Comprador Past

Luckily tumblr only allows 5 youtube videos on a post, so here are the best tracks of the year so far, with some links to other things if you like any of them.

1. The Soft Pink Truth - Grace

This stands in for the album it comes from. The Soft Pink Truth’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? is my favourite record so far this year. Each track is named after a word in the title (1. Shall, 2. We, 3. Go, 4. On, etc.), and the whole thing is an amazing mix of electronic, ambient and Steve Reich. Don’t give up after the first track and you won’t regret it.

2. Flying Lotus - Remind U (Instrumental)

This is a bit of a cheat. Flying Lotus is coming out with an album of Flamagra’s instrumentals this year. It’s not out yet, and the original album came out a while back. But I don’t care, I can listen to this track on repeat. This stands in for other weird hip-hop like Earl Sweatshirt’s latest EP, Feet of Clay, and Hobo Johnson (who is definitely not everyone’s idea of a good time, but can write songs about Justin Bieber and his feelings and i’ll still take a listen).

3. Dirty Projectors - Overlord

This is the most by-the-book entry of this list. I don’t know why, but this song cut through my brain at some point this year, and I noticed myself singing it over and over. Dirty Projectors always find a very weird way to play pretty conventional sounding songs, the guitar always chops when it could strum and the whole thing works way better than it should. Someone else who does that is Solange, who covered the Dirty Projectors a while back.

4. Gil Scott-Heron - I’ll Take Care of You (Reiminagined by Makaya McCraven)

This is another track that stands in for the record it comes from, We’re New Again. The record is a complete cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s final album (I’m New Here) by jazz-genius/drummer Makaya McCraven. If you like this, you have to check out McCraven’s 2018 album, Universal Beings, which is much more straightforward jazz, but as good as it gets, and not straightforward at all.

5. Fiona Apple - Under The Table

A lot of ink has been spilled about the differences between Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party previously. The amount of ink is in inverse proportion to the actual difference to the political problem that is now faced by the party. Both ‘sides’ of the Labour Party are incentivised to distance the current leadership from its predecessors. 

But the problem remains the same. 

Ed Balls’ famous “too far and too fast” critique of austerity was rightly recognised by the electorate as a sign of how the two parties were not that distinct on the central political topic of the day.

Cut to 2019, you can simply swap out ‘austerity’ for ‘brexit’ and the dynamics are the same. Both times Labour leaders were worried about losing the same demographic blocks and both times they solved this by sounding the same notes as the party in government, but with a seemingly different temperament. Jobs first Brexit.

Luckily tumblr will only allow 5 youtube videos on a post, so here are the best tracks of the year so far, with some links to other things if you like any of them.

1. Yves Jarvis - To Say That Is Easy

This song is beyond words beautiful, but it works much better when you know it’s the first track in a 22-song album that came out in March. The whole thing is unbelievable. Like if Astral Weeks had a tape-deck and was made only of acoustic soul music. This also stands in for last year’s serpentwithfeet track ‘Messy’ as he has the best voice in the world.

2. William Tyler - Rebecca

This is the most accessibly beautiful that William Tyler has ever sounded (though I still think Impossible Truth is his best album). He can still tell a story with just an acoustic guitar like no one else in the world. I really wish the last bar of this track could be looped and made into a whole other thing. 

3. Four Tet - Only Human

Having seen this live recently at Ally Pally, I can confirm that this track (based on a Nelly Furtado sample) is just as good in person as on record.

4. Noah Lennox and Paul Maroon - I Don’t Need a Crowd

This is all the hope and yearning you would expect from a combination of Noah Lennox (Panda Bear / Animal Collective) and the guitarist from the Walkmen. Sounds exactly like late Walkmen, but with more of a chant at the end. 

5. Big Thief - U.F.O.F.

Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) has many interesting ideas in it, but one that stood out is when she writes:

“surveillance capital creates a world of ‘no exit’ with profound implications for the human future at this new frontier of power” (21).

The idea of ‘exit’ frames us in a world not only of current totalising enclosure, but also imagines a world outside our own which not only will be the result of ‘exit’, but also contain its own exits. Without the latter, the former complaint (of a lack of exit) would be void of content.

'Exit' replaces the image of King Kanute holding back the waves. Evoking a high-tech version of the 60's mantra 'Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out'.

There is an alternative reading on exit which i’ve found at least to be thought-provoking. Nick Land* in a recent interview when asked about ‘exit’ from capital in the context of Left Accelerationism (L/Acc) stated:

“Capital is nothing but pure exit.”

Land’s contention that there is a transcendental error when talking about an exit from capital - you can’t exit from exit - does a couple of interesting things. By taking ‘exit’ off of the table Land in some ways responds to Efraim Carlebach’s Marxist reading of both Land and Mark Fisher. Carlebach highlights how both Land and Fisher in there work openly use:

...the famous passage in The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels describe how “[t]he bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part...The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations...revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Land simply comments: “If Marx and Engels had systematically substituted ‘capitalism’ for ‘the bourgeoisie’ in this passage, its accelerationist credentials would have been vastly upgraded.”

Carlebach points out that this essentially erases the role of the bourgeoisie in progressing society from feudal to capitalist forms (and on from there) and tries to replace it with a social relation, one that encroaches and increases in speed and power. The Landian contention in response then is that in some metaphysical sense we are at the end of the road. We have reached a point where all attempts to ‘exit’ will be coopted, usurped or otherwise led back to capital.

This undercuts a certain thrashing about for An Alternative that has been seen on the left and is a more finalistic assertion of what Mark Fisher was writing about in Capitalist Realism. It says, ‘yes there is nothing outside of capital’. 

Taking this in a more hopeful register, this can redirect our energy to something more productive. A response that says, ‘right, so what shall we do now’. To return to Zuboff, she demands our future back, our sovereignty back, our privacy back. If we look ahead though, creativity, subversion and freedoms have almost always come from a reclamation of the modern, a wielding of those technologies that are being used to control us.  

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‘Will Not Let Die’ and the question of ‘cool’ in academia

In a recent university lecture, the professor interrupted the lecture to ask “Is Foucault still cool?”

We were getting a general overview of the philosopher’s theories, which continue to hold a huge sway on critical international relations, more than other social sciences. 

‘Cool’ is a slippery concept (this version is more Lou Reed than Aretha Franklin) and the question was partly facetious, but as with all jokes, there was a layer of seriousness to it. It got me thinking about whether concepts like biopower, power-knowledge, the panopticon* are in part so attractive because of their ‘edge’.

Which brings us to Jasbir Puar’s recent book The Right to Maim (2017).

The book is dense but rewarding. It explores ideas around disability and political oppression through the concept of ‘debility’. Puar uses ‘debility’ to argue that the kind of oppression that can be inflicted by occupying forces (for example in Israel-Palestine) is akin to the physical experiences of disability. As we will now turn to she describes the experience of the israeli occupation of Palestinians in bodily terms, so the social experience of the occupation is ‘debilitating’. 

There is *a lot* more complexity to it, but for the purposes of this piece we will get to the main case that Puar uses. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has a recent policy which is intended to avoid killing Palestinians. They call it the “let live” (129) policy and the idea is that when dealing with security issues the policy dictates that soldiers should avoid casualties where possible. Taken on face value, and out of context, one could see this as a well-intentioned policy aiming to preserve life. However, Puar draws out the inhumane consequences of a seemingly humane intention, namely the rising population of Palestinians disabled through gun-shot wounds. 

Puar highlights that while Palestinian fatalities have declined, violence against Palestinians has in fact increased. Rather than preserving life, the predominant impact of the ‘let live’ policy is in generating a population in need of care and support from those not yet ‘debilitated’. 

This is where Puar gets the title of the book. The ‘let live’ policy is actually an “implicit claim to a ‘right to maim’ ” (original emphasis, ibid). 

Taking this as the starting point, Puar considers Foucault’s formulation of biopower. Foucault originally discussed biopower as the ability of the state to ‘make live’ and ‘let die’, which is an expansion of sovereign power, or the power to ‘let live’ or ‘make die’. 

Puar argues that the ‘right to maim’ and the Israeli occupation takes biopower to a next logical level of control, it is a logic of ‘will not let die’. The argument runs that, in addition to the control of the checkpoints, the occupation has created an environment where Palestinian subsistence is encouraged only to extract value from Palestinian workers and nothing more. 

Now, Puar is absolutely right to broaden Foucault’s conception of biopower under the circumstances, the occupation’s control of Palestine seems to demand some new conception of what he called a control society. But this is also where the theory runs into problems. Puar, like Foucault, is so drawn to theory as dark and transgressive (i.e. ‘a right to maim’, ‘will not let die’, ‘debility’, ‘make die’ etc.) that a crucial insight into the evolution of power becomes distorted. 

Taking a step back and considering ‘will not let die’ as a kind of imperative declaration enforced by society, it intuitively seems much more applicable to modern forms of medicine. A doctor keeping a patient alive is not allowing them to die when in the past they would have done. The kind of advanced medicine represented by life support, statins, emergency operations that can now maintain life from injuries which in the past would have been fatal, these activities remove the option of death in concrete ways that one could imagine Foucault himself being interested in exploring as lifespans have increased. Advances in healthcare enable life and capacitate bodies that previously would have been unable to survive. ‘Will not let die’ is not so much something that one would ascribe to a soldier aiming at a civilian’s legs, but more to a medic looking to save life, even at the cost of debility. While ‘will not let die’ is an important addition to the Foucauldian lexicon, it is much more applicable to maintaining life than maiming it. 

In this analysis, ‘will not let live’ is a much closer description of the actions of the Israeli state vis-à-vis the Palestinians. In a recent response to the Disorder of Things symposium, Puar seems to respond to the inversion i’m suggesting:

What the maiming vector exposes is the liberal conceit at the heart of biopolitical thought, that “letting live” is always a gift in contradistinction to the sovereign right to kill, or the “make die” quadrant.

The problem is that ‘will not let live’ highlights a simple fact of the Israeli occupation, that Palestinians are not free, are harassed by the IDF, by settlers and the rest. This is not an attempt to cede that the IDF is acting to preserve life, they are indeed shooting people and maiming them, but is also attentive to other forms of what may be reasonably claimed as life-preserving activities. While it has no chance at being dark, subversive or unsettling, using ‘will not let live’ to describe the occupation and ‘will not let die’ describe modern medicine is also closer to lived reality. 

‘Will not let die’ as a phrase, when combined with the realities of the ‘let live’ policy, evokes a sense of active torture. When combined with modern medical practice it not only takes on a different meaning, it evokes a different set of analyses and links the ‘let live’ policy with the broader practices of the occupation. 

Elsewhere, Puar uses the idea of the ‘asphixatory regime of power’, adopted from Omar Salamanca (2011). Check points become choke points. The trouble is that Puar’s use of Salamanca is much closer to what Foucault would consider a discipline society (rather than a control society). A discipline society is one that ‘dealt with individuals and their bodies in practical terms’ (2003, 245). The territorial and digital enclosure that Puar describes combine to create a totalised environment of discipline. Everything, including ‘calories, megawatts, water, telecommunication networks, and spectrum and bandwidth allocation’ (2017, 134) is under this regime. This means that the biopolitical aspects of the occupation are lost right where they are needed. Puar is not looking at the generative role of governmental policies (for example, Israel’s fertility policies), or the exclusion of Palestinian voices from the legitimate national or international discourse on the Palestinian situation. And it seems that once again the reason is in order to make a point that evokes a dark and monstrous image, of choking.

Now I am aware that this should not come across as either accusatory or calling out an exclusion in a book when no book can cover everything. I also do not want to critique in order to minimise the real suffering detailed in the book, that is why I have linked to some of those details as reported in the media. No one can assume to know why a certain analysis is chosen over another. Dark and shocking imagery is absolutely appropriate when discussing dark and shocking realities. The reason to assess the book’s treatment of the IDF’s ‘let live’ policy from this perspective is to point out two things: first, that some important realities risk being missed or misconstrued, and second, that there is a shimmer of a normative tendency toward darkness in similar analyses.

The contention is that there is a tendency in this book and among some other academics (especially those with a Foucauldian bent) to contort their analysis in order to fit a darker or more evocative idea/phrase/image. As mentioned above, this could be for any number of reasons, but the assumption that it is in part social. That it is in some way aiming for a dark, cool, cutting presentation of academic knowledge. Last caveat: I don’t think I am above this, I find it alluring too, but there seems to be a trend to it, and I think it is one that doesn’t always help the analysis itself.

These are the films i’ve seen so far this year, ranked. There are a couple which aren’t from 2019, but almost none from before 2017. 

I’ve left out a couple that are either rewatches (Reservoir Dogs) or old classics i’ve never got round to watching before (Three Colours: Blue).

See what you think.

The Favourite / Palace intrigue, absurdist costumes, comedy and insane dialogue this film was fun in the smartest and most rewarding ways possible. A completely entertaining and self-contained original script that seemed perfectly tempered by its long gestation and edits from different authors. (Award for Best Wigs and the Word ‘Cuntstruck’)

Beast / This film is the most twisted, non-twisted film. Like being gently stroked by someone you don’t trust only to have a bucket of gravel thrown over your head. Never has a film’s title hovered over it so emphatically and in such a way that it gives it an extra dynamic poetics. Both the leads hold the camera in frightening and surprising ways throughout. Strangely similar to Burning and Gone Girl. Also the better of the two Jessie Buckley films on this list. (Award for being like Gone Girl, but British and Better)

Us / Better than Her, You, and Them, this was just as good as almost everyone said. A truly great genre film that held its audience with a Jordan Peele stranglehold that is unrivalled in mainstream cinema. The film seemed to suffer with audiences in some cases, but only because they were comparing it to Get Out. Both are exceptional, I don’t have a favourite, but while it’s an inevitable comparison, it also makes no sense, they are both two of the best films of the last few years. (Award for Best Film to Watch in the Cinema)

Wind River / This was also a great genre film, but where Us made you grab your chair, Wind River trusts you to navigate along with it in a way that’s slow, careful and methodical. I found this incredibly engrossing, similar to Winter’s Bone in some ways, and my favourite of the frontier trilogy written by Taylor Sheridan - the other two are Sicario and Hell or High Water. (Award for Best Nick Cave Humming Soundtrack)

You Were Never Really Here / This film from the maker of We Need To Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher is just as dark as its predecessors. It is also a very self-contained story of a hitman rescuing a girl from high-powered brothel. Not for the faint hearted, but incredibly engrossing and just a great gut-punch of a film. (Award for Best Taxi Driver Remake)

Leave No Trace / I just watched this one and while I didn’t love it as much as Mark Kermode (it was his favourite film of last year), I did love the length of time you got to spend with the characters. A father and daughter living out in the woods, have to navigate changes; films with this little content make you realise how jam-packed most mainstream films are, and how little the extra stuff really adds. The sense of the outside and of alienation from mainstream society slowly sinks in so that by the end, I felt a bit surrounded by all the stuff in my room. (The Kelly Reichardt Award for film without much of a Conventional Plot)

Burning / This is based on a Murakami short story, is also a slow-moving film. It reminded me of The Square, but where that film’s downward spiral feels like walking through warm mud, this feels like a breeze. An interesting and kind of awe-inspiring breeze. The dread in this is so well measured and balanced, the tone through the whole thing works perfectly and the performances are incredible. (Award for Best Hobby)

Jellyfish / This is a heartbreaking film about a 15-year-old girl in Margate who - due to an absentee dad and a mum with mental health and substance abuse problems - is trying to care for her two younger siblings and her mum, while keeping up with school and a job. Liv Hill is completely engaging and manages to look exactly as young as a 15-year-old and as old as someone with so much on their shoulders. The film is incredibly low budget and honest and the stand-up comedy (you heard me) that the main character performs as an escape is also brilliant. (Award for Most Supportive Teacher)

Fighting With My Family / From the low budget to the high. I’m not sure why I enjoyed this film so much, it’s a pretty straightforward feel-good film about a rags-to-riches wrestler. Based on a priceless Channel 4 documentary and directed by Stephen Merchant for maximum Norwich-girl-in-Los-Angeles comedy it is equal parts silly and warm, and it left a lump in my throat. (Award for Most Generic Regional Accents)

Ruby Sparks / This is slightly older than the other films on this list (2012), but i’d forgotten how good it was until I watched Wildfire and was reminded about Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano (see more at no. 17). Anyway it is a great feminist read on the idea of the female muse and tortured male author. In one sentence: a successful writer’s new character suddenly appears in his house, and other people can see her too. It’s got the feel of a Charlie Kaufman film, but without the self-hatred. (Award for Best Antonio Banderas Cameo)

Wild Rose / Another heart-warmer here, but with some grit thanks to the relationship between Julie Walters and Jessie Buckley. The film has a strange tonal shift at the end where every imaginable loose end gets resolved, which is a shame because the rest of it is understated and down-to-the-ground. (Award for Best Mince)

Spiderman: Into the Spider Verse / This one went under a lot of people’s radars. An animated film with the closest visual style to actual graphic novels ever, it is fun and funny, though I wasn’t all that invested by the end. Lots of people said that it surprised them, which had me expecting something more surprising, still lots of laughs and visually awesome. (Award for Best Psychedelic Fight to the Death, and Best Pig Spider)

Green Book / This film suffered massively for having won the Best Picture Oscar. If it weren’t for that we could have celebrated the good bits and not have to dissect it as The Symbol of Racial Retrenchment in Hollywood. There’s an argument to say that the film needs that kind of dissection either way, and I agree, but the positives in here - the lead performance from Mahershala Ali in particular - are worth celebrating, a little. (Award for Best Film with ‘Book’ in the Title)

The Spy Who Dumped Me / This is silly fun, but also one long car chase. A film that belongs on Netflix. Kate McKinnon is always hilarious, but it’s still jarring to watch SNL-style-sketch-acting in a film. (Award for Best Uber Ride) 

Dumplin’ / ‘With the best will in the world’ should be the tagline for this film. It makes sense that this sits on Netflix forever, for that day when you and your mates want to watch something without thinking about anything. But it is also not as good as similar films. See Little Miss Sunshine for further details. (Award for Best Jennifer Aniston Vehicle)

Three Identical Strangers / A documentary that got a lot of hype -  identical triplets who only discovered each other’s existence in their late teens, became minor celebrities and then find out about how they were separated at birth. The story is incredible, but is told in a pretty plain way and by the end I was wondering why I was interested. (Award for Best Kvetching)

Hell or High Water / This is the weakest of Taylor Sheridan’s frontier trilogy (with Wind River and Sicario coming in first and second respectively for me) but it is still a good story well told. It is the story of two bank robbing brothers out to raise enough money for one of them to look after his kids. For me the two central performances didn’t work, Chris Pine is wooden (sorry) and Ben Foster is irritating as the more erratic brother. Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham to drag the film into some deeper and more interesting place. (Award for Best Car Switching Technique)

Wildlife / I had high hopes for Wildlife after enjoying Ruby Sparks a lot, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan co-wrote this and Paul Dano directed as well. While this kind of sad, simmering story might have been carried by grand naturalistic symbolism when Terrence Malick was at his height (not now, but check out Days of Heaven), this film seems to be dragged by actors all too aware that they're in a film directed by an actor. (Award for film most like an American Novel from the 1950s)

Unicorn Store / This film is a mess. It only goes above Crazy Rich Asians because of the sweet relationship between Brie Larson and Mamoudou Athie, which feels like the kind of romance that can only happen in a film with such low stakes. (Award for Having a Film with no Script Supervision)

On an accelerated future

Connolly and Wolin worry about an accelerated future. Their prescriptions for a ‘slow-time’ in addition to any acceleration tend to mirror that of Zuboff's demand for individual sovereignty. Srnicek and Williams on the other hand seem to have no time for slow 'folk politics'. 

Each side in its their own right seems to be a good advertisement for their counter. The clarion call for ‘slow time’ seems to exhibit something reactionary, or at the very least unrealistic, while the call for an embrace of speed seems to assume that this must be done in the dust of democratic deliberation.

The biggest compliment that can be paid to this film is that it leaves you wanting… well actually there are so many big compliments you could give it. Liv Hill who plays the main character, Sarah Taylor, a 15-year-old girl trying to support her two little siblings along with her mum.

They call the siblings ‘the babies’, but they’re both around seven, which considering the amount of responsibility their older sister is carrying is not that far from adulthood. Sarah’s life has one glimmer of hope in her drama teacher, Mr Hale (Cyril Nri). He grasps at the one thing he sees in her, an ability to make her fellow pupils laugh when she insults them, and asks her to prepare a two-minute set of stand up comedy for the end-of-year talent show. Homework includes “Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Frankie Boyle”.

Apart from Mr Hale, the adults in this film mostly creep around, creating danger for Sarah, whether it’s her mum Karen who is played by Sinead Matthews like a 90’s party girl gone off, or the men in the arcade where she works. Sarah’s life and how she handles it feel so claustrophobic that by the end you’re almost out of your seat willing things to work out.

Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that her greatest achievement was “Tony  Blair  and  New  Labour”.

Apart from this being possibly a little self-serving, it does helpfully construct a political logic which we could extend to say, for example: "...and Tony Blair's greatest achievement was the socially conscious conservatism of David Cameron, which in turn led to the class conscious 2016 Conservative manifesto which aimed to win round the rural working class".

Without getting caught in a political version of ‘there-was-an-old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly’, what this framework gives us is an opportunity to see political success, not in achievements made, but in the world produced by the political practices undertaken. This is different to the overton window, which is about shifting what can be seen as politically possible. This is more about recognising achievements of social or political movements beyond ‘changing the nature of the debate’. Applying this elsewhere, one of feminism greatest achievements could be considered to be the word 'feminism', the Occupy movement’s greatest achievement was defining the 1% and the 99%.

More controversially arguably the 'greatest achievement' (purposefully using inverted commas to distance myself from any idea I think this is inherently positive. ‘Greatest’ is about how substantial the achievement is) of the state of Israel is the creation and adoption of modern Hebrew as the language of the Jewish people internationally.

The opposite can be true as well, some have argued that the success of the Iraq war protests was that foreign intervention became unacceptable when it was proposed in Syria in 2013.

There are definitely other and better examples, the point is that it is an interesting thought experiment opened by a simple reimagining of ‘achievement’.