Exhibiting artwork for two day events@Audacious Art Expirement, Sheffield

Some of my work is showing at The Audacious Art Experiment, Sunday 18th March
Audacious Space, Harwood Street, Sheffield, 2pm - 10pm

FEATURING::

John Ledger Exhibition
Ben Nash
Former Bullies
Jack Allett
Irma Vep
CKDH

EVENT LINK HERE

£4 Donation
BYOB

WORK WILL ALSO BE UP FOR THE MARCH 31ST EVENT.........

Change of Blog colour

I have been informed that my previous white words on black background was hurting peoples' eyes when they tried to read it. So, as much as I prefered the previous, and I no longer wish to hurt peoples' eyes.
Please let me know what you prefer - Oh my god I sound like a company here!

Ghosts

Alongside the inner ring road in my home town is a skeletal structure which, to a visitor to the town, looks like a building on its way to completion. Yet to anyone who who isn't just passing by they know that this structure has been in its current form for nearly 4 years.

Its skeletal state gives it a ghostly look of something that is dead but haunts on not realising this.

Even over 2 years ago this 'Mary Celeste' looming over the town centre brought concern, even if this concern was more about practicalities; a friend of a friend told me about the huge daily cost of crane hire; the accompanying crane is still there, waiting in vain anticipation.

But the costs merely seem to add to the farce of the world that left it stranded. The building is a haunting from the world that was before the economic crash. Stood there, waiting to be clothed with walls, furnishings and busy busy people. But just like the

uneaten breakfast on The Mary Celeste, it doesn't look like the builders are returning to finish off, as if they also vanished when that pre-collapse real was shattered.


It's strange when thinking about how the crash happened nearly 4 years ago. It doesn't seem that long ago; when we are wrapped in a mediated-sensibility that is forever anticipating the return to this reality, for things to 'get going again', it feels like that event has never ceased being 'what happened yesterday'.

Of course, back in 'The Noughties' things were far from being easy; it didn't take much to notice the transparency of the business ethic that was draping all institutions in its shiny vacuity, and it didn't take much to notice how many were excluded from this all smiles world when one walked around their town centre after 6pm and saw the distinct lack of smiles there. It also didn't take much to realise that wars for oil and stupidly hot summers were clear indication that the finite planet would put an end to these capitalist fun and games.

Of course, I wouldn't be making the point that it was OK back then anyway, and this isn't the point of this bit of writing. However, before the crash, if you squinted hard enough, to only see the lights of the brightest/tallest buildings, and smiles of those able to afford teeth whitener, and also managed to squint hard enough to squeeze out the truth about your own alienation, one could momentarily lie to themselves and think "yeah, it's not too bad yet, and I'm sure things'll get sorted".

This world is very similar to today's, yet at the same time it also feels a million miles away. We know that things are going to get worse under the same set of rules, and we know we are going to have to fight really hard to make for something better - and this is really really daunting to people who can't quite fully believe what they know: that they have nothing left to lose (at present I am still one of these people.)


When I see this Skeleton and its crane I am reminded about the sadness of the passing of time, and the utter strangeness, the other-worldliness that can hit you when you give something like this building more than a fleeting glimpse. For this skeletal structure time seems to have frozen, allowing us to glimpse back at a place that is over 4 years from us now, a place made to feel closer to us through the ominous anticipation of its return, but the sheer oddness of thing frozen in time makes this place seem more like another world away, and I think this is closer to the truth.

At ease, and uneasy about it

There's certainly something that makes me feel very uneasy about being at ease with things in the year 2012, like I've accidentally pressed the snooze button on my wake-up-gotta-help-change-the-world alarm clock. With so much at stake, I'm walking around, still boozy from the previous night, too calm, way too calm, already in the storm and not even noticing it!

A weekly requirement has started to reveal its strange and disconcerting motives. An requirement that so many share, but which is so often not due to an addiction to alcohol. I can't get through a week without heading out somewhere to intoxicate/semi-intoxicate myself at least once. But it isn't so much the enjoyment of being drunk; there's something more which this whole 'heading out and getting drunk' polava provides. Around the socially-dictated high point of the week (Friday evening to Saturday night), if I realise that I'm going to be stuck in on my own I feel massively discontent, no matter how little I want to go sit in a town centre Weatherspoons or Lloyds Bar. The weighty cultural suggestions around me send me into a text messaging frenzy, in aide of finding someone who'll accompany me on a mission to relieve myself of this tension.

A few months ago I was partaking in an event (or more happening) in Sheffield which had links, due to a cohesion of objectives, with lots of other events going on around the same period. It was all very promising: the happening I was part of, named Pandemic (as in something all-inclusive, and something that can re-emerge at any time), is the antithesis of 'the event' as climatic conclusion of all previous hype. However, despite what was, or could be achieved, a day of such promising events never ever seemed to be fulfilled without the conclusive 'mission complete' feeling that a few (or many) drinks at the end of the day could provide (perhaps for myself more so). I was looking through photographs on Facebook of one of the linked events I couldn't get to. The event sounded very interesting, yet most of the photo's shown seemed to be of the ending part when people were drunk. Why do we need to have a certain degree of intoxication to feel that a day, which feels like it should be eventful, has been concluded?

Back to today, as I walk around a city centre after a reasonably heavy night, I feel relatively over-relaxed about things; I am not half as concerned about getting things done that I was so adamant about getting done the day before. I'll just go go home, eat heartily, piss around on the Internet and then go to sleep. Now, this in itself is by no means a sin, but it is state of being that is poles apart from the me of yesterday who was so much in tune with his concerns. However, it was also true that yesterday I was certainly anticipating heading out to give myself an half-decent blasting with alcohol in the evening. A drug providing one with a conclusive feeling to a day that has supposed to have been (or suggested to you that it ought to be) eventful.

Whilst participating in this series of happenings in Sheffield, I mentioned about these photos from this other happening to a friend (and co-organiser of Pandemic). Not at all to be critical of the way it turned into a drunken occasion, but precisely putting the question to both of us as to why events seem to need this end from the participators. We more or less suggested that this conclusive feeling, the feeling that confirms to oneself that "things are now complete now I am drunk, I can go to sleep now, satisfied", is a compensation for the inconclusiveness of events that are suggested to be the ends for the means themselves, and also, and more fundamentally, it is a compensation for the inconclusive and often seemingly meaningless end to a day in one's life.

I will continue to argue that we live under a social system that has exacerbated so many social issues to the point of being critical, and I'd argue that this odd problem is ever-more critical in our present times when everything is hyped up to the extent that so much never feels adequate, like it neither ever fulfils nor even arrives. But when one lives in a time when they are encouraged, by the language of advertising and neoliberal society on a whole, to feel that they are supposed to be having fun or experiencing something (or at least making plans to do so) all the time, days can very quickly feel incomplete/inconclusive meanders, making them seem so meaningless and empty when they aren't packed with life-affirmation. Does this have some relation to the so called "binge drinking" culture, we are suppose to be suffering with in Britain? Well, yes, completely: the intoxication brings a feeling of finalisation and conclusion to our days which demand this of us ever more. Perhaps binge drinking culture isn't the right term though? maybe a conclusion-searching culture, a satisfaction-needy culture, or, more to the point, a desperately-grasping-for-meaning culture?

Once we have undergone this process, the sense of a finalisation to something comes over us, that is physically powerful enough to give a feeling of completion to the week that's been (perhaps?.) This gives us a needed satisfaction; a sense of meaning, and allows us to make 'new weeks' resolutions' (yes, the weekend is a smaller model of the Christmas/New Year period) to do exactly the same again, once we climb out of bed on Monday morning and become (re)drenched in the social system's asks of us.

The alcohol-made satisfaction, and the hazy and tired feeling the day after, makes for citizens who don't want for much, and don't care for much but some at-hand comforts such as hearty food and easy-watching television. One becomes as close to being 'zombiefied' as they can get. Nothing stirs you as much as it should: News that private security firms are being invited to take on roles that the police usually do is an 'alarm bell' of a story for sure, but my alarms are muffled by the lethargy induced by the drink.; then there's the news about Police and Security 'services' blacklisting individuals involved in industrial action against the government's Draconian measures (although this information may have been purposefully disclosed, but made to look accidental, to scare people away from taking action against government measures in fear of losing all hope of finding work, thus It's likely I ought to remain passive to this news!)

This is one of the few weekends I have had free for a while. I wanted to write a blog about how climate change has dangerously slipped from the public imagination, and that the belief that it isn't happening (or at least that humanity isn't causing it) has risen. But I'm here walking around a Late capitalist backpack destination (a large art gallery) finding much to feel secure and satisfied about (again, not sins in themselves). I know climate change is still the mother of all issues, but for some reason my alarm bell reserved solely for this issue seems to be ringing much quieter than usual. I hope I haven't fallen for the general cultural lethargy towards this issue. This is why the weekly alcoholic anaesthetising is but a player within the larger societal structure that's always doing its best to numb us to anything that doesn't ring its loudest alarm bells. The economy? Yes. Growth? Yes Consumer Spending? Yes. But the gigantic monster awoken by capitalism (Climate Change)? No, forget it - not now people can't afford to shop 'greener'.

Too calm, way too calm!

I confidently reckon that Michael Stipe of R.E.M was alcoholically anaesthetised when he first wrote down his famous lyrics "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine": something really bad is likely unfolding, is probably unfolding, but I feel way too snug to move and do anything about it. The threat of climate change isn't directly linked to alcoholic anaesthetising, but as I say above it's a player in a societal pressure on us to forget about anything outside the immediate gaze.

Wait, this is serious

With initially morbid consequences, climate change (climatic chaos) needs to be put back into the public imagination in the ominously sounding 2012. It needs to be seen as the bed fellow to capitalism, to show how much we need rid of both; a continuous connecting of the two, like the other unwanted coalition we have been forced into a battle to stop; the Con-Dem's. With so much that demands critical and thorough thought and debate from many of us (if the 21st century isn't going to be a more action packed and gory sequel to the 20Th century horror show), here in the UK we have a government with a brutally simplistic world-view (allowed for by the, as of yet, mega pampered ride upon this earth that most of them have had) whose stampede against democracy, and everything that requires consideration, reflects this. We have a 'leader' here in the UK who has come out against what he called "anti-business snobbery" seeping into national debate (which roughly translates as "people who are critical of capitalism being put before the needs of human beings") saying with sheer fucking stupidity that business "is the most powerful force for social progress the world has ever known".

But as stupid as this is and as anti-capitalist as I am, I wouldn't try to deny it that capitalism has also enabled technology to advance at a pace unknowable before its appearance, and we need highly advanced technology to try to prevent the environmental crisis we have started from killing most of us off. Yet, I think we can still see the moon landings from over 40 years ago as the pinnacle of technological progress, and they are certainly the icon of that peak. I don't mean by this that technology itself hasn't advanced since then, but that the more ruthless (neoliberal/free market) capitalism pushed its way through during the decade following 1969, only to reel in more ambitious, and also more socially progressive ideas for technological use, into the palms of the global market, for pure commercial benefit, to which any claim that the resources and funds weren't there for better usage can be refuted due to the rapid shift of resources/money into fewer and fewer hands during this period (and what a waste!) The technology is there to build a better world; capitalism may have helped it along, but the better world and capitalism cannot co-exist.

Yet we are still at a stage where the governments and mainstream media (those who get their words heard by majority more than anyone else) do everything within their means to convince us that anything but the continuation of capitalism is impossible. So, instead of getting started on tackling the issues that really matter, such as addressing increasing poverty (in all areas of the world), addressing increasing discontent (in all areas of the world), and addressing the huge environmental issues (in all areas of the world), all that is showered down on us is the need to get the economy (capitalism) growing again. We are kept passive to the other issues; even if in some cases we are already experiencing them ourselves, they still aren't a big issue because the panic buttons in society aren't going.

But it's fast approaching a stage where it is taking everything and leaving nothing. This simplistic idea that "capitalism gives us things, that it provides us with decent lives" may have had some truth at the peak of its compromise with the welfare state, but it's validity as a statement has been fading away since. But now it's also close to taking a liveable planet away. Everything being taken away needs to be woven together into a cohesive rejection of capitalism, because bagaining with it to leave us at least something behind is very unlikely to work. Perhaps the crucial factor about the aforementioned news above about Police and Security 'Services' blacklisting workers involved in industrial action is that the government aim is to fragment groups, so as to pick them off one by one. It just made me think of how if the system reduces everything down to isolated incidents, which allows it (the system) be too massive to be in line for accusation, and how the reverse needs to be done to succesfully accuse it: weeving all the carnage left behind by it into one cohesive message saying "no more".

Predicted scenario

This hasn't happened yet, or may not, as I may not pluck up the courage, but here's how I predict it will begin

One reveals what they are made of just as much in places where they do not feel at home, rather as places where they are at home.

Imagining myself in cafeteria of prestigious university, in prestigious city; waiting to go for a chat (I.e. informal interview) regarding applying for Masters course. Of course, like usual, I have drunken my coffee way too fast, and I'm sat with dead time when I least want it, just twiddling with the pages of my sketchbook-cum-notebook.

I hoped a friend who lives down here could have met me beforehand, to gain a bit more confidence from not being so utterly alone, but ended up having to work today. People have busy lives, I shouldn't rely on them to give make me feel more at ease in my surroundings. I suppose I wanted them to be here to see who I really am, as one reveals so many truths about what they are made of when they are in environments they feel very uncomfortable in.

One's cultural upbringing is seeping out from scars that were supposed to be long gone. "I know I'll make 'school boy' errors when in there" one thinks to themselves, "how the hell can I 'hold my own' in conversation with this tutor who is going to be proper clever and know so much?" As much as you've fought against lowly assumptions of yourself, and you look at the progress you've made in that fight, at times like this it feels like you've still got a real long way to go. They certainly aren't shaken from your shoulders. No matter how intensely I keep reminding myself that it is the cultural environment I've been raised in that still tells me "I shouldn't be in such an highly place" and that "these places aren't for the likes of me" these words feel to be physically pushing into me, like a school uniform that is too small for me, not daring to move my shoulders much in case I accidentally tear my clothes.

If only one of my friends who now live around here could see the real me now; see how naked I am at in this environment; how the barriers that usually hide now reveal everything; where everything negative anyone has ever said to me is crawling on my skin(even how using the words me and naked in the same sentence still conjures up fears of being laughed at in front of the class at school!) Then they could see why it has taken me such a long time, right up until my late 20's to find myself in a building like this.

But I'm scared of the tutor in there seeing my nerves that I cannot hide - I'm going to speak to her about doing an MA in Culture Studies when I am the culture study! I bet she's used to talking to really confident people who can assure her of their capability ( I picture a young man, perhaps two years younger than me, and a good few inches taller, who doesn't walk with his shoulders so tensed-up that it's like he's constantly on a crowded train). But this is no help; feeling inferior to person you've made up in your head.

But then I try to remind myself that I'm here partly to help put that past behind me. But what if it catches up with me/keeps on finding me? Always presenting the caste of a downtrodden, easy-to-be-stupid-and-wrong me? Always taking perceived natural position below others. Always assuming that if there's been a misunderstanding between yourself and another that it is naturally your fault. No! Don't let this win! Well, I'm here now. At least we'll get the chance to see if all of this is true now: that the culture embedded in me, assumes that I'm not clever enough to study, well, erm, culture...?

Perhaps I should write these thoughts down that I'm currently having whilst waiting for the froth in the cup to turn back into drinkable coffee, and use them to aide my application............?

Two of a kind?

Two of a kind. Doing the same thing for different (but not too different) ends. Which one's picture is most familiar to us though?


The question of being bad/evil isn't addressed here, just the question of their role within the system in which they operated.

A “gruesome simplicity”: The Meaning of Noel Gallagher

(The title paraphrases Richard Seymour's The Meaning Of David Cameron)

(I suppose writing this is a melancholy act. Even though my love affair with the music of Oasis has been over for over a decade, their music is still the soundtrack for a point in my early high school days in the mid-to-late 1990's when things looked really bright around me, and society seemed cheery and optimistic [even if we realise how naive this was, looking back]. My friend gave me a cassette in 1996 with their best-seller '(What's The Story) Morning Glory' taped onto it. It seemed to capture the essence of my then blissful excitment for the future, from a time when even the smell of Lynx Atlantis deodorant seemed to smell of good feeling. But it wasn't just me, the 1990's had fooled most into optimism for things to come; the 'tracksuit' wearing youth, who the band would later scorn, were walking around the ex-coal mining villages I spend my days in, playing Oasis, alongside Happy Hardcore tape's on their portable tape players, and the name of the band was even sprayed onto many walls up and down. It Seemed like they had meaning for everyone, and it took me a while to realise that, to quote Morrissey, they said "nothing to me about my life" - Oasis truly were The Motorcycle Emptiness. But these illusions are gone now, and it's time to brush away the cobwebs made by those dated-voices who still half-maintain them. Well, this is part of a tearing away of the remaining cobweb strands.)

Reading the sleeve booklet for The Stone Roses: Tenth Anniversary CD, when only 16 years old, reading about “the gruesome simplicity of Oasis”, to contrast them with The Stone Roses, I thought it was merely referring to their musical style. Little did I know, or like to admit back then (being a high school kid still very much in awe of the ‘Britpop’ icons), that this was also reflected in the Gallagher brothers’ attitudes. But this was ‘so-so’ in the period from 1995 to 2001, when the illusion of The End of History, allowed for people with nothing reasonable to say to be revered, because no threat was posed from their ‘give a shit’ and clumsy remarks. Now, in a time which might as well be a million years from the late 1990’s, these dated-voices are indeed gruesome.

There’s no doubt The Daily Mail had reason to tweak what Noel Gallagher said in the article featuring the songwriter’s most recent ‘views’ (so as to show that “it’s ok for so-called working class heroes to become part of the establishment as long as they can make it out of poverty”). But whether Noel’s comments did or didn’t praise Thatcher is of no real relevance: his “I couldn’t give a shit” attitude (which is as course and as dated as any of the Top Gear Crew’s), and his simplification of desperately complicated social issues, now he as the wealth to keep himself and his family well out of reach of society’s growing number of desperate people (according to the Mail he “vows to send his sons to private school”,); this attitude is as right wing as the Daily Mail and is itself a Thatcherite attitude.

I will return further on to the question asking whether we should be criticising Noel or criticising the reason why celebrity voices are projected over other more sensible voices. But, in the present context, there’s no getting away from a reality where celebrity voices such as Noel Gallagher’s do permeate the four walls of our homes with ease, and are revered by the many that do listen to those icons to which they associate their own identity with inside this star-system complex inside ‘the society of spectacle'. And one must take into account how damaging reckless well-heard opinions can be.

One needn’t look far to find those who are inspired by his so-called “No Nonsene” straight-talk. A blog post from 2007 pits Oasis against Radiohead, using quotations from a Guardian article on Noel. Using a faux-soft-but-really-quite-fierce sense of nationalist pride to state, in favour of Oasis over Radiohead, “Noel is of course exercising the right of every free-born Briton – the right to take this piss. In fact, it’s not a right but a duty. The average Brit would much rather be thought to be an ignorant no-nothing than a pretentious wanker”. Well, forgive me for not wanting to be an average 'Brit’. But also forgive me for abstaining from using this myth of an eternal national identity to think of ourselves in this way, as it requires a blanking out of the cultural constructs that helped maintain state power during uncertain times such as the expansion of industrial capitalism and the second world war; also, if you haven’t noticed, the last 3 consecutive governments have been doing their very best to erase these ‘freedoms’ and ‘born-rights’ that ‘us Brit’s’ possess - can’t be that eternal can they then?

Perhaps Noel’s most damaging comments in the Daily Mail were his simplified views on young people and, in particular, on last summer's riots here in the UK. He makes sweeping statements that, whilst containing face value truths, are intentionally discriminatory: "There was a work ethic – if you were unemployed, the obsession was to find work. Now, these kids brought up under the Labour party and whatever this coalition thing is, it’s like forget that, I’m not interested. I wanna be on TV". He makes an easy diagnosis, and then does what is all so convenient for a cultural icon who now has the ability to separate himself from all that goes off below him; refusing to understand the causations, and the complexities that are rubbing together down on the streets with ever-increasingly ferocity, as he sits back in his stylish home absorbed in his dated, out-of-context-Mod-cultured world view (most likely).

Over the past month I have been without a job (as my job almost mockingly gets the best out of the workers for 10 months, only to momentarily let us go, without pay, with little savings at the most dismal time of the year) and having been in the Jobcentre a few times of late, I can inform Noel Gallagher that there is “a work ethic” now; people are desperate to work, they are fed up with the lack of hope of any reasonable future for them, and they are angry about it – as the work just isn’t there. Both men who spoke to me today skillfully controlled their rage, but you could see the anger building, an anger that is building not just in the JobCentre, but all over the nation, and Noel Gallagher is so out of date with views that have had no bearing on reality since the 1990’s that he just cannot understand this. Yet we still hear from him (and see his daughter being groomed into a model to become another face in the star-complex at only 11 years of age, although that's another matter, another Daily Mail matter that is!)

Whilst sitting and waiting, a man who looks fed up with life (you can genuinely see it in peoples’ faces) walks over to a Jobsearch machine (Jobsearch machines, noticeably, make the ‘job-searcher’ scrunch his face up – it’s a defensive mechanism saying "you lot don't fool me, whoever you are" to the patronising act of having to search these machines for non-existing jobs, feeling that somebody’s taking the piss.) As this man turned to face the screen I noticed that the word money was sewn into the back of his branded jacket. It was a bitter juxtaposition; a social-control system held together by the domination of the necessity of individual social status and general attractiveness being based on acquisition, material wealth, and the act of making it public as glamour, and the poorest in society so desperately need the loudest of items to showcase what they so desperately need, in order to feel some self-respect and self-worth; hence the poorest wear the words of that which systemically makes them the lowest of the low. And this gap, between the riches and the poor, increases under right-wing governance: increased misery whilst surrounded by an increase of capitalism’s aspirationalism in society.

And now we have a rough-draft diagnosis for the summer riots! (in a sense the certainty of further riots is sown into the stitching in brand logos that seek our love.) Troubled events which Noel Gallagher ‘gruesomely’ simplified into a duality between what was going on in “Syria and Egypt” where “people were rioting for freedom. And these kids in England are rioting for tracksuits” to which he added “it’s embarrassing”. Embarrassing for whom? A proud ‘Brit’? He then went on to say, regarding the match thrown onto tinder sticks – the police shooting of Mark Duggan – “it’s all on Twitter and before you know it there’s a riot going on. It was mass robbery and I was embarrassed to be Mancunian".

Usually finger-pointing is counter-productive, but because, as I said above, his words are heard well above more thoughtful words, I am going to make the point of the hypocrisy in this. Noel Gallagher scorning those who steal, when it is all-but empirical knowledge that Noel ,and his even simpler brother Liam, stole from cars and houses in Manchester to get enough money to pay for the musical equipment they needed in order to become the faces in the star-system complex which they have become. Noel Gallagher was stealing to fund something that gave meaning to him. Fair enough; poverty makes crime, and it's becoming even harder for people from the lower working class backgrounds to have the opportunity to become musicians (read Owen Hatherley’s Uncommon for a more detailed account on why there were very few 'Brit' bands from the 1990’s who weren’t from affluent backgrounds.)

Inequality in society has increased more so since Noel was committing robbery in the 80’s/90’s, whilst consumerism and the publicity needed to fuel it has swallowed up even more of culture. Such a society both eradicates meaning, as commodification enters even more walks of life, whilst fuelling feelings of desperation through making us feel we can do nothing but try to boost our own status within this hall of mirrors. But many cannot afford to, and the future looks to be getting bleaker for many. Riots where people steal as many consumer items as they can carry don’t happen for the simplistic reasons you dispel from your mouth, Noel. That’s a very Thatcherite attitude you’ve got there 'mate!' (Make no bones about it; all the signs say these riots will reoccur. And when these are the comments that get heard in society, one can see that the causations haven’t only been unaddressed, but that these 'tindersticks' may be getting even drier.)

In an NME interview, following the one in The Daily Mail, where he tried to reproach the tinting to his words which made him sound like he liked Margaret Thatcher, Noel ended by saying “Also, for the record, on the day she [Thatcher] dies we will party like it’s 1989. Just so you know”. But it’s a defunct reply: holding up a collaged image of the working class heroes has no context whilst one uses Thatcherite dialectic to describe what’s happening to the lower working class now. Hating Thatcher the individual is far easier than opposing the social engineering she oversaw, the very social engineering that has taken 30 years to cook up these big problems in society, and is especially easy to do once you’ve finally benefitted from it (as is exemplified in comments made in The Daily Telegraph in 2008, where he blames Margaret Thatcher for the increase in knife crime in Britain, but explains the current situation saying "It's horrible. It's not just in London, I was up in Liverpool the other day and it's the same there. The scumbags are taking over the streets"- but assuming Noel wasn't threatened by someone with a knife, nor witnessed a stabbing, he's obviously just making comments about people who he thinks are scumbags, which sounds like he's also caught the disease of seeing large swathes of the population as 'undeserving poor' also commonly known by the awful term 'Chavs'.)

But if the pre-fame Gallagher’s were in a pre-fame position today they too might have been on the streets of Manchester rioting. The ‘Gangster’ music which he abhors might have seemed more appropriate to his life, with its talk about the harsh realism of being at the bottom yet being constantly shown images of superstars, than the loved-up psychedelia of his much beloved The Beatles; the Britain of the 1960’s, or (more accurately) the Britain of a small area of London which is now projected back to us as if it was the whole of Britain, is so irrelevant to the Britain that we now live in that going to Indie Disco’s which play 1960’s songs, and their 1990’s take-offs, feels like entering The Land That Time Forgot, even more than stereotypically-uncultured northern town centres are supposed to.

In fact Noel’s simplistic attitude is echoed by many of the always-had-a-silver-spoon rich in this country who wish to see changes brought in that would take back democratic right from the likes of the pre-fame Gallagher’s. His disregard for those at the bottom of society in 2012 resonates with the ideas being spouted by Ian Cowie in The Daily Telegraph, for example, who’s idea for an ‘alternate’ voting system where voting is restricted “to people who actually pay something into the system” barring anybody who pays less that £100 of tax a year sounds like a rolling back of democratic rights to the Victorian times to me. This was a blog brought to my attention by George Monbiot in The Guardian this week, in which Cowie also managed to find the space to praise the British Empire’s one time control of the world, where “property-based voting eligibility” (a denial of voting rights for anyone who doesn’t own a property) “worked quite well when the parliament administered not just Britain but the rest of the world”; and in a funny way this all seems to resonate back again to Noel Gallagher, when he used to wield a Union Jack-covered Epiphone guitar on stage, as he lifted riffs from 1960’s psychedelic bands, who had already heavily borrowed sounds from colonies Britain had only just then recently let go (albeit borrowed with much more respect and appreciation); namely India.

But the problem isn’t with Noel Gallagher. The problem is that Noel Gallagher’s words (like Jeremy Clarkson’s, and even, although I respect him infinitely more, Morrissey) are revered by many in society. Why do their views become so important? To be fair, Noel Gallagher would be the first to admit he's no sociologist, no critical theorist of contemporary culture - he rarely speaks to a paper without slagging university off! Although one needn't have been to university be thoughtful about the world, Noel clearly isn't. He’s got nothing of real worth to say. But yet his words have been made into something more.

The words of a star must be seen to be of more worth than yours or mine; they must be able to command respect to provide legitimacy for the society of spectacle that plucks them up into the limelight at random, in order for it to maintain its dominance. Its star-complex halos over us, keeping us hooked on the dreams of the respect and adoration that fame provides, even if it is necessary at times to block out certain faces who fall from grace. Noel Gallagher's presence, his words and cobbled-together version of British working class identity, appeals as meaningful for many, and it can help mould an whole section of personalities around a narrow image. Whilst he commands more cultural respect than the faces who cover gossip magazines, he essentially has the same function, for a different section of people, whose impetus on difference from the 'lower' cultural faces is nothing of a difference on comparison with what makes them the same.
This structure has been maintained in what are still called western democracies since before World War 2. But its dominance has increased, massively helped by the fall of a disastrous-example of communism near to the end of the last century (although it had its own kind of spectacle, essentially a state capitalist dictatorship one) allowing it to cover the globe. All that was once classed as counter-cultural to the spectacular machine has been absorbed and reconstituted, killing off artists who couldn't deal with their commodification. Noel Gallagher was so far already past the point of being anything that the great reconstitutor of past sounds that he was, that this would never occur to the likes of him.

However, can we now find hope, in how out of date their voices are, possibly signifying that the whole structure of control cannot maintain itself anymore? Their almost "let them eat cake" understanding of the scale of the problems in the world almost eludes to a likelihood the capitalist system's requirement of the society of the spectacle for social dominance isn't functioning properly anymore. It's only a faint hope (I feel it necessary to end thoughts on things with a positive tone these days, to keep my spirits up in the face of all the sad sights I see and hear of in town centres), but it seems to resonate with a questioning of where the hell capitalism can go from here to maintain itself. For good or bad, it is very unlikely that there will be new high points within British culture, under our current social system, to save people for ever-more desperately clinging to its past.

To paraphrase the last words in Richard Seymour's 'The Meaning of David Cameron'; What is the meaning of Noel Gallagher? He means it's time to accept the world needs big changes, and also, to quite appropriately (in the context of Noels inability to grasp the meaning of Radiohead) use some Thom Yorke lyrics, there can be "No more talk about the old days; it's time for something great".

Does this make me a bastard?

"But I don't want your charity, keeping me down" - Skunk Anansie

BBC 1, as I begin to eat my dinner at a few minutes to 7pm: an advertisement about the upcoming Sport Relief major charity event, where a child gets chummy with his favourite sporting icons, when asking them to join in a two part costume to take part in the event. Then the always avoidable The One Show. 5 minutes in, the shows two presenters start jumping around, with bubbly smiles, in bright red costumes, telling us about the 'importance of the charity event', with narrated clips of past Sport Reliefs where certain celebrities have 'done their bit' to help the cause.

It's hard to show negative reactions to events which the hype has built moral fire walls around.
Once one starts to frown, and refrains from praising these 'great' celebrity role models, it may look like one believes they have sniffed out a rat, that they think all the good intention is false, or even that one doesn't want to be reminded of most desperate people/situations on the planet. Not at all.
I don't doubt that the celebrities, like Eddie Izzard on his country-long marathon, do these things in the aim of helping people. But when I see all this enthusiasm and hype being (good)intentionally whipped up for the causes it aims to serve, I can't help feeling a defeated sort of feeling, or the feeling that no matter how much I shouted "something is not right here" it is translated by those around me into "I'm trying to be controversial by slagging off things there to help needy people". But as long as our guiding light remains Live Aid, and big charity events are the main way of helping those (and those things) that are in the most desperate situations, I can only conclude that their problems won't only conclude but will increase.

So, is one mean and selfish if they find the televised screams, and 'bubbly' street charity workers' shouts for our help annoying and troubling? You may think this is the case, but it would be a very simple way of looking at it, a way that doesn't allow for the thoughts that it maybe isn't a rule of nature that so many people are in need of hand outs from generous people. If I didn't care for the homeless, I wouldn't find it so upsetting when I see people in train stations with all their possessions they can carry in transparent bags, wondering where they will spend their first night without a home. If I didn't care about nature, and climate change, and the damage humans are doing to the planet, why would the subject be noticeable (in some form) in nearly every piece of art work I have made for the best part of a decade? Surely one doesn't need to dissect the societal norms around them, to see that something has seriously gone pear-shaped when we are surrounded by so much call for charity, on every street corner, and in every newspaper, with logos that strangely seem to enhance the legitimacy of the big company logos which occupy the same areas?

Running "1, 3 or 6 miles" doesn't change things for the better, changes to the social system do; changes to a system where it has been normalised for more government money to be spent on bailing bankers out and military spending, and world sporting events (where nation states childishly compete to outdo each other with fancy shaped buildings and fireworks), than on helping the world's poor or tackling climate change. Mass charity is what happens when society stalls, and goes back on the idea of progress. Big charity events merely give causes their '15 minutes of fame' where they can appear on the stage of the usually much more don't-give-a-shit spectacle complex, to make our hearts momentarily bleed, hopefully just enough to be thrown a few crumbs to keep them afloat before the spectacle gets back to its usual task of keeping us as consumers hooked on dreams.

Charity of course, fits perfectly into this consumerist complex. Which is why the logos of the charities whose workers chase your guilt up and down high streets actually enhance the legitimacy of the big company logos that occupy these same areas. Giving money to a charity, or competing in an event to raise funds, is merely the purchase of ones exemption from the guilt of living within highly exploitative and destructive system, and this exemption allows for one to then go and buy from the big companies, with the exemption from the guilt allowing us to momentarily forget that these companies, if not themselves ruthlessly exploiting people and the environment in other parts of the world, are certainly part of a framework of companies bolstering the legitimacy of doing so.

And by stating that this is what I feel a world consisting of innumerable charities allows for, I am still not saying that all those who do give money or time to charity do think in such a cynical manner. But I do think one registers it as 'doing their bit to help', and may actually believe that it can cancel out the negative effect of shopping at big company stores (which of course we all have to do because it is has been almost impossible not to). I also think that it results from an unquestioning acceptance that this way (the way of charity being the only help for the most desperate situations whilst the real riches of the world are utilised for crueler ends) is seen as the only way, as if all we can do to help the most needy, from now until the end of the human race, is to throw them just enough crumbs to survive. Keeping them down, of course.

The quintessential young person-alienation that now carries on into later life

Feel like an angst-ridden teenager at 28? Which no confirmation of true age, when confronted with an ever-more manly face staring back at you from every reflection, can eradicate? With the ever-mounting pressure to remain young, to be hip, adventurous and to be eternally striving to advance oneself and be 'living' the high times, that is mediated to us by young-looking role models (whether they are actually young or incredibly well photo-shopped), the effects of alienation and discontent that traditionally by-and-large affect teenagers, now affect people further and further into their adult lives; the size 30 waistline is truly strangling us right into our 30's. Yet there seems to be no talk of this in the media, alienating those caught in a metaphysical no-man's-land furthermore.

Doing my artwork from home, and having a job (when I have one at all) that gives me days off in the middle of the week which no friends usually have free also, a much needed escape from my cul-de-sacked-residence is usually destined to be relatively solitary one, estranged from the friends who I have the confidence to call until the time of day when English towns have become alcohol-gated communities. I've got into an early-afternoon habit, once my hands can't take any more Biro-gripping and key typing, of heading to towns/cities within the 25 mile affordable-to-travel-to radius. But once I get there I am suddenly confronted by an attack from conventional reasoning as to why I am in this place. Amidst the races of individuals trying to get places from the station terminus, I begin to stall, getting in peoples' ways. They seem to have conventional purpose; a conventional life which they are in such a rush to resume. I don't. Just what am I doing here?

I start to feel a sense of not belonging, an estrangement and eagerness to find place, an uneasiness I expected to be way past by now. My mind starts repeating "I'm 28 for god's sake!", desperately trying to make it feel true in the physical world. But no matter how I try to rush off' trains when I'm meeting a friend, or arranging a van to pick my artworks up from an exhibition, my life seems to stay put; nothing has really changed since I was the shy 16 year old school leaver who would avoid people he went to school with in the street, rather than have to walk past them, in fear of being ignored by them.

Many things surmount in making me look back from these post-fordist times to my fordist predecessors, in shame and embarrassment. Families, homes, 'proper' jobs in their 20's. The societal changes don't seem to register on the tips of most tongues, and whether possible to do so or not, there is boding expectation to make ones way through the world, which hangs heavier around ones neck every time their age hits a higher 2o-something. But what's there to be made, doesn't make for this, and what lies in wait just perpetuates ones past doings.

If we stick to the core meaning of alienation - for one to feel that they don't belong; for one to feel not at home in owns one surroundings - then this alienation may be behind why, after getting off the train, I then make my way to sit in the very chain cafes that I am often critical of for driving small businesses out of existence. In towns/cities which aren't 'my home town', where I am at for no real reason, I feel out of context with the surroundings, with an imaginary person whispering "you don't belong here" in my ear. And these coffee shops are out of context because they are everywhere and are thus nowhere; a place alienated from its surroundings for an individual who feels alienated (which in no way exempts me from the guilt of frequenting such places). And after that where? For, when I've done sitting in the cafe, I don't really allow for anything much to 'happen', because I'm too eager for the feeling of at-least going somewhere, which the train back home-wards provides, and is this the underlying spur for the endeavour.

Regarding those who meander in solitude up and down streets, cultural discourse would have it that it's a 15-19 age thing, circumventing the age of The Catcher In The Rye's socially lost protagonist Holden Caulfield. And this holds true for musical tastes also; where bands dealing with discontent and alienation (a prime example being Nirvana, but I also the likes of Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins, The The, Joy Division) are neatly categorised as "angry young man music/the sort of music I listened to in my teen angst days" (yes, I have actually heard these said), as a call to get rid of these feelings of not fitting into society, as if it's an 'age thing', to find your seat within the big arena, something many seem depressingly able to do without any noticeable painful transition.

Well, the said bands are still some of my closest audio companions, and I first read the Catcher In The Rye when I was 25 years old, yet felt utterly in tune with this teenage protagonists aimless journeys to places in a city, that he realised he had no reason for being at once he'd arrived. Consequently I feel offended by the usual back-cover reviews describing the book as 'the quintessential book about teenage-angst ', to paraphrase the many.

What does this mean? Does it mean completely shelving everything I have just said just in order for it to be fitting to say "you need to move on (grow up)"? Well, if that is so, please fucking show me how to! Please show me how to move on from this junction-less ring road. If my brain was made of nuts and bolts rather than organic tissue I'd gladly let you tinker around with a screwdriver if there was any hope of lifting the veil of grey mist blocking sight of progression into an 'acceptable' place to be for an adult. But it wouldn't work. Plans are being made now, but if you see me still looking vacantly at train departure electronic boards in 1 year's time, don't be surprised.

But is it just me who cannot grow?

Weekends seem to actually induce mini-crisis points, from where I wish I'd never asked my boss for them off, because it seems so much easier to be working. At least on weekdays I can at least be functional in my usual doings, and not feel bowled-over by omnipresent 'evidence' to a uncertain self of people having purpose to their weekly working as they are meeting up during their shared time off with friends for a much earned rest.

At least on weekdays, I see others as being in the same boat as me, as equally struggling to deal with the cultural norms subjected onto them. And I see other reasons for the causation of alienation. Looking at every lone person on a bus, every lone person with time on their hands, I'm seeing others who are alienated and needing a place also. Everyone's looking for contact via their mobile phones. Perhaps it isn't just directly the propagation of youthful imagery that perpetuates the teen alienation into adulthood, but the rapidity of the amount of electrical communication?

When others contact you it makes you feel wanted, but not merely wanted in the 'desired' sense but wanted in existence. Someone of strong enough self certainty to avoid irrational anxieties, may not need to needed/wanted by others in order to make their existence seem of worth, but for others, lost in the blur of a fast-paced life, lack of contact with others, when all you see around you in the street is others texting/talking on phones, can make you feel anxious about your own worthiness of existence upon this planet. Thus you begin rapidly texting people, and the desire to get (back) onto social networking sites, such as Facebook, hangs like big tangled branches from every inhalation and exhalation. I tend to text with more ferocity the more I feel like the spectrum of life is passing be by, and also when I'm places where I feel like I don't belong, and regardless of what they text says, the real message is 'Hey, I'm here! Don't forget me". And of course it is for everybody else.

The link between why we are a society both equally hooked to high-tech forms of communication and the pummeling from youth-obsessed imagery, is what I'd argue is also the link between my inability to move past my alienation and the social system we live under. We never feel complete, thus we never feel like we belong.

Where am I? Where do I want to be? Should I be moving in a certain direction? Why aren’t I moving?

Anti-depressants are social control first and foremost, and when the desired effect they provide is wearing off one can feel their functioning in society stumbling, and occasionally tumbling. It’s at points like this when you realise “yes, the system does try to control me”. It’s such a disenfranchising feeling, and if I don’t trust the system how can I find help from within it? I can’t without capitulating, and that just never works because I’m too alienated from its design for life for it to successfully take me over (and yes, at terrible moments, when aimlessness is coupled with despair, I have begged it to take me over, like Winston Smith crying for mercy in the arms of O’Brien in 1984’s room 101; control and de-characterize me, as long as you take away this pain).

I have tried quite a few of the system’s offers of help, but none can give you help based upon your own understanding of the world. Another method of help from within the system is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT’s advice for the patient seems to be taken directly from the psychotherapy ideas which encourage hiding from the Social to work entirely on the Personal - ideas taken on board by elites, which have helped reconfigure the system to one based on control by keeping individuals trapped in a never-ending solitary pursuit for personal satisfaction. Thus the only help it can give you, to put it in a ruthless way, is to forget the problems of the world, and of others, that surround you, to dedicate yourself to a constant proving of your innocence and exemption from it all, in order to pursue an enjoyable life. To anyone who has spent much of their life concerned about what’s going off in the world, the therapy will be defunct from day one. The practitioners seem to genuinely want to help you live a better life, and you can’t help warming to them due to their friendliness. But, in effect, it’s arguable that you continue attending out of gratitude for their efforts, rather than the help actually being of use (it’s almost becomes the reverse of wha it is supposed to be: you go in care of their wellbeing, rather than the improvement of your own). This is unless one can take on board the system’s coding. But to do so means an initial wiping of one’s character; surely it must?

“All we want from you are the kicks you’ve given us” (Motorcycle Emptiness, Manic Street Preachers).

Certain friends would advise me to reject the system’s advice (i.e. the general societal advice understood from the collectivised ideas, suggestions and orders, mediated and spoken to us). So far, this has been all-but-impossible, and my time just seems to be spent on a mental ring road, where my thoughts just chase each other around and around (which is played out in the physical world by hopping onto trains in hope of finding a solution, only to arrive at places and suddenly wonder why I’ve even come here; Knowing that I might as well as stayed on the train as that’s where the sensation of moving onwards resides). But how can one reject a society completely when one has spent their entire life subjected by its images and words, guiding one towards its mores, and making anything less seem like a bleak prospect? When one is also so utterly dependent on it? Are these endless internal debates the fate of all humans who feel compelled to question and scrutinize? If I managed to exist without the pressures and mores of society grabbing me, would I find stability and acceptance? But can the greatest of philosophers even manage this?

The past month probably hasn’t been the wisest of times to begin a reduction to the intake of my Sertraline 50mg, anti-depressant, prescription; as my wage-earning work (to differentiate from my art-making work) has momentarily all but stopped, leaving me without a wage-necessity-dictated structure. So when one starts to feel ‘the dips’ that the emotional-levelling anti-depressants usually block, without a structure to give superficial meaning to one’s day, the marching from place to place loses its steam, and there is nothing to bury one’s head into, and one starts to feel worthless due to being unable to stop comparing their predicament to those who, superficially, seem to have a more purposeful life, a feeling exacerbated by the lack of money from being laid off without pay.

In life in general I feel that I am getting nowhere, and that the only progress I am making is an advancement of grey hairs and wrinkles. I understand this is philosophical poverty, but I never seem to have the space to fundamentally ‘get a grip’, and when life does leave massive dollops of time at my disposal it is usually because I am having feelings of worthlessness and uselessness, that scare me and compel me to get back on a treadmill, any treadmill, as long as it’s moving fast: when I have time to think, I often feel too fragile to question and scrutinize.

I’m sat writing parts of this whilst invigilating a gallery space. A video is being shown which is a continuous slow changing of photographs focussing on a woodland space, where one can see the seasons slowly take over from each other. This, of course is a continuous process. The video is continuous. There is no beginning and no end, except when I have to switch it off after the gallery as closed for the day. The seasons change; this continuous cycle should give me the courage to find meaning within my own continuous cycles, that’s if it wasn’t for the spectres of climate change and capitalism forcing me to feel like I need to ‘hurry the fuck up’.

But does my critique of the system mean I am ruthlessly against every element of the state?

This is where I get confused as to what kind of world I’d want. Or, more accurately, what kind of world I believe is achievable in the face of so many threats to humanity. I do, after all, have an unshakable desire for the continuation of humankind. Finding something or lots of different ‘somethings’ that help 7 billion people live on this earth, without fear of annihilation is the upmost priority for me – I cannot take flight from this. We cannot sit back and allow the possibility of apocalyptic scenarios scientist James Lovelock, amongst others, predict will wipe billions off the world’s population by the end of the century. Our being creates meaning; our existence allows for the world to be; without us there are still things there, but they are in nothingness. My mind is absorbed in this bigger picture, and I’m not in a position, nor am I the person that could think up any solutions, so I just get confused into despair.

Strangely I was thrown into a spell of depression recently after I read an article in complete rejection of the modern industrial world; the Europeanization process was how this writer described it; but its consequences can now be described as parts of the capitalist process. One would think I would be glad to find voices critical of such a de-humanizing, elitist, and environmentally destructive process (which, since its conception, has arguably always been on course to build a dystopia, a situation I would argue we are within now), and I am usually, yet certain voices can leave me in despair. The words were spoken by a leader of The Native American, Russell Means, and had to be written down by somebody else, because for him writing (or at least the dependency on written rather than spoken word) was a key source in the Europeanisation modernising process, that leads to an abstraction from the world we exist in, which has engendered Europe’s (or the Wests) ability to abuse the earth, due to becoming to see it (from the land to the people who live on it) as something which is there to be exploited, the bounties of the earth as a means to an end, which has led us to this catastrophic point; an argument that each technological advance has been borne out of this reckless model, and that it is all defunct and living on borrowed time, with a belief that nothing can stop this civilisation’s collapse.

I cannot disagree with most of this. But his solution, or not so much solution but stand point which he, and many others who believe a complete abandonment of the urbanised/industrialised, leaves me in a state of despair, from where I need to go for a cider just to soften the fear of oblivion. How can we go back to a state of living where we aren’t dependent on such technologies, without either seeing hundreds of millions die in the process, or letting a process that kills hundreds of millions arrive us at this point? We can’t. I can’t see how we can get back to a point which negates all the technological advances from this Europeanisation process, without consigning a hefty chunk of humanity to its doom. We couldn’t turn our backs on our technological advances even if we decided we didn’t need cars, computers, microwaves etc. ; we need advanced technologies to feed so many mouths, to provide energy to the system’s that keep us warm in places naturally cold, and for essential communication between different areas so we can act together in necessary times such as environmental disasters, and these are but a tiny percentage of the reasons we cannot now live without it. A very down-to earth, ‘grow your own’ way of living is a great way of teaching us what we’ve forgotten in our urban/suburban lives, but it just wouldn’t be possible for 7 billion people, on a planet which is already sweating and twitching due to our messing up of its ecosystems. But how can we manage to maintain the systems to do this without maintaining the nation states that control (or at least sub-control) them?

So, do I believe in trying to change things from inside the current social system, peacefully? Or do I believe in completely rejecting the current social system, both by subtracting from it, and by striking back against it, violently if necessary? I am always confused as to who I believe is right and who is wrong when it comes to trying to change the world for the better. Although I wouldn’t normally do so, if I had to categorise myself, not in a sense of any political alignments, but in a sense of the kind of person I am, I would have to label myself as an anarchist communist: I have always been adamantly individualistic, often to my own loss (even to the extent where I have to overcome a massively uncomfortable feeling, when I’m trying to join a demonstration, because when many people walk one way I always want to walk the opposite way), I hate the feeling that something/somebody is trying to tell me what I should do and when I should (my drawings which I have often called ‘landscapes of people’ are first and foremost me kicking against such feelings, followed by the despair that the social system embeds in my outlook). However, I have also always despised unfairness; I have never been able to accept that some people have lavish lives, whilst some peoples’ lives consist of fruitless hardship, of worthlessness and lacking any hope. I can’t stand injustice in the world; it will always seem unnecessary to me. As much as I have always felt like an outsider, I am also affected by The Social (what I see when I walk through a town/city) more than anybody else I know; sad sights of trashed lives can cripple me for days.

There’s nothing I would want more at the moment than to see this societal sickness almost cured, to see an end to the abundance of misery and poverty around me, and to see an end to the system based on greed and selfishness that engenders this; to see people with genuine meaning and happiness in their lives, to not have to see the opposite; people blind drunk at 4pm on a weekday, or people frantically trying to finding meaning through consumerism. Maybe one should always keep in mind the ideal (of a world free of the nation state, capitalism and their corporate marriage, but also free as possible from hierarchy and poverty/oppression and human-made suffering), but if much of what constitutes the ideal is ever so far away from being realised, but something far less ideal, but still considerably better than the current predicament , and does look to be attainable at present, then I would still show my utter support for it – even if this did mean that citizens were still subordinated and infantilised to a certain degree. For example, I will still show my support for those wishing to (re)strengthen the welfare state and reduce inequality in Britain, even if this does mean a continuation of capitalism and unfairness in general. Whether this is even achievable now; it may be too late to do any bargaining with a system that has reached its zenith of madness.

The thing is can the machinery of capitalism (which is dumping the poor before it dumps the entire earth into the incinerator) truly be halted from driving us over a cliff edge, without the dismantling of the state also? This is where my utter confusion kicks in. Although I feel a sense of belonging in the hills of the West Riding of Yorkshire, because it’s the only home I’ve known, I am in no means a nationalist to the nation of England, or the remnants of its empire (Britain). But as much as I despise the unthinking loyalty to The Royal Family whipped up by the media when there’s a Royal an event, and feel alienate from aspects of what appear to be its national identity, being a subject of the state wouldn’t make me anywhere near as miserable and desperate if the problems in our society, caused by and large by the inequalities intrinsic to neoliberal capitalism, weren’t half as bad as they are.

Then sometimes always clinks in my mind: “it’s their world, it’s built in their image, and they own it. Don’t expect them to give you anything.”- By which I mean, ‘they’ - the elite of the corporate state complex. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek warns how, instead of seeing developing capitalist nations, such as China and India – where there is barely any democratic rights, obscene income gaps between rich and poor, and nothing much to prevent ruthless exploitation of workers – as ‘developing’ in the sense that they are going through what the European/American nations went through in the 19^th/early 20^th century, one should see the reverse: that our perceptions of capitalism being tied with democracy are false, and only reflect a very short period in our history, and instead of China and India becoming like us, the likelihood is that capitalism will make the European/American nations more like China and India. This prospect certainly does put the brakes on trying to make mainly law-abiding changes within the system

But then again, Zizek in his book Living In The End Times also seemed to be suggesting in his conclusion, that rather seeing one method of challenging the capitalist system as wrong and the other as right, and wasting time arguing over this, one should, if not use all methods themselves, at least support each different way of challenging it, either through subtraction, action, or peaceful bargaining. Basically to push and pull from every end. All actions that aim for something better should be supported, but without ever giving up on ones ideals. Which I suppose leads onto the idea that society is a constant flux, and one should never rest on a structure relating to set ideas; one should always be seeking for the ideal, with no the permanent end in sight from where surely society would become archaic an hierarchical (?).

I must admit that I am guilty of wishing for fixed-endings under our current predicament, both in my own life and the wider world, but this is often out of wishing for an ending to the anguish that I feel , the inability to be at ease within the world. And here I am not looking for an ideal; I am in flight from the ideal. But, even when I can’t feel that there can be a predicament better than this, logic still convinces me to support and agree with those who want better than this

So then, if the construction of the state is the first step of corporatism, abstracting our sense of identity and belonging and aligning it to an artificial construct, which lays the perfect base for capitalism to flourish, how do we halt the reckless dynamics that make the system if we can’t dismantle the state without fear of catastrophe, unimaginable suffering, the worst case scenario? I’m not sure to be honest, but the technology, the advances, we certainly can’t do without now. Capitalism has brought great material changes to our lives, I cannot dispute this. But it is easy to see now that it has reached its zenith of bringing better material benefits for most; and has thus descended into madness in the quest to maintain its legitimacy. Not to subtract from technology; its technological advances are to be kept, but not it; it can only do the reverse effect now. But how humanity could achieve this separation of technology from an utterly destructive system is something I don’t feel I have the ability to be assigned the job of racking my brains over, even though I do this, day after day after day after day, on my West Riding train travel circulatory, which is why I have to express my thoughts on thing, that I’m likely out of my depth with, on this inclusive blogosphere. I need to vent this somewhere.