About

This blog is an attempt to make writing, studying, and thinking positively playful activities. Writing intellectually but not academically; refusing the conventions of academic labour (write like this, read this, structure yourself like this) and treating writing like a vibration, not a representation. (For more on this, see the last chapter of Fred Moten and Steffano Harney's The Undercommons.)

I don't where this blog will end up, or what its grander purpose is. Its job, for now, is to act as a receiver, a radio channel or frequency: tuning into those odd, playful thoughts that ground themselves in my fleshy brain -- the kind of thoughts which intrigue you or make you laugh, but ultimately never get developed -- and actively seeking to amplify them, zoom into them, nourish them. What happens when we actually try and resonate with and amplify those weird social vibrations, which manifest within but cannot be reduced to our consciousness? What is the result?

As can be inferred, this blog refuses the voice of the individual author. As Mark Fisher puts it, all 'I' am doing with this writing is adding a kind of "subjectivist fuzz" to concepts, movements, affects, intensities, etc. that exist far beyond me, or any 'one' for that matter. What will be produced will (hopefully) contain value, truths, facts, important arguments - but, again in Fisher's words, 'I' will inevitably "bodge it". Straying away from a respectable if somewhat joyless empiricism obsessed with what is means embracing areas of life more fuzzy and less determinate, harder to pin down (though with no less rigor, of course). I'm interested in these 'areas' because they seem to be the site of transformations, the what can be rather than plainly what 'is'. In a world that so plainly needs to change, so plainly needs to rid itself of capitalism, neocolonialism, imperialism, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, it's vital we keep tuned into these frequencies, these 'areas'. Organising, protesting, striking, occupying are all wonderful and valuable things, but in that they are so firmly grounded in the now, the urgency of the present, they are not sufficient alone at effecting the radical transformations we need. Alongside all this we need spaces to dream, sense, and feel, that estrange us. Maybe this blog could be such a space, in some minuscule way.


Twitter: @anarchoccruism