Good buddy Jay Springett sent me this link on Monday, saying it had come immediately after my SHIFTY essay in his RSS feeds. I was amused and gratified to see a tacit endorsement of my drive-by Raymond Williams reference.

I was also reminded of why I’m glad I’m not an academic any more, and why I’m making active efforts not to write in the ways that academia tends to lionise. This is a matter of style (and/or form), but also of content. In the case of the piece linked above, I really don’t think it’s helpful to keep talking about capitalism and/or neoliberalism in a way that reifies them—that posits them as real things with agency, as angry and capricious gods. Metaphor is a powerful tool, and I’m a big fan of it, but metaphor is also a magickal working; if you keep describing an angry, capricious god, you’ll sure as shit get one. And, well: here we are.

(For the sake of clarity: capitalism and neoliberalism certainly exist, but they are epiphenomenal: they are downstream from the causal actions of ontologically concrete beings with agency, emergent properties of an absurdly complex system. Capital is somewhat closer to being a thing than is its -ism, and is therefore safer and more useful a category to conjure with… but even there, I think we are—or at least I am—better off focussing on the concrete rather than the abstract.)

I ended my Curtis post on a note of ambiguity, because I could see what he was trying to say, but felt uneasy about the way in which it was being said. With hindsight, my concerns were basically pure McLuhan: the medium is the message. This was neatly clarified for me by a reflection by Paul Watson on his art practice, and in particular this observation:

I do think that Gen X in the UK—of which I am a part—needs to stop nostalgically mining our collective childhood for wistful cultural trinkets. We’ve done it to death over the past decade: all the things worthy of being saved, studied, re-evaluated, and re-released now have been.

That’s what was bothering me about SHIFTY, I think. Though I wonder if Curtis wasn’t also on some level aware of the same thing? He closes with the point that the techniques he’s using are the very same as those of the distraction apparatus, certainly—but that could be taken as little more than classic Gen X irony and autocritique.

But on the other hand, one of the strongest final images is that of a dying horse whose owner is not flogging it, but rather trying tearfully to get it to stand up and run one last time…