The X Factor revisited. posted by Richard Seymour

Several months back, I made fun of some countryfucks who stormed parliament, evidently expecting to find the polestar of human evil residing there:

[I]sn't it strange how protest seems to have involved a lot of penetrating this enclosed space, this theatre of power-struggle that is represented to us on the news but never disclosed in the flesh. Even if you want to see it in real time from the gallery, you have to go through an intensive search, give up all items from your pockets, surrender your coat etc. And you must agree not to make a noise, pick your nose, make any rude hand gestures etc. (I went there myself once, and had the pleasure of being eyed suspiciously by Brian Mawhinney MP). However, to get into that phantasmatic space, irupt into its core - you'd actually think you were busting right into the centre of power. The hidden assumption is that power has some final stopping point, some person or persons at the end of a chain of command whom one can demand to see and shoot if necessary.

But even in terms of private companies, this is no longer the case. Ownership is usually diffuse, managers are responsible to shareholders, and power is delegated down and out in increasingly specialised ways. It isn't that there is a capitalist who controls the levers and dispenses orders. Similarly, there is no chain of power leading up to parliament, and no hidden 'X' of authority once you get there. Far from encountering the human face of power etc., you discover the human faces of over-worked, cynical, seasoned politicians with only a limited and minor say in how the country is actually run. It is a failure in cognitive mapping, an inability to see power as anything but an open or concealed conspiracy, a direct organisation of people into structures and roles. Hence, the pathos of the spectacle in which angry, militant furry-bangers can only scamper around the chambers for a few seconds before realising that there's nothing going on there, and the real problem they face is in the wider society.

Would that I had the words for this . The totalising apparatus of Marxist thought is stood properly on its head, given a malicious twist, vulgarised into conspiratorial constructions. The left are everywhere, osmotically channeling their subversive energies into the pockets of mainstream liberalism. You just have to follow the network .

Incidentally, the little-known tabloid journalist Oliver Kamm links to the site approvingly because it reproduces some of his myopic anti-Chomsky screeds. He says he will link to the site and cross-post his Bloggerel there. So, aside from being an assiduous stalker, a dishonest debater who likes to cite or criticise texts he has never read and a humourless, pompous buffoon, he is also an active supporter of paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists.