[my collection of small change in piratey-type box, taken at a really rubbish angle. Obviously 'kapital' is not necessarily best represented by money, but you know, the first form of 'the appearance of capital is money' as Karl notes in er, Kapital. Plus I couldn't find anything else to fit in the light-box].

Discussing money is like talking about dreams; nauseating and boring in equal measures, because, on many levels, rather important. The very material consequences of the real abstractions of money (and dreams) conflict with our self-perception and those of people around us: 'I am not the number represented by my bank balance, I am a free man!' The way money both allows you to do certain things and prevents you from doing others forces us to become certain kinds of people. There is no existentialism here, or only for the very rich, who can of course be whoever they want. It's a shame that they almost always choose to be totally disgusting.

At the age of nearly 30, I have never had more than £600 positive money. Like everyone else, I live in my overdraft, have credit card debt, owe my Ma several hundred pounds and own nothing of a value above £300 (so, probably not worth stealing anything from me). Since the age of 18 I have spent between 25% and 40% of my income on rent every month, and I can't imagine ever owning any of the following things: property, a car, furniture. I spend my income on bills, eating out, drinks, books, other people and the odd vintage dress. I live slightly beyond my means and I never save anything. How very 21st century!

If I ever did have any significant capital, I'd pay off my debts and that of all my crew, and set up a publishing company. I suspect that about 80% of my friends would give the same answer. Perhaps I will run a 'what would you spend a million quid on competition'. The prize could be the piratey box!

wordle is fun. Thanks Dominic.

Of all the many stupid, irritating pieces of nu-language in the academy, the phrase 'speak to' (or, sometimes, 'talk to'), as in, 'I'll speak to this document in a moment' is enjoying a particular prominence at the moment. You can speak to a piece of paper all you like, but it's unlikely to ever give you a useful response.

The next Kino Fist will be on the theme of RED SPACE, and will be held at 2pm, 20th July, in the E:vent Gallery, 96 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, London E2 6PU. The films we will be showing are: as the cartoon, Khodataev & Kollektiv's 1924 short Interplanetary Revolution, as the main feature, Iakov Protazanov's Martian Constructivist-Trotskyist blockbuster Aelita, from the same year; and as our B-Movie, Harry Horner's magnificently ludicrous McCarthyite farrago Red Planet Mars.

Anyone who wants to contribute anything from 500 to 6000 [6000?! Owen, are you sure?!] words on the general themes of science fiction, cinema and socialism is encouraged to fling it in our direction to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk, no later than 13th July. To get you started, here's China Mieville's 50 Fantasy and SF works every socialist should read.

By the way, Kino Fist are looking to start screening short non-commercial films before the main feature. If you would like to send us something you've made (no dead animals) for potential screening (preferably 20 minutes or shorter and related to the general themes that KF are into), then send an email to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk.

PARRHESIA - A Journal of Critical Philosophy and COLLAPSE - Journal of Philosophical Research and Development present a one day symposium:
THINKING NOTHING - the void and its resurgence in contemporary thought
From the emergence of empty set as a basis for ontology, to materialist negative theology, to Metzinger's 'nemocentric' destitution of the subject, contemporary thought seems to be obsessed with nothing. But the politics of this nothing seems drastically different from its earlier existentialist and postmodern nihilistic incarnations. This symposium seeks to explore the problem of nothing in contemporary thought, asking precisely how the postulation of an inherent negativity as a productive realm of philosophical discourse has come to characterise our intellectual landscape, and how the contemporary void relates to those of Ancient and Modern philosophical traditions.

Speakers (TBC) to include:
Justin Clemens (University of Melbourne; Author of The Mundiad, Avoiding the Subject [with Dom Pettman], and coeditor/translator of Alain Badiou's Infinite Thought)
Ray Brassier (Middlesex University; Author of Nihil Unbound, Translator of Alain Badiou's Saint Paul)
John Sellars (University of the West of England; Author of The Stoics and The Art of Living)
Robin Mackay (Middlesex University; Editor of Collapse, Translator of Alain Badiou's Number and Numbers)
Iain Hamilton Grant (University of the West of England; Author of Philosophies of Nature After Schelling)

Please contact Alex Murray (a.w.murray[at]exeter.co.uk) for further details or to register.

'There has always been resistance to feminism - the backlash that Susan Faludi chronicled in her 1991 book of the same name. But there is also the satisfaction of arguments won, rights enshrined, respect ensured, the sense that the central feminist project - the fight for women to be treated as human beings, no more, no less - is inching along. In fact, reading a recent piece by US feminist writer, Katha Pollitt, headlined Backlash Spectacular and charting the ways in which North American culture is regressing on women's rights, I felt smug. Thank God that's not happening here, I thought, sinking into my seat and reaching for another chocolate.' (Kira Cochrane in today's Guardian)

What is it with the f*&%ing chocolate? Do you think it's cute? Suggestive of a slightly naughty non-po-faced feminism of the most modern kind? Does chocolate constitute your very identity? If you could choose between chocolate and, say, the right to vote, how long would it take you to make up your mind?

I noticed with a kind of resigned horror a new line of chocolates the other day. The following three images sum up the ideology of chocolate in the most obscene way:

[Some books on judgement leering ominously at you]

Judgement frightens me. Far from being the 'free-play' of the faculties, as Kant would have it, I think of judgement as something like a slab of finality, a giant irreversible lump of doom. Although it happens all the time, I refuse to believe that people ever really revise their opinion of someone after the first time they've met them. Or if they do, they merely add new information that covers over, but doesn't entirely remove, the initial judgement. It's like a palimpsest! Yes, indeed, all personal relations are a giant palimpsest of revised and revisable opinions written on a single surface. This is why getting drunk around people is a bad idea, as the scriptio inferior comes to the top and you fixate on one little thing, and think that that's them. 'You're so bitter!', 'you're so funny!', 'you're so complicated!' etc.

I like to think there's a qualitative difference between being critical (useful, important) and being judgemental (scary, dubious). But I often mistake criticism for judgement, taking light, easily-fixable comment for absolutist, ontological assertion. So a remark like 'you could change the wording of the third paragraph to make it more readable' becomes 'everything you've ever done is rubbish, everything you do or will do is rubbish, and besides, you don't even deserve to use letters, you uppity little imp'. I think it's a confidence thing...

At one point, I really did receive a weight of judgement against me (all unfair, obviously). I used to dream of courtrooms and trials and the anguished pointlessness of trying to defend oneself, confusing value judgement with legal judgement like some kind of oneiric numpty. Last night I dreamt I was a CSI though, so things are looking up.

The free-floating judgement of contemporary life, the Big Other made flesh through the channelling of tabloid condemnations (love rat, irresponsible role model, bad mother) is designed to put barbs in your head that extend far beyond the realms of mere sex, drug use and child care: but what do the others think? is the anxious motto of our age - the Big Brother house is the attempt to get a concrete answer to the unanswerable question: 'what do people really think of me?' The Facebook aps that ask you to 'compare people' or to 'say what you really think I'm like' are vain attempts to get closer to the 'really think', the impossible idea that there really is a space in which all opinion of you resides, and more to the point, that it is all true.

[Couldn't use flash here, as the picture is covered by glass]

This image is from an antiques market in Tehran. As far as I know it 'represents' (in so far as a blank-faced image can represent) the Hidden or Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who has been hidden since 874 AD and will reappear when the world has fallen into chaos and civil war. (But it might be Muhammad too, as he is surrounded by fire, like many of the pictures in the site linked below.)

According to my top Shi'ite cultural attaché in London, he is holding Ali's sword, a deadly bifurcated weapon. His face is perhaps absent because no one yet knows what he looks like (see this discussion of edicts against the representation of Muhammad, with a brief discussion of the Hidden Imam at the end).

There are many murals in Tehran, many to martyrs, some to more recent historical memory (on one visit, paintings of the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photographs lined one of the main motorways). One striking mural, which I unfortunately didn't have time to take a picture of, as everyone drives about 900 miles an hour, was of the Hidden Imam, his face covered by a sheet. It resembled nothing so much as Magritte's Lovers.



I wonder if there is some connection, whether Magritte knew of the sheet-faced Imam, or whether it was mere coincidence (or something to do with his mother's drowning in her nightgown). Either way, something deeply troubling and intriguing about the representation of the non-representable, as Lyotard once almost sort of said.

UPDATE: Joel informs me that Etienne Decroux might be of relevance here with his idea of 'corporeal mime'. Decroux defines his socialist, modernist, mime thus (extract):

"The dancer's body pulls thought after it. The mime's thought pulls the body

8. Unlike so-called "expressive" dance and "Isadoraesque" dance, we do not express our feelings with our arms, but rather with the trunk. The arms, in mime, must only act concretely: to fight or to work.

9. As opposed to nineteenth-century pantomime, we do not seem to be trying to explain something to the audience. We express ourselves despite ourselves.

In addition, while this nineteenth-century pantomime used lots of facial expressions, we use only the body and are usually masked."

Here is a picture of him:

1. David Harvey has this site dedicated to a reading of Marx's Capital in which he looks like a ninja with a whiteboard.

2. There's this on Saturday - if you liked Blue Collar you should definitely be interested:

London Free Film show: Doc on Revolutionary black unions in Detroit 1970's

Free Film show: FINALLY GOT THE NEWS

Saturday 28th JUNE, 8pm Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton St, London SE17

Followed by discussion and chat. With speaker Brian Ashton, an ex-car industry shop steward.

Hosted by 56a Infoshop and Mute Magazine

Although translations of Badiou have been fairly extensive and increasingly speedy, his fiction remains an unknown continent to most of his readers. In a way, it is understandable - his novels are extremely tricky, with massive modal shifts in tone, content and style. But I'm surprised no one has done any of the plays (or have they? Info to the usual address).

UPDATE: Susan Spitzer tells me she is currently working on L'Incident d'Antioche for a volume called Paul and the Philosophers edited by Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries. Excellent.

This story is taken from French Writing Today, ed. by Simon Watson Taylor (who also translates the story) (London: Penguin, 1968). The original reference is: Alain Badiou, 'Histoire de Duphort' from Almagestes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964). Other writers in the collection include Queneau, Ponge, Michaux, Beckett, Char, Genet, Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, Vian, Duras and Sollers.

The biography for Badiou reads as follows:

'Born 1937 in Rabat, Moroco. Graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris with a degree in philosophy. At present lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reims. The short text printed in this volume, an extract from his first novel, Almagestes (1964), written between 1956 and 1960, must not be considered particularly 'representative' of an extremely diffuse and complex work. the second volume of what is intended to be a trilogy, Portulans, started in 1960, appeared in 1967. Badiou's critical articles include 'L'autonomie du processus esthétique' (Cahiers Marxistes Léninistes, September 1966), and a long essay on the Marxist philosopher L. Althusser (Critique, May 1967).'

[click on the images to enlarge them. Any problems, email me and I'll send you them]

[my, these objects are cheery. Instead of a golden, humanist organ beaming rays of hope to the world, anyone would think I had a dead, shrivelled rat for a heart]

This woman is burning in hell as part of an extended Nativity scene. I bought her in Naples, but her head fell off a couple of years ago. She is a presepe, a curious combination of Catholicism, animism and craft that demonstrates just what is up with both demented forms of religion and representation in general. Of course, for slightly pasty Northern Europeans (particularly those apparently allergic to the sun), Naples is a deeply alarming place, filled with skull-heads on posts and kitschy death on every corner. It's a far cry from the disinfected passing aways and the quiet phone-call of puritan finitude.

Whilst most precepi are characters from the Nativity, many are more secular icons: politicians, celebrities. The woman burning in hell (has she committed fornication? And/or used a condom? Forgotten to thank her Mother-in-Law for the pasta she made?) is clearly not someone you would shove next to the Baby Jesus in a touching celebration of the virgin birth. Figures like this one appear in little glass boxes around Naples, usually accompanied by burning Priests, who have presumably been very, very bad indeed.

I am always amused and impressed by the optimism of the human spirit when I read that more people believe in heaven than believe in hell. Does anyone these days think they are destined for an eternity of sulphur-showers and being eaten by devil-worms? Cinema's obsession with apocalypse might indicate that whatever 'hell' is, it'll probably be brought on by us rather than waiting there for us, which would make us all Horseman trying to mount our own backs.

As if I weren't ontologically goth enough already, it turns out I am allergic to sunlight. After spending a couple of hours outside on (ironic-now-I-think-of-it) Sunday, I broke out in rashes and felt terrible. Now I have to take steroids and stay indoors. It's as if the world wants me to spend all my time on the computer and occasionally flicking through books, or something. Bah.

Accompanied by Leniency and his lady, we slowly made our way to Greenwich.

From a crack in the wall, the Village appears to be under siege.

Boxes of aliens seem more numerous than before.

This land is not your land. And if you hurt yourself on it, it's not our fault.

Ravensbourne College, back.

Ravensbourne College, front. That spike there by the Dome - every time I see it, I can't but think of someone being impaled on it, like a little person kebab.

Blinded by geometry.

Some rubbish makes a desperate bid to escape the Peninsula on a life-raft.

Mmm...Contaminated post-industrial wasteland. Having said that, I wake up this morning with some kind of weird allergic reaction. Perhaps I should lay off playing with plague-trash and heavy-metal deposits.

The horror of the Dome becomes all too much for one poor soul.

choses refoulées par la mer

Life finds a way. The bastard.

If I had a boat I would tie it to this chain.

We find a large, half-rotting dead fish on the path.

The Sulphurous Hail
Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath laid
The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice
Of Heav'n receiv'd us falling, and the Thunder,
Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep.
Let us not slip th' occasion, whether scorn,
Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe - John Milton

.................................................................

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned - Milton Friedman

This story, concerning a supposed pact between a group of US teenage girls, is interesting, far less for the scurrilous details (they used the same 24-year-old homeless guy! We blame Juno!), than for the conditions of the pact. This was not merely a bid to individually break the boredom of adolescence, but a desire to raise the babies 'collectively'. Aside from any supposed moral repugnance at such a project, this isn't actually such a stupid idea. If you're going to have kids, you must as well have them young, and you might as well divide up the labour. What's the point of individually washing 1 sick-covered baby outfit when you could wash 20 at once? And the madness of the nuclear-family-sleep-pattern-broken-by-baby. My Ma still can't sleep well, and she had her last kid more than quarter of a century ago. How much better it would be if one took it in turns to get some kip.

When girls at my school started getting pregnant, at 14 and 15, the reasons they gave themselves were almost all universally heart-breaking: 'I want someone to love me', 'but I love [the father]', 'school is boring'. If you were middle class, you had an abortion; if you were working class you kept it, in some kind of Dickensian mixture of Tiny Tim-humanism and pre-destroyed aspiration. But there is a moral/biological paradox here: physically it makes much more sense to have a kid when you are still relatively fit. 30/40-something mothers with decades of boozing, dieting and stress may be better placed financially, but they sure as hell aren't as able to bounce back from weeks of sleeplessness like a 15-year-old netball playing girl would be. But no nice middle class parent is going to put university on hold for the kid of their kid. Just as the school superintendent said of the girls in the pact: "They are young white women. We understand that some of them were together talking about being pregnant and that being a positive thing for them." The horror! But, but...they're white!...And they want to do it! It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the death of the nuclear family...

UPDATE: Bill sent a link to this 1989 Toni Morrison interview which includes the following very interesting exchange:

'Q. This leads to the problem of the depressingly large number of single-parent households and the crisis in unwed teenage pregnancies. Do you see a way out of that set of worsening circumstances and statistics?

A. Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility. I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community -- everybody -- to raise a child. The notion that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a patriarchal notion, that a woman -- and I have raised two children, alone -- is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units -- people need a larger unit.

Q. And teenage pregnancies?

A. Everybody's grandmother was a teenager when they got pregnant. Whether they were 15 or 16, they ran a house, a farm, they went to work, they raised their children.

Q. But everybody's grandmother didn't have the potential for living a different kind of life. These teenagers -- 16, 15 -- haven't had time to find out if they have special abilities, talents. They're babies having babies.

A. The child's not going to hurt them. Of course, it is absolutely time consuming. But who cares about the schedule? What is this business that you have to finish school at 18? They're not babies. We have decided that puberty extends to what -- 30? When do people stop being kids? The body is ready to have babies, that's why they are in a passion to do it. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

Q. You don't feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?

A. They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That's my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, ''Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me -- I will take care of your baby.'' That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black -- or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about. We don't care whether they have babies or not.

Q. How do you break the cycle of poverty? You can't just hand out money.

A. Why not? Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich get it handed -- they inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That's shared bounty of class.'

Stop the Fascist BNP

March and carnival parade against fascism and racism including floats with top artists performing, marching & samba bands and trade union & student union banners.

Saturday 21st June 2008
Assemble: 12 noon, Tooley Street, London SE1
(behind Greater London Assembly building, near Tower Bridge, nearest underground stn London Bridge).

(Or Playmobil does Hauntology)

It is clear that the real ghosts haunt the city, not the countryside. Walking around London - the Greenwich Peninsula, the Docklands, the pre-Olympics East - the spectres of all the other Londons, the poor London, the plague-ridden London, the revolutionary London of Wat Tyler massing troops on the Heath - hang in the air, poisoning attempts to make the whole city resemble the yuppie flats and commercial plazas of the regenerators' dreams.

The city is haunted, not only by the poverty that just won't tuck itself nicely away and the resistance that rears its head in protests and strikes, but by more mundane, yet more painful ghosts - the memories of shared walks, illuminated flashes of past conversations with people who have now disappeared for good, in death or in life. Getting off the bus or a tube in a infrequently visited locale, one is consumed by the ambient recall of a person and that place for a few seconds, a kind of socio-geography of the heart, a curious spasm of memory-pain.

The house in the countryside I grew up in was built in the 1600s, and bought by my parents for £7000 at the end of the 1970s. Cheap because it was ruined (my parents spent 13 years fixing it up), its previous tenant was an elderly blind women who lived solely in the kitchen. The house always scared me, even when my spirit medium great-grandmother and my exorcist great-uncle (I promise I'm not making them up) both declared that all the spirits there were friendly. As a child, interested in the macabre history of the British Isles, I would write letters to this great-uncle, who spent most of his time when not chasing spirits being a priest. One response I remember particularly well, written in red ink and lots of capital letters, he warned me not to meddle in the SPIRIT WORLD for fear of UNIMAGINABLE HORROR. That frightened me far more than the ghosts that I never, in fact, managed to see. My brother later claimed to have seem lots, but I'm sure he would have told me at the time, were that true.

We found lots of things in the house - a political document from the time of King James I that later disappeared, a perfectly kept Victorian child's shoe that Ma hung over the spiral staircase, the dessicated corpses of mice and once, even a bat, trapped behind a heater with all its fur intact. I kept it in a box and have it still. Early on, my parents found a circular slab of marble buried in the garden which they used as a cheeseboard, and some of my most enjoyable Sunday afternoons were spent trawling nearby fields for pieces of old blue china, which I would then bury in the copse for self-keeping, only never to find them again. There was a kind of desire for ghosts (of a containable kind), if only because the world itself couldn't be as boring as it seemed.

It is not perhaps, then, a question of believing in ghosts so much as constructing them. The airbrushed city of the future will need a whole army of them...