attica: heartfelt and thought-through

So! This is going to be a food review. Which is not something I will do very often, or possibly ever again, but most of my foodie friends are in the UK and I miss them and I wish we could take them to this restaurant, so this is a sort of long-distance dinner.

Last Thursday, J. and I celebrated our ninth anniversary* by having dinner at Attica, which we last went to in 2009. Since then it has (FINALLY) got three hats (the top rating) in the Age Good Food Guide, and shown up 53rd in the San Pellegrino Top 100 Restaurants list (the second-highest ranked restaurant in Australia). It is also pretty much my favourite restaurant in the world. We had the eight-course vegetarian tasting menu, and (SPOILER): it was gorgeous.

First of all: bread.

(Sorry, I forgot to rotate the photo before I uploaded it.) Rye sourdough, with rich yellow Jersey-style butter – unsalted, with pink salt on the side – and also with smoked emulsified olive oil with black salt on top (that’s the other little dish in the photo). Absolutely beautiful bread, elastic and chewy with a fantastic crunch. J. fell in love with the olive oil (so good!), but I alternated it with the butter (so classic!).

Then! Our first pre-starter. It came to us looking like this:

and when we opened it up we found this:

Walnut puree, with snow peas (and tiny flowers). As so often, the pre-starters were one of my favourite things – I suppose it makes sense to showcase your style at the very start, it’s sort of a little advert or mnemonic for the whole meal? Anyway, this was just beautiful: the peas were incredibly fresh and crunchy, and the walnut puree was subtle but rich, and did you see how they are in little walnut shells? With little flowers?

The second starter was

flash-fried shiitake mushrooms in … some special kind of crumb, which I didn’t write down, with a mushroom leaf on top. (This is one of those things that some people can taste and some people can’t, apparently: J says the leaf tasted of mushroom, but to me it was just a pleasant sort of, well, leafy taste). This was completely different from the first pre-starter, but just as good: intensely mushroomy, amazingly crisp, salty and good.

And then on to the actual eight courses of the menu! (Captions will be what the menu actually reads, then descriptions under the photos.)

First starter: Textured Cauliflower with Horseradish.

We had this last time we were here and it was one of my most vivid memories from three years ago. And it was even better than I remembered. Apparently there is cauliflower in here somewhere, but I didn’t recognize it, which is good because I abhor cauliflower. Anyway, also in there is: grated apple; goji berries; dehydrated coconut; verjuice ice; and puffed rice. And then over the top is horseradish ‘snow’. It is in the shape of a volcano in New Zealand (the chef, Ben Shewry, is from NZ), and it’s an amazing montage of flavours and textures and temperatures. The verjuice ice is sharp and cold, and the powdered horseradish melts on your tongue.

Starter 2: Leek, Lovage, Mustard Oil

Steamed baby leeks with lovage puree and little mouthfuls of mozzarella. The lovage is a very up-front taste, but it fades very fast and then the full sweetness and freshness of the leek comes through it, and the mozzarella holds it all together. This was so good.

Middle course 1: A simple dish of Potato cooked in the earth it was grown

We had this before when we were here, but I don’t remember the little pool the potato is sitting in now: it’s smoked goat’s curd with coffee and coconut husk ash, garnished with flash-fried salt bush leaves. The tastes of the goat’s curd and bush leaves were amazing, strong but complementary and really well-balanced, but I wasn’t sure about how it went with the immense simplicity of The Potato (which was also gorgeous, but subtle – I mean, it’s a potato). Having said that, after I finished the dish I was left with the taste of potato in my mouth, thinking ‘Wow, usually I don’t think potatoes taste of anything but they really, really do and they are delicious’, so possibly it needs the goat’s curd/bush leaves to bring it out by contrast? In my memory, the 2009 version of this dish was literally just a potato, but I suspect I may be wrong there.

Middle dish 2: Tomato, Smoked Sesame, Eleven Basils

Oh, God, this might have been the best course. That’s a long strip of compressed (?) capsicum, and then sitting on it are skinned Black Russian cherry tomatoes, and then just the inside seedy bits of other tomatoes. And little dollops of smoked black sesame seeds. And tiny tiny basil leaves from Attica’s garden. And hazelnuts roasted in spice. And goat’s curd. So there’s a sort of classic Italian basil/tomato/mozzarella salad in there, with a nice Italian pepper, but then hazelnuts and sesame seeds too. Which is sort of typical of Attica’s style, I think – Heston Blumenthal (who’s sort of our default comparison because we watch his TV programme and also we ate at the Fat Duck this year) would have had to be a bit more conceptual or wittier about doing a ‘take’ on the classic salad, and I’m not sure the hazelnut and sesame would have got in there – they’re just there, I would guess, because Ben Shewry (Attica’s chef) thought they would taste good. AND THEY REALLY DO. So in this way, the food here really reminds me of one of my other favourite restaurants, Cafe Maitreya in Bristol (voted the best vegetarian restaurant in the UK several times). The thing with Cafe Maitreya is – well, the food is really fresh and often foraged, which they have in common with Attica, but also, they don’t have a typical ‘shape’ to their dishes (often vegetarian restaurants do either variations on a meat-and-two-veg-style shape, or serve nothing but stew-type shapes). It seems as though Cafe M come up with their dishes by thinking through which ingredients will work together, and designing a whole dish around that. Whereas Heston Blumenthal either tries to do a version of an existing dish, or thinks scientifically in terms of flavour combinations, almost isolated from the actual ingredients themselves. So I think it was around this point in the meal that we decided that Attica is like a combination of the very sincere, ingredient-based, fresh, vegetarian style of Cafe Maitreya with the advanced techniques of Heston Blumenthal (there were all kinds of things we were eating that you couldn’t do with just your basic ‘chop, saute, roast, serve’, home-style techniques/equipment). Hence, basically, our perfect restaurant. (I said this to our incredibly lovely waitperson at the end of the meal and she said yes, she thought the style was ‘heartfelt’ and ‘very well thought-through’, which is exactly right. In fact I’m going to go and make that my title!)

First main: Kumara, Purslane, Pyengana

Kumara is a Maori word for sweet potato, so that is a slab of sweet potato roasted in a salt crust. It’s on a bed of almond-and-garlic bits (technical language deserting me as the meal moves on: in a minute I’m going to stop remembering to take photographs, too) with a warm egg yolk and broccolini buds, and then it’s sauced at the table with a Pyengana cheddar sauce. It’s incredibly, incredibly rich and so delicious – okay, maybe this one was my favourite dish. So many strong flavours, but not competing at all.

Sadly, it filled me up so much that I could only manage a couple of mouthfuls of the second main (this always happens to me on tasting menus: I used to think it was because most meat-based restaurants worry that they can’t possibly be feeding the vegetarians enough and therefore overdo it on the vegetarian mains, but these mains were tiny and it still happened, so it must just be me. I get a bit emotionally overwhelmed at about this point, also.) And I forgot to take a photo of it! Sorry!

Second main: Mushrooms, Mulled Wine, Pearl Onions

[No photo, but you can see a picture of the meat version of this dish in this review, which also has better photos of the cauliflower and potato dishes. It shows the cos lettuce stems & onion slices really well.]

Portobello mushrooms heaped with red grains made of mulled wine and blackberries somehow, with chervil and dill on top, and a little pool of parsnip puree nearby. Then long spear-type things of pickled cos lettuce and halved salad onions. So pretty, and so delicious, and I really appreciated the sharp/vinegary tastes after the richness of the previous main.

And then! Dessert! I forgot to take a photo of the first dessert again: it was also beautiful, and worked as a palate-cleanser, too, instead of there being a pre-dessert. So it was sweet but also savoury-ish. The menu lists it as ‘Raisins, Whey, Hazelnut’, but what it was was beautiful green grapes and pale brown half-raisined grapes (from their garden again, I think), with sheep’s-milk whey and cubes of pale/translucent hazelnut puree, and yarrow. Anyway, it woke me up enough to remember to take a photo of the next and final course:

Dessert 2: Native Fruits of Australia

From the top: quandong; lemon aspen; candied rosella petals; muntree; bush currants; desert limes. Sitting on honey custard & bush currant ice, with a little circle of sheep’s-milk yoghurt flavoured with eucalyptus.

So many different tastes, none of which I had ever tasted before (native Australian fruits are not something you see all over the place here); sharp and tart, balanced by the subtle sweetness of the yoghurt and the custard and the ice. Just beautiful. And it was really nice not to end the meal with a chocolate-based desert, which almost every fancy place I’ve ever been to has done – they’ve often been brilliant, but chocolate never really feels very subtle, so it’s sort of like being hit with this rich, obvious, sweetness after a very thoughtfully balanced menu. A few little chocolates with coffee is a different matter, as is:

Post-desert: ‘pukeko eggs’

Little white chocolate eggs! Filled with salted caramel! Butterscotchy! In a nest!

We had them with mint tea, then rolled satiatedly home THE END.

So, in conclusion, all the good things they say about Attica and Ben Shewry are true, and one day we will take U & M there in return for the many beautiful evenings at Midsummer House and Alimentum, and it will be great.

*INORITE?

parrots

2pm: I look out of the window of my suburban house, hoping to find a plan for my book out there. Instead I see green parrots, flying low down the street.

BanQuet launch

So it’s currently (near the end of) Midsumma, Melbourne’s queer cultural festival, and being a word person I have been going to a few of the events at Word is Out, the literary strand of the festival, held at Melbourne’s queer bookshop Hares & Hyenas (yes! Melbourne still has a queer bookshop! But then Melbourne has so many bookshops, you wouldn’t believe it. At least you wouldn’t believe it if you came from Bristol.)

Anyway, last night I went to H&H again to the launch of the BanQuet2012 Anthologies, anthologies of erotic writing by queer women and queer men. I was standing in for my friend Kate Harrad of (among other places) Fausterella, who had a story in the women’s anthology (about pianos, apparently. I haven’t read it yet – I couldn’t fight my way through the horde of Melbourne hipsters at the bar to buy a copy!) It was a fantastic event, really well-chaired by the energetic (and, um, phenomenally beautiful) publishers Carson and Dettori, who kept us moving along through the readings at a cracking pace and did an excellent job of introducing the readers and the narratives, so we didn’t get lost. The readings themselves were variable – the skill sets for ‘writing good erotica’ and ‘performing to a packed house’, as anyone who’s in slash fandom knows, are not overlapping, and not all erotic writing translates from the page to the voice – but Kath Duncan‘s poem ‘Butch Cock’, which opened the night, was particularly great.

Here’s a little slideshow of images from the night:

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G’day!

I’m in Melbourne!

Here are some things that have been happening:

1. I was walking along St George’s Road listening to Lou Reed on my iPod (and realizing that I don’t like Lou Reed, which is very sad as I always assumed I did/would) when I suddenly became aware of a burning sensation on my head. Had I been bitten by a gigantic antipodean insect with a terrifying venom? Was I experiencing a massive allergic reaction to perfectly mild antipodean insect venom? Had I been sunburnt on the top of my head through my hair and there alone? What? WTF?

I went into the discount fridge shop, turned my iPod off, pulled my headphones down round my neck and burned my fingers on them: they’re European headphones, with a silver-metal strip across the top of the head, which I would like to stress IN EUROPE never becomes hot enough in the sun to BURN YOUR HEAD.

I reapplied my sunblock.

2. There are butterflies! Everywhere! Huge, fluttering, gaily-coloured butterflies! One of them was dancing around outside the second-floor library window I was looking out of yesterday! One of them was fluttering down Smith Street (a wide, busy, shopping street in the trendy northern suburbs) as if leading us to the next clothes shop! One of them kept pace with our tram down Brunswick Street!

3. Last Wednesday, it was hot, and the telecomms guy was coming at 1pm to instal broadband, so it wasn’t likely to be a very productive working day, so after the broadband was fixed and we’d played with it a bit, we got the tram from our house to THE BEACH and swam in the sea and ate chips and felafel and drank fresh orange-and-pineapple juice and watched the kiteboarders.

4. I am still very much in love with Australia.* The graffiti says things like OUR WORLD RULERS ARE INCOMPETENT and WHITE POWER SMELLS and be silly, be honest, be kind and PLEASE READ PYNCHON**, and in the Baillieu library at Melbourne University the student who’d annotated the book I was reading had written ‘Yes!’ against a radical critique of liberal multiculturalism/pluralism*** and then written ‘Reformist??’ suspiciously in the margin of the next paragraph, and then ‘Collapsing gay and trans?’ in the margin of another essay, and, oh, look, I have fantastic students at Bristol, but they are much more likely to indignantly defend liberal multiculturalism against these EXTREMISTS who don’t understand that there ISN’T any racism now, and not to know what ‘trans’ means. (Or why ‘reformist’ would be an insult, come to think of it.) Jenny and I are alarmed and exhilarated to no longer be the most radical people in any given group, but much the woolliest liberals. Feminism is so much more mainstream and so much harder-core here. We need to raise our game!

5. My hair is in terrible, terrible nick – I haven’t had it cut in about four months and it wasn’t a very good cut even then – and last night we went to a Midsumma event (that’s the annual Melbourne queer cultural festival), where I discovered that I am in a strange no-man’s-land of hair. All the 20something butches have it shaved up the back and sides with long, quifflike strands or spikes falling into the face at the front, and all the 50something butches have it utilitarian-short all over, and I didn’t really see any 30/40somethings (couldn’t get babysitters?), so I am going to have to decide whether I think of myself as young or old. But I think I can get away with being ‘young’ for a couple more years.**** Also, I really want to have my hair shaved up the back with long quifflike strands at the front, and I have already spent $30 on eco-friendly organic Rock Star ‘tested on rock stars, not on animals’ hair putty at Hairhouse Warehouse.

6. I am writing a book! I actually originally started this blog in February 2007 when I was in Melbourne writing my last (also first) book, Now and Rome, and I meant it to be a writing blog primarily, recording the process of writing and nutting out some of the ideas in the book. But that turned out to be much harder than I’d thought it was going to be, partly because so much of the writing process (for me, at least) involves despair and self-hatred and profound psychic struggle and do I want to blog about that? Not really, not so much. Anyway. We’ll see what happens. There are lots of things I do want to say about this book, which is going to be about reception theory so that when people ask me what my job title (‘Lecturer in Reception’) means, I can point them to a handy, easy-to-read, slim-volume introduction. At the moment I am mostly reading like crazy and getting very excited about everything. My reading is overselecting white male writers/theorists/critics at the moment though, which I need to put a stop to (I was embarrassed by the bibliography of Now and Rome for precisely this reason). I mean, Roland Barthes and John Mowitt are going to be pretty big figures in the theoretical landscape of the book already, but I don’t need to fill in the background with exclusively white male extras.

7. This is another nice thing about Melbourne, everyone asks me about my book and is interested and has something to say about it and I don’t really notice it in the UK because it’s so ubiquitous and invisible, but it’s like this layer of class resentment and suspicion of intellectual work is just missing, at least from superficial social interaction. We’ve mainly been spending the last month moving into Jenny’s house from the friends’ place where we’ve been staying, picking up excess baggage from the airport, getting utilities and phone service and broadband, getting our stuff unpacked from storage containers, etc, so almost everyone we’ve seen in the last month has either been one of Jenny’s friends (a 50/60something feminist and usually a culture worker of some sort) or a tradie (30/40something skilled manual labourer, male), and the conversations have been pretty much exactly the same with everyone: ‘that sounds interesting, will it cover [x, y, z]?’ The 50/60somethings have an occasional tendency to ask me if by ‘book’ I mean I’m doing a PhD, forcing me to say ‘NO I GOT MY PhD IN 2003 I AM A SENIOR LECTURER***** THIS IS MY SECOND MONOGRAPH’ in a way which possibly does not prove my maturity as much as it is intended to.

8. In some ways this is my third book, in that I have already published a monograph and also a novel-length Harry Potter fic, but in some ways it is my first book in that the fic was intended to be about 8000 words long and got out of hand (it’s about 80,000, I think), and the monograph was a revision of my PhD. So this is my first book that I have had to plan, as a book, from scratch, which is something I have always avoided doing like the plague. I have already had to throw out my lovely chapter plan and start following the advice I keep giving my students (figure out what you want it to say, then figure out what you need to explain to your readers so they can understand it, then you have your structure!). Which is very galling, but probably salutary. Anyway, it reminds me of something Una once said about how the thing you learn about writing one book is never the thing you need to know for the next one. (T.S.Eliot said something similar, I believe.)

So, in conclusion, hello. I missed you, Internet.

*by which I mean ‘the trendy inner northern suburbs of Melbourne’, but, you know.

**I actually have never read Pynchon, who comes under my block on all male American authors post-Hemingway apart from Dennis Cooper, but I remember Aren recommending him, so who knows, maybe I will. I really have quite a lot of Georgette Heyer to read first, though–

***For them as are not familiar with this critique, it isn’t an argument against difference and diversity and having a culture that’s open to lots of different kinds of people – it’s an argument that the way liberal ‘multiculturalism’ has been framed as a kind of free-floating co-existence-without-struggle actually doesn’t help us to open up our cultures, because it (a) assumes that cultures coexist without interacting, that each culture is pure and unmixed in its own right, and (b) covers up the existence of real inequalities and real differences between different groups of people. Sort of like saying ‘It’s so great that women and men are so different, they bring such diverse perspectives to the table!’ and then organizing all the meetings for a time when all the women are doing childcare in a building without a women’s toilet. (And then of course one childless woman with great bladder control shows up, and everyone says ‘See? We’re not excluding women!’)

****Though do I want to? See below on being mistaken for a student.

*****I’m not, in fact, a senior lecturer, but hopefully I will be in August, so I think that counts.

Peter Pan

Hello, I have been away for RL reasons which I won’t be talking about here. I’m going to celebrate my return eventually with a big four-part post on chicklit, you lucky people, but in the meantime I wanted to link to this story, ‘Never’, a Peter Pan fanfic, which carefully makes visible the implicit violence and horror of Neverland. (I have no idea whether the author considers it fan fiction or an avant-garde postmodern retelling of fable or what, but as you probably already know, I don’t really see an essential difference between those two things, so I’m calling it fan fiction because that’s the name for the largest extant group of ‘stories set in the Peter Pan universe and commenting on J M Barrie’s universe’.)

The story comes from an oddly different-but-similar reading of Peter Pan to mine (its author, Ursula Vernon, writes this about her own experience of Peter Pan), in that I think that disavowed violence, a profound ambivalence about adulthood, a construction of childhood and adulthood as forever at war and of adulthood as a terrible loss (but of childhood as forever imperfect, incomplete, violent and vulnerable), underpin Peter Pan itself and make it the weird, rich, unresolvable work of art/cultural symptom that it is; but I think Vernon thinks that Peter Pan is supposed to be read as an unexamined paean to ‘childhood innocence’, a deliberate aversion of the eyes from Piggy’s corpse, as she puts it in the blog post I link to above, and that she is putting the book’s lies up against the truth about childhood as she experienced it extratextually. Whereas I think the book is very much about the uneasy relationship between adult investments in childhood innocence and childhood itself as an amoral, violent, yet dependent state. But, partly for those reasons, ‘Never’ is a fascinating story, and a rigorous critical response to Peter Pan, and I’ll probably set it as secondary reading next time I teach Peter Pan.

there is only seeing, and in order to go and see, one must become a pirate

Last week I was at a two-day workshop at Bristol called To Receive is Never Neutral: Towards an Ethics of Reception, which was in some ways a continuation of and response to the conference I organized at Bristol last year called Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception. And one of the quotes that was circulating around the conference was the one from the title, which is from Kathy Acker, and has been picked up and put into motion around Bristol by the indefatigable feminist-philosopher-heroine Alex Wardrop and her supervisor and my colleague, the excellent Genevieve Liveley.

As always, the mention of pirates returns me to a key passage for the way I think about reading, writing, and reception, a passage from John Mowitt’s indispensable book Text:

the text insists that artifacts mean both what we make them mean and what others might make them mean if we stopped trying to represent their interests for them. Of course, we are in no position to know what this might be, and we have to struggle to structure what we do so that it might be pirated by those whose struggle against disciplinarity might well be unrecognizable to us.

And this suddenly seems to me to be the answer to a question about the ethics of reception which kept coming back, which in a way framed the event last week: the question of clarity. The workshop opened with a keynote lecture from Sarah Wood (a scholar I admire more than I can say for her generosity and rigour and refusal to shut down the relational, the affective, the worldly, in her work) in which she talked about Derrida saying, in an interview, One does not always write to be understood, and characterizing the ‘difficulty’ of his writing as a kind of giving-to-read, a gift to the reader, a handing-over. Later, in the final session of the day, Matthew Gak (who I can’t find a decent link for, although the reviews on, er, RateMyProfessors.com speak highly of him) talked about clarity, and our responsibility as thinkers and writers to be clear, to make ourselves understood. And this is a problem which keeps coming back for me, because I affiliate myself with two traditions at once: an ‘Anglo-American’ feminism which valorizes a particular kind of clarity of expression, and a ‘French’ poststructuralist-feminist-queer tradition of thought, which valorizes a difficulty which requires some work on the part of the reader.

What the Mowitt quote does for me is bring those two aspirations together. (There’s also a quote attributed to Einstein, which I use as a compass in my writing and in my advice to students-as-writers: Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.) Because, you know, what do we mean by clear or difficult, anyway? There are people who would be recognized as ‘clear’ writers who make me weep in frustration because their dependence on natural, everyday, colloquial language actively obscures their meaning from me, and people who I know are often experienced as ‘difficult’ or ‘obscure’ who make me melt in rapture because of the precision, the ringing clarity, the beautiful subtlety, of their expression. For one, obvious perhaps but quite fraught, and quite common, example: sex. (As in sexual intercourse, ‘having sex’, sexual activity, etc, not as in gender.) Stephen Pinker, who has basically built a whole reputation as a clear writer, a popularizer, etc, talks about ‘sex’ in such a way that I literally cannot understand what he is talking about: sometimes he talks as if it is an activity which can always potentially result in pregnancy, but sometimes he extends its range to the kinds of activity which actually count as ‘sex’ for me, as if sex between two women, one of whom is post-menopausal, was somehow a sub-category of baby-making. Whereas I nearly died with pleasure a few months ago where I finally got round to reading the Introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (who my students tell me is ‘difficult’ to the point of unintelligibility), and she defines ‘sex’. Not only that, but she does so in such a way as not to exclude any activity which would be understood by the people engaging in it as ‘sex’, and so as to clarify the whole of the argument that follows.

So the kind of writing that usually gets called ‘clear’ or ‘intelligible’, I’d argue, is actually a kind of fake clarity – it’s only clear if it is read from a particular position where, for example, ‘sex’ and ‘activity likely to get someone pregnant at least potentially’ actually do mean the same thing. From a position only minimally displaced from the cultural norm, that kind of writing can be unintelligible. Whereas I always ‘understood’ Eve Sedgwick, and to some extent Derrida – I mean, I found Derrida so difficult when I was first reading him, but so enormously pleasurable, so exciting, and I knew there was something in there that I needed, that was worth waiting and struggling for, that would help me in what was a desperate situation. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes (p.59):

I came to theory because I was hurting — the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most important, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.

My experience was similar to this, and I know other people who found a solution to pressing problems and real pain in theory. So the idea that ‘clear’ writing is the only possible, or even the best, solution to real, urgent, political/ethical problems, is simply not borne out by my experience, at least not this fake-clear writing which takes a short-cut to clarity by allowing ideology to do the greater part of our reading for us (Althusser: whenever we say ‘That’s obvious! That’s natural! That’s [the] right [reading]!’, that’s ideology.) Because people who are marginalized by that ideology will not be able to ‘do’ that reading, and will not benefit from it.

So the problem of clarity is really, I guess, a problem of address. All writing, of course, requires a mutual understanding between writer and reader, a shared pool of codes, connotations, significations, common experience, things-that-can-be-taken-for-granted (where would we be if we had to explain the workings of gravity in fiction every time someone walked, stood up, dropped a teacup?). The problem is how to write in such a way that we don’t rely for our meaning on the reader’s counter-signature on egregious ideological shorthands and short-cuts. And that’s how we make our writing piratable, too: and it’s only now that I see that Mowitt is saying something like the opposite of Acker, not how to be a pirate, but how to let ourselves be raided by pirates, how not to prescribe the ‘proper’ reading, the proper meaning, the proper interpretation of our work in such a way as to exclude the readings of other people whom we cannot imagine or predict.

At least that’s what I aspire to, what I will be trying to practice in this book.

(And it turns out that I’ve thought all this before. You say I am repeating/ Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?)

link round-up on riots

Happily, the Guardian at least seems to be stepping back a bit from the blanket depoliticization of the recent English (and I believe Welsh) riots: here’s an essay by the magnificent Gary Younge, here’s one by Naomi Klein, here’s a particularly triffic article about how the idea of a ‘mob mentality’ is about a hundred years out of date, and while I’m at it, here’s a blog post by Dan Griffiths reminding us, brilliantly, that the Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman claimed £8865 in expenses for a 40-inch TV.

I have one more post I want to make about this, about the legal power of shop windows to stop us taking things that we want and how that’s bound up with other, less salubrious ways in which law divides space and regulates flows, but it’s taking a while to wrestle it into words. And anyway, I’m supposed to be blogging about Derrida–

ETA: Zizek on the riots, from the London Review of Books, reblogged at I Cite:

The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying… The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.

How I hate to agree with Zizek–