Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Politics

  • contractions / contradictions

    From the Salvage Collective’s third Covid State Dispatch. The opening salvo deserves constant repetition: The hubris of seeing in this moment the inevitability of socialism follows the shattering electoral defeat of the left, and can only end in two ways: with demoralisation; or with the predicate-shifting disavowal that leads one to find a socialist militant…

  • the feared disseminators of complexity

    A new discovery, made within Simon Reynolds’ response to the shuttering of Beyond the Beyond: Matti Swiedmann’s Red Velvet Corridor. Top of the stack of posts at present is this thing, rambling around in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard… all the intervals in that haunting earworm of a scale that…

  • In search of a dialectical utopianism : Harvey (2000), Spaces of Hope

    Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni. Press. Focussing here, for reasons presumably obvious to long-term readers of this site, on Chapters 8 (“The spaces of Utopia”, p133-81) and 9 (“Dialectical utopianism”, p182-95) of what is now a vintage part of the David Harvey canon. Reading these pieces really brought home just how…

  • neither unprecedented nor revolutionary / bioethics, biopower and the pandemic

    OK, this is gonna be a long one. And if the C19 situation is fraught for you, then consider this a content warning—I’m going to talk about mortality and our societal attitudes to such. I’ve been wanting to write something like this for a good few weeks, but have frankly been too much of a…

  • synthesis is an ever-complicating process

    Here’s a gloriously rambling thing from Matt Colquhoun that starts off talking about dialectics. Hence my choice of title—I’m currently undergoing a sort of dialectics of my understanding of dialectics (if that’s not too pompously meta a way of putting it), and I keep getting sychronicitous little gifts of other people’s thought, like this one,…