Poly and Continuous Partial Attention

So in a fairly typical manouvre, in that I'm doing this about 3 three years too late, I have been reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman. One of the interesting confluences between the two is in their analysis of contemporary capitalism's demand that we be constantly 'plugged-in', leading to what Fisher describes as ' twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.' In this post, I'm trying to think through this phenomenon in relation to the practice of polyamory. Fisher’s analysis is based on Linda Stone's notion of Continuous Partial Attention, so here is a link to it if you want take issue with any of the things I’ve written. http://lindastone.net/2009/11/30/beyond-simple-multi-tasking-continuous-partial-attention/ - Oh, and here is the MANDATORY DISCLAIMER in which I say that obviously, there are as many ways of doing poly as there are people who do it, if not more, and I don’t want to generalise about other people's relationships on the basis of my own etc etc etc. I am definitely an anarchist and definitely not telling you what to do, honest.

Stone's definition of Continuous Partial Attention, as opposed to what she calls 'simple multi-tasking', lies in her sense that in the latter we focus our attention on a primary task, but are also completing a menial job that requires little mental effort - for example, talking on the phone while stirring soup. Continuous Partial Attention, by contrast, involves a state in which we are engaging in two activities which require similar levels of intellectual engagement - writing an email and talking on the phone simultaneously is a good example. Stone suggests that Continuous Partial Attention is not an intensification of multi-tasking, but is characterised by a different productive mode - so, in multi-tasking, we understand that we are engaging in two tasks in order to free up our future time for something more interesting, whereas in Continuous Partial Attention we are constantly searching for 'scanning for other people, activities, or opportunities, and replacing the primary task with something that seems, in this next moment, more important.' She suggests that although such a mode of congnition is useful for short periods of time, we risk stress-related unpleasantness such as the inability to sleep and cravings for sugary foods if we habituate ourselves to it. Incidentally, her sense that eating sugar and consequently gaining weight are prima facie ills really irritated me. Whevs, Stone. WHERE'S MY TAZ BAR?

This struck me as an interesting concept to think through in relation to polyamory, mainly because discussions with people who don't 'do'/'get' (for which read 'approve of') poly often focus on precisely these kinds of issues. I've found a widespread belief, often only half articulated, that there is something emotionally suspect about poly; that it revolves around a kind of 'twitchy, agitated... inability to concentrate' on just one person, just one relationship. The way that Stone makes the link between this kind of intellectual engagement and the consumption of sugary foods is also relevant to the way poly is conceived of as in some way being about greed and dissatisfaction – symptomatic of the consuming desire to constantly consume. There's a pervasive sense that choosing to do poly relationships opens one to accusations of 'scanning for other people, activities or opportunities, and replacing the pirary task with something that seems, in the next moment, more important.'

I'll be honest about this: it's not an easy accusation to refute. Polyamorous relationships *do* openly acknowledge the possibility of change and flux; that there might be someone around the next corner who will be super interesting and important. Of course, this possibility exists in monogamous relationships as well, and one of the things that irritates me about comparisons between poly and monogamy is that this doesn't get full recognition. Anyway, my feeling about this is that there's an crucial difference between an acknowledgement that there might be other people in the future who could be important and different and new and exciting,  and understanding this as necessarily implying that the person that this happens with is necessarily *more* important than whoever you're currently going out with. It strikes me that one of the crucial aspects of polyamory is that it becomes necessary to understand that there are different kinds of importance in relationships. The explosive febrility of getting involved with a new person, the exciting newness and magpie shininess that this entails, functions in a completely different register to the intimacy of a long-standing relationship. In fact, I've found that getting involved with someone new can underscore the ways in which the older relationship is important and unique. This is particularly the case if you understand romantic relationships as being a part of your life that you engage with intellectually - something that you keep working at, trying to understand better, get a deeper and more functional knowledge of.

Stone characterises Continuous Partial Attention as demanding that your attention is constantly diverted towards the 'next link'. Perhaps. However, if we understand having more than one partner as in some way analgous to this, then it's important to conceptualise said relationships  as forming links to one another - between you and your partners, but also between your partners themselves, and between you and your partner's partners. It's imprtant to remember that the metaphor of 'the link' doesn't necessarily impell your attention towards abandoning your current set of concerns in favour of chasing after a constantly receding future event. As anyone who habitually has 40 tabs open in their internet browser at any one time will know, links work both ways - forward and backwards. They provide roots. They make networks. There's nothing about the 'link' metaphor that necessarily implies a superficial or shallow emotional engagement - you could equally argue that if you are in a poly relationship, you're forming a network of links around you (and your partners, and your partner's partners) that centre and ground you (and the people with whom you're in a relationship) and that this stengthens your ability to relate to other people rather than weakens it. Poly can mean that you're more involved, not less.

Of course, this way of thinking about poly relationships has some difficult implications. One of the things that I find trickiest about it is identifying the boundaries of where my relationship with them ends, and where their other relationships begin. Some people seem to prefer not to discuss their other relationships at all, some feel that there's a sense in which talking about their relationships will be hurtful, either to the person who's being talked to or the person who's being talked about, some people over-share. When I was first in a poly relationship I blankly refused to engage in any discussion of my partner's other relationship, simply because thinking about it was too painful. And then there's also always the possibility that you might just *not like* your partner's other partners (although thankfully I've never had to deal with that issue.) Equally, I'm aware that my sense of the importance of network formation might intrude on another person's need for privacy. Just because I'm seeing someone, doesn't necessarily mean that their other parnters will want to have anything to do with me. All of these are important considerations, and obviously I would never advocate forcing a relationship, or set of relationships, into the paradigm discussed above. But I think that it's important, if you want to do poly - if you really think that the whole model of dedicating your entire sexual life to a single person FOR EVER AND EVER AND EVER AMEN is a wee bit problematic - then it's important to think through the most aspects of different ways of doing things. This post is really about offering a way of thinking about poly that makes a virtue of what is often considered a vice.


*as an aside - what is it about it being 2013 and people still being embarassed about having met their partners on the internet? Seriously, you guys, I mean: it's fine.

15 Albums That Mean Something to Me: 'Alopecia', Why?

Basically, you just can't ignore an album the first lyric of which is

I'm not a ladies' man I'm a landmine 
Filming my own fake death. 

Can't ignore, can't argue. I STILL get goosebumps every time I listen to it. It is one of the ones whose lyrics I have shamelessly plagiarised in my own writing. This is probably one of the few albums that makes it on here according to musical merit more than the memories I directly associate with it - mainly because, unusually amongst these records - it was recommended to me by someone that I didn't know very well, and chased it up simply because I was looking for new music (well, mainly. Also he had trendy glasses and LOOKED LIKE A YOUNG STEVE ALBINI.) We still don't know each other terribly well, so it wasn't one of those albums that became friendship/relationship defining (let's not beat about the bush, I pretty much only ever check out music because someone I crush on recommends them to me.)* However, this is a bit of a double edged sword, because I do feel a sense of ownership over Why? that I have with very few other bands. You know how, if you get introduced to a musician by a friend or a lover, there's often this slight sense that you're an imposter - not *truly* a fan, just someone who likes this band because someone older/wiser/better-informed/looking/in some other way unattainable - knows a lot more about them than you do. You know that feeling, right? Of course you do, because you're reading about music on the internet, and the ONLY reason anyone ever does that is because they're looking for that elusive sense of belonging. I'm right, yeah? That sense that you know enough about a band to not be embarrassed when someone calls you on your knowledge. Otherwise, why would you give a fuck what the name of the bassist is, would you? You don't. I know you don't. You know I know you don't. You and I both just don't want to look stupid.

But yeah. With Why? it really wasn't like that. The boy I was trying (VAGUELY) to impress didn't live in my city, so basically I was just allowed to get on with it. They were kind of my secret, you know? Which meant that I didn't have to know the names of all the band members or the chronology of their different releases: I could just listen. Really listen. And I lapped this album up in a way that happens very rarely to me. And it's so meaty - lyrically, it's just unbelievably dense, and even the resonances in Yoni Wolf's intonation repay seriously close attention. One of the lyrics from the album runs:

'I'll suck the marrow out - and rape your hollow bones Yoni'

Right, so *I'M NOT WEIRD* - but this feels to me like an apt metaphor for what you do with this album. It's undeniably lyrically oblique - abstruse, even - but it's insistent and when you listen to it, you force meanings onto it. Meanings, perhaps, that doesn't quite fit the individual lyric or the delivery but makes perfect sense to you at the time - and for me, that means that this listening from one end of this album to another is stuffed full of memories that have literally nothing to do with the album itself. For posterity, I will now record the most prominent example:

'You're a beautiful and violent word
With the skinny neck of a chinese bird'
('These Few Presidents', Alopecia)

This never fails to remind me of Sam, who's always struck me as birdlike. This was particularly the case when we were first going out because he had a fuzzy shaved head which really put me in mind of unfledged down. I remember going to stay at his house after Christmas, when we hadn't seen each other for a while, and I'd been listening to Why? a lot in the interim, and we were in bed together and it felt so nest-like that the image stayed with me, and it's now become an integral part of the way that I think about him.

Jesus. It is too much to talk about all the different things this album means to me. Take it as read that EVERY song on this album has three or four moments in it that have memories that strong - that fucking physical - attached to them. And that, my exciting TWO READERS, is why it is in my top 15 albums ever.

PS: After I am done with my Top 15 albums, I may do a Top 15 Why? lyrics, and go into more detail about the images they evoke for me. PROJECT JAZZ HANDS! 

And here endeth the lesson.

 *For the purposes of pointless autobiographising, I have for years been vaguely meaning to organise my record collection according to which boys I was trying to impress with each purchase. This has never happened due to SHAME, but perhaps now is the time.

15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #3: STOP MAKING SENSE, TALKING HEADS

So, not that many people have been reading these posts (2 for the last one I wrote. A WHOLE TWO. One was my boyfriend; who was the other???? SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW ME PERSONALLY IS READING SHIT I AM PUTTING OUT ON THE INTERNET OMG I AM FAMOUS)

Annnnnnnnywayyyyyyyy...

There aren't that many of you all out there, but the two people who have read the last posts I did about '15 Albums That Meant Something To Me' may have noticed that they are usually associated with a specific time and place. In this respect, 'Stop Making Sense' is a trend-bucker. It sort of forms a refrain throughout my life: In fact, I can't remember a time when I *didn't* know that album - it's always, always sounded familiar to me. Trying to imagine what it was like to hear it for the first time is a bit like trying to remember what it was like to learn to write: except even vaguer and stranger, because no one ever *teaches* you to listen to Talking Heads, although if I had my way and also magically became education secretary despite not really being very pro this whole 'parliamentary politics' endeavour, I would probably make laws to ensure that this did happen. Anyway, it's always been familiar because it was one of those pieces of music that my parents had on tape and played in the car on long journeys, so until about 2001 I mainly associated it with the M4 (visiting grandma) the M1 (visiting other grandma) and the M11 (going on middle-class holidays.) Actually, there's a weird beauty to parts of the M11 route - mainly the fens- that works surprisingly well with the edgier tracks on 'Stop Making Sense' - try being 7 (in fact, it being your 7th birthday) and your parents getting you up while it's still dark to beat the traffic out of London and then falling asleep wrapped up in a duvet and being woken up with the sun full in your face in the middle of flat-as-piss-on-a-plate East Anglia BY THE LIVE VERSION OF PSYCHO KILLER WHICH IS JUST DAVID BYRNE AND A TAPE RECORDER. Plus you're about to stop at Little Chef to receive birthday donuts AND a copy of the Walt Disney Robin Hood film on VHS. Perfeck.

The coup-de-grace for me, though, and the real reason why this album makes it on here as opposed to any of the other parental car-based cassettes, is because when I finally got around to buying my own copy of the album (on CD this time) it was an extended version with an extra six songs tagged onto the original album track-list. So there I was, happily nodding along to 'Psycho Killer' and 'Burning Down The House' and then I went to the toilet and then I came back and WHAM BAM IT WAS 'THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (NAIVE MELODY)' AND SUDDENLY I WAS IN LOVE. IN LOVE. I've never, before or since, felt the shock of something so utterly and devastatingly beautiful emanating from something so familiar. It was so unexpected. I don't have children, but it felt like what I imagine it must feel like the first time you see a child of yours and for a minute you don't recognise them because you have suddenly grasped, in your bones and stomach, that they're not a child any more - they're an adult, and they're beautiful. Generally, you know, I don't go for beauty in music. I care about energy, and conviction, and sex, and intelligence. If it doesn't make me want to dance, or fuck, or cry, or inscribe the lyrics into my flesh (cf John Darnielle) then, for the most part, it can go hang. But this song, and this album, is beautiful, undeniably. It has the quality of something uncanny about it, for me. It keeps coming back, in slightly different forms. That's partly to do with the proliferation of different versions of the songs - firstly from covers (recent once include The Arcade Fire and MGMT, as I'm sure you know) and secondly due to the fact that, because Stop Making Sense is a live album, different versions of most of these tracks appear throughout the Talking Heads oeuvre. But I think for me there's something a bit more going on here. This album reminds me that even when you think you've got a band, or an album, or even a song, pinned - when you really think that you've wrung all the juice from it that you're ever going to get - you're wrong, basically. Music will always, always have the power to come back and bite you on the arse. And that, actually, is what you want it to do.

Here endeth the lesson.      

15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #2: THE FUTUREHEADS, BY THE FUTUREHEADS

The first time I heard this album was in the Fopp on Rose Street in Edinburgh, August 2004. You remember back in the day, when most people didn't have the internet or iPods or anything and if they wanted to buy an album they hung around in record shops and waited for the grumpy dude behind the counter to put the record they were interested in on those little banks of headphones where you could stand and look really cool and hope all the boys noticed? Well, yeah, I was doing that, and to be honest I just stuck the Futureheads on because the other records available were Gang of Four's Entertainment!, which I mistrusted as too highbrow, and some irrevelevant shitey jazz that you're not legally eligible to listen to if you're female or less than 47 years old. Anyway, that probably holds the record for my 'best-single-music-related-decision-originally-taken-to-impress-boys'; it certainly outweighed spending 25 quid on Dylan tickets because I had a crush on some knobhead who thought he was the best musician that ever lived (spoiler: HE'S NOT). Anyway, I liked them immediately: the way that occasionally happens when you meet a friend of a friend in a bar and know by the end of the evening that you're going to spend a bit too much of the next decade making fart jokes on their Facebook wall. All of this was great, for two reasons. Reason 1 was that it meant that I knew of the Futureheads before they became famous for being That Band What Did A Cover of 'Hounds Of Love' Which Is Possibly More Eccentric Than The Original. I don't usually have the energy to know about good bands Before They Get Famous, so this was a rare treat. The second reason was that the second week I was in Edinburgh, I lost the CD carrier I had brought with me (yeah, 'CD carrier' muthafucka. Remember them? No, of course you don't, because you're on the internet and therefore 10) so the only music I had for the six weeks I spent there was the CD I had playing in my Discman at the time - this one. This is probably the one album associated with a specific time and place more strongly than any other piece of music I've ever listened to, ever. It's weird, because the album sounds definitively modern: those precise guitars and sweet-voiced, I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-gender-paradigms harmonies never fail to recall for me bruised, brooding, historical, masculine Edinburgh, but there you go. Memories that involve music are always like that: endlessly contradictory, endlessly compelling. And also, this album is so good. Just so fucken GOOD, man. I'm re-listening to it now, and I still can't fault it. Do you remember those chocolatey pretzel crisp things that you used to be able to buy around 1998/9? The ones that worked because they were all crisp astringent interior and then melty sweet chocolate on the outside, and then part of the pleasure of them came from just how unexpected they are? This album is like those guys: there's the crisp, brittle precision of Dave Hyde's drums, then the sugariness of the famous acappela backing vocals, and THEN ON TOP OF THAT THEY TALK ABOUT MURDER AND PEADOPHILIA AND SHITTY LOW PAID TEMP JOBS AND THEN THEY WHIP OUT THE KATE BUSH COVER AND START CHATTING ABOUT MAN RAY. Seriously, re-listening to this album now: these dudes are so under-rated. Everyone liked them, but no one seemed to think they were that interesting. And damn it, they are! They're clever and funny and interesting and actually, I'd really like to be friends with them. Even if in 2004, all I cared about was that they wrote kick ass music for indie kids to dance to and I thought that if I listened to them enough I would magically be transformed into the kind of girl that boys who look good in tight trousers wanted to kiss.

This was meant to be a facebook post, but then I got qualmist about how maybe it was a little bit too personal for friends only,and decided instead to post it to EVERYBODY ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET. HURRAH. Ok, here it is. It's about music, predictably: 15 ALBUMS: [The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what albums my friends choose.] DISCLAIMER: These are not the 15 albums that I love the most, or the ones that I think are best, whichever criteria it might be that you're using to define 'best' at any given moment. They're the ones around which memories have crystalised and hardened to such an extent that I fully expect to be hanging on to them long after I've started mistaking my children for my siblings and have been packed off to the nursing home/labourcamp/privatised incinerator for the elderly and infirm which will no doubt be the only option for impecunious OAPs once this government is through with our health service. ANYWAY THAT IS NOT THE POINT I AM NOW TALKING ABOUT MUSIC THAT I LOVE AND CARE ABOUT: 1 - The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee I first came across the Mountain Goats through the good offices of a close friend who was going through a horrendously painful break-up and, as a result, linked me to possibly the most acrid divorce ballad ever written, 'No Children'. Although I thought it was great, I was a callow 23 year old at the time, and was more interested in taking ecstasy and listening to Dodgy's 'Staying Out for The Summer' and Das Racist's 'Pizzahut/Tacobell' remixes to pay much more attention. When I finally got round to following up the tip, I bought the only MG album in the shop, the excellent but slightly less mindblowingly, accost-you-in-a-dark-alleyway-and-hold-a-knife-to-your-throat-while-divesting-you-of-small-change-family-keepsakes-and-probably-underwear arresting 'We Shall All Be Healed'. So I forgot about them for a while, and listened to some more Dodgy. Hey, I thought. Mountain Goats. They're on the longlist. I'll get round to it one day. It didn't matter that my friend was practically howling at me to buy Tallahassee. What the fuck, I thought. He howled at me to buy St Vincent, too, and he was definitively wrong about that. More Dodgy. When I finally did get round to buying it, it sat virtually unlistened on my iPod for a few months. And then it was November, and it was a pisswet day, and I was hungover as hell and I had the glaze in my eyes from too much shagging and I also had the sinking feeling in my stomach that, at the age of 24, I was learning to recognise as an early sign that I was falling in love (again) with the wrong person (again) and suddenly 'Staying Out For The Summer' didn't seem quite the thing. I was walking down Crookes Valley Road in Sheffield and put Tallahassee on - maybe because I wanted something to match the bile and dread of 'No Children', maybe because I was going to work and I knew that if I listened to it, I'd have something to talk to my friend about which wasn't this new and painful dread in the stomach. And then I heard: 'I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing On which our survival depends People say friends don't destroy one another What do they know about friends.' Bizarrely, that love-affair - despite possibly the most acrid beginnings in the history of relationships that John Darnielle might plausibly write a concept about - worked out pretty well. In fact, if anything, it's the only time I have ever fell completely, besottedly, and embarrassingly in love with two people at the same time. One of them, predictably, was John Darnielle.

Flights of Fancy from a Mind Jailor

As I mentioned in my last blog, I have recently started working as a teaching assistant. This has simultaneously been one of the most rewarding and most frustrating decisions of my life to date. Obviously, I could use this opportunity to go off on one about how fucking awesome it is to teach a kid how to use commas properly (surprisingly awesome) or to rail against the iniquities of an education system that insists that at age 11, all children - whether they can read and write or not - should be able to identitify a metaphor as opposed to a similie (rail rail) but I'm not going to (or at least, not very much.) This blog is actually about a thought experiment. It is aimed at those who believe that the human race are inherently slavish followers of their given authorities and that because of this a society which is organised around the interests of the people who live in it rather than a disproportionately influential - and therefore priveliged - group of financial and political power-mongers.

Think back to when you were at secondary school.* Do you remember how many hours of every day were spent arguing with your teachers about the rights and wrongs of every un-written homework assignment, every incident of name-calling, every time you tried to throw a chair at another student and accidentally broke a window? Do you remember how many times the scary kid (his name was Bradley. It's always fucking Bradley) at the back of the class got up and marched out because he quite fairly believed that it really wasn't necessary for him to know the date of the invention of the Spinning Jenny?* Do you remember how loudly he slammed the door? Or, for the more studious amongst us - do you remember how many times you forged a sicknote excusing you from P.E? Do you remember when you told your physics teacher that you'd spent two an a half hours finding your way back to the science block from your violin lesson? Do you remember bribing the kid in the NUS office at sixth form college to lie about your age on your student ID? Do you remember traipsing an hour and a half across town in the rain because you had £8.25 and you needed £7.50 of it to get an ISIC card with said fake d.o.b proudly emblazoned across it?

Course you do.

I'm not trying to say that the model society would look anything like a modern secondary school (I did write the bit about the iniquities of the education system, right?) But - and here's the thought experiment - imagine if all that energy - that sheer bloody-minded teenage tenacity - was directed at the people who were *really* trying to screw you over. Imagine if, when the HR guy at your work comes round to inform you that, because you're only in the first six months of your employment, you're not going to get paid for the day you had off sick - oh, and also that the free-lance work that you did for us is now part of your job descriptiona and you won't be getting the six hundred quid that you thought you were. Imagine if you could summon that level of pure ballsy not giving a shit-ness next time you're working in a café where they take all of the credit card tips and half of the cash ones and stick it in the till at the end of the day. Imagine if you could bust it out every time you saw The Times Weekend Magazine.

Imagine if you could get that angry at the people who wrote this year's budget. And I think I know why it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the people who you see, face to face, aren't responsible for it, are they? Of course not. But imagine if instead of letting that anger dissipate, you simply asked - as politely as you knew how - to see the person who was responsible. Or at least the person who's next in line. And when you worked your way back through the H.R managers and the C.E.O.s and the junior ministers and the cabinet secretaries and finally got to George Osborne and he said 'there's no one there. There is no one behind me, yet I am not responsible: the system is to blame' you were allowed to say 'Fine. You have said that you are not responsible. I will be responsible for this. Me and the thousands of other poor fuckers who can't pay their heating bills any more. But that means you need to fuck off. And also, you're in detention until you die.'



*This may not work if you went to a fee-paying school.
*1764.

University fees and other major questions that have occured to me in the past six months.

K, I haven't been on line for about six months. I'll talk about that at some point, but not right now. Right now, I felt it was important to talk about some of the things that I've learnt about the world and the way that it's organised since I started working as a teaching assistant.

Oh, wait. Ok, I am definitely going to do this, but not right now. I will do this tomorrow instead.

Sorry to get you all excited.

ships in the night....

So, this is my first experience of an international crisis as a half-committed politico. I got a text message mid-morning last Sunday, urgently calling Sheffield activists to gather at the town-hall at noon to protest against the Israeli boarding - by force - of five aid ships attempting to deliver aid to Gaza. I did have reservations about this - the protests that I've been to in the past (particularly ones pertaining to the Middle East)have proved depressingly simplistic and one-sided, and besides, I've never felt terribly comfortable shouting slogans and waving flags unless I feel that I can defend my position with an intelligent, informed and sceptical interlocuter for at least fifteen minutes afterwards. I went, in the end - even (more or less) observing the fifteen minute silence proposed - perhaps rather ill-advisedly - by the organisers*. Whether this gesture did any good to the world is something that I'd like to explore in the course of this blog.

My first reservation - after the initial shock of the evident brutality used by Israeli forces - was the creeping sense that the outrage being expressed about the course of events was somewhat misplaced. I don't pretend to know a huge amount about the situation in Gaza, but even I'm aware that had an incident such as the violence on the Mavi Marmara taken place on land and been directed at Palestinians, it would have been, if not exactly routine, then certainly not an international news story: in all honestly, probably not much more than a ripple on the back-pages of the Guardian. Even the main speaker at our impromptu protest tacitly acknowledged that when she asked us to get in touch with our local MPs: 'we need to stress that there are British civilians on those boats... of course, *we* care equally about all the suffering, but parliament will do nothing unless it's in the British interest.'** I was quite impressed that she could acknowledge the protectionist impulse, even if by attributing it only to Westminster she rather begged the question of the motivations of most of the people in the crowd. Ultimately, it's an impossible conclusion to avoid: the cause of the furore was not violence, but rather the people against whom the violence was directed.

I'm not convinced that this is a terrible thing, in itself. The organisers of the flotilla had said explicitly that the mission had been arranged to call attention to the blockade, and, at the risk of sounding cynical, it worked. My principal concern is that the focus on the international questions raised leaves issues about the nationalistic tenor of the discussions surrounding Palestine and Israel unanswered. The violence is situated in a debate about the right to national self-determination, which, as far as I can see, doesn't address the central problems that Palestinians - and Israelis - have to deal with on an everyday basis: ie, how to get through a day - a week - a whole life - without going cold or hungry or being shot at. Although a loosening of Israel's stranglehold on the people of Gaza would undoubtedly improve their lives, the discussions posit these problems as something that can be resolved through the framework of national and international politics, rather than national politics being their cause. This is disingenuous: it is hard to imagine that the same bitter disputes would be taking place if we lived in a world where the notions of 'nationality' and 'the nation state' didn't have as much purchase on our psyche as they do at the moment.

That argument, however - convincing though I find it - doesn't really give us much to *do* with the situation as it now stands. It's more of an issue that it's well to be aware of than an incitement to - erm - do nothing. It seems to me that if enough international pressure is applied, then there might be an opportunity to achieve something positive - the lifting or at least the lightening of the blockade - out of a particularly brutish set of circumstances. If this is in part facilated by a wave of popular protests, then it has a double advantage: firstly, it might - and it's a puny and tremulous 'might', because it's *never* very sensible to be optimistic about anything in politics - make the lives of some people who have been shat on from a great height a bit easier. It also might - with the same caveats - draw attention to the fact that popular protest can and will have an effect. And I am coming to the conclusion that anything that lessens the sense of popular impotence in the face of injustice is a good thing. A huge part of that, obviously, is because such an awareness would give injustice in general a slightly less easy ride. But I think I mean something more than that. I have spent most of my life feeling in one way or another weak and impotent. My own experience has taught me that in such circumstances, it's in many ways easier to ignore suffering than it is to confront your own powerlessness to change it. This leads to apathy of a particularly insidious kind: the kind of apathy that is generated by a wilful shutting down of your own powers of empathy, a semi-conscious decision to become even less conscious. Ulitmately, powerlessness and impotence make you feel - make you act - less like a human being. So I suppose, overall, that I'm glad that I did make it to that protest - although next time, I'd prefer it if we could have fifteen minutes of noise rather than fifteen minutes of silence.

*A word to the wise, protesters: A hush descending on a crowd of people can be very effective, but not when there's only about a hundred of you and you weren't being terribly noisy in the first place, in which case, the effect is more one of embarrassed silence than overwhelming moral authority.

**I'm paraphrasing here, so - whoever you are, activist lady - I'm sorry if I've misquoted. In my defence: I thought taking notes at a protest would get me some funny looks, or possibly an accusation of spooking.

New Politics

So, having said in an earlier post that I don't find parliamentary politics or the goings-on at Westminster compelling per se, I have found the horse-trading and king-making of the last few weeks pretty interesting, particularly this notion of the 'new politics' that Cameron and Clegg are bandying around. It has to be acknowleged, I think, that the past few weeks has generated an exceptional level of interest amongst people who don't normally care that much about politics. As an example of this - a few weeks ago, I went for a Friday night drink in a Sheffield pub, and was drawn by a total stranger - a middle-aged father of two - into a conversation about the election, which eventually extended to include everybody on our side of the bar - 15 or 20 people, almost all of them total strangers to each other. Even the nine year old had an opinion about it. I've never experienced anything quite like that before. And when Clegg says, of the coalition government, that it is:

"new politics, where the national interest is more important than the party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength".

I think that is the mood that he is invoking - a tangible if temporary shift in the way people engage in the decisions they make about their own lives. That said, this change is patently not a product of the electioneering of the main political parties: it is the simple but largely unspoken fact that for once we were faced with an election in which the outcome was uncertain. When was the last time that happened? '92, probably - when I was seven years old. In every election that I can recall with anything approaching an adult consciousness, the outcome has always been assured - usually whole electoral terms before. How can it be that in a so-called democracy, the belief that the future is not yet determined is something that we experience for a few weeks once in a generation? In Cameron's inaugeral speech (can I call it that?) he claimed:

People last Thursday in the ballot box told us politicians that they didn't think any party deserved an outright majority. so the only way you can create stability is by creating a government, a coalition government, which lasts.

Quite apart from the fact that I don't recall their being an option for 'no outright majority' on the ballot paper (there certainly wasn't on the one I defaced), Cameron has jumped the gun here - fetishised without any justification this notion of stability - and all the stagnation that this entails. 'Uncertainty' is a peculiarly British bete noir - mandarin-speak for job-losses, deprivation, social unrest - a code word for a plan that has gone wrong. That seems to me to be a terrible dereliction of the political function. Politics and politicians should never be certain. Cameron has attempted to capitalise on both by hybridising a hope for some indeterminate but profound change with an ideological and political commitment to the status quo (which is, after all, what 'Conservative' actually means'.) As a starry eyed idealist who's had the benefit of a congenial conversation in the pub, I reject this commitment to stability with every screed of energy available to me. We should acknowlege not just the danger and the possibilities of uncertainty, not only that mutability is an undeniable fact of the universe, but that as human beings - animals able to make conscious decisions - uncertainty and instability are essential parts of our make-up. It is this fact that make us properly people.

Do Anarchists Dream of Electoral Sheep?

So, given that this blog is meant to be about all politics and that, it seems appropriate to write - erm - something - about, you know, voting. This is not something on which my thoughts have settled, as of yet. On the one hand, I have no truck with the notion that if a citizen forfeits their right to vote, they also forfeit their right to comment on their own political situation. I've got every right to comment on any political situation I damn well like, whether that be the regularity of the bin collection in Meersbrook, Sheffield, or the fraught relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe with regards to immigration control and, erm, well, mainly the fact that the Zimbabwean people don't have any food to eat right now, yeah? Provided, of course, that I've bothered to inform myself to any degree about it. Which, actually, I haven't, and this is why I'm refraining from commenting about either bin collection in Meersbrook (it seems to happen) or the situation in Harare (pretty fucking terrible, I'd have thought.) But I *have* thought a bit about the ethics of voting vs abstention, and you, dear readers, are going to get the benefit of it.

As far as I understand it, if you don't have much truck with the political elite as represented by Westminster - by which I mean that if you don't find the goings on in the corridors of power entertaining in the same way that you find a soap opera entertaining - then the reasons for votiing are as follows:

1) You think that a vote for the party that you want to win/find least objectionable will make an appreciable difference to your own life and to the lives of people you care about.

2) You think that voting for a specific party upholds or extends a part of your own identity.

3) You have a genuine respect for one of the candidates put forward to represent your own area.

4) You think that if you use your vote to support a minority party, this will somehow contribute to a critical mass of opinion-formation that may in time change the whole tenor of the political establishment.

5) You don't think 4) at all, but you're going to use your vote to protest against the fact that you don't see any of the current viable options as, well, viable.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the most significant ones for my purposes. As it happens, I'm not of the opinion that voting for a minority party - whether this party finds some representation in parliament or no - will significantly change the character of mainstream politics in this country. I simply don't believe that this is the case. Even if by some miraculous, miraculous occurence the Green party romped home (home? No.) to power by a comfortable margin, I don't believe that they could effect a genuine change in the way that people in this country organise themselves. It wouldn't change the way that we think, because, you know, we're the ones that need to do that. And besides, they won't win. They probably won't win a single seat. The BNP is obviously a far more frightening proposition, and in fact offer the most compelling reason that I can think of for voting so far. If I felt that they were genuinely within reach of becoming a serious force to be reckoned with in British politics, I would turn out and vote Labour without a shadow of a doubt.

I suppose there is an argument to say that even if far right parties like the BNP aren't currently a serious cause for concern, refusing to vote allows them an opportunity to gain ground that should be denied to them. That's a relatively compelling argument, as is the idea that you should vote in the forthcoming election because, say, a Labour victory would probably mean a slightly more clement set of cutbacks in the public sector and therefore maybe a few more nursery schools and dialysis machines staying open. I'll ignore for now the fact that I live in an extremely safe Labour seat so essentially whatever I choose to do will be meaningless because I think that's a copout of an argument. So yeah, two relatively convincing arguments there. Essentially, then, the question of whether to vote or not hinges - like the last post - on a question of compromise. Do I believe that it's better to knuckle down and vote for a party that I find comtemptible - for its deceptions in the war in Iraq, for its continuing commitment to the introduction of prviate finance into the public sector (did you know that in some Sheffield primary schools kids are now being sent home adverts for private companies selling school equiptment along with their dinner order forms?) for the ugliness of its private smear campaigns, for the Hutton enquiry, for the cash for questions, for their sheer, petty, incompetent, humiliating lack of imagination - which as far as I can understand it rests either on a total inability to appreciate what it's like to be alive and a human being, or else a wilful ignorance of this state of affairs - in order to secure a slightly less shaky future for certain public services that I genuinely believe are useful and worthwhile.

I dunno, basically. Maybe I'm just a bit too proud to put my name to that shit. Maybe I feel that the whole sordid business debases what I think politics should be about - trying to work out what's right and fair and to balance that with what's possible - because I've never believed that it's right to demand the impossible. Seems like a waste of energy. But I do believe that it's important to think about what you're signing up to before you put your name to something, and I believe that voting is probably amongst the most important forms of signature that you'll ever make (birth certificates and rent-books notwithstanding) and if you don't think that there's an option there which represents you enough - which isn't too much of a compromise - then there's no shame in withholding it. So to be brutally honest, it looks like the option that I've plumped for is on the surface of it the most superficial one at all. I don't want to vote because to do so would damage my sense of who I am, of my integrity as a person.

Yeah, sure. I know, I know, big drama, right? Get over yourself and all that. But the thing is that my sense of identity gets bashed about on a bi-hourly basis anyway. Most people's do, I think. I'm in no hurry to make it worse, and certainly not for the sake of a myth of intelligent participation invented principally to legitimate the power that has been held in the same hands for generations and generations. Fuck 'em. They can do without me, to be honest. Not that they'll care much anyway, and not that my staying at home on May 5th - in my strong Labour seat - will make a ha'porth of difference anyway.

Next week: voting, part 2. So, I'm not voting in this election. But is it wrong to vote per se?

Some of the things I've been reading recently:

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/asfuck.php

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/infighting.php

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/07/evangelical-atheism.html

Feeling the Fear

OK, you know how I mentioned that I used to hang out with Tories when I was university? I've just done something a little rash, and invited two of them to come and stay with me in Sheffield for a few days next month. On Tuesday I got a message from the more - erm, committed - of them on facebook. I reproduce in full:

Alright, a quick survey of friends attached to your recent photo albums reveals that most if not all have 'Nobody Likes A Tory' badge attached to their respective Fbook pages, as though this were something every thoughtful, halfway decent human being ought to brandish before breakfast. I beg (emphatically) to differ, and am much looking foward to an encounter with this gaggle of collectivists of yours come the early part of next month.
Can't wait to see you again, I hasten to add, and advise that I am practicing a special pie in honour of the occasion.
PS: no need to worry about protection rackets. Frankly, not sure Armstrong's whiff of gentrified Buttskillism is going to be much of a softener. More like blood in the shark's tank. But what the hey: it will, at the very least, be an enlivening culture clash.
Love

So, I'm mainly writing about this because the point of this blog is exploration. And for this to have any meaning, this has to be real exploration, not just the kind where you spend half an hour every day on the internet reading the Daily Mash and a bunch of blogs about how it's probably ok to watch pornography because, actually, like, everything's sexist really, yeah?* Which means proper conflict, which means putting people whose opinions I respect in the same room for a little while and seeing who comes off with fewer chunks missing. I just wish that it was possible for this to happen without feeling as if I genuinely might be risking a few relationships that I value hugely and possibly alienating people who I not only respect but love. And the love that I feel for people that I don't agree with - Anarchists, Trots, Neo-Liberals, Catholics** - has always been a reason not to involve myself in politics. And I suppose that this post is actually asking: is it right to love somebody whose political commitments you feel range from misguided to actively insidious?*** Because even if you believe that this commitment stems from their own good faith, and even if you know for certain that such people are vastly more inteligent - and vastly better read - than you are on almost any topic you care to mention, isn't it the case that your relationship with them is predicated on the unspoken agreement that for much of the time you are covering your metaphorical eyes with your metaphorical hands and singing 'LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA' at the top of your metaphorical voice?


But then you have to ask yourself at what point you think that this stops. Isn't any political organisation essentially a group of people who have decided together what is an acceptable level of LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA? It strikes me that the Left in particular would benefit from a bit more of this, and a bit less in the way of in-fighting and bitchery. But that's always been a problem for idealists - by definition, they don't like compromise. Which is one of the very things that makes them attractive. But essentially, the thing that makes me *want* to commit to some form of leftist politics - the point at which it diverges from policymaking and electioneering - is that in almost all its forms it is based on trying to make the world an easier place to love other people in. You can call yourself a Marxist, and claim that you seek a world in which the worker owns the means of production, or you can call yourself an Anarchist and say that you want to live in a world free from the oppressive power of a faceless governmental beaurocracy - and also that you want to Smash Shit Up - but essentially, what you mean is that you want to live in a world where the relationships that you form on a daily basis aren't tainted - or, god, at least - are less tainted - by the everpresent facts of competition, cruelty, jealousy and exploitation. That holds not just for broad, overarching structural analyses - you know, the kind that deserve capital letters, like Anarchism and Communism - but also movements that allow a large number of less radical participants, like the Woman's Lib or the Civil Rights Movement. What I find unattractive about the Left is that in practice this does not happen - vitriol is as much an ingredient of early 21st century politcal practice as cloak-and-dagger terrorism and propaganda by the deed was in the late C19th. And Ben, I think, is quite right to criticise the impulse to join the 'No One Likes A Tory' club on Facebook. I don't think that in all good conscience I can truly belong to any movement that mainly likes to combat its opponents through the medium of facebook and name-calling. And I know that this isn't solely a problem of the left - I've seen the EDL graffiti off London Road in Sheffield - but this is kind of the point. We're meant to be better that. Or at least, anything that I want to belong to has to be better than that.


* I will probably have to make up my mind about this at some point. Patience, patience!

**I'm a slut like that.

***Have just re-read the sentence, and should probably note that I am aware of the fact that 'misguided' and 'actively insidious' aren't ever more than a succesful election campaign apart from one another.****

**** Ooops, sorry, said 'election'. Must try harder.

The Manifesto

Right, this is the idea: I am 24 years old. A brief sixth-form flirtation with socialism aside, I have always been apolitical. Resolutely so, in fact. To illustrate - a brief resumé:

WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TORIES:
At university I spent most of my time hanging out with other-worldly would be academics who sported tweed jackets sans irony and were conservative without having to think about it. Thinking about it, 'hanging out' might be too strong a phrase. During this period in my life, I was known as 'the ill-informed but well meaning Guardian reading one'. This appelation is still more or less accurate...


WHEN GEO MOVED TO SHEFFIELD:
...but has been attenuated by the fact that I now live in Sheffield, where it is mandatory that you want Thatcher dead and were arrested during the miner's strike. This even holds for people who are undergraduates here. Generally speaking, the character of the city is slightly to the left of Trotsky.

WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TROTS:
When I first moved, I shared a house with two members of a Marxist organisation called the Allianc for Worker's Liberty. I went to their meetings occasionally until one of their members told me that he'd advised the organiser of the branch against attempting to recruit me because he had 'met more left-wing policemen.' Also, I accidentally slept with this guy's mate, and then I felt a bit embarrassed. Anyway, after that:

WHEN GEO WENT GREEN AND BASICALLY SLEPT IN A PLANT:
I kind of fell in with this crowd of unbelievably beautiful eco-hipsters who ate paté out of bins a lot and introduced me to the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones and allotments. About this time, I started to neurote about turning the heating on and eating sea-food. I still did it, though. In fact, my only concessions to the political convictions of my social circle that I've made thus far are a) that I now feel self-conscious consuming diet-coke in company and b) I bought a bike. So anyway, that pretty much brings me up to around last October...

WHEN GEO STARTED SLEEPING WITH AN ANARCHIST:
Does what it says on the tin, really. I started seeing this guy who's an anarchist. Only it wasn't just that I started seeing the guy: I actually started listening to him. And now I'm going to reading groups and can make cracks about doctrinaire Marxists without having to surreptitiously check the terminology that I've written on the back of my hand first. I'm not going to vote in the coming election, and I've even worked out why.

EVERYTHING IS CHANGING:
Essentially, EVERYTHING IS CHANGING. And I'm not entirely sure I like it. Sure, I was a wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal before, but at least I was my wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal. So this is what this blog is here to do, really: a sort of ebb and flow chart of my thoughts about what I've heard, said and read over the past six months, and what I will be reading, hearing, saying and thinking in the future. This will almost certainly be sloppy, ill-thought out and badly researched half of the time, if not more - I'm only a beginner at this game, remember. But it represents my attempt - long delayed but I guess necessary - to work out what I think is wrong with the Way that Things Are Currently Organised - and to try and decide what, realistically, I can do about it. I'm not on here to proselytise or even particularly to justify my apathy - because I am apathetic a great deal of the time, I know - but because I find those blank white MS Word documents desperately daunting and I think that putting my thoughts into a public forum might help me to keep thinking them. I'd like to hear about the conclusions that other people have come to: whether you're an embittered old bastard with a gin problem and only a handful of rusty red star badges and a divorce to show for twenty year's devotion to the cause, or a fully-fledged eco-anarchist with twenty-six partners who's recently given birth to a tree. Tell me what you've been reading, and what you thought about it. Tell me how many fights you've been in recently. Tell me about this really great forgotten post-punk outfit who've developed the knack of neatly constructing damning critiques of 20th century consumer capitalism in two and a half minutes, complete with glitteringly jangling guitars. Fuck it, man. I'm ready. Bring it on.

And, on that note: I might go and read about anarchy for a little while. Laters.