Towards a Radical Anti-​Capitalist Schizophrenia?

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0
21 December 2010
Francis Bacon second version of triptych 1944–3

Inter­net shop­ping has entered main­stream cul­ture. Every major cor­por­a­tion in the world has a web site offer­ing product inform­a­tion, inter­act­ive advert­ise­ments, and, increas­ingly, the abil­ity to buy products on-​line. Dis­count books, pizza deliv­ery, stocks, and just about any­thing else you can ima­gine are avail­able for pur­chase in cyber­space. Inter­net based com­merce exem­pli­fies and extends the trends in cap­it­al­ism that this paper attempts to elu­cid­ate. In par­tic­u­lar, World Wide Web shop­ping accel­er­ates the rate at which a shop­per can acquire products. The only thing that sep­ar­ates an advert­ise­ment from a pur­chase is a couple of mouse clicks. My cent­ral con­ten­tion is that late cap­it­al­ism not only accel­er­ates the flow of cap­ital, but also accel­er­ates the rate at which sub­jects assume iden­tit­ies. Iden­tity form­a­tion is ...
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Scattered Thoughts on Streets, Demands and Revolution

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0
20 December 2010
Discarded Scarf

‘Demand the Impossible’ is doc­u­mented as being one part of a slo­gan graf­fit­ied dur­ing the French stu­dent revolt of 1968. I got to know it via Peter Marshall’s Demand­ing the Impossible: A his­tory of Anarch­ism (1993). Along with this frag­ment­ary graf­fiti the song from the dia­sporic Greek-​Cypriot Manos Loizou ‘The Street’ (writ­ten in 1965 by Loizou and unable to be recor­ded until the fall of the Greek Junta ) kept turn­ing in my head over these last few weeks. I don’t exactly know why. I don’t exactly know why my memory was bring­ing these two sen­sorial tracts forth, but it was. I can offer a guess. The cur­rent student’s move­ment in the UK is claimed as UK’s 68 and the streets is where hope is mobil­ized, artic­u­lated and ...
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Poems, Kettles and Monopolies

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0
17 December 2010
Concentric Circles

A short poem inspired by the stu­dent protests, mainly on the ‘ket­tling of ket­tling’ idea used by friends and sup­port­ers of injured protestor Alfie Meadows. They cre­ated some­thing of a ‘Rus­sian doll’ effect by sur­round­ing the police at their headquar­ters at Scot­land Yard. Also some under­ly­ing thoughts on the state’s mono­poly of violence. Dolly Caught in a series of monologues, an untimely pro­clam­a­tion of self. Typed, Tweeted, reworked, and drafted - a reminder of escapes from the underworld. Sub­sist­ence com­bined with distance, the elite re-​emerge, the schisms re-​align. The red­ness that we fight over, a shar­ing of sorts. Mono­pol­ising, the force of tactics, the Rus­sian doll of resistance. Bring­ing her back, reign­ing her in, feed­ing her, starving her, beat­ing her, enra­ging her. She has more lay­ers than you.
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This boat was stopped

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0
17 December 2010
Network 7 via Reuters

At least 28 Ira­nian and Iraqi asylum-​seekers drowned yes­ter­day within sight of the Aus­tralian ter­rit­ory they were aim­ing for. The media keeps emphas­iz­ing that there were “women and chil­dren” on board. If they were all men, would we not need to feel bad about it? is there a uni­ver­sal inno­cence about women and chil­dren that means that even white aus­trali­ans will be able to relate to the people they can oth­er­wise only under­stand as “boat people”/“queue-jumpers”/“terrorists”? There is a def­in­ite incon­sist­ency between the expres­sions of mourn­ing, grief and a-​political human tragedy that are being ban­died around now, and the wel­come this boat would have received had it made it safely to the shores of christ­mas island. Had the tragedy of the ship­wreck ...
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Biblioclasm and the Book Bloc

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9
17 December 2010
Demo Spectres

Bib­li­o­clasm: bib­lio– comb. form + Greek - klas­mos breaking Born in Rome dur­ing the stu­dent protests of Decem­ber 2010, and again in London’s demon­stra­tions of that same month, the Book Bloc would not nor­mally fig­ure in a chro­no­logy of lib­ri­cide. After all, no actual books were des­troyed. But, as we shall see, it’s not all about the books. A witty and prac­tical piece of protest theatrics, the Book Bloc is essen­tially a line of home-​made DIY shields made to look like over-​sized books with a view both to pro­tect pro­test­ers from the vis­cious­ness of flail­ing police truncheons and to send out a mes­sage by mak­ing a ges­ture sym­bol­ising the need for cul­ture to defend itself in the face of an aggress­ive ideo­logy against which it sees itself in per­il­ous opposition. The elo­quence with ...
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Geographies of the Kettle: Containment, Spectacle & Counter-​Strategy

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21
16 December 2010
Swarm

“Those who live by the spec­tacle will die by the spec­tacle.” Jean Baudril­lard The last few weeks of student-​led protests against the ideo­lo­gic­ally blunt and fin­an­cially reck­less Tory-​Liberal Demo­crat cuts and the massively short-​sighted, bru­tal and regress­ive cuts to third level edu­ca­tion in par­tic­u­lar may well have marked some­thing of a turn­ing point in mod­ern Brit­ish his­tory. They have won back the power of polit­ical protest that was seem­ingly lost after the defeat of the anti-​war marches in 2003. Tony Blair’s smug plat­it­udes about spread­ing demo­cracy in Iraq saw it dis­solve domest­ic­ally in a sea of bit­ter­ness and apathy. The last few weeks have seen people learn once more, indeed seen school chil­dren and stu­dents teach us, that people do have ...
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Italian Protests: A Supplement to Rory

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0
16 December 2010
Alessandra Tarantino / AP

In Italy, apart from the more expli­citly aggress­ive con­front­a­tions of yes­ter­day, the stu­dent move­ment had already per­formed last month strategies of sim­ul­tan­eous occu­pa­tion of key sym­bol­ical sites (Coli­seum in Rome, the Tower in Pisa, The Mole in Turin and so on) not only pro­du­cing sym­bol­ical oppos­i­tion to gov­ern­ment policies but also attract­ing praise for the cre­ativ­ity of such a protest, thus gain­ing import­ant legitimation. Similarly, although from a dif­fer­ent con­texts, unem­ployed work­ers have staged occu­pa­tions of aban­doned jails (as in Sardinia’s Asin­ara island where a par­ody of the Island of Fam­ous has been staged by the unem­ployed work­ers to sens­ib­il­ise the pub­lic about their con­di­tion) or cranes, as has been the case of three ‘illegal’ immig­rants in Bres­cia, who las­ted 16 days in ...
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The Europe to come

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1
15 December 2010
Tizian – Rape of Europa 1562

Jür­gen Haber­mas and Ulrich Beck enthused about the European model and proph­esied its export­a­tion to the world. Many were the suc­cesses of the Union, they claimed.1 Old nation­al­isms and xeno­pho­bias had been left behind, former enemies col­lab­or­ated in peace­ful com­pet­i­tion cre­at­ing the most suc­cess­ful eco­nomic region in the world. The European Union’s prin­ciples of demo­cracy, human rights and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism were a beacon of hope. Europe was the model for the future of humanity. The real­ity is so dif­fer­ent today. The European Union is no longer a model but a dys­func­tional organ­iz­a­tion that has betrayed its found­ing prin­ciples: eco­nomic sta­bil­ity and prosper­ity based on social solid­ar­ity and respect for human rights and justice. Recent attacks by eco­nomic and polit­ical elites and the European ...
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A Note on Violence

By
5
14 December 2010
View from Tory HQ rooftop

There is a determined constituency within the new student movement who do not rule out the use of physical force in protest. The damage they incur is far from random vandalism. The courage they display in refusing to be intimidated by the increasingly brutal tactics of the police has garnered some recognition from others within the movement. Yet the issue remains controversial and potentially divisive.
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The Violent Vocabulary of Policing

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0
13 December 2010
Fees Riot

Those of us liv­ing in the so-​called advanced demo­cra­cies such as the United King­dom often for­get that Police is an integ­ral part of coer­cive capa­city of the state. Yet, what should make a demo­cracy demo­cratic is account­ab­il­ity of the state to the people. People mat­ter. It is not enough that in Bri­tain, there are organ­iz­a­tions to over­see poli­cing. Demo­cracy is more about a cul­ture than insti­tu­tions, a cul­ture that is intol­er­ant of dehu­man­iz­a­tion of people. My exper­i­ence of wit­ness­ing the poli­cing of the recent stu­dent protests in Lon­don (espe­cially on 24 Novem­ber in the White­hall area and on 30 Novem­ber in Tra­fal­gar Square) against the government’s attack on pub­lic edu­ca­tion raises ser­i­ous ques­tions about how demo­cratic we really are. The events of ...
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Courage, comrades, a new world is about to be born!

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0
13 December 2010

The fol­low­ing is the recent response by Jean-​Luc Nancy to the decision to shut down the French, Italian and Rus­sian depart­ments at the Uni­ver­sity at Albany, SUNY. It is a state­ment of gen­eral sig­ni­fic­ance, lament­ing the tend­ency every­where to for­sake human­it­ies and the think­ing it engenders at the behest of the mar­ket and (cap­it­al­ist) globalization. To choose between elim­in­at­ing French or Philo­sophy … what a fab­ulous choice! Should one rather take out the liver or the lung? The stom­ach or the heart? The eyes or ears? We need to invent teach­ing that is, on the one hand, strictly mono­lin­gual – for isn’t it true that everything can be trans­lated into English? – and strictly lack­ing in all forms of ques­tion­ing (for example con­cern­ing what is implied ...
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A Face Decomposed

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0
12 December 2010
A detail of Diana Al-Hadid's 'Self-Melt' (2008) - Perry Rubenstein Gallery.

Within the alchem­ical legal doc­trine of royal circles, the doub­ling of the heir to the throne’s body as the expres­sion of the nation’s future health requires, as Ian Jack has noted, that the utmost com­pos­ure be dis­played.1 Serenity should not des­cend from time­less alti­tudes, for were it to do so, the dark­ness of becom­ing would engulf the nation. Fic­tion though it be, the break­down of com­pos­ure that occurred as Charles Wind­sor encountered polit­ics in the raw may nev­er­the­less stand to sig­nify the truth of a change in the field of socio-​legal composition. The loss of com­pos­i­tion oper­ates as the ever-​present hori­zon of crisis for those sub­ject­ive the­or­ies of nat­ural right which seek to invest the com­pos­i­tional power ground­ing the state’s norm­at­ive order either ...
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The Nomadic Hive Manifesto

By
4
11 December 2010
Beeing & Nothingness

The manifesto that came out of the "Arts Against Cuts" teach-in at the National Gallery in London on 9 December 2010
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Charter 08

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0
10 December 2010
Tiananmen Square

Charter 08 was writ­ten by China’s Human Rights Defend­ers includ­ing Nobel Peace Prize Win­ner Liu Xiaobo. A hun­dred years have passed since the writ­ing of China’s first con­sti­tu­tion. 2008 also marks the six­tieth anniversary of the pro­mul­ga­tion of the Uni­ver­sal Declar­a­tion of Human Rights, the thir­ti­eth anniversary of the appear­ance of the Demo­cracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of China’s sign­ing of the Inter­na­tional Cov­en­ant on Civil and Polit­ical Rights. We are approach­ing the twen­ti­eth anniversary of the 1989 Tianan­men mas­sacre of pro-​democracy stu­dent pro­test­ers. The Chinese people, who have endured human rights dis­asters and uncount­able struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that free­dom, equal­ity, and human rights are uni­ver­sal val­ues of human­kind ...
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London Book Bloc

By
5
9 December 2010
London book bloc

On this day, des­pite the protests, the plan to raise the cap on tuition was car­ried by 323 votes to 302. Like the Wu Ming in Italy, would any­one like to have a go at sum­mar­ising a mes­sage of protest from the names of the books on their shields? Feel free to use the com­ments sec­tion below. Their Mani­festo Read: The Book Bloc joins the stu­dent and pub­lic sec­tor work­ers’ protest to affirm and defend what is under attack: Our uni­ver­sit­ies and pub­lic lib­rar­ies, lit­er­acy, thought, cul­ture and jobs. In the past few weeks our attempts to do so peace­fully have been met by police with bat­ons, riot shields and horses. These are not isol­ated incid­ents of bru­tal­ity but part of a sys­tem of insti­tu­tional ...
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