#the one would say something distinctly anti-capitalist

[thebiggestfuckgiven]

i just think they would get along

[against-forms-recognizable]

My husband has a good friend from his college days who we've known for a long time, this guy who was born here but whose parents are from India. He was dating another friend of ours for a long time, this super smart super cool Jewish woman, but they split up. This was revealed to be due to long-standing tensions between her, him, and his family. She wanted to marry him, have kids, settle down, and he wanted the same thing, but his parents and family continually threatened to disinherit him and cut him out if he had kids or a marriage with anyone except a respectable Indian woman. This is, of course, extremely racist, culturally chauvinist, and xenophobic, not to mention abusive and controlling. It's also not very uncommon at all with immigrants.

Which is weird to me, specifically in the case of India, because they've embraced the standard Western values to a great extent. Like, the normal package of Democracy and Free Markets and Human Rights, it's very much a part of the weave of the Indian cultural fabric now. So why did those things get picked up and not the je ne sais quoi individualism which produces the abolitionist tendencies against various forms of traditional prejudice and discrimination we see in Western culture? There's a book I've mentioned on here before called Breakout From the Crystal Palace, written in the 1970s by this guy named John Carroll, which finally made me have a possible inkling as to why.

In the book, John says that modern Western philosophy has produced three distinct threads of viewpoints on selfhood and individuality; one rooted in the liberal, rational/empiricist outlook of humanism and the enlightment etc., one grounded in Marxism and class/identity, and the last being the distinctly anarchist line of commentary generated by thinkers like Nietzche, Stirner, Dostoevsky, Thoreau, Wilde, and so on. This last one is different from the first two by basing itself in critique, and specifically critiques of ideology/morality, of objectivity/rationality, and of materialism/economics. This is not anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism he's talking about, believing those tendencies are more properly viewed as anti-state liberalism (since ancaps embrace natural law) and anti-state marxism (since ancoms embrace Marxist materialist and class analysis), but more the anarchism of the egoists, the illegalists, the individualists, insurrectionaries, Situationists, surrealists, nihilists, and so on. It's this line of thinking that was responsible for generating post-modernism and the sexual revolution and so many of the transformative cultural dynamics in the West over the last century.

If we take that insight and apply it to the historical context of the rest of the world, the reason why individualism never caught on to such an extent outside the West becomes a little bit more clear. The process by which the set of Western values were received in places like India and China and Japan was one driven by states, and while communists and capitalists both maintain an interest in the kind of governance which leads to purposefully exporting your ideology abroad, that is definitionally something anarchists have not been involved in.

In light of this, I would probably say, people in the West afraid of the decline of Western values in the face of ongoing immigration from highly different cultures should have more confidence in the ideas of their own. (Honestly I think it's better to dissociate from cultural identities in general, but people are gonna people) Post-modernism and individualism have proven to be a nigh-unassailable fortress of ideas, and its tenets will be picked up by osmosis and synthetically work their magic on foreign cultures over time in much the same way those ideas have changed the Western cultural landscape. It's not a process that's going to resolve during our lifetimes, likely, but every culture in the world will eventually have to have its own conversations with itself about these ideas and questions, this line of thinking is not going to go anywhere or just disappear into thin air, and the other cultures of the world are not immune to it in some way that Western cultures are not, just like they weren't immune to Marxist or humanist ideas.

[oneweekoneband]

Some Context

I keep referring to BTMI! songs’ critiques of the “punk scene,” and I realize that I should give some context on what that meant at that particular moment in time. My account is going to be a little muddled because I didn’t actually live through most of what I’m about to recount (well, OK, I lived through it, but I was too young to understand it until I became a teenager at the very end of the era), so I apologize if this comes across as inauthentic or second-hand – the best I can say is that even if I wasn’t “there,” I felt the ripples and aftershocks of the tensions within the punk scene throughout my teenage years and beyond.

I don’t want to sound like I’m idealizing the past too much, so I’ll say that if my study of the genre’s history reflects any kind of reality, we can safely say that punk rock, for all its rebellious posturing, has always had a commercial aspect to it. Hell, everyone knows the story of how Malcolm McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols as a kind of “anti-boy band” specifically to make money. But it wasn’t until the 90s that punk became a business institution. And this turn of events revolves largely around the rise of a “sub-genre” of punk that has now become the first thing most young listeners think of when they hear the word: pop-punk.

The biggest pop-punk bands of the 90s (Green Day and Blink-182 being the most notable examples) enjoyed a steady rise to mainstream popularity from the time of their origins until many reached the kind of “superstar status” previously reserved for what were known in the 70s and 80s as “arena rock” bands. This was largely unprecedented, and it fundamentally changed how punk as a genre was approached from a musical and political standpoint. By the mid-2000s, punk became an opportunity to make big money, upping the stakes for anyone trying to get a piece of the pop-punk pie.

At the same time, pop-punk began a fragmentation into increasingly stratified subgenres that attempted to alter what some saw as a disappointingly formulaic approach to counter-culture. Thus we got emo*, metalcore, and, of course, ska-punk. The irony of this genre stratification was that the subgenres proved to be just as restrictive and formulaic as pop-punk, if not more so: metalcore bands must have tuned-down guitars and screamed vocals, ska-punk bands must have a horn section, downbeats on the 2 and 4, and sections that alternate between ska and hardcore, etc. And with these subgenre divisions came further divisions of punk fans into cliques that frequently fought amongst each other for the spotlight, each claiming to be the true successor to the iconoclasm of the original punk movement. On top of all this, some punks with noisier/avant-garde leanings that could smell the stagnation coming found solace in rejecting any kind of commitment to pretty much anything, adopting a cheap irony to shield themselves from the self-parody they might otherwise be accused of. But instead of opening up new creative avenues, this stance tended to lead only to a callousness that encouraged making fun of almost anyone who claimed to take what they were doing seriously, creating a race to the bottom for who could appear to care the least.

This is the scene I imagine Jeff grew up  through; I merely grew up in the midst of it. This was already the state of punk rock by the time I started listening to it in the late-2000s. Naturally, Jeff had a lot to say about it. His music and lyrics in BTMI! frequently challenged the apparent incoherence of playing punk rock in the 21st century. Perhaps the fact that he started from a position in it considered (by the mid-2000s, although Propagandhi had already released “Ska Sucks” in 1993) to already be deserving of mockery, that of the much-derided ska-punk scene, is part of what gave him the vantage point he had. BTMI! started with songs in a genre already considered to be obsolete, and Jeff sounded like he was fully aware of this from the start; he sings and plays with irony, but it’s a different kind of irony than that of the callous hipster types that had started to dominate the scene at that time. BTMI!’s sense of irony feels like it’s laughing both at and with itself, like a person who knows exactly how ridiculous they look in doing something but goes ahead and does it anyway. And there’s a freedom in this, the freedom that comes from both self-awareness and shaking off the chains of shame simultaneously.

Granted, BTMI! didn’t just play ska-punk – over time, their sound grew more and more diverse as they branched off into different experiments and new arrangements. This was another challenge to the punk scene of the time: a refusal to be pigeonholed and restricted to a single genre. Jeff mentions in some of his notes how much he was inspired by music that falls pretty distinctly outside of the realm of punk, like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Beach Boys, and his own music reflects those influences. BTMI! was more than a ska-punk band, and, against the limited measure of what a punk band could be at that time, more than a punk band as well.

In addition to its ironic malaise, BTMI!’s lyrics also tackled the punk scene’s in-fighting problem and general hostility to anyone perceived to be coming from outside of the culture. Jeff decried gatekeeping and violence at shows, pushing instead for a community based on kindness, positivity, and recognition of what members of the scene have in common. Punk rock is still angry and political in his vision – during the Bush years, how could it not be? – but that anger is also therapeutic, helping to lift up those who come to punk seeking some kind of release from mainstream capitalist drudgery. And even those that don’t care about punk deserved respect; Jeff was a big proponent of not being cruel to the “boring nice people” who weren’t a part of the scene.

One final note for context that doesn’t inform BTMI!’s music as much as my own understanding of it: by the late 2000s, another development occurred within punk, once again to its detriment. The worst aspects of the emo and metalcore movements came together into something that would become known as “the scene,” populated by “scene kids.” Though rejected by most “traditional” punks, this quickly became the most popular subculture of its time, and is likely how the majority of kids in the last couple generations ended up learning about punk as a culture and musical form for the first time. BTMI! didn’t necessarily explicitly address this development (though there are hints of some recognition of it in their lyrics), but their music did stand out in stark contrast to most of the “scene” music of that time. This is partly what attracted me to them so much: they were a punk band that had nothing to do with “the scene,” independent thinkers with a musical vision of their own, willing to mock anything (including themselves) but still seriously committed to what they did because they knew that was what they wanted.

*Yes, I know that the roots of emo reach further back, but I’m talking about when it began to solidify into what we recognize to be “emo” today – let’s face it, Rites Of Spring is a far cry from My Chemical Romance, or even, I don’t know, Cap’n Jazz.

[lizpelly]

The Anarchist’s Playbook: Occupy Boston takes a page from the radical underground (October 12, 2011)

Since all of the Boston Phoenix archives are either deleted from the internet or difficult to access, I have been wanting to republish some articles in full here for years, and thought this might be a good place to start. I wrote this short piece during Occupy Boston, at a time when it seemed like the contributions of anarchists were not being fully understood. It feels particularly relevant right now. This was written in 2011, and although I would report it out differently now, I still consider it to be an interesting document.

* * *

Just hours after his men finished wiping the Greenway's manicured gardens with the bellies, knees, and faces of Occupy Boston last Tuesday, the BPD top cop attempted to create dissent by blaming a familiar bogeyman: the "anarchists."

BPD Commissioner Ed Davis told the BostonHerald on Tuesday that he had no problem with the real protesters. "The [Occupation] group that was here for the first 10 days was working very closely with us," he said, "but they warned us yesterday morning that a new group, the anarchists, wanted to take control."

Occupy Boston scoffed at that statement — suggesting that the BPD was using a loaded term to turn public opinion against a nonviolent movement. "Any 'anarchists' who tried to disrupt the peaceful protests were BPD plants," the group tweeted from its official @occupy_boston account. "Our anarchists linked arms and sang songs. Peacefully."

In fact, the Occupy movement is deeply rooted in anarchist traditions and values. Many of the national Occupy movement's organizational tools — the lengthy general assemblies, the finger-waggling exercises in consensus-building, the free food and clothing available throughout camp — come from anarchist models of direct action, horizontal organizing, and gift economies.

In Boston specifically, Occupy draws on the experiences of the local direct-action activist community: the anarchists and DIY enthusiasts who have long organized non-hierarchically in collective houses and radical book shops. The current occupation in Dewey Square is ultimately providing a national stage for a fringe population that has espoused these anti-corporate ideals for years. But suddenly — as the protesters chanted to the BPD on Sunday night — "the whole world is watching."

Zaina (the activists interviewed asked that we not use their last names) is a 20-year-old BU student who volunteers in Occupy Boston's food tent. She's also a veteran of Food Not Bombs, an international grassroots network of independent groups that serve free vegetarian meals to all comers. Using mostly salvaged food, Food Not Bombs, like Occupy, is distinctly anti-capitalist. Before the Occupation, FNB's focus was on providing two meals a week — one in Central Square, one in Boston Common — mostly to homeless people and traveling kids. Now, Zaina and other FNB regulars work alongside other Occupy volunteers, serving food around the clock to the camp's residents and visitors; they've already fed hundreds.

In the next tent over from food, the "Really Really Free Market" offers a space where anyone can drop off unwanted items (mostly clothing) and/or pick up something they need — for free. It's based on the radical anarchist concept of a "gift economy." In stark contrast to market economies, there's no expectation of direct compensation for giving. Local collective houses organized RRFMs in Allston's Ringer Park throughout this past summer.

But the influence of anarchist culture on the Occupation goes beyond the notion of a free exchange of goods and services. For good or ill, the interminable, self-involved "general assemblies" — something often picked out as a weakness of the Occupy movement — also have their roots in the anarchist underground. It's called "horizontal organizing," decision-making without a command hierarchy or a leader.

"I don't think consensus organizing and horizontal organizing is exclusively anarchist," says Jacob, who lives in a cooperative house in lower Allston. "But it is an idea that we use and love. And I think that it is really addictive. When you participate in a collaborative process, long and slow as it is, at the end . . . every time we pass a decision, the crowd at the GA just roars. Just because we made it, we got through, we heard everybody's voice. And it feels good. . . . It's crazy. And so beautiful."

As the Occupy movement spreads to dozens of cities, it is bringing with it a new organizational structure that is fundamentally different from the marches and the protests of the Civil Rights era and, later, progressive protests against the Vietnam war.

For anarchists, the Occupy movement is transforming their intrinsic daily practices into tactics utilized by the masses.

"When I go to meetings, we do the twinkles all the time," says Zaina, referring to the now-ubiquitous hand gesture that indicates an occupier's support for a given idea. "And to see hundreds of people doing that now is so great. . . . This has been spread across so many people, you just look around, and you see 200 people doing the twinkles, and it's just so great."

[ponderanew]

Can Protestant atomization be overcome?

And should it be?

(This is a lightly edited version of an essay I wrote for a law school seminar on capitalism and democracy.)

Introduction

Protestantism, it has to be remembered, is only masked, momentarily, as a religion. What it is underneath, and enduringly, is a way of breaking things.

- Nick Land, The Atomization Trap, Jacobite Magazine

European political philosophy, from Hobbes to Mill, consists essentially of efforts to construct and justify new foundations for society in the destabilized wake of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation did much more than dictate new church authorities and tweak a few doctrines pertaining to salvation: it swept away many (macro-scale) political entanglements with the institutional Catholic Church and introduced an entirely new (micro-scale) self-conception in relation to truth, first of the religious variety and later all others. The fundamental unit of Protestant society was no longer the fief, the parish, or the guild, but the atomized individual. It is this individual that almost all these European political thinkers begin with when trying to derive the characteristics of the good society from first principles.

An atomized individual is one who conceives of him- or herself as final authority on matters of conscience, ideology, association, or other relevant characteristics by which an individual can be distinguished from the surrounding society. To the extent an atomized individual submits to an outside authority with which he disagrees, he does so only externally and begrudgingly, as the result of an internal calculus that such submission is more tolerable than the consequences from not submitting. His thoughts are not initially taken captive to the obedience of any authority he does not choose, and the authorities from which he derives his own thoughts and ideological commitments are made by his continuing choice of and assent to those authorities, not by their intrinsic authoritativeness. Naturally, his associations are voluntary, with exit of some form or another always remaining an understandable (if not positively sanctioned) option. His rallying cry is Luther’s (probably apocryphal) “Here I stand: I can do no other.”

Armed with his own Bible, telescope, rational mind, or empirical senses in turn, the Reformation man gave way to the Enlightenment man, and on into Modernity, becoming more thoroughly atomized along the way. The Reformation method of changing society, what Tocqueville saw as the common method of Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire, flows from the basic presupposition of the primacy of private judgment. Luther did his part to unlatch society from Mother Church, Descartes from any sort of inherited dogmatism in religion, Voltaire from religion at all; it fell to the social thinkers of post-Reformation Europe to replace Christendom and its corresponding hierarchies with an entirely new foundation.

These thinkers were thus involved in answering a distinctly Protestant-flavored question: how do atomized individuals socially cohere? Their answers were concerned primarily with how societies produce and maintain liberty and equality for their citizens. The preeminent importance of liberty and equality appears obvious given the above definition of atomization: if man is atomized, then liberty (the independence of man from man) and equality (the non-domination of man by man) are fundamental to his nature. Social arrangements that render man in fact unfree or unequal are thus predicted to decohere; human beings will tend to settle into arrangements that more closely mirror the innate qualities that their natures predict.

We see these themes even in Thomas Hobbes, who seemed to value security more than continuing liberty or equality: the act of man in the state of nature to come together and create a sovereign has legitimacy precisely because man is free and equal. In other words, liberty and equality for Hobbes are the preconditions of meaningful political participation, although their ongoing role once a sovereign is established is less pressing for Hobbes. The central roles of liberty and equality become all the more explicit and thoroughgoing in John Locke and the American and French revolutionary political documents, which place the two values front and center in their blueprints for democratic governance. Democracy, as it approaches universal suffrage, increasingly guarantees formal liberty (subject to the general will, the tyranny of the majority, or what have you) and substantive equality. Adam Smith’s notion of the market society is founded on “natural liberty” and its consequent equal treatment of all in economic matters; capitalism is thus a system of substantive liberty and formal equality (with vastly unequal outcomes resulting from everyone’s equal entitlement to transact voluntarily). The promise of capitalist democracy is that it maintains the two societal virtues in a tense balance: when capitalism threatens equality too much, democracy reins it in; when the tyranny of the majority impedes liberty too much, the iron law of the market finds a way around the roadblock. In sum, both democracy and capitalism are aspects of the great answer to the question of how atomized individuals form a society; they presuppose, rather than prove, that man is of necessity atomized.

At this root Karl Marx struck. Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity was itself a grand exposition of the distinctly Protestant character of atomized man, probably did not believe himself to be saying anything controversial when speaking of a human essence or human nature as a set of characteristics possessed by each individual. For his boringness, he became a punching bag for the animating idea of the most vigorous political movement of the 20th century. Marx’s counter-proposal was the first truly alternative anthropology to find purchase in the European consciousness after the Reformation. But Marx’s effect seems, in retrospect, to have been something more like a surface treatment than a true reorientation of man. The seductiveness of private judgment was not displaced by inculcation in revolutionary practice, and 20th-century left-leaning groups splintered off of each other in a pattern reminiscent of Christian denominations in the American South. Many of today’s states that still call themselves Communist have essentially market-based economic systems. This isn’t to say that history has settled the battle between individualist atomization and Communist collectivism, but to the extent Marx was correct about the reality and power of thought being its real claim to truth, atomization still seems to be winning.

Knowing all this, is de-atomization achievable at all, and if so how could it be done? Marx took a shot at the king, and the perception since 1989 has been that he narrowly missed. Nietzsche, as the intellectual godfather of the other influential 20th century collectivist movement, seems to have missed by a wider mark. It remains to be seen which shots not yet taken might land, but reviewing the history of internecine Protestant disputes—discussions of which troublemaking social facts needed addressing, which aspects of a society contributed to its resilience—can give us an idea of where the weak points might be. If Protestant atomization is the end of the history of anthropology, it is so because to decide, for yourself, knowing what it is, for or against it is to be complicit in it. Anti-atomization, as an ideology propounded by an individual, seeking the voluntary assent of his fellows, performatively presupposes atomization. The least atomized communities today are those that have successfully shut out accurate information about the rest of the world; the most effective way, and perhaps the only way, to escape atomization may be never to atomize in the first place (think North Korea).

Lasting de-atomization may be impossible, and avoiding the phenomenon in the first place has come with substantial costs. So the natural follow-on question is whether and why it might be desirable even to try to overcome atomization. Once again, the answer will draw on the history of internal debates about how to kludge together a social system on a foundation of atomized individuals, as well as Marx’s and Nietzsche’s external critiques of the most favored kludges. Slapping a moral valence on atomization as a general trend is easier said than done; you might as well ask whether “growth” or “dynamism” is good or bad. In all such cases, the answer is clearly that the goodness or badness of the abstract principle depends on the context. All we can do to provide a useful answer, not abstracted to the point of meaninglessness, is describe what we lose, and what we gain, when we unglue society and reconstitute it on an atomistic foundation. Burke provides a fond glimpse at the society we lost, Locke and Smith give us the dual cores of atomized society—democracy and capitalism, and Marx provides an internal critique of the system and a jumping-off point for the next would-be rebuilder of a collective social foundation. I will thus focus on these thinkers in exploring the relationship between atomization and social order.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek proposes a method of reading the major works of a canon subversively by situating their claims in light of a “minor text” from a disfavored or counter-hegemonic tradition. I propose to thus “short-circuit” the project of Protestant political philosophy by reading its claims in light of Nick Land’s brief essay “The Atomization Trap.” This reading identifies a rejected and disavowed premise that nevertheless explains the trajectory of the post-Reformation political philosophy canon: the sort of “human nature” that makes democracy and capitalism especially desirable is not the universal essence of humanity, but a distinctly Protestant phenomenon that is still progressively instantiating itself and has not finished eating its way through our organizational principles. This atomization premise implies that liberal capitalist democracy is not, in its current form, the end of history. If human nature were stable, there might be a means of making permanent a system of political legitimization, built upon features like those of democracy and capitalism. But progressive atomization destroys the bare possibility of stable rules for political legitimization. Even if atomization has an endpoint, we aren’t there yet; capitalism and democracy will have to evolve or else be cast off as mere inherited dogmas by the ever-more-atomized man of the future.

I. Burke: Actually, Inherited Dogmas are Good

Edmund Burke stands in a contrast to his contemporaries that becomes much more starkly apparent in light of the atomization premise. Burke’s history-first pragmatism always stuck out from the theory-driven approaches of his contemporaries, but his support for the American Revolution and opposition to the French allows a cursory reader to lump him in with the faction, internal to the Protestant project, that favored Locke’s take on natural rights over Rousseau’s theory of the general will. But a closer reading of Burke reveals him not as a conservative Protestant, but as a crypto-Catholic, in anthropology if not religion.

Burke’s basically Catholic outlook is apparent in his objections to the French Revolution and his theory of political inheritance. Burke’s appeal to sentiment in his description of the end of chivalry in favor of the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” is characteristic of his general approach. Chivalry is an exemplary institution of the sort that an organically integrated (i.e. non-atomized) society generates: it establishes particular modes of ritualistic behavior between persons of different rank, especially across gender lines, and by doing so simultaneously entrenches the underlying class and gender stratification of power in the society and (according to Burke) makes the lower-ranked members of that society happier with their lot, since the classification binds the nobles and knights along with them and tempers the force of the exercise of raw power by its normative strictures. Such an institution could sate the inherent human desire for recognition by means of a “pleasing illusion” rather than by tampering with the class ranks on which the social order was built.

The state of flux of the rest of French society, beyond the basic political liberty that the French Revolution achieved, was Burke’s ground for refusing to congratulate the French on their achievement. Burke’s analogy of social order to an entailed inheritance implies that conditions are attached to its transfer to each successive generation, and that these conditions require perpetuating certain norms of the prior generation’s social order. The English fee tail entrenched male primogeniture norms (and particular aristocratic families) by binding real property to their continuance; Burke sees the perpetuation of social order in much the same way, as contingent on the continuation of hierarchical social norms and strictures. His litany of institutions and societal qualities enjoyed by the Kingdom of France and lost or degraded by the Revolution—“laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved,” etc.—serves to illustrate the problem inherent in trying to convey social order without complying with the entailment.

Hobbes’ fear of instability is the nearest analogue within the Protestant canon to Burke’s anti-French Revolution sentiment, but Burke is clear that his objection lies elsewhere: not merely against the political act of rebellion against a monarch, but against the entire worldview animating the revolutionary project in France. Hobbes’ argument against a right of revolution depends on the atomistic individual owing it to himself to obey the sovereign that he or his countrymen chose, since consent to the principle of popular sovereignty and majority rule in the initial act of choosing a sovereign is consent to the sovereign that the process produces. Atomized man could (and for Hobbes, must) thus consent to the given sovereign despite his private objections to certain sovereign prerogatives or policy choices. But Burke could care less about what sort of political order human nature is said to predict.

Burke’s objection to the Revolution is more basic: reconstituting society by theorizing about human nature in the abstract and upsetting every institution not derivable from first principles is an inhuman, disembodied endeavor. Human societies, Burke claims, have historically developed organically by trial and error, not according to an ideological plan. They function as a complex ecosystem, with intermediating institutions such as the nobility and clergy, between the sovereign and the individual. These institutions temper and obscure the workings of power on the populace, making the subjection, inequality, and social immobility endemic in old-model societies more tolerable, as part of a unified whole with its own richness and grandness. (You might be a tenant farmer, slaving away in your lord’s fields to produce your quit-rent wheat, but your fealty is unimpeachable, and besides, the last will be first in the kingdom of heaven.) The revolutionaries’ project—to strip these intermediating institutions of their power, deposit whatever power remains in the assembly, and hope the society continues to hum along as it did before but with some fundamental inequities rectified—is therefore a pipe dream. There are simply too many variables to control for when trying to replace an entire social order with one derived from first principles.

Burke’s different perspective on the American Revolution is therefore more a function of the circumstantial prudence of the Americans than their ideological differences with the French. The American Revolution lacked many of the society-disrupting characteristics Burke would later lament in reflecting on the French Revolution. Burke notes that the Americans, as a distinctly Protestant (and dissenting-Protestant at that) people, had an intrinsic attachment to English-style liberty and self-governance; moreover, before the Revolution they had lived out this internal impulse by forming popular governments, subservient to the crown, within many of the colonies. A change in allegiance from the crown to their own government, set up according to many of the principles already existing in the colonial governments, was therefore much less drastic a shift than the French abolition of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the entire feudal system of obligations and privileges, as well as the disestablishment of the Church. Moreover, according to Burke, the colonists’ idea of liberty was more consistent with the English tradition, theoretically passed down as part of the “entailed inheritance” of English political order, than were the efforts of England to bring her colonies to heel. Such a revolution is fairly describable as a restoration of old principles, freshly adapted for a liberty-craving populace. Not so the French Revolution: there is no indication that the positive radical liberalism, rather than mere grievances with feudalism, of the assemblies was shared by the common man.

The different growing pains that the French and American republics experienced are traceable to the different suitedness of the government systems for governing the people of each republic, as they existed at the time of the revolutions. As a predominantly dissenting-Protestant group, and as a colonial society, the Americans were much more zealous for and experienced in self-government by the time of the Revolution. The French citizenry was largely Catholic and subject to feudal social arrangements; the elite lawyers who represented them in the Assembly, and whose ideas of human nature reshaped the state, were often not. Recriminations, executions, and a few more iterations of the republic were to follow in France. But America’s chief issue was less inexperience than internal division between the two sorts of freedom-loving Protestants Burke mentions: the southern slaveholders and the northern post-Puritans.

Burke’s perspective on atomization is complicated; he is no raging ideologue for or against it. He proposes that mashing a not-yet-atomized social order together with a new political order that presupposes atomization is a dangerous game. But when the people are already atomized, being the sorts of Protestants that are “most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion,” self-government that presupposes atomized man might work out just fine. So Burke cannot really be read to endorse either the individual or collective conception of human nature; he simply endorses individualist government for individualist man, collectivist government for collectivist man, and gradual transitions of government as the population individualizes. But his rosy depictions of feudal France give a helpful account of the sorts of virtues that a pre-atomization society is uniquely suited to incubate.

The problem with trying to retain a social structure that can incubate the virtues of chivalry and mutual respect between feudal classes is the system’s vulnerability to headstrong atomizers, which the history of the French Revolution illustrates. Burke seems to see the writing on the wall for the remaining pre-atomization societies in Europe as he chides the French for ruining the noble and mutually trusting exercise of sovereign power for all other insufficiently liberal states. Notably lacking in Burke is any indication that France should try to regain the virtues she has lost. Such a project would presumably be impossible, since once the pleasing illusions of feudal power have been stripped away, all there is is the bare exercise of political power motivated by atomistic ideology; reinstalling the illusions cannot fool anyone. The Revolution made the king and nobles into mere men, who died like any other; with them died the mystique of royalty and the comforting feudal structure according only to which power could legitimately be exercised. If government is to be rational, and rationality is to be judged by private judgment, then anything that can be judged to be in the public interest is doable, and nothing is beyond the reach of the State. And this sea change in the relationship of sovereignty to the individual, once accomplished, is irrevocable. A power that has shown itself willing to cast off all its limits once cannot be trusted to stay within them in the future.

II. Locke and Smith: How to Save Liberty and Equality From Each Other

Liberal, rational government has as its basis only the self-sovereign, contracting individual, so the only real limits on power at any time are those that nearly everyone is convinced are important. This makes social cohesion risky, since the rules governing decision-making for the society are subject to change based on popular whim. The project of liberal political theorists is thus to show that each self-sovereign individual properly ought to agree to certain limits on power, based on some first principles that everyone in the society already agrees are valid. For Locke, these principles are religious: the notion of a natural law that governs man in the state of nature, with God as judge when no human judge is available, is crucial for Locke to establish that there are limits to the power of a state over an individual. Mill appeals to utilitarian ethics to fill much the same role in a later, more secular age. Both were doubtless aware that the true cause of governments’ confining their exercises of power to the proper sphere, defined by Locke’s natural-rights theory or Mill’s harm principle, was not the principle itself but the deterrent effect of the popularity of the principle.

Adam Smith’s project is similar in that he is aimed at convincing atomized society to adopt a set of norms that promotes social cohesion, but his norms are economic and deal with statecraft only secondarily. The laws of supply and demand may be essentially laws of nature, but the sort of person who is likely to think in terms of, and carry on economic activity in knowing accord with, the laws is atomized man, not the feudal peasant. (The peasant pays his tithe-wheat, not because he is at least indifferent about having the benefits of satisfying a religious duty rather than a tenth of his wheat, but because that’s what peasants do.) Capitalism produces social cohesion for several reasons. First, it requires minimal restrictions on buying and selling along with a strong property regime, decreasing the chance that the populace will grow weary under oppressive state restrictions on their ability to earn a living while increasing the initial value of the investments that the people feel secure making. Second, its convincing theoretical foundation makes whoever wields sovereign power in a society at any given time less likely to implement restrictions that hamstring its productive power. Third, it flatters the ego of atomized man, telling him he does good for society by seeking his own good, and thus encourages its own continuation among the common people.

Despite their advantages, both liberal, natural-rights-based governance and capitalism are vulnerable in certain ways. Liberalism, more than capitalism, is endangered when the populace stops believing in it, be that because of security exigencies, a new sweeping ideological fad, or simple demographic shift or a reaction thereto. (The recent rise in popularity of illiberal-right nationalist parties in Europe can perhaps be attributed to this sort of dissatisfaction with liberalism.) Modern secular man may consider Locke’s discussion of the source of natural rights mere superstition and either support the political recognition of his own favored set of human rights (data privacy, broadband Internet, etc.) or reject the idea that there are real limits on what a democratic sovereign may do to respond to emerging needs. He may do so at no cost to himself, as long as his opinions are not too esoteric, but may face social sanction if his expressed ideas are repugnant to his fellows. This process is often slow but can be sped by large-scale social crises.

The fact that one can, as we Americans do, write the rights down in a Constitution and laws slows the disintegration process of the liberal consensus but does not arrest it. Laws have to be interpreted by people at the time they are applied, and if the underlying concepts need to be adapted (in the view of the appliers) to new circumstances, they will be. Thus did liberty, a consensus rallying-cry of our Revolution, morph into “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” one of the most divisive declarations of right in today’s climate.

So liberal democracy relies on social sanction to preserve its list of limitations on sovereign power, by which liberty is protected from the tyranny of the majority. Which particular liberties are protected may change, but the facts of democracy and limited government tend to persist. Capitalism’s productive power improves the material conditions of many members of society; those persons have a vested interest in its continuance and often derive extra political power from their economic power if they so choose. But when the sort of economic activity that robust market capitalism tends to promote leads to economic downturns, as happens with some regularity, democracy tends to react by restricting economic activity of various sorts. (Price controls as part of the New Deal, Dodd-Frank after the financial crisis, etc.) Rarely do such restrictions destroy or permanently hamper the power of capital in a society, but they do tend to sate the impulse of democracy to punish capital for its excesses. And capital inevitably increases its power despite the restrictions, by moving over to less regulated sectors of the economy, refusing to comply and paying the occasional fine, or some other workaround.

For its part, capitalism tends to secure liberal democracy against becoming illiberal. The interests of capitalists are aligned with those of the property-owning class throughout history, in favor of social stability rather than popular uprisings. Social stability comes in part from atomized man being content rather than being subjected to oppressive restrictions on liberty. Capital is thus unlikely to deploy its political power in support of internal changes that illiberalize society. (In recent years, capital has actively withdrawn economic benefits from U.S. states that have passed arguably illiberal laws, such as HB 2 in North Carolina.) This is not to say that capitalism tends to liberalize states that are already illiberal (Singapore comes to mind) but that the effect of capitalism is relative stability in whatever sort of political order a state already has.

So both democracy and capitalism are theoretically vulnerable to being abolished within a state by acts of popular sovereignty, but the two tend to reinforce one another. When a democratic society has higher economic liberty, the more-capable tend to outcompete the less-capable to a greater degree than when economic liberty is low (which is not to say that society approaches a pure meritocracy, just that the proportion of wealth attributable to merit increases). Inequality thus increases without any gentle, overarching social myth that justifies it; if you’re poor, the capitalist myth goes, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough, or you made bad choices. Democracy reacts to inequality by instituting redistributive systems: single-payer health care, Social Security, etc., which either restrict economic activity or appropriate the proceeds of it through taxes and fines. When democracy gets too far over its skis in an attempt to restrict or appropriate, capitalism finds a way to exploit the market inefficiencies created: whole cottage industries spring up to reduce the transaction costs created by new regulations, companies restructure compensation packages to exploit loopholes in the tax code, etc. And the relatively free movement of global capital means that no one democratic sovereign can hamstring it too much.

With this relationship between democracy and capitalism in mind, let us examine how successful Locke and Smith respectively are in their projects of building a lasting society on the foundation of atomized man. At first glance, Locke seems like a lost cause; he presupposes far too much in the way of detailed points of theology to be convincing to a modern, secular reader. But many of his conclusions are equally reachable by means of the implicit premises that seem to underlie much of contemporary liberal ideology. Smith’s empirical foundation still has its devotees, but his reliance on theology actually fares worse than Locke’s. Overall, the fact that both democracy and capitalism have survived as long as they have despite the falling out of fashion of many of their proponents’ premises implies that something in the nature of how atomization has proceeded up to this point, rather than external facts like particular theological doctrines, produces democracy and capitalism.

Locke finds the equality of man in his common creation by God, and his rights as set down in the natural law which is written on man’s conscience. We know that God made us free and equal by simply reasoning about our natural state, once antiquated concepts like the divine right of kings are shown by reasoning from the Scriptures to be false. God reinforces this rational judgment that all men by nature are free and equal by writing the natural law on our consciences, such that we feel that oppression is wrong. The natural law allows us to distinguish government from organized crime and valid claims to property from false ones. For Locke, all this is apparent simply from pondering the nature of things, in light of the Scriptures.

The finer points of Locke’s theology are no longer agreed by social consensus among historically majority-Protestant countries, but the basic thrust of his conclusion is still widely accepted. The notion of rights that inhere in each person equally by virtue of our humanity is still common, even if we no longer agree on what basis those rights exist. But this doesn’t get us all the way to a stable political order; we need some criteria for evaluating claims of right and deciding whether an asserted right the government is infringing is a real right such that the government foreswears its legitimacy by infringing it.

This lack of consensus on a method of evaluating claims of right threatens the Lockean project, but not terminally; as long as atomization remains, so do some self-evident rights. Some rights and liberties are inherent in the atomized self-conception; e.g., the right to one’s own opinions (and therefore freedom of religious belief if not necessarily practice) is necessary to exercise private judgment. Human equality is also inherent in the atomized self-conception; all of us have access to reason, so no one can dictate authoritatively what truth is, including ethical truth, for another; therefore no one has any authority over another’s actions not constructively consented to by the other. To the extent that society continues to be full of atomized individuals (and there is reason to suspect that it will), these rights will remain self-evident.

Other rights and liberties follow from the implicit premise of providential history, the sort of post-theistic Protestant worldview that uses phrases like “the wrong side of history” to condemn political stances with which it disagrees. This worldview is not inherent in the atomization process but is a strong corollary to it; the legitimacy of private judgment implies that many modes of being and living in the world, formerly repressed as improper on the basis of certain past superstitions or other theories now believed false, are just as honorable as the historically hegemonic modes. This worldview employs the atomization method to its conclusion—at least to whichever conclusions are fairly cognizable by the society at the time (it took four score and seven years for Americans to realize that “all men are created equal” meant regardless of race, and another 55 to realize “men” should be read there as the neuter noun for all of humanity). Since atomization tends to produce this worldview, it could become fixed in society to enough of a degree to form a sufficient social consensus of the limits of power.

Reading Locke subversively through the lens of atomization thus teaches us that it doesn’t really matter what the ground of rights is, as long as there continues to be sufficient social agreement on what it is. Since the atomized conception of the individual and the truths that it implies are the only continually self-evident truths in an atomized society, those are the liberties that everyone can agree the government exists to protect.

The most important liberty for the project of achieving social cohesion through liberal democratic capitalism is the right to appropriate and own property, and while Locke’s foundation for the property right is solidly provable all the way down to the nature of the atomized individual, he does not succeed in legitimizing any particular arrangement of property titles. Locke’s basic property argument is that every man owns his own labor, and therefore mixing one’s labor with material from the commons converts that commons-material into property, as long as the taken material is not wasted and as much and as good remains in the commons for others. This theory can explain how some property was created, but it provides no support for the current arrangement of property ownership, as there is no way to tell which parcels of land or chattels were taken from the commons in an original legitimate act and which were not. Locke argues that the use of money is a constructive consent for others to take more than they need from the commons, since the waste problem is solved, but the historical legitimacy problem remains: which titles descend from legitimate takings, where as much and as good was left for others, and which do not? Some takings were illegitimate when they occurred if the entire world is now parceled up. Other takings were accomplished by clear violations of the law of nature, as articulated by Locke. Should those be reversed as well?

One solution to the problem of property legitimacy is to deny the problem and hope that the democratic sovereign doesn’t get riled up over any morally questionable genre of property claims (e.g., the claims to much of the land formerly held by Native American tribes, or a resistance to paying reparations for slavery) enough to threaten the stability of a wide swath of property rights. In practice, this has worked out well, but there is no reason intrinsic to Lockean political theory why it must. It follows that, although the entitlement to property in general is provable from the atomization principle, and stable in a society where everyone can trace their property claims back to a legitimate taking from the commons, the particular arrangement of property titles that we have in any of today’s liberal democracies is not.

So the property-holder may have surety in the institution of property in general, but not in any title of his in particular, aside from that which he mixed his labor with in appropriating it from the commons. (Even property validly appropriated by another and transferred may be suspect, since the right to alienate property can be subject to limitations.) But perhaps it is too much to ask that the rightful owner of Blackacre be provable from historical facts and the nature of man, with no other premises involved. Maybe a little title risk is acceptable on the terms of liberal democracy—the risk can likely be mitigated through other means.

Capitalism and its market-society norms provide the residual risk-mitigation. Adam Smith’s vision of market society replaced the settled feudal order with atomized individuals entering into voluntary arrangements. Such arrangements allow people to acquire things they value more by trading away things they value less, so every rational trade increases the wealth of the nation. But every trade for goods presupposes clear title to the traded goods. So a society that wants to unlock the wealth-generative power of capitalism will generally develop clear rules to disperse clouds on title and statutes of limitation beyond which possession can be conclusively presumed to carry title. And since the political power of capital in capitalist states is high, these rules are insulated from change.

So if capitalism is stable, it can fill the property hole in the liberal-democracy puzzle. Unfortunately, capitalism is as vulnerable to a populace that ceases to believe in it as liberalism is. Smith’s account of the stability of capitalism relies on a sort of providential history quite different from that which now predominates in modern liberalism. For all of the economic benefits that the empirical analysis of capitalism suggests are present, Smith’s case for capitalism was as much psychological as based on a rational analysis of the material circumstances. For Smith, the ambition to accumulate, to gain the trappings of the slightly better to-do man in the street, encourages the sort of economic activity that makes everyone better off. His metaphor of the invisible hand, applied to figures such as the rich landlord who produces far more wheat than he can consume, refers to subconscious psychology, or perhaps divine providence, rather than a calculated decision to take advantage of economies of scale—otherwise the hand would not be invisible.  

Smith concedes that it is hard to trust that markets will satisfy the needs of the populace as well as planned arrangements do. It does take a leap of faith, as a newly post-feudal ruler, to liberalize the wheat market and then cross your fingers that the farmers collectively produce neither too much wheat, such that they cannot recoup their costs and are ruined, nor too little, such that the poor cannot afford bread. Smith justifies this leap of faith by an appeal to divine providence, which was probably more convincing to his audience in 1776 than it is to many liberals today—few of whom believe that the same divine providence, which ensures the “right side of history” comports with the Good, also ensures that farmers don’t misjudge demand and glut the wheat market.

But all is not lost: we now have centuries of empirics on how well markets function to provide goods at marginally above the cost of production, and what we formerly used to trust in providence to produce, we now trust in our own scientific skills to predict. And the great thing about science is that it too is an implication of atomization: the ability of private judgment to interpret the world requires there to be an interpretable world out there. So capitalist market norms, armed with empirical data on poverty reduction and economic growth, can provide a practical stopgap where liberal theory doesn’t require that we continue to recognize all the property claims we currently do.

In sum, both Smith and Locke argue for their preferred systems of social order on religious grounds that have largely fallen out of fashion. The rousing success of their preferred systems despite the secularization of society suggests that the real ground of their systems is not some religious metaphysic that society no longer swears by, but the presupposition of human nature as atomized. Since the important elements of both liberal democracy and capitalism are reasonable conclusions from the presupposition that human nature is atomized, they are likely to continue until atomization either goes too far for them to continue to generate social cohesion or gives way to a new collectivism. I propose that only the former is reasonably possible—atomization is a one-way ratchet.

III. Marx: Against the Bourgeois Atomizers

If the story Burke tells is a cautionary tale about what happens when you atomize your sociopolitical relations, Marx’s story is a cautionary tale about atomizing your economic relations. But unlike Burke, who contented himself to be an outside critic of a quickly atomizing society not his own, Marx found himself in the unenviable position of trying to re-collectivize his already atomized society. His method of trying (and failing) to do so is instructive for our question of how atomization could perhaps be overcome.

Marx substitutes a Hegelian historical inevitability for Smith’s doctrine of providence and unsurprisingly comes out with the opposite answer as to the structure of the good society. This could be as much a result of the sort of capitalism each thinker was exposed to as anything else. Smith’s vision of capitalism in 1776 was a relatively rosy one, populated by newly post-feudal towns full of artisans and rural farmers newly working for themselves. Marx writes during and after Britain’s industrialization, where the much more efficient use of unskilled labor was in grimy city factories, which were often undercutting the small-time artisans of the towns and drawing them into the cities as well. The trajectory of the health and well-being of workers under capitalism between Smith and Marx was not promising. It is no wonder that Smith came out extolling the invisible hand while Marx emerged predicting that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Marx recognized that the atomized view of human nature was a perspectival ideology, emerging from a particular social and material context, not a universal truth. Marx viewed human nature, not as an “abstraction inherent in each single individual,” but as “the ensemble of the social relations.” Therefore, the whole edifice of liberal-democratic capitalism, designed as it was to feed atomized man’s inherent wants and needs, could be supplanted by an alternative system without running into any fundamental, human-nature-level disconnects between the populace and the set of relations that constitute communist society. Marx describes atomized man as “alienated,” in that he conceives of some things that are properly part of himself, most notably his labor power, as separate from himself, and able to be exchanged for commodities. Alienation for Marx is a spiritual loss with attendant social and psychological effects, and when accompanied by the material deprivation which capitalism necessarily inflicts on the worker, it makes the relation at the heart of capitalism—the exchange of labor for wages—fundamentally unsustainable.

Marx’s materialism and otherwise quirky metaphysics (derived from Hegel, who as far as Protestants go was a rather quirky one already) make his vocabulary difficult to translate into familiar concepts from the Protestant political philosophy canon. In addition, the fact that Marx operated under a fundamentally different conception of human nature than the liberals means his concepts do not translate very well. But Marx’s critique of capitalism, that the entitlement of capitalists to the surplus-value of the labor-power they buy ends up destroying social cohesion and makes a revolution inevitable, is essentially an argument that unbridled liberty destroys equality. But does it? Liberty and equality certainly threaten one another, but the balance of power seems to wax and wane rather than trend toward one value destroying the other in liberal, capitalist societies. If Protestant political theory had been getting human nature that wrong for 300 years, one would have expected a little more difference between how liberal capitalism worked in theory and in practice.

A possible answer is that neither Marx nor the liberals got human nature exactly right. Perhaps human nature is malleable with a change in social relations, per Marx, but atomization is a one-way ratchet, and once you’re atomized, your nature is well suited for liberal-democratic capitalism and not much else. The efforts of 20th-century regimes bearing the Communist appellation to create a post-atomized human nature, to create the “New Soviet Man” or other such fantasies, bear this out.  What the failures of Soviet policy mean for the theory of communism is an open question, but the evidence on the possibility of de-atomization suggests that it’s hard to do, if not impossible.

* * *

Conclusion

The progress of Protestant political philosophy, from Hobbes to Mill, is best explicable by means of a progressive atomization premise. Man continually runs more and more inherited truth-claims under the lens of private judgment and splinters off into factions that in various measures accept or reject the old way. The only inviolable truth-claims are the ones underlying the process of private judgment itself, and those are inviolable only as long as the atomized man is not willing to abide logical contradictions in his thought.

I use “atomized man” as a stock phrase, but there is no reason atomization has to stop at isolating individual human beings from each other and from their social groupings. Perhaps the fundamental unit of the society of the future will be minds rather than mind-body complexes, and the norms of the inviolability of the body or respect for dead bodies will be dispensed with as so much old-fashioned sentiment, like prohibitions on blasphemy. The separation of a person’s gender identity from what have traditionally been called biological facts about sex may end up prefiguring this development in our atomization process. Perhaps the division will go further, and the fundamental unit will be the will rather than the intellect. That could get us to a place where people stop agreeing with the logical implications of private judgment while continuing to exercise it. The empirically useful categories, like logic, are less likely to become socially controversial than the merely traditional ones, but who knows. Perhaps this is the future that Nietzsche saw, and went mad.

Since both liberty and equality are validly derivable from the process of private judgment, as long as logic holds sway some types of equality-guaranteeing and liberty-guaranteeing social systems should remain valuable for social stability. This will likely involve some form of popular sovereignty and private ownership of the means of production, as these are tried-and-true pillars of relative social stability when combined. This phase may last a long time, or it might be rendered obsolete by developments in technology: superintelligent AI-based governance or hyper-efficient fully automated corporations. One can hope that technology renders our economy functionally post-scarcity before social cohesion stops being possible.

Outside of some exotically futuristic technological solution, or the grace of God, I do not know how atomization can be overcome. Surely through no merely human effort. Elective communities, even explicitly anti-atomization communities, simply reinforce the primacy of private judgment; their initial and continued existence is the result of a private judgment made by their members. The Communists tried revolution and the destruction of the atomizing class, but their revolutionaries had been atomized first. Our best hope may be to say some prayers, but not everyone can do that in good conscience.

I suggest we keep talking to one another. It won’t put off the end indefinitely, but it might help.

[3ternaln0w]

Journalist Jaroslaw Kowal interviewed Luton for Dni Muzyki Nowej Festival, Jan 2019.

Jaroslaw Kowal: Is that correct that “Black Box Animals” were written and recorded in various places across the Europe? How long did it take to make a whole album?

Rob: Yes, That’s correct. The whole thing took about 7 months, If I remember well.

Attilio: I think we had a clear vision from the beginning, it’s been a delicate and complex process but at same time everything was quite instinctive and so, step by step, we ended up at the crucial part of the album and for what I remember the last month was something really intense.

J: Was it initially planned to record music in several places or did You made that decision spontaneously?

R: It wasn’t initially planned, but since I was traveling quite a lot in Europe at that time, at some point I just realized it was way more enjoyable and spontaneous writing/composing on the road, getting ideas whilst hiking in the wilderness instead of being isolated in a studio like we normally do, so I personally tried to keep that way as much as possible. It was like a back and forth nature/studio.

A: Being all the time in a studio could be extremely boring and unproductive, sometimes. The fact the Black Box Animals was recorded in several different places is in my opinion what makes this music authentic and possibly with a so called wild character. So even without planning that much, that happened eventually.

J: “Black Box Animals” is a very dark album, with field recordings included and many different instruments, yet I wouldn’t call it a 100% experimental music - there’s a lot of melody in it. What is a perfect balance between those two worlds that for many musicians are opposite and can’t be combined?

R: Melody was already part of the intuition when Luton thing started, but at the same time nothing was really planned as we were open to the different explorations and sonic practices. I remember when I initially spoke about the idea to Attilio, I was probably way more into the orchestral part of the package but the bigger picture eventually came to us ended up in this sort of collision between those two worlds, strings and abstract electronics.  We weren’t interested in being stuck in a single genre or label, though. In this terms we probably see Luton like a sort of open laboratory.

A: Neither do I consider Black Box Animals as a 100% experimental album and even  the use of field-recordings is something marginal in my opinion. Creating compositions for classical instruments, sometimes even really ancient ones like russian zithers for example, and blend them with their opposite in terms of nature of sound, that was the main effort in this case. The contrast between a certain dark atmosphere that permeates the whole work and melody is just the natural consequence of the process in itself.

J: Is experimental or improvised music actually evolving? Do You see it changing across last five-six decades or is it more or less the same? On the other hand pop music - which is often seen as music without a soul - is clearly changing year after year. That makes me wonder, which of those is actually more progressive?

R: That’s a tricky question. I’ve never considered pop music a thing without soul, anyway. Music is music but also it is much more than that. We could discuss about that for a long while now and I’m pretty sure that would be very exciting to find out where every word could lead us at some point, the language-like stuff would come out, but at end of the day, I don’t really believe separateness is a great idea, so if you relate the word “experimental” in a John Cage way, thats perfectly fine by me then. We experiment with sounds. That’s what we do and lots of musicians in every genre do, after all. Everything else changes all the time and nothing really ends. It’s not like the world’s gone to shit now and stuff like that, almost the opposite I’d say. It’s a feedback loop, we -as human beings- don’t really need to put some language on it.  

A. I personally think that experimental music is always in a never ending evolution. There are several artists keep going in really interesting directions, and this for me means looking for a personal expressive code, basically. But, in my opinion, there’s an annoying downside in contemporary music which is in the difficulty to perceive distinctly the artistic value from the marketing side. Marketing has nothing to do with quality in music or in art in general. Everybody knows that but unfortunately is really frequent that poor and soulless music are sold as sensational hype in really closed circuits, which is something we don’t really like or support honestly. About pop music, well, my preferences are often limited to what I used to listen to when I was younger, so for me it has an almost exclusively emotional value.

J: You are both from Italy, but at Your facebook page Stockholm is set as a home town. Are You located there at the moment and why did You decided to leave Italy?

R: We’ve been to Stockholm a couple of times. We were involved in a sound residency in electronic music at Ems Studios, a truly magical place with an extraordinary vibe and amazing staff. We recorded massive amounts of raw sounds and crazy “bleep booops shshshs trtrrtrtr” (…) from this incredible Buchla modular synthesizer but nothing from those sessions really ended up Luton, eventually. Sad story. But a couple of tracks in the album were recorded there and especially “Sodermalm Phantom Cab” is something really influenced by our Swedish adventures at EMS studios and good times spent together in Sweden. Said that, I’ve been living in Manchester (UK) for a couple of years now and Attilio lives in Southern Italy. There’s not a really specific reason why I have decided to leave Italy I’m afraid, I guess I was interested in leaving my comfort zone for a while at that time.

A: The connection between Black Box Animals and Stockholm is something really strong and without our time spent together in Sweden, our music would not be made in this way, I’m pretty sure. I personally have always lived in Catanzaro, a small windy city in the deepest south of Italy. But generally speaking, traveling is always a great inspiration for the musical composition. However, I tend to always come back to my hometown. I’m going to spend at least three months in Madrid in Spain in the next few months and I am curious to see what this will bring to my music.

J: Stereotypically Italy - or even whole southern Europe - is seen as a sunny place with parties from dusk till dawn, but Your compositions are very far from that. Is it actually that rare to hear Italian band playing so dark and melancholic music?

R: It seems we’re definitely far from that then ahah, but yeah lots of music from Italy it is indeed. It’s not that rare at all. And If you have the chance to check out some experimental music from ‘60-70s too, Archivio Rai or early minimalism, Luciano Cilio, and many others, well, that’s not sunny music at all. Speaking about melancholia, well could be probably because of a sort of mediterranean DNA, couldn’t be? It’s a cultural thing or something like that I guess. But yeah, sun is good. FACT!

A: What Roberto said is true, I believe that the melancholic connotation of music reflects a character, but it is something really difficult to explain with words indeed. Søren Kierkegaard said: “if you ask a melancholic what reason he has for his condition, what do you know what is it, I can not explain it? “Therein lies melancholy’s infinitude.”

J: I’ve seen Your rider and it seems that You have a very clear idea of how Your live shows should look like - no front lights, just monochromatic light behind You or completely dark room with the smoke. I can see how it fits music from “Black Box Animals”, but do You need that only for visual aspect or does it help You get into right mood? Is it somehow helping You on stage?

R: Something truly interesting happens when you listen, performing or doing things in the darkness and/or in self-imposed situations/conditions. I mean, it doesn’t have to be complete darkness, but we try to avoid any interference from music, like visuals, heavy lighting or too many things going together at the same time. Maybe in the future could be different, we are open to explore different ways actually.

A: Darkness is something really helpful to stay focused, but also for meditation and contemplation in general, and I believe it can facilitate people joining any kind of experience. In regard to the live show we would like not having any kind of aesthetic or sensory impulse to interfere the sound. This is also really helpful for us to play in the right condition in order to enter in our dimension. A black box.

J: First sentence in Your bio states that “Luton is an anti modernist duo” - is that because modernism is mostly about realism and it seems that Your music is more about “magic”?

R: That was a statement by Attilio so I would like to ask him if he could explain to us. But yes, about magic, what could I really say? I really do like the idea about that, if you ask me. Music or I would say sound primarily is magic indeed to me, like a primitive force or an invisible spirit world that I pretend to comprehend, and in my mind disturbing a system that I can’t understand and see what happens, well that’s what I call an experiment. At the same time the nature of sound is really similar to botanic or biology. With sounds you can say these big abstract things, something you can’t express with the alphabet. When the word fails the magic happens. Paying attention, contemplation, contradiction, moving all things back where there is nothing is probably my subconscious purpose. And -in this purpose- nature of sounds is my white light, my teaching voice.

A: You should add something really crucial to what you said, Rob. Capitalist Realism, the book by Mark Fisher was a great inspiration for the making of the album. We both are into Fisher vision of the modern life, and we are sadly observing that the widespread feeling of resignation and unhappiness that permeates our lives in general really depends on the capitalistic system and the neoliberalism that has changed any aspect of the social sphere. So work and life, social and real life became inseparable, capital follows us when we sleep, and unfortunately as you can imagine music and arts are included in the symptoms of our current cultural malaise too. Luton is anti-modernist in the sense that we try to reject our frustration of dealing with a so called entrepreneurial fantasy society, by trying to support ourselves to the ritual, the shamanic, the primitive, but also the anarchist side of the music, possibly without being attached too much to something in particular in terms of genre or hype.

J: It’s a bit of a cliché to call an album a soundtrack to non-existing movie, but “Black Box Animals” sounds very cinematic.  Did You draw any inspirations from cinema art?

R: I personally studied cinema and wrote about that quite a lot when I was younger, so most probably thats still a big influence to me, but yeah we are both inspired by movies for sure. In terms of sounds, I think the way I worked with the orchestral part in this album is what makes the whole thing very cinematic, stuff like 4d sounds, spatialization, timbres etc. We are now interested in a different approach for the new material which is slightly more like painting or drawing abstract lines but with sound dynamics. You have to capture the right thing, but you don’t know what the right thing means exactly. Most of the times, I have not any clue about what’s going on, I’m just one of those dots between all these abstractions around me like a string extending from the top of my head to a distant cloud or star. It’s really odd.

A: Ours is a cinematic music for sure. Rob and I often discuss ourselves a lot about cinema and we constantly share different point of views about that. This in fact has played an important role in our friendship, I must say. For a song of the album, “Sodermalm Phantom Cab”, we asked Ion Indolean, a young Romanian filmmaker, to direct a videoclip. His style is in some ways similar to new Greek neorealism. We would also like to experiment with other forms of cinema and filmmakers in the near future.

J: What I’m quite sure is that dance and theatre are inspiration for You - both of You have experience in that field. How different is that to writing music without a script You need to fit to?

R: They are, indeed, especially contemporary dance personally. Writing music for commissions is challenging, sometimes frustrating, not always rewarding but you generally learn a lot from it which is good.

A: Experience I had with dance and theatre helped me to develop the ability to adapt my sounds to a context that was almost completely unknown to me. I find it much easier to express myself with self-defined limits. The work I did for Luton was facilitated by the complexities of previous experiences.

J: There are lots of the instruments on “Black Box Animals”, but I guess it’s not possible to bring them all on a live show? How different is this material live to what can be heard on album?

R: Thats considerably different. I would say the album is more like a sort of slow journey whilst the live version maybe a bit more like a black vortex, and consequently more physical, droney and abstract, but also we’re trying to get the job done with some reiterative piano moments in between and we’ll see how it goes. Does it make sense? I don’t know, everything is a process indeed.

A: At this stage we should prepare ourselves to the darkest side of Luton. However, there will be the presence of the piano which is something we’re really into at the moment.

J: What struck me the most is that You’ve started Luton just recently, but it feels like You understands each other perfectly. Were You a friends before starting Luton?

R: Well, I think we impersonate each other in a way, as we actually met each other only twice in the real life and we also live in different countries. But -you know- in Luton we’re just two guys swapping these sort of messy lines on a white canvas, making a lot room for fuckery if you know what I mean. For me that makes sense and it’s way more interesting and flexible that being in the same room jamming on ideas or having strict roles. There’s a kind of mix between mistery, alchemy and playfulness between us and I think we really enjoy.  

A: We live in different countries, that’s a fact, but that doesn’t make much difference. Sometimes our level of interaction might be really intense and so our conversations. This is one of the positive sides of the internet age, after all. We’ve known each other for several years but in my opinion he’s like a childhood friend of mine. Connections between people have something mysterious and impossible to understand on a deep level, sometimes.

J: In January You’ll perform in Poland for the first time. Do You have any favorite artists that comes from here?

R: Penderecki and Eugeniusz Rudnik.

A: Apart from Penderecki, I enjoyed the music of contemporary ambient-experimental musicians like Gregg Kowalsky and Jacaszek.

A mention for my friend Nicholas Szczepanik too, American but with Polish origins.

J: Thanks for Your time.

R: Thanks so much, guys

A: Dziękuję, do widzenia.   

[mercerislandbooks]

Kelleen Tries It: Doing Nothing

This month’s “Kelleen Tries It” was a tiny bit foiled. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing appealed to me by its cover, title, and back cover summary about “all that we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.” I assumed this book was going to be some sort of self-help on mindfulness and disconnecting from social media (it has “How to” in the title), but I was pleasantly surprised. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is a theory book, brilliant and well-written one, but not an instruction manual.

She offers a guide of sorts by writing thought experiments and commentaries of her own meditations, but a reader might end the book thinking well, now what? Part of this has to do with the disjointed narrative between chapters. She starts the book by discussing her impetus for writing it, the artistic inspiration and social change that motivated her talk about the poison of the attention economy. Then she transitions to discussing times in history when people have tried to retreat from society and failing, follows that up with explorations of artists who played with the idea of “refusal in place,” and ends the book with deliberations on communities, ecological and interpersonal. In the first paragraph she states, “In a world where value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily” and the last page ends with a meditation on the power of existence in the 30 million-year-old design of pelicans.

There’s a lot going on in this book.

Ultimately, I could not take direction from someone who would not give it to me, but she did open doors for challenging my perspective. What I loved most about the book is that after all the academic discussion and block quotes, she is simply inviting readers to take the time to sit in stillness in a park and say hello to our neighbors. She doesn’t think of technology in itself as evil, instead condemning the way social media sites suck us into a never-ending slough of stimuli. She openly claims to be anti-capitalist looking for existence outside of economic and material success, but she never suggests escaping or rejecting it completely. Do I agree with everything she said? Just about — it’s hard not to see her points, to feel the wear of the everyday grind in your body and to see the change in climate around the world.

Here is a picture from when I did nothing last weekend, sitting on a bench on Marsh Island, watching dragonflies and lily pads, and getting a sunburn.

One of the ways she introduces her position is through fourth-century Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s “The Useless Tree” to readers:

The story is about a carpenter who sees a tree ... of impressive size and age. But the carpenter passes it right by, declaring it a “worthless tree” that has only gotten to be this old because its gnarled branches would not be good for timber. Soon afterward, the tree appears to him in a dream and asks, “Are you comparing me with those useful trees?” The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Meanwhile, uselessness has been this tree’s strategy: “This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? ... What’s the point of this — things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die — how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”

Points of view in the social world are what she identifies as paradoxes. Good for one being is bad for another, and the tree resists in place by challenging the carpenter’s definition of usefulness.

Odell explains how taking steps to acknowledge all living things and systems as actors of their own accord can decentralize our goals from human progress to earth’s progress. She suggests paying attention through apps that identify plants by their names, by following rivers to their origins, by learning about the place we live in the physical world we share rather than the altered one online. Not only does she talk about the way nature gives her sacred spaces of peace but also how close attention to physical reality deregulates the constant desire to be plugged-in and competitive.

Where we can pay attention, we can act in something she calls “manifest dismantling,” undoing the damaging effects of attitudes like Manifest Destiny that thought of earth as a blank slate for human progress and a resource to build upon. The urgency for change comes from climate crisis but also from internal desires to escape politics and social media we all experience at some point. Resisting in place, looking away from the screen, staring at the birds, are ways to enact a passive kind of change that decentralizes our focus.

This is my childhood backyard, my mother’s garden. It should not be a wonder to me that looking towards nature stroke a note with me.

For me, this book’s usefulness materialized in putting language to struggles I’ve always had with my understanding of living in the moment as a synonym to laziness. The concept of productivity is something that has long haunted me. My personal mental health struggles with my perfectionist anxieties and the pressure and competition to be at the top of my class in college has made me think intensely about my relationship with productivity. The compulsions to be the most productive me possible may create results in the immediate but in the long term I suffered. I see people close to me suffer from the same type of anxieties, as if their free time must be used in the most productive way possible – taking on projects and mastering new skills with fervor and determination as if they have to prove they are worthy of having free time that they can show all these results from. As if their existence needed to be productive to be justified. This bothered me for reasons I couldn’t explain.

Last weekend when I chose to read and nap on a hammock. It felt like the right setting for the book.

Lucky for me, Jenny Odell’s book spoke to the issues I have been struggling with. Doing the majority of my work for the book store and tackling other freelance contracts from home has been a struggle with boundaries. Jenny discusses disappearing job stability and labor unions in the context of the modern work force when she says:

The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries – eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will – so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.

The phrase “twenty-four potentially monetizable hours” stuck with me as the source of much of my concern, frustration, and anxiety over the past year since graduating from college. Every second is time that I could be productive, since I can work from anywhere at any time. In fact, I do work most everywhere, out with friends, at family gatherings. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about it. Now, I am not comparing the stress of my work to anyone else’s (I mean I get to write and go on Instagram and take pictures for work), but the stress of constantly feeling available to work is a growing cultural disquietude within the rise of freelance work and the gig economy. It’s even aesthetic to work as hard as possible for as long as possible, to be “always on the grind.”

Odell doesn’t have direct answers for any of these problems. In fact, she distinctly talks about finding a third option from the “yes or no but you have to say yes or else you will be fired” culture of the job market. She looks for an “I would prefer not to” response taken directly from Meville’s Bartleby and more loosely from Zhuang Zhou’s tree. In this arena, she looks to environmentalism, bioregionalism, and spaces of appearance between people. Places where context can give you a bigger picture, and the bigger picture can calm the crazy.

The trifecta of recent mind-bending.

Reading this book in harmony with Forest Bathing (see the post here) and more recently Conscious by Annaka Harris has been a trip in decentering my point of view. If literary theory and the work of Derrida and Lacan disrupted my internal and static identity in college, Li, Odell, and Harris challenged my external identity in my post-college exploration for meaning. I question what I spend my time on, when I am happy doing what I am doing, and why I become overwhelmed by tasks and time. Forest Bathing made me think of nature, not as a resource but a necessity. How to Do Nothing forced me to confront my anthropocentric point of view and remember there is an existence outside of capitalism, and that it is okay to spend some time there. Conscious lead to an upheaval of my understanding of non-human things, making me look at my external world with wonder. Together I have been re-thinking what’s most important to me and trying to put it those ideas alongside what is most important for the planet.

As I said, the best thing about How to Do Nothing is that all she suggests are small steps to looking at our world with context outside the human systems. Stop to look at a flower. Dedicate an afternoon to stillness. Take a detour on your roadtrip to stop at a reserve, a park, and remember that life will go on on Earth whether or not you make that deadline.

I’m continuing this theme next month when I post my interview with the author of the forthcoming Hollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton. We will be discussing Buxton’s take on the holocene, the endurance of life, and how language frames our points of view.

– Kelleen

[sficacalmoddity-blog]

PRESIDENT TRUMP SIGNALS FOR WELFARE REFORM BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE SYSTEM As I was talking to a woman on the bus yesterday, she was in finance and we were discussing Universal basic Income (UBI) among other things, I told her that I was not a strict anti-capitalist.  I am opposed to structurally designed and legislated inequality. I am equally opposed to corruption.  I used to consider myself a Socialist (albeit an elementary one), now I consider myself a Progressive.  I very much agree with Naomi Klein when she says “I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent.  It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity.  A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy-like a national oil company-held in state hands.  It’s equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state and reduced markets need not be fundamentalist” I Am writing this for 2 reasons- I do not currently work for someone and get paid a wage. Technically “unemployed”, yes?  And I said 2 days ago I would write about this.  About my experiences at Hornblower Classic Cable Cars.  And I’ll write about the “Hustler” club as well. My other reason?  Reading that President Trump is considering “welfare reform” because there are people “taking advantage of the system”.. Well lets look at who is “taking advantage of the system” First of all, our President, before being elected, bragged about not paying his taxes.  In a debate I believe.  He said it “made him smart”.  He is also on record as defending not paying contractors that have worked for his companies. Once again, President Trump is thinking about welfare reform because there are those taking advantage of the system.  Lets hear from Naomi Klein again “For the heads of U.S. multinational corporations, contending with a distinctly less hospitable developing world and with stronger, more demanding unions at home, the postwar boom years were unsettling times.  The economy was growing fast, enormous wealth was being created, but owners and shareholders were forced to redistribute a great deal of that wealth through corporate taxes and workers salaries.  Everyone was doing well, but with a return to the pre-new deal rules, a few people could have been doing a lot better”. President Trump wants to CUT CORPORATE taxes. It’s my understanding that Exxon paid ZERO US tax dollars in 2012. Exxon? Zero?  How much did you pay?  How much money did you fork over to Exxon? Thirty something odd years ago CEO’s made about 26 times what their workers did.  Now they make about 300 times. WHO IS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF WHO?  To be continued…

[tragicbooks]

13 gorgeous photos reveal what it's like to be LGBTQ and African.

'Saying something is "un-African" is saying a kaleidoscope can only be one color.'

<br>

Growing up, Mikael Owunna felt like the African and queer sides of his identity were at odds with each other.

Owunna, a 26-year-old Nigerian-American photographer who identifies as queer, had a difficult time finding a way to reconcile those two parts of himself.

Mikael Owunna. Image used with permission.

"I experienced considerable homophobia in African spaces, and was told that being gay was 'un-African' - a disease from the West and white people," he wrote.

But after personal reflection and seeing the work of Zanele Muholi, a black lesbian South African photographer he admires, he realized these two sides of his identity didn't have to be at odds.

So Owunna created a photo project, "Limit(less)," which explores African and queer identities through style.

The portraits and stories he captures reflect the joy, rich history, and resilience of queer African people living outside the continent. The people he shoots are empowered, joyful, and confident — and, as Owunna quickly realized, so are their clothes.

All photos by Mikael Owunna, used with permission.

For Owunna, the project is a love letter to those who are navigating two worlds and a reminder of how far he's come.

"Coming from my personal experience where I experienced a lot of trauma around these two identities and didn't feel like I could be both, it's a way for me, with each click of my camera, to heal myself," Owunna says.

Here are 13 memorable moments from the project thus far.

1. "I don't look like a stud, I don't look like a dapper queer. I look like something else..."

Terna is Nigerian-Liberian American. She is bisexual but identifies as queer most of the time.

"...and that something else is a nod to where I come from. It’s me standing in my power, but it’s also distinctly you, like I have my little fedoras and those types of things, which I think do tip over into some of the queer aesthetics particularly, I would say, the queer aesthetics of people of color."  

2. "[My style is] more of a postmodern Angela Davis."

Gesiye is Nigerian-Trinidadian, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She identifies as bisexual/queer.

"I don’t limit my African or LGBTQ identity to one form of expression, everything I wear is and can be a blend of these identities because that’s who I am and how I’m choosing to define it."

3. "I’ve always been around white LGBTQ people and they didn’t really see me as queer."

Juliet was born in Uganda and raised in Sweden. She identifies as queer.

"I’ve overcome all of this by finding other black queer people and forming Black Queers Sweden, the feminist and anti-racist movement and independent organization for black LGBTQ+ people, where we can be ourselves; both black and queer."

4. "The most beautiful part about being African/of the African Diaspora is our resilience."

Odera's country of origin is Nigeria. They identify as queer.

"To live and thrive as an African is an act of revolution and power. And for me, living my truth as an LGBTQ person is simply an extension of that power."

5. "The first time I met another queer African person was indescribable, and reaffirmed my identities in ways that nothing else could have."

Eniola is Nigerian and was raised in the U.S. She identifies as queer, but also "fuck labels."

"I hope that 'Limit(less)' reaches people who benefit from this affirmation. Too many of us think we’re the only one."

6. "My style has been described as old Somali uncle."

Wiilo was born in Washington, D.C., while their parents were on vacation. Their family returned to Somalia but emigrated to Canada because of the civil war. They identify as queer.

"Wiilo in Somali means, 'girls who dresses like boy.' It’s a nickname that I was given by my elders when I was younger. I am drawn to clothes that I feel both my dad and mom would have worn living in Somalia in the 70’s and 80’s."

7. "We are dynamic, bold, and beautiful, and queer."

Em is Nigerian-Efik from America. They identify as agender/genderqueer.

"Our Africanness is only stronger with this identity because everyday we breathe, especially for African trans folk, we are resisting and revolutionary. That’s pretty damn African to me." 

8. "Starting in university I started to embrace all facets of who I am because that’s what I need to survive."

Taib was born and raised in Canada to an Ethiopian mother and Kenyan father. He identifies as queer.

"I have big plans for my future and in order for me to reach my full potential I need all of me at the finish line not just the pieces that white society can stomach."

9. "Walking this world as a Black queer femme womxn, it is sometimes a struggle simply to survive."

Kaamila is Somali-American, biracial, and black. She identifies as a bisexual queer dyke, a fluid femme, and a womxn.

"Some days, makeup is my war paint and accessories are my armor. Some days, I decorate and adorn myself in a ritual of affirmation of all that I am. Not simply surviving, but thriving! I could be described as gaudy, often dripping in gold, and maybe a little bit gangsta. My style can be big and bold, taking up space in a world that tells me to be small. I make myself art in a world telling me that who I am is not beautiful. But I am not above leaving the house in sweatpants and uggs. It’s wack that women’s worth is wrapped up in whether we are considered appealing to others. My style is personal, political, playful, practical. It is a mix-and-match and mashup of all of the above."

10. "I have for a long time thought that I could only fully embrace one of the two identities, that they were mutually exclusive."

Brian is Rwandan but grew up in Tanzania, Niger, Kenya, Benin, and the Central African Republic. He identifies as queer.

"When I decided to embrace my LGBTQ identity, I subconsciously pushed away my African identity. I found myself becoming what some call a 'Bounty' or 'Oreo', black on the outside and white on the inside. But prior to that I had already tried to push away my LGBTQ identity. It was complete denial... And then one day I thought to myself why not try embracing both identities, just for the sake of trying. I remember feeling butterflies in my stomach and feeling so light as if an enormous weight was lifted off of me. I never felt so complete and comfortable in my skin."

11. "I’m a hard femme with an hourglass silhouette, a Goodwill budget, and a firm grasp of anti-capitalist rhetoric."

Netsie is a queer Ethiopian Namibian.

"I wear whatever makes me feel comfortable and powerful and safe. I’m too clumsy to own a pair of un-ripped tights. I love wearing bold patterns that clash, things that could be pretty but aren’t, anything to remind people that when they look at me, I am looking right back at them."

12. "My beard feels like a connection to my Muslim heritage, and it feels transgressive to wear it with this body, living the life I do."

Yahya is a half-American, half-Moroccan boi. They identify as a second-generation radical queer (on their mom's side) and pansexual.

"To be honest, I think I reserve most of my Moroccan clothing for special occasions. I think the examples that have been given to me of powerful queerness have mostly been through a Euro-American lens (which is why this project is so important!)."

13. "As the cliche goes, my style is a way for me to express myself - and my multiple identities, those discovered and undiscovered, all play into that."

Tyler is a Kenyan-Somali-Canadian. He identifies as queer.

"I guess my queerness, in part, fuels my ability to transcend the expected. And that is what I try to do with my style, transcend the expected and, in many ways, come home to myself."

For photographer Owunna, the work isn't done. He hopes to expand on "Limit(less)" in Europe this fall.

He's photographed and interviewed 34 queer Africans for the project so far, primarily in North America. He's crowdfunding an effort to cover the trip to Europe, where there are four times as many African immigrants, an ongoing refugee crisis, and the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric and the far right; essentially, there are countless stories that need to be told.

And Owunna, centered, happy, and at peace with himself, is just the person to do it.

Image via "Limit(less)"/Kickstarter.

<br>

[ihavethoughtsaboutfilms]

'The Founder' flounders; a sterile portrayal of the American Dream

This capitalism love story unfurls with depressing predictability in a dispiriting tale of avarice that never quite finds its feet.

If ever there were a story for our time, The Founder is it. Chronicling the provenance of the McDonald's monolith, its combined themes of personal expediency and the cynicism of corporate values are perfectly aligned with the neoliberal ideology of today. In its depiction of the American Dream, replete with equal measures struggle, ambition and inordinate success, John Lee Hancock's rendition of the McDonalds origin story is either a tale of ruthless takeover or shrewd business acumen, depending on your economic beliefs. Highlighting the disconnect between our Hollywood ideals and the reality they describe, the film is an example of the cannibalising effect commercialism has on conscience. What it isn't, unfortunately, is great cinema.

A company biopic, The Founder recounts the story of the man that transformed the McDonald brother's small-town burger joint into the billion-dollar entity we know today, taking the chain to its corporate apotheosis and casting off the dead weight in the process. Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) is a selfish and mercurial gadget salesman. Always sure he's onto the next big thing (from storage solutions to milkshake mixers) he tears through the American suburbs with his glib and sycophantic pitch, trying (usually unsuccessfully) to make a sale.

It's 1954 when we meet Ray and his current purview is that quintessential emblem of 50s Americana, the drive-thru restaurant. Multi-mixer in hand, he struggles to fight off disillusionment as failed venture after failed venture bears down on his psyche. That is until he stumbles across a family-run fast food outlet in the suburbs of San Bernardino, CA. Smitten with their new food service model (the revolutionary Speedee System) and spotting an opportunity to develop their idea, Kroc encourages the brothers to let him begin franchise movements on their behalf. What follows is a protracted battle of the wills between the somewhat naive McDonald's brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch, respectively) and the increasingly implacable Kroc as they tussle over the strategic direction and intellectual property of the business.

Michael Keaton is a seasoned pro and, alongside his recent credentials, most notably Birdman, his portrayal of Ray Kroc cements his status as a crisp and intelligent actor. Embracing the recent typecast, he seems particularly suited to the role of anguished middle-aged man, capturing the restive persona of an individual emasculated by his lack of success. Browbeaten by a mismatch between personal expectations and reality, his high-strung nature emphasises his perpetual yearning for 'more' and 'better'. So far, so admirable. But bathed in the glow of the infamous Golden Arches, Keaton's naturally frenetic disposition takes on a darker sheen. As he navigates the world of lenders, leases and land registries, his Machiavellian impulses become more pronounced and he combs his business plan for opportunistic gains, no matter how much they deviate from his forebear's original vision.

This kind of self-centred pride is a centripetal motif of the film and possibly Ray's defining feature. Intoxicated by success, his machinations reap exponential commercial rewards whilst his personal relationships disintegrate. In Ray's interior world, passion is a finite resource. It is dispensed throughout his life, and an investment of energy in one area is necessarily a reduction in another. The more effort expended in advancing his capitalistic ideals, the less attention is paid to his partners (the McDonald's) and his partner (Ethel). As his despondent yet supportive wife (a drab role for Laura Dern), Mrs. Kroc acts as the emotional proxy for all the peripheral figures in Ray's life; as with the majority of his acquaintances, his success is her decline.

Despite these dramatic tensions, the film has a lethargic feel to it. It opens with a lurch and hesitates forward without any real sense of progression, without much thought to the development of its characters. Though Offerman and Lynch's embodiment of the middle-American enterprising spirit is estimable, the characters they portray feel distinctly two-dimensional. The same is true for other key roles, as though screenwriter Robert D. Siegel did not know how to apportion our attention. We are presented with a suite of unempathetic characters, none of whom garner enough sympathy to warrant our full engagement. We are left unsure who to root for. We know it should not be Ray – but then where to direct our pathos? Mrs. Kroc is too subordinate; the brothers too credulous; the McDonald's staff too exploitable. Perhaps it is partially attributable to a broader reluctance to sympathise with the agents of capitalism, but the lack of even a vaguely tangible champion is unsatisfying.

Where the film succeeds, however, is its absence of political agenda. This is not the anti-capitalist polemic of Super Size Me, nor does it try to be. Both writer and director steer clear of harsh indictments in favour of a plainness that allows the audience to reach their own conclusions. We don't witness Kroc's fall from grace because he is no hero to begin with. He is the underdog whose chance at salvation is usurped by greed and whose ever-increasing rapaciousness unfolds with methodical consistency. In doing so, the script recalls the biblical invocation, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?", but leaves us alone to arrive at the bleak conclusion: "Quite a bit (about $500m)."

The problem with this non-declarative mode of storytelling, however, is pacing. Outside of a beautifully choreographed scene depicting the mechanics of the Speedee System (aka 'The Productivity Waltz') the film lacks the momentum to catch our interest. Keaton's kinetic performance clashes with the slow tempo of the script, resulting in a film that feels attenuated and unsure of itself. It's a shame, because its opening scene is so promising. The inaugural soliloquy sees Kroc deliver his slick sales pitch directly to camera. The insincerity oozes from his plastic smile and seeps down the lens as we are introduced to a man incapable of masking both his immense ambition and sense of desperation. This opening vignette is the most successful in the film as it represents both the first and last slice of humanity in the protagonist: this is a man who should be deserving of compassion, but his subsequent actions do nothing but preclude our sympathies.

In this regard, the film shares some thematic concerns with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Notions of freedom and confinement, a preoccupation with respect and reputation, and the consequences of hubris are present in both works. Yet, where Miller appears to cast America's competitive version of capitalism as something that traps its denizens, The Founder paints it as a force for liberation. Not that either of these interpretations is less true than the other; the 'Land of the Free', of course, entails the freedom to act on self-seeking motives. But Hancock's rendering fails to capture that duality and subsequently falls flat.

This entire philosophy is encapsulated with mordant honesty when Kroc postulates: "If my competitor was drowning, I'd walk over and put the hose in his mouth. Can you say you'd do the same?" With such an injunction, you'd think this would be a intensely dark character study. But like a McDonald's pickle flung against a greasy window, this is a film that starts high, sharp, then gradually slides to a halt. Despite the valiant effort of the cast, and much like the eponymous burgers themselves, The Founder is a bland dish that fails to provide adequate sustenance. I'm not lovin' it.