Friday 1 October 2010

cloacal critique

That which is communist is not “violence” in itself, nor “distribution” of the shit that we inherit from class society, nor “collectivisation” of surplus-value sucking machines: it is the nature of the movement which connects these actions, underlies them, renders them the moments of a process which can only communise ever further, or be crushed.
Theorie Communiste

In lieu of anything useful, another quote from TC on the nature of communisation and a minor reflection, that I'd somehow like to work into my HM paper, on the usual adoption of the negative value of excrement. Thinking of Brecht's 'bad new', Freud's equation of money and excrement, and Bataille's reversal with his (non-)concept of heterology, perhaps we might re-think a 'cloacal critique', although with an awareness that metaphoric reversals of valence seem pretty cheap when, as Mike Davis points out, so much of humanity does live in excrement (and has done). Perhaps there would be someway to connect to Owen's Socialist Lavatory League, and the inadvertently apocalyptic visions in the CiF posters' revelations of apocalyptic waste burning in suburban Britain? Or, of course, and as mentioned by Owen, Evan's salvage punk re-tooling of debris. After all, to return to Marx's point that history advances by the bad side and Olson's Kingfishers, 'on some rejectamenta' is where change takes place.

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