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[...] The arid shopping mall at the end of history opened up as the only possible future. Worse than the career opportunities that never knocked were the ones that did: jobs for everyone in the striplit wall-to-wall mart of Time Out of Joint America in which it is 1955, forever... No shadows to hide in ... No room to move, no room to doubt ...
i love his riffs on malls
Yet Lovecraft's texts are exemplary of Weird, rather than straightforwardly Gothic, fiction. Weird fiction has its own consistency, which can be most clearly delineated by comparing it to two adjacent modes, Fantasy and the Uncanny. Fantasy (and Tolkien is the exemplar here) presupposes a completed World, a world that, although superficially different to 'ours' (there may be different species, or supernatural forces) is politically all-too familiar (there is usually some nostalgia for the ordered organization of feudal hierarchy). The Uncanny, meanwhile, is set in 'our' world - only that world is no longer 'ours' any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged. The Weird, however, depends upon the difference between two (or more) worlds - with 'world' here having an ontological sense. It is not a question of an empirical difference - the aliens are not from another planet, they are invaders from another reality system. Hence the defining image is that of the threshold, the door from this world into another, and the key figure is the 'Lurker at the Threshold' - what, in Lovecraft's mythos is called Yog Sothoth. The political philosophical implications are clear: there is no world. What we call the world is a local consensus hallucination, a shared dream.
Gangsta’s hyperbolically-staged fantasies of omnipotence were always nouveau-riche giveaways, which, like the bling, sang out that these working-class black Americans had not yet achieved the easy way in the world, the casual confidence that are the birthrights of those born to wealth and power. The (gold) chains have always clanked as loudly as Jacob Marley‘s that the struggle to escape servitude has run aground, and that untold riches for a very few were the compensation for the many languishing in inertia, poverty, incarceration. Is “Started from the Bottom”—which we all laughed at: no you didn’t, Drake!—Drake’s commentary on all this? Hear it as an act of imagination, Drake putting himself in the sneakers of those who had to struggle from the depths like he never had to, rather than as some forged autobiography, and it makes more sense. But listen to the sheer weariness that weighs down the track: the heavy tristesse that starts the moment after you’ve reached the top of the tower, as the realisation sinks in that there’s no replacing the thrill of the chase. Drake was always expected to be a success, so he was deprived even of that brief moment of satisfaction before the ennui and the paranoia set in. Reaching the top was standard, the least he could expect.
To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted. The consciousness in question is not a consciousness of an already-existing state of affairs. Rather, consciousness-raising is productive. It creates is a new subject – a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for. At the same time, consciousness-raising intervenes in the ‘object,’ the world itself, which is now no longer apprehended as some static opacity, the nature of which is already decided, but as something that can be transformed. This transformation requires knowledge; it will not come about through spontaneity, voluntarism, the experiencing of ruptural events, or by virtue of marginality alone. Hence Hartsock’s concept of standpoint epistemology, which maintains – following Lukács and Marx – that subjugated groups potentially have an access to knowledge of the whole social field that the dominant group lacks. Members of subjugated groups do not however automatically possess this knowledge as of right – it can only be accessed once group consciousness is developed. According to Hartsock “the vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and represents an achievement which requires both science to see beyond the surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the education which can only grow from struggle to change those relations.”
There are still those who would like to pretend that a Tory administration would be so much worse than New Labour, so that deigning to vote for anyone else would be an "indulgence". Choosing "the least worst" is not making this particular choice, it is also choosing a system which forces you to accept the least worst as the best you can hope for. Naturally, the defenders of the dictatorship of the elite pretend - perhaps they even deceive themselves - that the particular slew of lies, compromise and smarm they are hawking is "only temporary"; that, at some unspecified time in the future, things will improve if we only support the "progressive" wing of the status quo. But Hobson's choice is no choice, and the delusion of progressivism is not a psychological quirk, it is the structural delusion upon which liberal democracy is based.
[...] In the pre-Thatcher 1970s, it took six carworkers to do the job of one; in the post-Thatcher Noughties, it takes six consultants to do the job of none (since the mission statement wasn't worth writing in the first place). Same decadence, diffferent beneficiaries. [...]
hahaha love this
[...] Ecological catastrophe and mental illness are present in capitalism's wrap-around simulation as warps, unassimilable discontinuities, that which cannot be but which, nevertheless, cannot be extirpated. Perhaps these negative Reals - these dark shadows which allow us to see Kapital's striplit mall of the mind for what it actually is - have their complement in a positive Real, an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in and re-define everything.
more mall metaphors
[...] the current media phobia about unions is an indication of the power that they have at this time. History is starting again, which means that nothing is fixed and there are no guarantees. Right-wing victory is only inevitable if we think that it is.
basic and yet vaguely pretty
One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive's world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the condition, the depressive does not experience his or her melancholia as pathological or indeed abnormal: the conviction of depression that agency is useless, that beneath the appearance of virtue lies only venality, strikes sufferers as a truth which they have reached but others are too deluded to grasp. There is clearly a relationship between the seeming "realism" of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism.
reminds me of Franzen on the same subject (tho much more eloquent and meaningful here)
[...] ’68 presupposed both a credible leftist political project (from which it could deviate) and a social democratic context (which provided the conditions for its exorbitant demands). But both of these have definitively disappeared. They are a distant memory even for the parents of many of the teenagers who took part in the recent UK protests. The current movement has had to build itself up almost from nothing, in a situation where the revolutionary left has no infrastructure and the moderate left has long since acquiesced to capitalist realism; and, perhaps most astonishingly, it has been constructed by those who had previously been the most obvious victims of capitalist realism – the young. And it should also not be forgotten – even though it often is - that ’68 failed. The new breed of protestors expect to win. They do not have the ingrained defeatism – and romanticism of failure – that has been the vice of so much of the so-called radical left since the 60s. Another difference between ’68 and now is the class composition of the protestors. Where the university students of the 60s were a small elite, many of the students involved in the current wave of demonstrations are working class. ’68 was about a short-lived alliance between workers and students, but many of today’s students are already workers, forced to do part-time – and often full-time – jobs in order to support their studies. Similarly, the Fordist model of the worker (as someone who does 40 hours a week in a factory for 40 years of their life) has long since been replaced by precarious work, which assumes “flexibility” and short-term contracts.
In the UK, the government has targeted education, the arts, public services and benefits, imposing cuts that are breathtakingly punitive. The justification for cuts in all these areas has been the capitalist realist rationale that “there is no more money”, but opponents have rightly identified this as a thin pretext used by the rump of neoliberalism in order to pursue its uncompleted ideological project of totally eliminating public space. But this has created the conditions for an alliance between all those groups, which are ‘naturally’ hostile to neoliberalism. In terms of art and education, what we are potentially seeing here is the reconsolidation of a relationship between bohemia – those elements of the bourgeoisie, which disdain business values – and the working class. That relationship – which allowed the arty working class to escape drudgery, and for the bohemian middle class to make contact with the mutational energies of proletarian culture – was the engine of British and Irish popular culture during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Could today’s antagonism revive this? I see no reason not to be optimistic