so I was interested to read this post from k-punk on the darker side of utopias. Maybe it provides some ontological backing for my earlier criticisms in the description of “utopia as a fear of inability to project a desire and utopia as paraniod exclusion of everything outside its foundation desire.”
Sort-of related is infinite thought’s condemnation of smug, ignorant atheism and the reaction to the newly-discovered human species:
“There have always been myths about small people - Ireland has its Leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there’s some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times,” said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England.
This kind of dumb positivism, which sees all fiction as fictionalisation (and all metonymy as allegory) is directly related to the utopian impulse, because they both depend on the premise that, in reality, there is no alternative. My politics depends precisely on the claim that there is an alternative, and a practice that makes this alternative actual; in other words, on a belief in the reality of fiction.
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Just in time for Halloween
I heard the new 411 song this morning which samples ‘Sour Times’. It seems a bit pointless, really — using a Portishead sample to make a spooky sounding record just ends up creating a mediocre version of Portishead. They should have sampled ‘Mysterons’ and made a really poppy record with it, instead.
Also on the way to work, it struck me how camp ‘Take Me Out’ is, particularly from the point where Alex Thingummy sings “ooo-eee-ooo” onwards. Maybe it’s just me, but I imagine it being performed by a slightly over-dapper, prancing Leslie Phillips-esque figure. Their other songs, unfortunately, have a more plodding, Alfie Bass feel to them.
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But will they play Go Mental?
The Guardian is reporting that:
As a tribute to Peel, the first record Radio 1 played after his death was announced on Newsbeat at lunchtime today, was The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks, one of the DJ’s favourite songs.
This was followed by tracks from the White Stripes and the Strokes.
‘Teenage Kicks’ is splendid, but I’m not sure the White Stripes or Strokes do much to honour Fat Jack (as he occassionally referred to himself) — they seem like the kind of artists you’ld ignore when he played them, then, when they became big you’ld think “well of course John Peel played them first” (remember, John Peel broke The Bluetones). It would have been a much more fitting tribute to have followed the Undertones with Go Mental’s ‘Hold Me Now’, which John Peel once called the best record of the nineties.
And another serendipitous tribute arrives in the form of a website at djgermanspeedcore.tripod.com which collects lyrics of gabba and happy hardcore records. I should e-mail John Peel and tell him about it…
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Unexpected sights at the ESF
- The Sparticus League trying to sell Workers’ Hammer outside the anarchist/autonomist (self-)organised space at Middlesex University. Old Cambridge hands may be interested to know that I vaguely thought I recognised the Sparticist (singular) in question, only later realising that the guy reminded me of James Ferner, onetime SWP head-honcho of this parish. What a crazy turn that would be.
- A security guard at the Camden Centre getting into an earnest conversation with a member of sans papier cultural organisation No Vox, over the merits of French hip-hop. They laughed at MC Solaar, and bonded over a shared appreciation of NTM. Speaking of which, isn’t it wierd that the most-played rap record on Radio 1 of recent times, ‘Guns don’t kill people…’ features a sample from ‘Nic la police’, the song which legendarily got NTM arrested?
- (Not strictly at the ESF) Chris Moyles playing a cover version of Harry Belafonte’s ‘From a logical point of view’ every day on his radio show.
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Anti-luddism
In a blinding (because blazingly illuminating) series of posts (continued in part 2, part 3, part 4 and now part 5), Spurious brings a different perspective to issues of precarity. Words that particularly grabbed me:
Who is aware of it, this light? Only the part-time worker, the contractor who goes home early at three o’clock or, who, because she has no friends among her colleagues, looks out of the vast windows across to the field out of which a new retail village has begun to appear.
One of the things I’ve taken away from the precarity discussions around the ESF is the need to re-think the primacy of workplace struggles. I see the plausibility of the Leninist idea that the workplace is the privileged site of struggle because that is where the proletariat’s economic strength is greatest. But to assume that it necessarily holds true today is to be insufficiently historicist, to forget that this applies to a particular organisation of capitalism. What kind of workplace struggle can I engage in when half of my working time is spent at home, working for a company with one other employee, and for clients perhaps a couple of hundred miles away, perhaps I know not where?
In an earlier stage of capitalism, the luddites waged sporadic, isolated attacks on a capitalism that was itself isolated into a few locations. As capitalism increasingly spreads out over the whole of society, do we not need an inverse of luddism, a method of struggle which targets capital everywhere?
But what would this look like? Up until now (as one would expect in an age just entering post-fordism) struggle outside workplaces has generally been idealist, either consciousness-raising (certainly useful but obviously not sufficient) or moralistic ‘demands’ to those in power. What sort of genuinely materialist activity can we take outside of the workplace? As post-modernism is, in part a hyper-modernism so post-fordism is hyper-fordism (or, for the Hegelians amongst you, an aufhebung of fordism); I imagine the action we need would be a kind of hyper-strike, a social strike. But my imagination doesn’t extend as far as seeing what such a thing would look like. Perhaps Spurious’s does?
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“So, what, now every idiot is going to go up the front and talk?�
Well, the European leftists seem to be doing well so far. The YOMANGO people are at least as theoretically sophisticated as I would have hoped, talking about creating common vocabularies of gestures which blur traditional distinctions between private (everyday, non-political) and public (alienated/reprsentative) actions. They’re very sharply dressed, too. I’ve been to a few interesting discussion on precarity, which seems to be a really useful concept to create common struggles around. There’s an Indymedia report and something slightly less coherent at DRL. I didn’t make it to the Life Despite Capitalism conference today, unfortunately, but I’m planning to go to the closing plenary tomorrow, where hopefully I’ll see The Reverend Dr D. Wayne Love and John Holloway, which can’t be bad.
Something I forgot to mention. Scandinavian anarchist women with blond dreadlocks? You would.
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Off to London tomorrow
There’s an interesting article from the forthcoming special issue of Radical Philosophy on the ESF. In particular:
In the UK publicity leaflet published in July, international Social Forums were promoted as self-congratulatory spectacle: ‘The ESF emerged from the spectacular success of the WSF… The ESF is a festival of resistance…. celebrating the global movement.’
I wonder if the traditional Left haven’t made something of the same mistake as Fathers 4 Justice, seeing in the party-as-protest tactics of the anti-globalisation movement only their image, the carnival spectacle, and not the underlying political purpose. Because the carnival against capitalism is fundamentally about agency, both in the sense of encouraging everyone to be an active participant rather than passive protest ‘consumer’, and in the sense of creating new forms of action (in which context the protest camp/street party/social centre movement of our movement is interesting). The anti-capitalist movement may be trememndous, but the one thing it isn’t is spectacular.
Anyway, I going down to London tomorrow to play my part in the spectacle of (and around) the ESF. I know some of my readers live in London and/or are likely to be coming down to the ESF: if you’ld like to meet up drop me an e-mail or come by the Indymedia Centre, where I’ll probably be spending most of my time. In particular, the Indymedia party (Lab of Insurrectionary Imagination, Mark Thomas, Rob Newman, No Vox theare/music) on Friday night looks like it will be worth coming to – I’ll be the guy behind the bar, looking a bit like Trotsky.
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