Shuffering & Shmiling

For Ajamu, emphasizing the non-visual aspects of photography – working in and with the dark, in all senses of that word – enables a ‘move from the social body to the material body’. That is to say, it allows him to ‘refuse to see the body in terms of representation’, but rather in terms of sensation – as something open, leaky.

‘It teaches you the pleasure of waiting and that maybe waiting, and nothing happening, can be enough. In a darkroom, it’s like that line in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments [1977]: “I am the one who waits.”’ In the dark, other connections between photography and sex emerge: ‘Poppers smell like photographic fixer. Did you know that?’

We end up with an image of the British working class that does not include working-age people, that more often than not comes attached with the prefix of ‘white’, that renders invisible Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders.

The Times reporter was similarly struck, and noted that playing the keyboard occasionally produced the “blue flash of an electric spark.” There was, he wrote, “a suggestion of magic in it all,” comparing it to an effect by the stage magician Harry Kellar, then famous for levitating female assistants and simulating his own decapitation.

Electronic music existed in the United States before the majority of Americans had access to electricity. The lineage can be disorienting that way.

To sieze the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper.

Custom settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining in the will, and of motions in the body: all which seems to be but trains of motions in the animal spirits, which, once set a going, continue in the same steps they have used to; which, by often treading, are worn into a smooth path, and the motion in it becomes easy, and as it were natural... A musician used to any tune will find that, let it but once begin in his head, the ideas of the several notes of it will follow one another orderly in his understanding, without any care or attention, as regularly as his fingers move orderly over the keys of the organ to play out the tune he has begun, though his unattentive thoughts be elsewhere a wandering.

Healing as a society would mean inventing a new community beyond the identity and border politics with which we have produced sovereignty until now, but also beyond the reduction of life to cybernetic biosurveillance.

That wage labor is itself an institution of confinement has never been clearer than now, as we witness “essential” workers as de-munized bodies brutally forced into spaces of lethal risk.

The first phase of the epidemic disproportionately affected what were then called the Four H’s: homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and heroin users.

There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London.

We have assembled a Gideon's Army, small in number, powerful in conviction ... We face the future unfettered, unfettered by any principal but the general welfare"

The promise of modernization in the service of autocracy frightened Herzen who warned of a Russia governed by 'Genghis Khan with a telegraph.'

The only concessions to a more conventional documentary style in The Dilapidated Dwelling are the inclusion of talking-head interviews with real academic experts, architects and designers – the appearance of a phenomenally smug James Dyson, boasting of his commitment to R&D, provoked audience snickering

I imagine that apart from degrees of refurbishment and decay, much of the physical fabric is more or less as it was during the 1990s. The city has changed far more in other ways – socially, economically, politically and so on. Some of these changes are visible: there is, for example, no longer such an absence of continental diversions. Others less so: it’s difficult to discern just by looking that the proportion of owner-occupier households has fallen below 50 per cent, while an image of a hedge fund’s office in Mayfair probably doesn’t reveal very much about what’s going on inside.