Four zones of reach, four invitations from melancholy territory
Futures past. Left: not so long ago people thought the future looked like this. What d’you reckon to their vision? An Italian Futurist pram, encountered in a street in Siena, through which crusaders would leave the city at Porta Camollia, for Rome and the Holy Land. The wall behind the pram tells a better future story? Right: going back a ways . . King Ashurbanipal (Assyrian ‘King of the World’ 669–c.631 BC ) projected this as the future or, more accurately, as an eternalising present. The low relief demonstrates to all who see, how powerful the king is, twisting the tail of the lion – who seems to have other opinions. Lions were routinely marshalled for him to slaughter, proof of his divine right; his regime and dynasty fell, of course. The ruling ideologies and oligarchs today would have us adopt a similar image of their (‘our’) power and dominance over natural order. What do we reckon to their vision?
Making a living economy, language(ing) of struggle, writing personally
Halifax: This is where I was brought up. But I didn’t know it in these ways above – C19 hub of Chartism and associationist socialism – until I read a book: EPThompson’s The making of the English working class. He was writing in the bottom right-hand corner of the town, at the same time as I was being inducted as a cadet member of the professional-managerial class, at Halifax Technical High School, in the top-left corner. Writing can matter!
In an earlier paper Goodbye universe I wrote about activist legacy and plurality, and offered a summary of the intentions of the Methuselah narratives. also asked: what does it mean for an activist to ‘write personally’ as an alternative to organising collectives and directly collaborating in mobilising cultural, economic and aesthetic formations? So, in this paper I'll briefly gloss each of the elements within this summary of intentions:To offer beginnings and framings of
parallel articulations of threads in
a weave of explicit understanding, of
how we activists might, beyond fragments, continue to
cultivate the collective, mutualised capability to make
Above: The Dalit movement in post-revolutionary Nepal | The Buddha’s eyes in a stupa in Kathmandu
There’s a long-ish road ahead in this blog, so a bit of mapping is in order. A dear friend who read the opening paper was concerned: about repetition, about overwhelm for a reader; perhaps about claiming too much for an individual’s contribution; and certainly about a programmatic tendency. These are all good things to pay attention to, as a series of writings gets under way.
Futures past. Left: not so long ago people thought the future looked like this. What d’you reckon to their vision? An Italian Futurist pram, encountered in a street in Siena, through which crusaders would leave the city at Porta Camollia, for Rome and the Holy Land. The wall behind the pram tells a better future story? Right: going back a ways . . King Ashurbanipal (Assyrian ‘King of the World’ 669–c.631 BC ) projected this as the future or, more accurately, as an eternalising present. The low relief demonstrates to all who see, how powerful the king is, twisting the tail of the lion – who seems to have other opinions. Lions were routinely marshalled for him to slaughter, proof of his divine right; his regime and dynasty fell, of course. The ruling ideologies and oligarchs today would have us adopt a similar image of their (‘our’) power and dominance over natural order. What do we reckon to their vision?
