freely associating

We gave a talk recently over in Hebden Bridge. What follows are the bare bones of what we said, but if you scroll right to the end, there's a concrete idea building on a recent post here. We got asked to talk on the theme “Who will save us from the future?” which is the theme of the latest issue of Turbulence. We’re sort of going to do that ...

I've been away so this overview is a bit late and more than a bit disjointed… First up a couple of positives. Against an absurd level of police harassment, the camp for climate action refused to be intimidated… That might appear a small thing but it's easy to underestimate the importance of such an open and public display of opposition. Elsewhere 'politics' is daily reduced to questions of public ...

Our piece on antagonism which seems to have dragged on for ages (we’ve talked about it here, here, here and here…) has finally been finished. Well, sort of. A short version of it is being published in the forthcoming Turbulence magazine, out in August. A slightly longer version has been submitted for inclusion in Antipode and we’ll post that remix in due course…

How do we face the future? The same way we face the past… Maybe it’s because time’s dragging at the moment (the sun’s out and I’m slaving away at work), but I’ve been thinking about the way time works – how it speeds up, slows down, and occasionally crosses over on itself. And I’ve been trying to link that to our recent work on antagonism. Part of the motivation for ...

[gallery] One of the questions we keep tripping up on when we talk about antagonism is whether there is a real antagonism that is masked by false antagonisms. Of course this makes us nervous given the left's history of subsuming other struggles so that class struggle (narrowly defined) is primary and women's issues, for example, are classed as secondary. This is related to treating class as a fixed identity ...

We’ve been thinking antagonism recently and have drafted a piece entitled ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, that we hope will be published in the forthcoming Turbulence product and also - in an extended form - in Antipode in a special issue on ‘autonomy’. In the piece we describe the 1980s UK anarchist practice of publishing names and addresses of those who dominate our lives as liberating and quote Lucy ...

We've talked before about how “Social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them.” Then recently, in an as yet unfinished piece called ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, we’ve been trying to write about antagonism. These are just some notes to try and think through how those are related. That is the link between movement problematics, the recomposition of antagonism, ...

Yeeuch, it's a horrible mash-up. Sometimes it feels like we're living in the last days of Babylon, with the strange becoming increasingly common and Deleuzian concepts storming up the charts; at other times it's like the 1970s never really went away (I'm half expecting another Winter of Discontent run alongside a Crass revival). But of course it's none of those. It's just the way things are… So how does ...