freely associating

As well as being a place to store our half-baked ideas, this blog is also meant to be a place where we can collect, record and circulate interesting stuff. And amidst all the shite that’s been written about the current credit/finance crisis, this piece (by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici of Midnight Notes) really stands out. Read and think on… “MUST THE MOLECULES FEAR AS THE ENGINE DIES?” –NOTES ...

I’ve just started reading Naomi Klein’s new(ish) book, The Shock Doctrine, and I came across this quote on page 7: Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the ...

The band Crass had a big effect on some of us Free Associator's lives. Indeed we've had a bit of talk about them here of the years. We've discussed the chances of a Crass revival, or whether, in fact, Crass are beyond recuperation. In fact Brian brought up the topic just the other day. Well M'lud, I present above exhibit A, nicked from the ever interesting Uncarved Blog. ...

We gave a talk last night at the CommonPlace on capitalism and climate change. The slides and notes for it are available here, but a horribly brief summary goes like this… The climate crisis is an energy crisis. It's about the conversion of one form of energy (fossil fuels) into another. Physicists call that conversion 'work'. But the climate crisis is also a 'work' crisis in the everyday sense ...

A new year arrives, we have a new project to be getting on with and I should be concentrating on that but I just can’t stop my head from turning backwards. To be more precise I can’t stop musing on those moments when music and politics collide and the effect they’ve had on my life. This was all sparked off by one of my Christmas presents: “The Future is ...

I’m half-way through a new book by one of the founders of Class War. It’s pretty un-fucking-putdownable (see, it’s already having an impact on the way I write), mainly cos it captures that whole sense of potential that existed in the mid to late 1980s. Some of this might be pure nostalgia, but it was a pretty mad time. And one of the things that was mad about ...

I recently finished the new Althusser collection, the Philosophy of the Encounter. In it Althusser sketches what he calls “aleatory materialism” or “materialism of the encounter.” Althusser draws upon ancient atomist philosophy as a metaphor for what he means. In atomism there are two initial components before the world existed, atoms and the void. Atoms fall through the void, empty space, parallel to each other. They never touch each ...

I really like this photo. A friend who suggested it illustrated smooth space sent it to me. If you look at desert part though it's not smooth like a pool table but is marked by the flow of sand. It's a space of flows but unlike the striated space on the right which has a transcendent grid imposed on it, the deserts dunes are self organised according ...

In an article “On the New Philosophers” Deleuze sticks the boot into Bernard-Henri Levy , et al, saying: “We’ve been trying to uncover creative functions which would no longer require an author-function for them to be active (in music, painting, audio-visual arts, film, and even philosophy). This wholesale return to the author, to an empty and vain subject, as well as to gross conceptual stereotypes, represents a troubling reactionary ...

Hey brits- Have any of you lot ever read the novel A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle? That book popped into my head on my busride the other morning as I was thinking about Brian's calling 70s squatting a nascent biopolitics and my calling it a resurgent biopolitics. What follows is a reconstruction of my train of thought, only I've replaced all the "I remember this one thing I ...