Every time I return to this, it seems more true.

First of all, if you’ve never encountered Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula, you’ve missed a true wonder of nature/mathematics. That has next to nothing to do with what follows, but I found it whilst googling the Latex plugin (less exciting than it sounds) needed to render this post properly, and it is the most astounding thing I’ve seen in a long while. I am having serious trouble believing it really works. How the hell…? And are there any more of those things? (I suspect an infinite number, but how do you find them?)

So, I bought a book on Algebraic Topology, started reading it on the train, just the opening section on “prerequisites” (a bit of naïve set theory - no problem - a bit of algebra, slightly less familiar). There’s a discussion of groups, in which it’s mentioned that “it can be shown that a set of elements of a group is a subgroup if and only if for all and in .”. I was taking reading notes, and wrote “How???”…

Well, here’s how. I worked most of it out on the train, and the rest on the bike ride home.

We have to prove that is a group, in other words that:

• It is closed over the “multiplication” operation, e.g. if and are in the group, then so is .
• It contains an element , such that .
• For every element in the group, there is a unique corresponding “inverse” element, in the group such that .

Let’s start with proving that . This is actually quite easy. We know that for all and in . What happens if and are the same? In that case, , and since , that means that . Hooray.

Now we must prove that for all , . This is also quite easy. Since we know that , let . That means that for all , . And , so for all , . Hooray again.

Now we can prove that . First we must show that . Let . , therefore . It follows that , in other words that .

Now, since for all and , and for all , , it follows that , therefore , Q.E.D.

It’s a bit like the proof that you can derive all of the boolean logical operators from NAND…

Here’s a fun game: replace the word “Derrida” in each of the abstract titles given here with the word “Badiou”, and see if it hurts any worse.

(via Ben)

hairless cats prowl the streets
snails desert their shells
black shoots pierce the concrete -
death from below!

swarm under, death!

you will trip up one day
and fall into the underworld
stalagtites and stalagmites
glistening like gristle

you will trip up one day
on your untied laces
and the souls of the damned
will yodel in triumph

the souls of the damned
will pause in their rotation
and sing like schoolchildren
from their microwave ovens

the facts are compelling
they yodel in unison
the souls of schoolchildren
are 90% gristle

in the fatal urinal
where you trail your laces
they sing out from the plugholes
in minatory gurgles

join us! join us!

you will stumble one day
and then we will have you
straight down the piss-chutes
and into the ovens

black vines grasp your ankles
snails schlupp up your trouser-leg
waving their tentacles
sniffing for gristle

down with the stalagtites
up with the stalagmites
in the ghastly quarter-light
of the eternal Reich

the facts are compelling
they swill down the plughole
the souls of the damned
are ineffably lovable

So, I finished writing the book. Teasers and matters arising may show up here. This is the chapter list:

1. The Cold World
2. Written In Blood
3. The Aesthetics Of Dejection
4. A Sermon In The Name Of Death
5. The Brain Of Ulrike Meinhof

“Written in Blood” is on Hopkins, “…Dejection” is on Coleridge, although there’s quite a bit of Larkin in both for some reason (well, this won’t surprise anyone who knew me as an undergraduate, not that many people who who did read this to my knowledge - where are you all, anyway? Where are your blogs? Don’t tell me you’ve all grown up, you spineless renegades!). “…In The Name Of Death” is on Xasthur, with a bit of Britney. Annoyingly, the YouTube clip of the video for “Everytime” spliced with “The Eerie Bliss And Torture Of Solitude” seems to have been removed, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it once existed and was awesome. “The Brain Of Ulrike Meinhof” diagnoses the RAF as the executioners of West German hedonism; the moral of the story is, roughly: if you don’t want your kids to turn into terrorists, help them find something bigger than happiness to pursue. Hmmm, I really should send a copy of this to Roger…

Meanwhile, I’m in a right old state: I’ve been up since 3AM with severe abdominal pains, although these finally seem to be fading, and intermittent vomiting. Generally speaking, when pain makes you cry, you know it’s bad. But maybe the worst is over; I’m off to see a GP later, by which time the whole thing will probably have sorted itself out. I will say one thing: NHS Direct is bloody good. Almost un-UKishly good, in fact - as I said about the superb hospice in which my late grandmother spent her last days, it’s like living in a first-world country. Or a country one could conceivably imagine having survived the second world war. It’s still there, underneath it all - and by “it” I mean, I think, people.

I recommend this unreservedly.

I’m a bit fatigued with amateur Lambethology. Anyone waiting for the present Archbishop of Canterbury to come out and say something really definitive on the matter of, say, whether there might ever be women bishops in the Church of England will be disappointed for a long while yet. It’s not that he doesn’t have an opinion - I dare say he does, although I wouldn’t dare try to say exactly what it is. It’s that he doesn’t think it’s his place to impose it, whatever it might be, on the whole Anglican communion. There are some quite deep reasons for this (read some Donald MacKinnon, if you doubt me): not liberal wooliness or refusal to take difficult leadership decisions, but leadership of another order altogether.

Many observers seem to regard Williams as weak and vacillating; actually he is admirably precise in his judgements and principled in his positions. The fact is that the answers to the problems currently facing Anglicans cannot come from him. It is frustrating, but there it is: it is simply not the commission of his office to resolve contradictions among the faithful by unilaterally deciding on matters of orthodoxy. If you want someone to do that then what you want is a Pope, not an archbishop.

The contradictions exist, obviously, and need to be worked out, and I’m not convinced that this can or should be a wholly polite and courteous process. At stake is whether the church can recognise in full the gifts of women and gay people, or whether it must continue to insist on a sexually mutilated personhood for certain classes of person. It is a choice between grace and sadism. The irony is that many people find sadism more attractive: they can cloak the immense, arbitrary cruelty of sexism and homophobia with a stance of compassion towards the afflicted, whilst enjoying the privilege of glorying in the righteousness of their own adherence to “family values”. But perhaps that is not the true libidinal position: after all, there are no perfect families. Perhaps what the defenders of sexual orthodoxy are really clinging to is precisely the condemnation of their own “imperfections”. They tend to characterise equality as permissiveness, as an “anything goes” attitude towards sexuality - what would they themselves lose, if such an attitude were to prevail?

To be a sexual being is to be a chimera, an amalgum of parts that do not cohere. I do not mean simply that “everybody is a little bit homosexual”, or that we all sit somewhere on a continuum between two poles of orientation. I mean that sexual identity is factitious, the counting-as-one of a fundamentally inconsistent reality, and that it is haunted by phantasms, infantile desires, perverse inclinations and no small amount of unrepresentable Dreck. That is the real of sex: “something about the body”, to use a phrase of Virginia Woolf’s, that is irreconcilable with its self-image and with the socially sanctioned expressions of its desires and capabilities. If one wants to be tortured by this, one can - it’s the easiest thing in the world to be screwed up about. Alternatively, one can declare oneself “sex positive”, get a whole bunch of piercings and pretend that one is totally cool with the whole situation. But it is not totally cool. It is not totally anything: that’s the point. The real of sex cannot be subjected to any consistent presentation; any possible presentation of it will be a mish-mash, a confusion.

Orthodox religious sexual ethics attempts to subordinate the real of sex to some regime of meaning, be it reproductive futurism (”go forth and multiply”) or romantic love (”at last I have found The One!”). The latter has a depressing hold on the imaginations of outwardly unreligious persons: they may not worship a trademarked deity, but they seem happy enough to imagine that some anonymous force in the cosmos actually cares enough about who they mix their DNA with to have selected that special someone for them in advance, and then arranged their entire existence as a sort of providential narrative leading up to the point where they sign the mortgage agreement together. Agnosticism means letting capitalism do your believing for you (and “atheism”, in its current popular incarnation, seems to mean aggressively refusing to let anything but capitalism do your believing for you. Most serious Christians are closer to real atheism, it seems to me, than most avowed atheists). But I digress.

If “anything goes” (and someone who fears that this is what equality really means will inevitably fear a slide from acceptance of homosexuality to acceptance of bestiality and paedophilia, since for them such acceptance means the removal of all restraint on the “impure” elements of sexual desire) then the site on which these narratives produce their (profoundly satisfying) conflicts and resolutions is dissolved - the very possibility of meaning vanishes, and we are reduced (presumably) to brutish animal coupling, the sort of thing those awful men get up to in public lavatories. Condemnation of sexual impurity acts as a guard against racial/biological degeneration, a sort of horrifying return-to-slime in which the very bodily integrity of human beings is dissolved into undifferentiated filth. At the same time, this fantasy of total release from sexual integrity - of uncontrolled desires running wild in every direction at once - is very powerfully invested; the real sex lives of actual gay people, even the most adventurous, generally pale in comparison to the excesses conjured by the homophobic imagination.

At the heart of the struggles over sexual ethics and orthodoxy in the Church of England is the question: can the church help people to live with themselves as sexual beings? As it stands, it does not help: it hinders, and some people eroticise the obstacle more willingly and self-gratifyingly than others. The imago of “the family” it projects is an idol, and must be shattered: those whom it attracts, it perverts, and those whom it repels are right to be disgusted with the idolatry it commands.

Poetry has nuisance value.

“Nuisance value” is the value of a frivolous insurance claim or lawsuit: the amount the entity on the receiving end will pay you, even though your claim is meritless, just to make you go away. It’s a measure of the overheads of whatever system is used to resolve such claims - the cost, to the winner, of winning without having to fight over anything of substance.

More generally, then, nuisance value is a measure of the noise in the system. In the case of language, poetry presents what may be frivolous demands on the hearer’s time and cognitive powers. Its claims are not transparently resolvable. There may after all be something in it. You will have to pay a certain amount of attention in order to find out whether there is or not. (Even poetry that is limpidly accessible, forthright and direct may actually be disguising an underlying vacuity). A poem is a bid for the share of attention needed to look into the matter. Its value is precisely what would pay the poet to shut up, go away and stop bothering you instead.

They really couldn’t have chosen a better acronym.

“To be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing”.

Nothing I suspect could be further from the nature of Rowan Williams than to think of Peter Akinola as an enemy whose scorn is to be welcomed. Nevertheless, the separation of a reactionary faction from within the worldwide Anglican communion - and they are reactionaries, there is no other word for it - provides a clear opportunity for the definition and defence of a progressive line. It should be possible, although it is far from sufficient, to affirm homosexual equality; to demand that women and gay men (and, inevitably, gay women, although nobody seems nearly so bothered about them for some reason) be enabled to use their gifts as bishops; to refuse theological simplification and high-handedness in dealings with other faiths; to seek to be a church of (and by) grace and not of (and by) law. Let the conservative evangelicals pursue their messianic fantasies (”if you receive an SOS from anywhere in the world we will move in” - who is he, Batman? I suppose this could be termed illiberal interventionism). We will see soon enough what lies behind their urge to exclude, stigmatize and punish.

Well, the Lambeth Conference is likely to be interesting this year. It’s not often you can say that.

I’ve started doing some hobby programming again, and have decided to put the more concentratedly techie stuff on a separate blog: Kode. It’s “code” spelt wrong, just like “poetix” is “poetics” spelt wrong - do you see? In a parallel universe, there’s a website with the domain name “kodepoetix.com” and blogs called “code” and “poetics”. But not, as far as I know, in this one.

This is Gorgorotten, who are both truly grim and grimly true:

There are quite a few black metal parody videos of one sort or another on YouTube. People just like dressing up as scary clowns and pratting about in the woods, I think.

Update: Interview with Gorgorotten guitarist Necrobastard!

This is a lot funnier if you’ve seen the interviews with Gaahl in Peter Beste’s True Norwegian Black Metal

The Grauniad’s giveaway “great lyricists” booklet today features the words of Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys; not exactly Dylan, but nowadays the ability to craft a half-way decent rhyming couplet counts for a lot. I’m reminded of Lawrence Miles’s complaint about Stephen Moffat being lauded as a genius Dr Who scriptwriter, when what actually makes him stand out from the pack is just a sort of baseline competence - a distinct set of skills not everybody has, but anybody writing TV scripts ought to have as a bare minimum.

I liked this couplet in “Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured”: “But this lad at the side drinking a Smirnoff Ice / Came and paid for her Tropical Reef”. All the same, it’s basically music hall double entendre isn’t it? Anyone in the entertainment business ought to be able to knock that sort of stuff out without breaking a sweat.

A few months ago, a woman with a baby in a pushchair stopped me on the way to work, asking for directions to Communications House. She was carrying a letter on Home Office headed paper. I told her which way to go; she thanked me and carried on up the road. She was gone before it had quite registered with me what was going on; what happened next for her I don’t know.

I do know from personal experience that getting involved with other people’s problems can be costly, and can lead you into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations. I don’t want or enjoy that sort of hassle, and have no image of myself as a hero descending through the clouds to rescue those in need. Sometimes it’s right to intervene personally, whatever the cost, but a lot of the time it’s better to know who to call, to be able to put people in touch with networks who can support them, and to support those networks according to one’s own abilities. It might not have been right or helpful to get personally involved with that one person’s case, but it wouldn’t have hurt to be able to give her a number to call.

Liberty are doing some good work on issues relating to asylum, detention and deportation, and I’m proud to have signed up and sent my thirty quid in to support them. I’m now looking into the work of the No Borders network, and No One Is Illegal, trying to find out how I can usefully contribute given the limited time, money and energy I have available.

It seems to be the season for formerly fairly quiescent people to start getting politically involved; as I write, Sarah is filling out the form to join Unison, just in time for her union dues to support a summer of strike action across the public sector. This wasn’t a spontaneous individual decision: she and her fellow LSAs had a discussion over lunch one day which led to them agreeing to join en masse, photocopying the application form and handing copies round. I think it basically dawned on them that they were all being horrendously underpaid, and that their hitherto preferred strategy of just sitting around complaining about it all the time wasn’t really doing them much good.

I rather wish Ken Macleod’s fictional Webblies (the International Workers of the World Wide Web, or IWWWW) were a real organisation; IT workers like myself have so far proved very difficult to unionise, for a variety of reasons, but given the general convergence of hacker opinion on things like the desirability of Free (as in speech) Software and the inanity of corporate culture you’d think some sort of left-libertarian collective agency ought to be possible, even if people still get into flamewars about whether static or dynamic typing is better*, whether Java should have closures**, or what have you.

* Static typing is better, but only if the type system is something like Haskell’s.
** Java should not have closures; Java should shuffle off into the Grace Hopper Retirement Home for Defunct Corporate Languages and be replaced by something*** that had closures to begin with.
*** e.g. Scala.

Time: 7 pm, Tuesday 24 June 2008
Venue: T&G, Transport House, 128 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8TN

Asylum-seekers and migrants who had been locked up indefinitely by the British state are carrying out one of the most sustained fight-backs in the UK in recent years. Three major detention centres (out of 22) have been destroyed, forcing the government to release hundreds of detainees. Hunger-strikes, occupations, naked protests, dirty protests and successful break-outs involving tens and hundreds of detainees have become a regular feature of immigration detention. The government has reacted with brutal levels of repression, using assault, segregation and transfers to prisons to punish the protestors.

The UK government has also tried several times to prosecute those involved in large-scale riots. This has rarely resulted in convictions and has more often led to public humiliation for the government and the private detention contractors. The government is persisting in its plans to rebuild ruined wings and build completely new centres at Brook House (opening 2009), Yarl’s Wood (opening 2010) and Bicester (opening 2012). These will provide more profit-making opportunities for the building contractors and private detention companies but in the end are likely to face the same level of protest.

Protests in detention centres are often ignored by the mainstream media and also by political activists. London No Borders invites you to an info night to discuss why this is the case and to raise awareness of detention centre protests as one of the front lines of current
political resistance. The primary aim is not to plan future actions but to discuss what has happened already and why it has had such a low profile. We particularly welcome ex-detainees who witnessed or participated in detention centre protests and ex-prisoners who could relate this issue to prisoners’ struggles.

No Borders calls for the closure of all detention centres and an end to deportations

Email: noborderslondon@riseup.net

Programme for Radical History Meeting
Tuesday 24 June 2007 – 7 pm
T&G, Transport House, 128 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8TN

Introduction

Purpose of meeting:
· to raise awareness of detention centre protest as a political movement
· to support current protest by setting it within a historical tradition

Scope of meeting:
· detainee activism in detention
· NOT conditions of detention or surrounding issues about the asylum system, destitution, anti-deportation campaigns etc.

Outline of chronology and main types of resistance and summary of main events.

Speakers from various detention centre protests, including the 2005 Yarl’s Wood mass hungerstrike and the 2006 Harmondsworth uprising

· to talk about the events in which they were involved
· to address some of the following questions if they want to

Ø What were the triggers for the protests?

Ø What were the demands? Why were those demands chosen?

Ø Why did they choose that type of protest? What tactics did the protestors use in the course of their protests?

Ø How did the protestors organise amongst themselves?

Ø How did the protestors manage divide and rule tactics by the authorities?

Ø What outside support did they get? How helpful was it? What kind of support were they hoping to get?

Ø Outcomes – impact of the protests on conditions and treatment; gains and losses; repression by the authorities

Ø How did the protests change the way the protestors viewed themselves and their situation?

Ø Why have the protests had such a low profile relative both to the level of protest and to the profile given by activists to other forms of resistance? What is the relationship between detainee activism and what is called the ‘social movement’? Issues of racism etc.

Open discussion

Groups to give brief outline of current activities
Proposal for working group to create written record of history of detention centre resistance

Michael Neocosmos, The Politics of Fear and the Fear of Politics:

This politics of fear which finds its origins fundamentally within the apparatuses of power, has been complemented since the 1990s by a fear of politics, ie. the unwillingness or the inability of popular politics, with a few exceptions, to break away systematically from a state politics of fear.

The context is a discussion of xenophobic pogroms - attacks on “non-indigenous” Africans - in the South African townships. Xenophobia, fear of the foreigner, feeds on the state discourse which identifies the foreigner as such, which supplies the template for recognising the foreigner in our midst (foreigners “over there” form an indiscernible mass: there is no foreigner amidst the foreign).

Passive citizenship, the expectation of delivery from the state, the fear of criticism, self-censorship, the culture of uncritical celebration have all been noted at one time or another as obstacles to political thought. A fear of contesting authority, kowtowing to those in power, the politics of cramming “our people” into positions, all this has lead not only to a demarcation between ethnic and other identities capable of “delivering”, but also to a politics of the exclusion of others as a standard/ normal practice. The exclusion of alternatives (economic, political or intellectual) constitutes the dominant practice. The fear of responding to the politics of fear in a critical and organised manner, to say no to treating people differently, to say yes to maintaining a firm point that all must be treated equally by power; the absence of all this constitutes the fear of politics, the fear of political agency by all of us.

I would like to underlike critical and organised. The fear of politics is a fear of crisis (splitting, krinein), of the antagonism that arises when the possibility of an alternative is broached; and it is a fear of organisation, of any form of political discipline that is not immediately subsumable by that of the state.

Michael Neocosmos talks about an “alternative politics of peace and equality”. This politics of peace is not a passive politics: passivity means acceding to the politics of fear, which targets the foreigner for exploitation and violence. Nor is this politics of equality an impartial politics: impartiality means permitting fascism to monopolise discourse in order to dominate and silence others. Peace and equality require a militant politics, which separates itself from the state and develops its own positive political thought, upholding through all struggles and contradictions the “firm point” on which it is based. This is what the state cannot deliver; this is what we must do.

I haven’t really been interested
for a long time
in sunbathing starlets
with their pierced navels

but I saw your photo
on this website I clicked on
mistakenly
and I wept for a whole hour

my body shaking
all over like the awesome
total orgasm
that other website promised

you could learn to give
your lover assuming
you had one
and she was game

thinking Christ
Christ I’m getting older
and the starlets
are getting younger

all the time

“London has been at a severe level of threat from terrorism for a number of years and, in the current climate, attacks such as the ones we have seen are totally irresponsible as such behaviour can be used as cover for more sinister criminal activity.”

That’s the plod explaining why it’s perfectly OK for them to erect enormous security barriers to keep protestors out of sight of un-President George W. Bush and, like, scary and wrong for them to try to get near enough to him to tell him to fuck off and die.

“In the current climate”: anyone who uses these words should be spat on. That should be the instinctive, physical response of every thinking person to hearing such imbecility coming from a public figure. How dare they talk to us like that.

Benjamin Noys has a blog, which is rightly cause for general ce[l|r]ebration.

“Incognitum” of Eliminative Culinarism (linked by Mr Noys) I take to be Reza Negarestani, or some amalgum of himself and sundry non-selves.

I’ve just lugged home a review copy of Peter Beste’s True Norwegian Black Metal, which includes some excellent photos of the verrry intense Gaahl from Gorgoroth:

Down thirteen flights, his cap and gown after him,
his popped eyeballs rolling into the road.

Never made out what they were shouting.
Push coming, shove coming.

Box your ears for you. Give you
something to think about.

Ichor. He thinks of it as ichor.

Still an awesome song, even when being butchered by the likes of me:

When I was 17, I had A-levels. And rejection. Mmm, rejection…