La la la
La la la la la
La la la
La la la la la…

We’ve been vaguely considering doing some sort of anthology of our work so far, and it’s made me think about the different ways of reading (and by extension of writing). My first reaction was that it would only be worth collecting up our various texts if we could somehow make them cohere, so that they stand up to scrutiny. But there’s a tension here (one that’s not necessarily productive). On a superficial level, there’s the whole academic trip where you attempt to pre-empt every criticism, shore up every argument and tie up any loose ends. But at a deeper level you can see this as the work of some molar perspective which seeks to totalise, to impose some sort of unity-in-identity, and to capture energy. “We have to relate this argument here to that one there… And how does this fit in?” But the end result might well be stasis or death. All the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed. You know the feeling when you finish reading a book or article – it’s all clear, you agree with almost everything (how could you not?) but your response is “Yeah, and…?” It’s done to death. It has a trajectory that’s entirely predictable: the authors think A and B, therefore they’ll almost certainly think C.

Another example: there’s a critique of Move into the Light? (a text we had a hand in) on the grounds that it’s easy to read, so you think “that’s nice, that’s interesting…” and then 5 minutes later you think “what does that mean?” From one perspective, the incoherence/confusion over the metaphor of light is a weakness of the text. Just when you think you’ve got a grip of the metaphor, it shifts again and unbuckles the understanding you’ve carefully assembled. I’ve been watching Carnivale and I have exactly the same problem.

But in another way, that’s one of the more productive ways to read a book/watch a film/listen to a song. It makes sense, but only sort of – it’s always hinting at something else and keeps sliding away towards it (obviously I’m not talking about sloppy writing which is just annoying). It’s much harder to extrapolate from, because it’s always threatening to become something else, to fall off the charts. And I think there might be a connection here to the way the Turbulence tabloid for Heiligendamm ‘worked’, I think. Individually the articles had weaknesses, but the whole more than made up for it.

So, I guess the question is this: does this have any bearing on how we understand affinity? And becoming? Is there something ineffable about it, something that resists scrutiny and yet – or maybe because of that – is still enormously productive? More crudely, what makes us hang around the anti-globalisation movement when we know all the arguments against it, when many of the critiques of it make sense?

I just can’t get you out of my head
Boy it’s more than I dare to think about