Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 73

Derbyshire

Back from our brief escape from the city.

Palestinian Lives Matter

Rebecca Long-Bailey was fired today for retweeting an interview with Maxine Peake in the Independent in which Peake claims the Israeli police taught American police the restraint techniques that have been killing unarmed black men and women throughout the US.

Clearly this is the result of a Labour Party hair trigger on the issue — warranted after the last few years of chaos — but how inaccurate is the claim really?

The offending paragraph reads as following:

“I don’t know how we escap...

Front Window #12: Northern Insomnia (The End?)

The other week, our familial corona-bubble left London to move back up north and we got jealous quick so followed them up there. We’re desperate to leave London after this is all over and this recent adventure has only solidified that desire even further.

It’s been an odd little trip. On the one hand, we’ve finally managed to experience some extended time in the great outdoors — rather than the sort of fleeting hop over the city limits that this series has inadvertently become dominated b...

Are We The Baddies?

One problem with identity politics is that individuals are pushed aside in favour of the (ethnic) group.
Community is then reduced to competition over status between those groups.
So it pushes all of us (incl. whites) to identify on ethnic lines. This is why it is problematic. pic.twitter.com/mKdkVVs4XU

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) June 22, 2020

Black Lives Matter sends identity politics into a feeding frenzy but it only ends up chomping on itself. The argument here from Matthew Goodwin is s...

Taking the Knee: Black Lives Matter, Subjugation and Sovereignty

Dominic Raab came under fire today for saying he doesn’t understand the gesture of “taking the knee” as a form of protest, saying it is “a symbol of subjugation and subordination” from Game of Thrones and, other than when he proposed to his wife, he’ll only be caught doing it before the queen.

The fury at Raab supposedly comes from his complete misunderstanding of the act’s context — its origin in Colin Kapernick’s bizarrely controversial habit of kneeling during the US national anthem before...

Xenofeminism and the Problem of the Non-Alienated Region

Alex has written a really fantastic blogpost on the tensions between immanence and transcendence in the Xenofeminist Manifesto. It chimes with something I’ve been thinking about recently, after spending quite a bit of time with Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. (I’m going to pull on this thread here, which may or may not resonate with Alex’s post — I cannot claim to be as well acquainted with XF’s named antecedents as she is.)

The sense in which “alienation” is used in xenofeminism’s self-describ...

Ideology Tumbles like a Statue: Notes on the Far Right, Žižek and Lukács

The hordes descending on UK cities to defend statues over the weekend have been laughable, even if their actions are telling.

As tweeted earlier, the argument that the Right have been peddling — that our nation’s old statues, installed by past generations, depicting slavers and the like, should stay up despite the current climate because they educate people — has been spectacularly undermined, as the statues’ defenders turn out to be the stupidest people around.

This all happened me...

Front Window #11: Obelisk Hunt

Another Friday walk, from about a month ago, following #9 and #10.

This time we found ourselves swooping back and forth under a motorway, on the hunt for an obelisk that we didn’t find. We skirted the edges of suburbia and picked flowers and wild garlic.

This is the weekend that Boris gestured towards lifting some of the lockdown restrictions. (Still no idea what is or isn’t allowed anymore.) We were stopped, at one point, by a police officer, out in the middle of nowhere, where we had s...

The Crisis of the Negative: The Relativist Right Never Change

Two things inaugurated the blogosphere’s engagement with accelerationism: the financial crash of 2007/08 and Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Zack Synder’s 2006 film, 300, for Lacanian Ink.

I discovered this the other day by doing a big deep dive and, whilst I’m saving a proper excavation of this moment for something else, I can’t stop thinking about it at the moment as all the usual suspects come out with their dumbest middling takes on the Black Lives Matter movement. They tend to look like this:...

Hegemony of the Cliché: Pomophobia Revisited

This is something that emerged fleetingly from the Q&A following my lecture yesterday for the University of Birmingham’s Contemporary Theory Reading Group — which was fantastic by the way; I’ll post about it when the lecture recording goes live.

Hailey Maxwell asked a question about how I see myself and my project in relation to Fisher. I’ve obviously had a lot to say about this recently but it led to a coinage in the moment that Niall later suggested could be a decent alternative to capital...