unlike friday’s installment, this one’s a bit all over the place…
main rec for today is this excellent essay by huw lemmy on aesthetics and capitalism. the breadth here is stunning: lemmy traces the kind of dark magic of the aesthetic across a whole range of different sites, from the early renaissance through the Moors murders to sonic youth’s 1990 album goo. heavy on the john berger, which is always good (ways of seeing is one of those books that i consider to be introductory reading for anyone wanting to dip their toe into theory/philosophy; capitalist realism is another).
Image making is one of capitalism’s primary forms of magic. Any art school worth its salt should excrete only graduates fearful of its power. The image we carry inside us makes us find copies of it everywhere. And we look. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote:
The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from lighthouse --only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality . Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God. According to the convention of perspective there is no visual reciprocity. There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation.
in terms of other reading recs, i enjoyed reading the introduction to AngryWorkersWorld’s new book, Class Power on Zero Hours, which can be read at libcom here. AngryWorkersWorld, from what i gather, are basically this collective of people who in 2014 decided to leave their previous lives to live together in some industrial-ish suburb in west london, getting jobs in various distribution centres and food processing plants and organising slow-downs and stirring shit up. there’s an undeniable practical thrill to reading it, a sense that hey, i could do this too.
there’s one particularly interesting paragraph here, which i’ll credit to laura for sharing on instagram, as it’s what initially sparked me to read the introduction:
We suggest a different kind of class politics, one that is embedded in the daily lives of working class people. It may sound simple, but the fact that many on the left have no concrete relationship to working class areas or working class people is a big problem. You end up either lamenting their status as victims of capitalism’s deindustrialised past (as much of the Brexit voters are); as robots (as Amazon’s tech-savvy warehouse workers are); slaves (as many low-waged workers in modern workplaces are); or destitute (as the rising numbers of homeless and those affected by benefit cuts are). How are robots, slaves, the destitute and victims supposed to be a force worth reckoning with? This totally disenfranchised notion of the working class will not allow us to unearth its revolutionary potential. This is exactly what the ruling class wants.
the interesting question this raises is: what “is” the working class? AWW correctly denounce the view of the working class as a pure lack or absence, a “not-” in the form of not-rich, not-clean, not-polite, not-propertied, which is not only philosophically incorrect but politically robs the working class of all agency.
but if the working class are not a “not-”, then what are they/we?
the alternative to being “not-” seems to be to affirm the working class as some kind of positive substance, which seems to be what AWW are vaguely gesturing towards with their notion of “embedding” themselves in working class communities. but this just doesn’t sit right with me, it’s a reproduction of dualistic bourgeois notions of identity... the answer to the ruling class making you some empty container isn’t to fill up the container with positive substance, but to smash the container and the table it sits on to pieces. doing otherwise evokes a logic of “authenticity” that leads to depictions of the working class as male factory workers or flat-capped miners that have arguably done as much harm as good historically.
the working class isn’t a positive substance. on the contrary, it’s defined as the class that has its “self” subtracted or stolen from itself from through capitalism’s class structure. and this is, all at once, an economic, political, and ontological problem. can you even speak the name of the working class accurately, or represent it accurately? one could make the provocative argument that the movements that have best historically expressed the working class are those that don’t explicitly evoke “the working class” at all: e.g. acid house in the late 80s… (i don’t know if this argument is correct or makes sense btw - just thinking aloud…)
idk. i don’t have an answer to any of this, and accept seeking one is probs futile, and inhibits any kind of practical action, maybe… but it is interesting, it’s been bouncing around my head a lot today. might try and work this into a blog post or something larger. but in the meantime, if you want to get more of what i’m getting at here, there are two mark fisher k-punk blog posts that are really informing what i’m thinking: “epistemic privilege of the proletariat” and “punishment enough”. from the former, which evokes the complicated mixture of ontology and politics i’m gesturing towards here:
Social confidence is not based on achievements but on intrinsic ontological status: the ruling class are taught to see themselves as essentially talented and intelligent, irrespective of either achievements or failures. […]
The working class, meanwhile, tend to be more existentialist, believing that status has to be earned, and continually earned.
find out more about “class power on zero hours” + order it here
other bits and bobs:
i enjoyed this short documentary on the lucas plan, which was a 1978 proposal by workers at Lucas Aerospace to repurpose the company to produce socially useful technology following a wave of layoffs across the sector at the time.
really enjoyed this edition of the music journalism insider mentioned yesterday on “high quality inputs”. it features an interview with jazz writer tod gioia about his writing process, which is correctly built around the simple process that, if you want good outputs, you need good inputs:
If I have a secret to my craft, that’s it. I believe that writers need to maximize their high-quality inputs in order to create good output, so I design my day around the inputs. I will devote 2 or 3 hours per day to writing, but around twice that much time in exposing myself to new ideas and new sounds. That’s the engine room where it all happens. If I manage the inputs correctly, the output takes care of itself.
sorry, this was a mess, but i’ve had to rush it bc busy this evening.
stay safe!
jake x