Après moi le déluge!

The system-driven selfishness of the capitalist mode of production, as seen by Marx all those many years ago:

In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that is may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases out pleasure (profit)? But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.

(Capital, 381)

It is perhaps the last two sentences which speaks most readily to current predicaments.

Progressive change (whether in relation to workers rights or environmental degradation) as a purely market-driven effect, divorced from ethics, is only too palpable when it comes to the depletion of nonrenewable energy resources, where serious implementation and funding of alternatives will only commence (in the coming decades) when the price of producing oil exceeds the production costs of its cleaner rivals.

Growth, Growth, Growth

7 billion people now inhabit the Earth. Although they don’t, of course—the article announcing the news is by now hours old. Now there will be several thousand more. Even now you can add on another couple or so. And now? Yeah, maybe you’d better just keep your pen handy …

This 7,000,000,000+ already uses 1.5 planet Earth’s per year—an inescapable statistic which defies logic as it damns. “Use” is perhaps a little neutral in this sense. How about “consume”? Everyone is, after all, born into a capitalist system hell-bent on consumption, on the acquisition and loss of money.

This capitalist system requires at least 3% growth in order to sustain itself. David Harvey’s lecture does better than I could ever do. As does Sir David Attenborough quoting President Kennedy’s environmental advisor Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad—or an economist.”

The whole of the Attenborough speech can and should be read here.

I wrote nearly 18 months ago on this same topic and surmised that we suffer from what political scientists call “status quo bias”—basically a resistance to change when the imperative for change seems insufficient. Expensive products and holidays help drive this. The worldwide Occupy protests are an important step in the opposite direction.

Population Growth, consumption Growth and 3% compound Growth feed each other hungrily. And it is from these three interconnecting issues that a whole host of other worthy causes stem. It almost seems unnecessary now to talk of the environment, of animal welfare, of renewable energy, of global warming, since all are intimately related to and negatively dependent upon these three predominant (and growing) problems.

Answers? Well, I’ll probably have it all figured out in the morning …

For starters though, a healthy dose of consciousness raising through the (very limited, given the readership of this blog) dissemination of important information. Start with the Harvey lecture. Go on—consume it up all nice and tight.

Hypocrites! or pragmatists?

The criticism of the Occupy London protests in much of the right-leaning press in the UK recently has focussed largely on issues of hypocrisy. How can these so-called activists possibly be politically motivated, the question goes, if they’re seen drinking Starbucks coffee, browsing the internet on their Apple laptops, and wearing designer clothes? There they sit, complaining about a system of excess and corruption, whilst they themselves reap the benefits. Hypocrites!

The alternative (but still linked) rebuke is that the activists are made up only of feckless students, rich kids with nothing better do to, or the lowly unemployed. And why should anybody listen to these freeloaders? Do they really think that without capitalism’s guiding hand they’d be receiving their benefits or student-loans? And as for Henrietta and Ptolemy living off daddy’s oil money: they don’t know they’re born …

The recent (debatable and debated) news reports claiming that 90% of the Occupy London tents were vacant overnight conforms to this same all-or-nothing logic. Activists are clearly required to conform to an unchanging social role involving minimal shades of grey. As soon as one social category is breached or blended with another then activism ceases, political messages are compromised and hypocrisy reigns.

But then what does this really leave?

If the logic states that it’s impossible to engage in the activity of activism whilst immersed in the activity of capitalism, then who is left to speak? The answer, presumably, is only those with no political voice at all; those who can be easily derided or ignored—those, in effect, who can safely protest without ruffling too many feathers.

Undoing this cleverly disarming logic is, of course, quite easy. The influence of markets, branding and capitalism is inescapable. Put simply, it is impossible to be an effective political activist without engaging in hypocrisy. Just as it is very difficult to be an effective environmental activist without, say, international air-travel. Slavoj Žižek puts it well:

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy’s turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our “terror”, ominous and threatening as it should be.

To remove these necessarily overlapping areas leaves only a choice between the ‘all-in’, easily stereotyped (and ignored) left-wing anarchists who want a return to communism, or the ‘all-out’ Mr Monopoly bankers who’d willingly sell Africa to Shell—which is effectively a choice between fuck- and bugger-all.

If someone at Occupy London leaves the camp every three days to go and catch up on paid work (so as to lengthen their stay at the protest), then their act of so-called hypocrisy is in fact a pragmatic choice based upon the realisation that whilst the current system is broken, it is the only system in town, and that it is only through such a system that new and collective political agency can emerge.

Within a hegemonic system like capitalism, hypocrisy must in fact be the point of departure for any act of political dissent. And whilst there are certainly some modes of hypocrisy it would be better to avoid (protestors drinking Starbucks coffee for one), to simply berate pragmatic people for working within their limitations is a shortsighted and manipulative attempt to caricature what is a complex social movement into clearly defined parameters, and works only to stultify debate.

And it makes me mad.

Subatomic particles: the musical!

EDL supporters have been ridiculed, Jeremy Kyle has been put to music, and now this, from the Symphony of Science: the Quantum World, autotuned for your pleasure.

I’m increasingly siding with Leibniz. This really is the best of all possible worlds.

Twittertone

My relationship with Twitter began about two years ago when I was offered a prospective fortnightly column in TimeOut Hong Kong writing a series of 24-hour ‘tweet diaries’ about special events or daily life in the city. Not knowing anything about the medium I thought it best to sign up and get used to the thing, so I created a username, uploaded a picture and started writing infrequent updates about my mundane existence. The audience for these tweets generally consisted of a few friends who I knew used the service, various maniacal twitterers with upwards of fifty-thousand ‘follows’, and the odd pornography bot spouting on about butt-plugs and bargain-basement buggery. I think I lasted all of two weeks before the inanity of what I was doing struck me and I bailed out.

Recently though, in an ineffective bid to increase the readership of this blog (which wavers somewhere between nothing and barely anything on most days), I set up another Twitter account and started the whole sorry process again. Of course, nothing had really changed in the interim, other than slightly less people I knew were on it, and there seemed to be inordinately more sex-bots prowling the site in search of hapless sweaty clickers. I followed a few people of interest, was followed myself largely by marketing folks selling shit out of cardboard boxes, and idled away a few hours sending the odd tweet, chatting to friends and replying to or retweeting tweets which were funny or interesting, or both. But now I feel pretty much back to where I was just under two years ago, when I decided Twitter was pointless.

Having said all this, if you follow the right people, you can be directed to some very interesting articles, videos or online projects which you might otherwise have missed. It was through Twitter, for example, that I discovered the Top Documentary Films website, which has a collection of thousands of watchable documentary series available online; the Topsoil website, which is a sort of writing collective working towards equality and solidarity; and a fellow called David Kozin, who is looking to research a medical condition close to my heart known as HPPD. So clearly there are resources to be found if you look in the right places.

My main problem with the site, however, is that it seems largely to be populated (outside of the marketing folk and sex-bots) by people feverishly writing acerbic or witty one-liners about nothing at all. And more often than not, they’re not very good at it. In fact, most of the people I follow (which is probably where I’m going wrong), spend all day every day harping on about bugger-all in a certain withering tone of satire, farce, aggression and ‘oh my god I’d better write something’ desperation. Some of them make me smile, some don’t. All of them whiff faintly of futility.

None of this should be read as an end to my Twitter revisitation though. I think I just need to recalibrate my expectations, organise my feed a little better (by cutting the nitwits), and use Twitter for what it is evidently good at: exchanging information, disseminating knowledge and cultivating ideas (some of which can of course be acerbic and witty). Graham Linehan is perhaps best of all at striking this balance.

Whether I’ll write anything myself or simply use it as a dynamic resource for information is of very little consequence. With no followers or method for acquiring followers I may as well shout my opinions into an empty beancan.

Funny, huh?

…

Incidentally, my TimeOut ‘tweet diaries’ never got past the initial submission, which I blame solely on the format.

I’m very big in Sudan

Ever since I uploaded my ill-advised Metersbonwe advertisement to YouTube, the response has been underwhelming (which is to say, entirely as expected). A total of 58 intrepid souls have watched the thing in just over two months, which is probably about the hit rate you’d get if you uploaded a video of someone silently reading a book or quietly sipping a glass of water.

Oddly, however, of these 58 imbeciles, the majority appear to come from Sudan.

Unfortunately, due to poor cartographic standards on YouTube’s part, I am unable to determine at this stage whether my fame burns brightest in the newly created South Sudan or in the Republic of Sudan to the north. Equally unclear is just how big of a part my video played in cementing the official separation of the two countries after a long and protracted series of civil wars (stretching back to 1956) had made it seem that peace was impossible.

The potential impact of the video on the ongoing humanitarian situation in Darfur also requires more work.

Discussions with Jeremy Bowen are currently at a stalemate. Jim Bowen is a maybe.

Vindicated

I wrote a number of weeks ago about bald Masterchef judge Gregg Wallace (who I write on an unusual amount, it seems) attracting a particularly high volume of sexually oriented Google search entries—’greg Wallace dungeon‘, for example, and ‘gregg wallace kerb crawler‘—and surmised that there may be a dedicated cabal of scandal-hunters constantly scouring the internet for traces of misdeed and mischief.

To end I imagined three (frankly hilarious) new scandals that might be next on their agenda:

Hmm … I wonder if there’s anything about Adrian Chiles’ reach-around hell? A Sooty and Sweep love-hotel, you say? I’d better check. And what’s that? Jamie Theakston has admitted he has a vagina growing on his arm? Well I’ll be!

And then today found this search term, ambitiously spelled, in the stats corner of my blog:

sex scandle sooty and sweep

Whatever this person was actually looking for, I hope they found it. Or at least I hope they found it on the internet and don’t have to seep out into the real world to get gratification.

And if there is an internet video featuring a teary and collared Sweep in a motel shower, with Sooty stood over him, wand in hand, dead eyed and squeaking, Matthew Corbett off with Sue in the adjacent bedroom, fumbling noisily under sick florescent lights …

… then I clearly haven’t been looking in the right places for it.

Procrasticus Autisticus

My entire summer has been exhausted by the writing of a prospective first or early chapter of my millstone thesis on the decreasingly fascinating and increasingly complex logic of my newbestfriend the portmanteau-word, and as a result I have spent a great deal of time staring blankly at Word, playing guitar, and contriving doomed pursuits (playwriting, story-writing, song-writing, this-writing) to keep my mind off-track at all costs. Of course the grinding guilt of Not Working On My Project ensures that any such distractions only prove distracting fleetingly, which in turn ensures that no progress is made in anything more interesting than my thesis, which then sends me back to my aborted side-projects, which … (repeat agonizingly).

All this means that my prospective play has no name or subject-matter; my story-writing has reached three paragraphs; I am still naff at playing the guitar; my song has three verses but no chorus, structure, rhythm, etc.; and this bit of stuff here may well never make it onto my blog.

I have, however, become absolutely masterful at staring blankly at Word, and my growing thesis chapter now contains a definition of a portmanteau-word which is so full of academic horseshit that I can be nothing but inestimably proud of it. What’s a portmanteau-word? Well … It is that movement beyond language through language that cleaves open an unknowable semantic space (in the area beyond sense) which both invites, through excess, and functionally negates, through excess, elements of control and interpretation which seek to delimit or ‘know’ its contents—a process which remains ongoing (or at least open to change) in perpetuity, although in different (and very often diminishing) degrees … Of course. I hope now that anyone doubting the applicability or usefulness of a doctoral degree in English literature feels suitably ashamed of themselves.

I perhaps peaked in the procrastination stakes yesterday, though—until now, that is—when I decided to compile a list of thirteen songs with such wondrous opening notes that they encompass the remaining composition so completely I don’t even need to listen on (weird, no?) … I can retrospectively rationalize this clear evidence of mental illness with the fact that, with time tight and a deadline fast approaching, I have worked subconsciously to develop nothing less than a brilliant time-saving device for the busy urban professional or feckless postgraduate. But I can barely even convince myself of this.

Here it stupid-well is. The songs are great even if the reasoning and motives aren’t.

‘Family Portrait’
Rachel’s (Music for Egon Schiele)

‘Untitled 1′
Sigur Ros (Brackets)

‘Broken Chord Can Sing a Little’
Silver Mt. Zion (He Has Left Us Alone)

‘Black Eyed Dog’
Nick Drake (Made to Love Magic)

‘Into my Arms’
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Boatman’s Call)

‘You Ain’t Grieving’
Madelaine Hart (L.A.A)

‘Point of Disgust’ 
Low (Trust)

‘Who by Fire’
Leonard Cohen (New Skin for the Old Ceremony)

‘Only Skin’
Joanna Newsom (Ys)

‘Freibad’
Hauschka (Ferndorf)

‘As Serious As Your Life’
Fourtet (Rounds)

‘Troubled Waters’
Cat Power  (The Covers Record)

‘In McDonalds’
Burial (Untrue)

…

And now: back to the essay …

Heedless Acts

I once had my hair plaited into cornrows following a bonkers decision to allow a friend to plait my hair into cornrows. I went to a first-year seminar on Troilus and Cressida looking for all the world like an alabaster Craig David, rosy scalped and tit-like. The look didn’t last long, and thankfully there is no photographic evidence. But cornrow comedown is a capricious beast, and I was beset with a King-like ‘fro that took many washes to dampen. Yet another life-event to be filed away under Heedless Acts, perhaps. Much like the time I spacked a wad of Florints on a furryball equivalent of Find The Lady on a hillside path in some distant Eastern European capital. Or perhaps that misty evening in East London when I was struck down by a pizza delivery scooter only to be rescued by Kevin Whately and his wife. It is an ever-growing and bewildering category, possibly of booklength.

There are times, though, when this Heedlessness pays some sort of dividend. My recent appearance in a local independent film, Yum Cha Gweilo, is a good example, and one which has seen my (imagined) showreel extend by a third in duration. I now have a skillset including and limited to: eating competently under pressure, jumping on command (see below), and impersonating a physics geekboy drinking in a London bar. My hairslicked nerd-flick completed the transformation from bookwormpansy to wormholeshowoff and I delivered my lines with all the aplomb of an untrained novice actor. Fortunately (and stereotypically) they were looking for a wooden and pipelike (nerdlinger) delivery, so it took very little effort and I was done within four or five immaculate takes.

“I love quantum electrodynamics and the potential implications of string theory … So this is what you should do. Don’t call her today, wait about a week, maybe two, and then just when she thinks you’ve forgotten about her …” Acting go(l)d.

And speaking of glorious glowing deities:

Syntaxless BKK

NHS spectacles, unwashed moustaches, men of the register; the paedo-sheek of Hoxton Square wrought citywide. sleazy wheezies at the ATM: phlumk, bounce, bounce … bounce. phlumk, bouncebounce. The Drain of the World. “See, it’s real!” Ladies and gentlemen, please: drinkupquick, nothing to see here. click, pfffsssssssst! KNO3s and paps, mammas and pappas; cashslaps and slappers. just drinkupquick. pop! Shweeeee … pussyclubsoda bills and beaks.          bye.