Supposing dependence on the financial economy is also freedom from the coercive momentum of capitalist production; and supposing there is an affinity between the distinctive patterns of London’s non-productive City-type activity and contemporary cultural activity, such that the position of the subject in contemporary London culture reproduces the subject position found in the financial economy, then Singing The News is an attempt to exploit the peculiarity of this position. As the financial economy plays on the ‘real economy’ (it is both sequel and prequel), so Singing The News is a fanciful remake of ‘reality’ as reported in primary news sources.

With two provisos:

1) Attention to form is the means of reconnecting flights of fancy with the cultural corollary of abstract labour, i.e. that aspect of labour, the concrete abstraction only fully realised in capitalist production, which is truly universal, common to all. Thus form – working on a piece of writing in order to formulate it – is what makes it and the experience rendered in it, common to all (even if the further realisation of this property requires additional work on the part of readers). This in marked contrast to the formlessness characteristic of the digital conversation between ‘journalists’ and ‘the people formerly known as readers’. This kind of conversation amounts to mimicry of the financial economy; instead of answering back.

2) Whereas the spontaneously fanciful character of the financial economy tends to negate the human –  this negation is widely experienced as an ‘unbearable lightness of being’, in Singing The News similarly fanciful characteristics are semi-consciously (as conscious as I can make it!) induced with the aim of adding weight to our common humanity. read more