#75 Letter To America: Wrestling With Trump

March 13, 2016

From Shoreditch to Sevenoaks, from cool young things in edgy East London all the way home to their suburban mums and dads in cosy Kent, British citizens are horrified at the prospect of Trump for President.

Not that they are unduly exercised by the plight of the American people. Through their horrified expressions they are sending themselves a re-assuring message; signalling that their own life world is wholesome enough not to admit Donald Trump – neither to Shoreditch House nor to the golf club.

‘Only in America,’ they say. But ‘America’ here means that country of excess which is populated by excessive numbers of working class people. In this context, the familiar bits of business to do with Anglo-American misunderstanding, e.g. the one about two cultures divided by a common language, is really more to do with traditional middle class disdain for the working class, especially when the latter is apprehended in the vicinity of the polling booth.

Thus the spectre of Trump now haunting Britain’s middle classes, is drawn from their recurring fear of the masses, currently personified in the Middle American masses who seem to have fallen in love with him.

Accordingly, in the case of Trumphobia versus Trumphilia both sides are largely mythological and partly pathological.

But to those well-versed in the ‘morbid symptoms’ of capitalist society, this is a familiar pattern – as old as Antonio Gramsci’s original use of the term, not far from a century ago.

Moreover, repetition of the familiar tends to provoke a correspondingly familiar response, such as: where there is bourgeois myth, let there be left-wing demystification. But at a time and in a place where the value of ‘fictitious’, i.e. mythical, capital, is higher than that of the ‘real’ economy, setting the matter straight by means of an age-old reality check, is likely to prove…unrealistic. read more

#73 Warehousing

February 26, 2016

(1) Permanent Warehouse of Souls

On 25 February Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras spoke out against ‘the transformation of our country into a permanent warehouse of souls’. In the wider context of vastly increased migration into Greece from the East, Tsipras’ comment was directed specifically at European heads of state continuing to ‘act at summits as if there is nothing wrong’ while tightening border controls along routes into northern Europe – effectively demobilising migrants and turning Greece into the European Union’s storage bin for refugees.

Upend the marathon road north from Athens to Macedonia.
Raise it and plane it to the perpendicular.
Now it’s one long tall shelving unit of previously scattered souls,
Scanned and ready for despatch; if only we knew where to send them.

Heads in a noose because really what’s the use; or perhaps half-grown men, migrants from Pakistan, half-hanging themselves in order to gain our full attention.
Near-suicide – noted.

Note the consistently quiet desperation of migrants crowded into Athens’ Victoria Square. Whispers and murmurs building occasionally to bouts of ululation, before subsiding again.

Looking down at those uninvited beach boys,
Who paid good money to have themselves washed up on Mediterranean sand,
Some hard-pressed Greeks can only hear this sound wave as bar-bar-barbarism.
And who can blame them?

(2) Life and Soul of the Warehouse

‘Wandering around for 10 hours scanning and stowing items really does eat away at your soul.’ This former warehouse worker at Amazon’s Dunfermline depot reports ‘long hours with depression guaranteed.’

Surely preferable to the threat of deportation, as above; although another Amazon ex-employee declares she would ‘prefer to starve rather than go back there again’. read more

#52 London-Charleston Express

April 18, 2015

Jewel heist. Diamond caper. Scarper, it’s the Rozzers. What larks!

The real location was London’s diamond trading district, near Holborn, yet the £300m Easter raid on the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company suggested relocation to an Ealing Comedy, complete with burglar alarm that went off but prompted ‘no action’ onthe part of bungling police.

But Key Stone Cops ‘n’ Robbers wasn’t much of a comedy; certainly couldn’t cut it as tragedy. The Daily Mirror tried for Jacobean, positing Mr Ginger and Mr Strong alongside footage obtained from security cameras at the entrance to the vault; paintingthe thieves as Reservoir Dogs. But the footage itself was closer to outtakes from health and safety information films, complete with operatives in High Vis vests demonstrating how not to lift heavy loads.

Nefarious or not, a lot like watching paint dry.

Heavy-set bloke running away from car, more like something from Family Guy. Cut tothe park where there’s an ugly clash between his green top, tending towards turquoise, and the lime-like foliage of an overhanging tree.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat: rim-shots but too many of them for Ray Charles’ girl knocking on his door. It’s really the sound of Walter Scott going down to meet his maker (Hallelujah, He Loves Us So), the proverbial black man blasted in the back while running away from a white police officer.

Shot by a passer-by, the cellphone footage is neither comic nor tragic. Looks a little ludicrous but lacks a single punchline; instead it takes seven hits to knock a man down. Following procedure, the shooter logs on to a different (tragic) order of things, but only post festum, post mortem. Death itself comes un-masqued, without tragedy or comedy; it is desultory, diminished, demeaning. read more

#41 In The Balance

November 30, 2014

On the one hand your new born baby – head flat against outstretched palm, its body pushing back onto your lower arm like a monkey on a bed of leaves.

In your other hand, the stock of an AK-47, barrel pointing upwards – a vertical axis to complement the horizontal infant.

Do they weigh about the same – these two things, each gravitating to the crook of a different arm? I would have guessed the gun was heavier than the baby….. but you look so well balanced.

As one offsets the other, there is no sign of strain in your arms or shoulders – it seems you could stand like this forever. Meanwhile the tiniest tilt of your head, the less-than-half-a-smile playing across your lips, indicate the internal equilibrium of a Mona Lisa.

News reports of 31-year-old Abu Rumaysah, who skipped bail (awaiting trial for ‘encouraging terrorism’), and boarded a bus from Victoria coach station to join theJihadis of Islamic State (dodging MI5 turned out to be as easy as taking the Victoria Line from his North London home), have pointed to the gross discrepancy between left and right: innocent infant on one hand, shoot to kill on the other; two handfuls co-starring in the selfie he posted to celebrate arriving in Syria and the arrival of his new born son.

There is more to the disparity. Rumaysah’s given name is Siddartha. Given to him by his Hindu mother long before he converted to Islam, it is also the birth name of theBuddha. How ironic that the latterday Siddartha turned from ways of peace into a man o’war (and not even a proper war, at that).

Yet there is no getting away from the poise in the picture.

Although his actions are utterly misguided, absurdly lop-sided, and – yes, let’s have another layer of irony – he may even end up doing the same work for IS (press releases and web design, if reports are to be believed) that he could have picked up in London’s ‘creative industries’, nonetheless for a moment at least this man has found his spirit level. read more

#39 Remembrance

November 9, 2014

Pace Wilfred Owen, it’s not an outright lie – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Remembrance ceremonies, such as the ceremony taking place this morning at London’s Cenotaph, enact the ‘sweet and noble’. A ritual of dulce et decorum, but not necessarily hollow. The falsification comes in the change of tense – not ‘to die’, Horace’s old line would be straight and true if it read: ‘to have died’.

On Remembrance Sunday, in the primary composition of former combatants, thesecondary role accorded to politicians and other civic dignitaries, and, above all, in thetwo, silent minutes of concerted contemplation, decorum is restored to all those who have died in bloody chaos.

In the moment, bodies broken open (more ghastly than grave robbing), bereft of sense and sensibility (only sensation, agonising sensation). But now they are people again, re-assembled in orderly progression.

The solemn procession, at its head our idea of the dead.

Take this, we say, for we do it remembrance of you. Which may be only partly true, but what else….?

Whichever side. Besides the Cause. There is nobility in having died, now it has been entered post festum.

#38 Top People’s Family In Free Fall

November 2, 2014

Pity the poor Establishment – now bordering on dysfunctional.

Since the summer the British elite has given away two of its elder daughters: first, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was obliged to step down from the government inquiry into historical child abuse, which she had been asked to chair; and now her replacement, Fiona Woolf, has been forced to go the same way.

Dame Elizabeth – thin lipped, fine boned – seems to symbolise the ascetic tradition among Britain’s ruling class. Loyalty to the law and devotion to the Anglican church have combined to keep her back straight throughout half a century of ‘public service’.

At this level, public service – yes, let’s lose the scare marks – is not without numerous privileges; but one should point out that at least as many demands are made of theprivate individuals who sign up for it.

These are the people who can speak of ‘one’ – one does this, one does not do that – without cracking up. As they see it, there’s no reason to be embarrassed by this antiquated term; instead there is every reason to expect the privileged to adhere to common standards.

Of course our club is exclusive, but anyone elected to it can be trusted to behave properly; hence ‘one’ is the proper noun with which to describe what any one of us would do.

Having previously combined senior judicial responsibilities with corporate tax law at thehighest level, Fiona Woolf has been closer to the money. Her year-long term of office as Lord Mayor of the City of London, which comes to an end in a few days’ time, amounts to a symbolic re-capitulation of the finance-oriented aspect of her stellar career.

If Butler-Sloss dresses in the manner of Thomas Cranmer, the sixteenth century archbishop and Protestant martyr, Mrs Woolf is more what you’d expect of Kim Kardashian’s great aunt – plucked eyebrows and lipstick to tone in with hairsprayed hair (from bronze to blond); and two-piece, fitted suits from material that might have been made into wall-hangings in the Chelsea church where she sings in the choir. read more

On The River

February 16, 2014

The sunny river is dotted and decked with yellow, and blue, and orange, and white, and red, and pink. All the inhabitants of Hampton and Mousley dress themselves up in boating costume, and come and mooch around the lock with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke, and watch the boats, and altogether, what with the caps and jackets of the men, the pretty coloured dresses of the women, the excited dogs, the moving boats, the white sails, the pleasant landscape, and the sparkling water, it is one of the gayest sites I know of near this dull old London town.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men In A Boat (1889).

This is the sight near old London town:
The dull brown river is dotted and decked with cars, and road signs, and one that says ‘Ferry’ even though it’s in the middle of the wide stretch of water not at the edge, and bins for scooped-up-and-bagged dog-pooh attached to poles you can’t see because that’s how high the water’s risen, with not a dog-walker in sight and not likely since there’s no walking to be done; only wading (downcast eyes) or messing about in boats (half-smile if you’re in the boat, serious expression if you’re pushing or pulling the occupants to a place of safety).

All the inhabitants are dressed down in wellies and woolly jumpers and the occasional bib-and-tucker like the ones trawler men wear for gutting fish. No landscape: the streets awash with floodwater and abject politicians, and the military moving sandbags (in foreign news ‘military’ means coup and governments overthrown, but here in the waterlogged Home Counties the undertow is upbeat – expect to see Wills and Harry mucking in), and everyone’s gutted and the guts of Middle England are spilling into blocked drains and backing up.
Enough Prog Rock imagery – STOP!

Surrey’s inhabitants were high and dry and laughing when others were sinking into poverty 30 years ago. Half-of-me – the bitter half – doesn’t mind them getting wet. But there’s no question of them drowning. Worn down, yes, since Three Men In A Boat in Victorian high summer; nonetheless the mark of prosperous respectability remains far above flood-level. read more

Flights of Fancy

December 31, 2013

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

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