#srnicek

Newcastle: Pavel Srnicek flag returned

A flag which pays tribute to former Newcastle United goalkeeper Pavel Srnicek has been returned.

The flag, displaying the ‘Pavel is a Geordie’ chant, was taken after Newcastle’s 2-1 defeat by Chelsea[1] in the Premier League in August.

Goalkeeper Srnicek, who [played 190 games for Newcastle, died in 2015, aged 47, following cardiac arrest.

Srnicek’s…

Newcastle: Pavel Srnicek flag returned

A flag which pays tribute to former Newcastle United goalkeeper Pavel Srnicek has been returned.

The flag, displaying the ‘Pavel is a Geordie’ chant, was taken after Newcastle’s 2-1 defeat by Chelsea[1] in the Premier League in August.

Goalkeeper Srnicek, who [played 190 games for Newcastle, died in 2015, aged 47, following cardiac arrest.

Srnicek’s…

A flag which pays tribute to former Newcastle United goalkeeper Pavel Srnicek has been returned.

The flag, displaying the ‘Pavel is a Geordie’ chant, was taken after Newcastle’s 2-1 defeat by Chelsea[1] in the Premier League in August.

Goalkeeper Srnicek, who [played 190 games for Newcastle, died in 2015, aged 47, following cardiac arrest.

Srnicek’s former team-mate and ex-Newcastle keeper Steve Harper called for its return last week.

Harper, now an academy coach at Newcastle, wrote on Twitter: “Could whoever has taken the ‘Pavel is a Geordie’ flag please return it ASAP.

“The big man meant so much to so many people and it’s only fitting he’s remembered whenever NUFC play.”

Srnicek, who was capped 49 times by the Czech Republic, had two spells at St James’ Park between 1991 and 2007.

In his first spell, Srnicek helped Newcastle win promotion to the Premier League and was an integral part of the squad that came close to winning the title under manager Kevin Keegan in 1996.

Srnicek, who also played for Sheffield Wednesday, Portsmouth and West Ham, returned to Newcastle on a season-long deal in September 2006 but was released in May 2007.

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References

^ Newcastle’s 2-1 defeat by Chelsea (www.bbc.co.uk)

BBC Sport – Football

ON INVENTING THE FUTURE / Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek

Every “future” inscribes a demand upon the present → whether at the level of human imagination, or within the sphere of political or aesthetic action necessary to reach towards their realization...

Futures make explicit the implicit contents of our own times, crystallising trajectories, tendencies, projects, theories and contingencies...

The manifesto-form is the embodiment of this futural orientation → It brings with it a particular mode of address: declares, declaims, demands, and all in relation to some incipient future that it hopes to will into existence.

“The seeming impossibility of certainty in today’s political world, and in particular on the political left, renders the manifesto a slightly curious mode of address: just who would stand as prophets and pronounce the new world just beyond reach? Yet to do so is a painful necessity not because of the certainty of this or any other future, but because of the certainty of the persistence of the neoliberal alternative in the absence of attempts to move beyond the reactive and into the register of the prospective.”

More simply: we must begin to imagine alternatives to the present, however gauche, or risk the permanence of the trajectories of today.

Notion of “futures functioning as a heuristic fiction” (what elsewhere is described as a ‘hyperstition’) → In this sense, their relative truth value (or feasibility) is less relevant than their ability to break down existing prejudices, shibboleths and received wisdoms amongst the various silos and tranches of the political left. In posing these demands, a future orientation might emerge which, even were it not to fully realise these demands, would functionally transform the horizons of leftist politics.

Noiton of the taskification of labour

The consequences of the left’s abandonment and evacuation of the territory of the future → the left has relinquished the imaginative-libidinal terrain of the future. This can be identified across an entire range of different left-political phenomena:

from the collapse of European social democratic parties,

to the over-valorisation of critique in political academia,

and in the widespread reactivity on the part of radical left campaigns and activists, always keener to prevent and protect against neoliberal incursions rather than propose and propound some viable alternatives.

I.e. the left’s capacity to determine (or influence) the course of the future has also declined → “the future” has been abandoned by the left not just because it lacks the desire to design it, but also because of its declining hegemony, its relative weakness in the balance of forces.

As Lyotard’s epochal definition puts it, we have grown suspicious of the metanarrative, and in its wake historical teleology and even grand-scaled meaning-making have collapsed into an impossible to summarise plurality of fractured, partially overlapping micro-events → there is of course some truth to these claims, yet as we argue, Lyotard moves too quickly to dismiss the mass belief in ‘the future’ and the big picture trajectory → What has disappeared is faith in the future in the more depressing sense of a better future, while looming dystopian perspectives, of a future of hyper-neoliberalisation, rising surplus populations, and environmental catastrophe have become all-too ubiquitous...

The task of elaborating futures, both within the sphere of ideas and the domain of action, might be deemed on such a basis a classically modernist one. This is a frame which we partially endorse: Modernism’s emphasis on the future, on the possibility of human accomplishments to determine a better future, is certainly not to be abandoned.

THE ACCELERATIONIST MANIFESTO / Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams

Today’s politics → beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats…

30 years of neoliberalism: rendered most left-leaning political parties hollowed out of radical thought. At best, they respond to our present crises with calls for a return to Keynesian economics, in spite of evidence that the very conditions which enabled post-war social democracy to occur no longer exist.

The new emergent social movements have been unable to devise new political ideological visions: instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy. They propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.

In the absence of a radically new vision, the hegemonic powers of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence. To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures, and the recovery of the future as such.

Capitalism → associated with ideas of acceleration. The essential metabolism of capitalism demands economic growth, with competition between individual capitalist entities setting in motion increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve competitive advantage. In its neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.

However neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which is essential.

It is a severe misrepresentation that left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration. If the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.

For all its exploitation / corruption, capitalism remains the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains are not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form. An accelerationist politics hence seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least direct them towards needlessly narrow ends (patent wars, idea monopolisation… are contemporary phenomena that point to capital’s need to move beyond competition and its increasingly retrograde approach to technology). Rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.

Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. The material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed, but repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

Any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that after a revolution people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve and ignorant. We must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. While much of the current global platform is biased towards capitalist social relations, this is not an inevitable necessity. These material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.

“Direct action” is insufficient to achieve any of this: the habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success. We must be done with fetishising particular modes of action:

Politics must be treated as a set of dynamic systems, riven with conflict, adaptations and counter-adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each individual type of political action becomes blunted and ineffective over time as the other sides adapt. No given mode of political action is historically inviolable. Over time, there is an increasing need to discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities marshalled against learn to defend and counter-attack them effectively. It is in part the contemporary left’s inability to do so which lies close to the heart of the contemporary malaise.

The overwhelming privileging of “democracy-as-process” needs to be left behind: the fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action.

Democracy: cannot be defined simply by its means (via voting, discussion, or general assemblies) → must be defined by its goal: collective self-mastery.

The problems besetting our planet and our species oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex systems analysis is a new form of action: improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice which works with the contingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting. A new form of abductive experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world.

Capitalism is a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society.

Therefore movement towards a surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more rational global society → it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, such as the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising.

On how automation can facilitate a wealthy post-capitalst society.

Former Newcastle keeper Srnicek dies

Pavel Srnicek also played in Portugal, Italy – for Brescia and Cosenza – and for Banik Ostrava in the Czech Republic 29 December 2015 Last updated at 16:23 Former Newcastle United goalkeeper Pavel Srnicek has died at the age of 47, nine days after suffering cardiac arrest in his native Czech Republic. A big favourite with fans during his first spell at St James’ Park between 1991 and 1998,…

Former Newcastle keeper Srnicek dies

Pavel Srnicek also played in Portugal, Italy – for Brescia and Cosenza – and for Banik Ostrava in the Czech Republic 29 December 2015 Last updated at 16:23 Former Newcastle United goalkeeper Pavel Srnicek has died at the age of 47, nine days after suffering cardiac arrest in his native Czech Republic. A big favourite with fans during his first spell at St James’ Park between 1991 and 1998,…