Penarth Beach reveals two kinds of “dinosaurs”: prehistoric fossils and the discarded commodities of modern life. As Walter Benjamin suggested, both bear traces of vanished lives - and hint at the future ruins of our own consumer world. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/two-dinosa...
Adorno argues language is “administered,” marked by quantification / profit. Expression that resists this is dismissed as irrational. As this logic presents itself as objective, it extends across all linguistic forms. LLMs can be seen as natural successor to this instrumentalised form of language.
The brutality often associated with the production of value would likely be too much for the sensitive, happy and mystified souls involved - at least judging by the stock photograph.
I agree, but note life exists beyond the spectacle, partly to ease my own hopelessness. What escapes consumerist falsehoods can appear in everyday life, if we’re attentive. As Raymond Williams said, no dominant culture ever exhausts the full range of human practice, energy, and intention.
It’s hard to see how things can change when even new “clean” technologies come from the same capitalist mindset that created the bad old problems in the first place - to misquote Brecht. Real change must come from the bottom up; as the real catastrophe is the continuation of the status quo.
The “Red Wall” has descended into cliché and needs fresh critique. Art practices can help by revealing meaning through absence and presence - showing how capital both gives and takes away - while highlighting the enduring human value that persists. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/photograph...
After years as a miner, longer in Labour, I joined the Greens the day before the election, and feel vindicated. Reform - and now, disappointingly, Labour - do not reflect mining communities’ tradition of challenging entrenched power rather than blaming scapegoats: the impoverished and marginalised.
It’s strange when the liberal press suddenly “discovers” that capital is an objective force shaping not just society but culture as well. That cultural forms mirror modes of production or, in Raymond Williams’ terms, the structure of feeling that underpins them.
A history of working-class resistance would be worth redeeming too. One where there remained the conviction resistance be directed at entrenched power rather than toward their designated scapegoats: the impoverished and the dispossessed. History when thought of like this remains open to possibly.
After Adorno, nature isn’t a timeless given, but a construction shaped by discourse and historical process. A landscape continually reorganised and sanctioned by capital. Complicating any bucolic reading, as representations often obscure the violence that underpin seemingly pastoral scenes.
I guess because dishonesty is now so utterly naturalised. By coincidence, I’m just about to do a lecture on art practice and radical honesty.
Why Fredric Jameson proposed cognitive mapping: not to fuel conspiracy, but to counter it. By using aesthetic and art practices to 'map' global capitalism in the everyday, including its ideology. Cognitive mapping helps us represent, recognise, so understand real systems and to dismantle false ones.
In the first wave of post-war developments, this estate is emblematic of the social contract. 'Operation Raise the Colours' has colonised a road nearby – the flags already frayed, some having fallen to the ground attracting little attention. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/a-council-...
Marx’s insight the domination of nature mirrors that of the subject, the climate crisis isnt't external to social relations, but an intensification of them. So the need for a *mimetic* relation to nature, hence the aim of Joel Kovel's eco-socialism. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/the-blaens...
Fredric Jameson admits there is an inevitable failure built into his concept of mapping capital. This should not be understood as defeatist, but rather as a Sisyphean condition: a process that must continually be taken up again.
landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/art-as-cog...
This photo prompted a reflection on my own experience as a miner, and Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the re-emergence of fascism. Particularly his prescient argument that such tendencies would reappear, if anywhere, first in the United States. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/theodor-w-...
Pit-head baths embodied a collective reality. They were structures from a period where there remained the belief that resistance is directed toward entrenched power, rather than their designated scapegoats: the impoverished and the dispossessed. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/the-politi...
Walter Benjamin was acutely aware capitalist history unfolds not as linear progress, but as catastrophe. The ‘messianic’ task of knowledge is to rupture the inevitability of this catastrophe, to reveal counter-histories of refusal and possibility. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/the-old-pi...
I found this collection bucket not long ago for the Liverpool dockers' strike, at the home of a friend who was head of the printmaking department at Bradford School of Art – affectionately, known to some as The Socialist Republic of Printmaking. landscapeasdissection.substack.com/p/a-fragment...
As Marx observed, capital accumulation tends toward infinity: there is no limit to wealth. For the precarious class, as we call them today, the inverse holds. Poverty is bounded, not by sufficiency, but by survival; beyond a certain threshold deprivation culminates in social and biological death.
In so far as, as Marx pointed out, the motor of capital is greed and fear.
or the Frankfurt School
I often reflect on Theodor Adorno’s theory of negative reasoning, which locates meaning in what is absent or lost rather than in instrumental value. As he notes, when one learns to fear a knock at the door as the Gestapo’s arrival, one comes to truly understand the meaning of freedom.
Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City comes to mind here. In essence, his argument is a dialectical one: you can’t have one without the other.
See Theodor W Adorno / Frankfurt School, particularly The Authoritarian Personality and Dialectic of Enlightenment. It’s kind of all there, the answer to your question.
“…you can't make much of an alliance out of negatives; the only real basis of alliances is agreement on positive proposals for transcending the negatives.”
Raymond Williams, Decentralisation and the Politics of Place, 1984
It is the kind of question I ask myself constantly and is my fascination and trust in history. I believe capitalist history, as ongoing catastrophe, may demand new barbarism before opening a horizon of possibility. Pessimistic, I know, but such is the trajectory of human existence.
I have ‘the brick’ for you.
Talking like we are now, as citizens, means the non-identical / utopian is not easily lost, and will continue to be the case, as it has been throughout the barbarism of history.
Adorno's point, as you know, is that the non-identical must be rediscovered at every stage of humanity, his project of negation—or thinking, if you like. But like you say, the present is lost and, in a generational sense, so is the future.
