From The Undercommens: Fugitive Planning and Black Study:
So, as a youngster heading out to do what damage I could to the world, I inadvertently joined, as if by accident and certainly by bluff, a research project in which, in the end, it turned out that the leader, when report time came around, decided that the report back to the funding council should say that I had been incapable of doing the research required. This because I was too cautious in not wanting to orientalise the other,. Damning indictment. I saw the thing rather differently – having joined the project to maim it, there was nothing cautious in a critique of lame versions of identity, hybridity, and oooh, culture. The critique of ethnomusicology logically followed, for form’s sake, and of exoticism, of egoistic cult scholarship and professor-ism, of the inheritance of baubles and trinkets of election to a clergy that no-one believed, not even themselves. There wasn’t even any need to condemn them as they condemned themselves, and the riposte ‘I thought you were dead’ still brings laughter and joy. In amongst the ashes and horrors, and rent-a-kill terrors. They do have the resources that still make some things possible, get in an grab some, since soon it will be gone. And all the while give some back, not just lip – I have lent out more books than I own, and I own a lot of the bloody things. leaving them lying around (though particular about not leaving them spine open, or on a wet bench. Yes, bloody things they are – written in letters of blood and fire, shares of a capital produced through pain and struggle just to escape beyond the enthusiasm-sucking routine of having to pay the rent and feed the kids while syphoning a substantial packet off into projects, and more books, because, yes, the research councils were a bit wary after that. Oh, and then apparently named the enemy of anthropology from within. I’ll take that too. With chips. More soon.
Trinketization 