Images From the Future

imnotkanye:

So the freakinomics podcast did an episode about suicide and in it they suggested that the reason black americans are far less likely to commit suicide than white americans is because black ppl have the privilege of blaming their problems on white people. Hahaha

Theses on Thatcherdeath 2013

Today’s Novara on Thatcher’s death was an interesting assessment of her legacy. Here are a few of my own brief theses on Thatcher’s death and celebrations, loosely based on the themes in the show.

1) “She may be dead, but her legacy continues”. No one is so stupid to believe otherwise. Ignorance of this is not the reason people celebrated her death, was never the reason people planned the celebration her death. In the conservative historian E. Kantorowicz’s tome, The King’s Two Bodies, he explores how the medieval sovereigns of Europe were invested with both a body corporeal- the shitting breathing bit- and a body mystic - the actual concept of sovereignty itself, that includes the realm and its holy order. Going much further here is going to take me off track, but my point is this: it is a long-established precedent to embody a conceptual framework in a person, with complete appreciation for the artificiality of doing so. Thatchers death is important precisely because it prefigures the death yet to come; the death of neoliberal economics itself. 

2) Must we show respect for the dead? 

Thatcher never afforded her enemies the same respect. Moreover, her class, her party, has never afforded the poor that respect. From Pinochet to Hillsborough, this bears repeating. Those who accuse ‘fellow leftists’ of flippancy or lack of solemnity, are themselves the least serious of all, because they are clearly incapable of taking seriously the material impact of neoliberalism, and seeing therein the cause of our rejoicing. 

3) This is a moment to make a break, to disrupt the solemn atmosphere of statesmanlike economic sycophancy.We were expected to don our rictus grins for the Royal Wedding, The Olympics, and now expected to make the national switch to mourning. In a quotidian sense, we are constantly implored to produce the right affect at the right moment, in the intensively affective labour of post-industrial economy. Our affect will never be appropriate under capitalism.  We should embrace the anomic qualities of this moment: ’The left’, so often accused of ‘joylessness’ is now, suddenly, too joyful.

4) ‘The left’ is not celebrating because ‘it was beaten’. We are celebrating because we are still here. We have survived. As long as we survive there is a chance for revenge, the revenge of actually building the world we want to see.

Posterity will ne’er survey

A nobler grave than this:

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

Stop, traveller, and piss. 

-Byron