Consumer Electronics, the zenith/nadir of a great weekend.
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  • You, Nina Power, RRobin Urbanomic and 4 others like this.
  • Robin Barnes YOU'VE BEEN CO-OPTED BY CUN-
  • Josephine Berry Slater Paedophobic mugging! don't join the army of drongos rotating around this attractor of tawdriness. Remember, we're in the anthropocene dude, we have bigger things to worry about. xx
  • Andrew Osborne I don't know if we're going to agree on this Josie, I've been thinking how good it was all day!
  • Josephine Berry Slater No no no no no. Paedophilia/phobia are side issues. They present units of ethical intrigue and affectability. They create a feeling of pseudo-control and pseudo-activity. If we can 'deal' with this - either through outrage, punishment or the politics of pleasure - we can heal the social wound. But they are being used to black-out the immensity of the wound and our total passivity and helplessness in the face of it. They intensify our helplessness. I really think the left/avant-garde should abandon this trope. Leave it to the fixers of Jim'llfixit. xx
  • Benjamin Noys obv I didn't make the event, but I'm interested in what this debate is about
  • Josephine Berry Slater Well, there were a couple of performances working with the taboo/transgression of paedophilia, as part of a noise event. I didn't see all of Consumer Electronics', but felt like my neurons had been hijacked for the purpose of manufacturing frisson, which annoyed me. We'd been talking about the anthropocene all weekend, which seemed to dwarf the 'horror' of the performance. This isn't to say the sexual abuse of children is in some way irrelevant to the future/survivability of humanity, not at all, but the focus is stultifyingly narrow, or oedipal. This is also helpful to the nation state which wants to present itself in expanded oedipal form - hence the shock of Jimmy the enjoying father, who was also BBC licensed father, which is one in a concatenation of fathers, which help forge the mythology of the bloodlines of the national family etc.
  • Benjamin Noys that would be the ex-whitehouse... if so little surprise. 'a mother within, a priest beneath, an eye above'. Although I still like Bataille...
  • Andrew Osborne Josie, on one level I just really enjoyed Consumer Electronics, it was really beautiful. But I also think this paedophile/phobe circuit is interesting in terms of the familial/national.