boredom is always counter-revolutionary

I’m on the home straight for submitting my thesis, which means it might be a while yet before I have any time to update this blog. In the meantime, I’ve included below some Wordle illustrations of frequently used words in each of my (provisionally titled) chapters.

Chapter 1 – The Dialectics of English Surrealism

Chapter 2 – Surrealism put to work: Mass-Observation

(more…)

In the clusterfuck of analysis of the August riots, ‘Riot Polit-Econ‘ over at Mute (or Pdf) seems, to me, to be a particularly incendiary piece. The ‘Khalid Qureshi Foundation and Chelsea Ives Youth Centre’ claim that their analysis is one that rejects bourgeois-liberal-moralist as well as rote leftist perspectives, and offers instead an account of the profits of the ‘immiseration industries’ which do the dirty work, so to speak, now that the retail wings of banks have supposedly become moralistic, and which maintain the structural dynamics of service industry economies.*

Sample quote:

the press gesticulate at their demonstration-model abyss and moan about the ‘nihilism’ of the riots which shattered the facades of so many betting shops; and the sky does not fall in. But fulmination against the destructive ‘nihilism’ of the riots merely underwrites what it claims to protest against, because it refuses to acknowledge just how much of our social ‘fabric’ would have to be destroyed if any social life were to be more than accidentally livable. In the future, it must by now be obvious to anyone without a derivatives portfolio that effective social action will have to be more and not less destructive, because less and less of that fabric is capable of being redeemed merely by a modification in the terms of its ownership. However important concerns about the ‘proper’ targeting of destruction may be, when their social function is to serve as a gag – and it usually is – better not to let them be put in your mouth.

There are a couple of sections in ‘Riot Polit-Econ’, toward the end, which I either don’t follow or which seem to make rather large and unannounced stepping-stone steps over some issues and onto others. The analysis deals well in political economy, not so well in race. For example, I’m not sure of the origins or source of these lines of questioning:

But what is the relationship then between structural long term unemployment and co-incident class and ethnic divisions within ‘communities’? How do ethnically defined petit bourgeois groups constitute themselves? If they do so in certain material settings through crime, why is this? This is to suggest that the subsistence-level underclasses of the UK, including ethnically specifiable petit bourgeois elements, may have relied for whatever material security they do possess on recourse to extra-legal economies.

Similarly, the analysis of community defence groups feels rather ramshackle. However, the writers acknowledge their (our) ‘current outpost on the cloud of unknowing’ and, as I said, their structural analysis of a service economy is particularly illuminating.

* I’m no expert here, but I would suggest that ‘Riot Polit-Econ’ is most proximate, by way of a leftist category of analysis, to David Harvey’s ‘accumulation through dispossession’.

By Mackenzie Wark–whose The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International has, I think, just been published–an interactive guide to the Saint-Germain-des-Pres bohemian milieu from which emerged the SI:

http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/7/totality/

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. It reminds me of the Usborne books I read as a child, but instead of annotations like ‘The telephone can be used to speak to people in other places’, we now have ‘The spectacle is the antithesis of historical consciousness.’ Which is cool, I guess.

Yes, finally Principia Dialectica, by way of Michel Prigent, have spluttered some invective in my direction! I predicted as much six weeks ago, so PD was rather slow on the uptake, but still, it’s nice to be noticed. And, amongst other things, I’m a ‘top rated academic’ now. Who knew?!

Perhaps you have already seen this and this.

Well, in the interest of public safety and in unthinking deference to state power, I hereby recommend that you report this blog to your local Police. Its author is not an anarchist but most certainly has anarchic tendencies and sympathies. When push comes to shove comes to truncheon blow, this blog’s author is on the side of the anarchists.  This blog’s author espouses direct action, will readily identify as anti-capitalist, and has even been know to listen to crass (he prefers rudimentary peni, but he is isn’t certain that the Met’s intelligence office will have delved that deeply into the crass records roster). He would gladly discuss with your local Police what he considers to be the merits and the demerits of ‘anarchism’, in relation to politics, culture and the critique of capital. If, however, your local Police  would prefer a more subterfuge (Murdochian) means of ‘intelligence’ gathering, he would advise against phone-hacking as his texts usually consist of ‘pub?’ and he doesn’t even know how to use voicemail.

Over at 3:AM, some summer reading lists. Mine are really obvious, I think.