isaacson, 2016, the bull and the ballerina

written 20240217.

really interesting. an overview of anarchist and diy movements over the last half-century, and their complex relationship to capitalism. isaacson sees diy and utopian anarchist practices as being both prefigurative of other possible worlds, and as self-critically mapping out their own limitations as they run up against the dominant logic of capitalism, hence representing the ballerina to wall street’s bull. she nonetheless considers these practices to form a kind of optimistic, expressive negation.

isaacson positions these practices against anti-utopian and capitalist realist narratives like fukuyama’s “end of history” or thatcher’s “there is no alternative.” this is framed as a politics of style and mediation, as a response to discourses of pragmatism and maturity which only serve to foreclose alternative possibilities. the book then traces a line through situationist and countercultural zines, bay-area diy and punk, riot grrl and queercore, and finally into the black bloc and the occupy movement; that is, countercultural movements and scenes that get criticised for refusing to operate in a “mature” register.

there’s lots of rabbit-warrens to go exploring, starting from this book, particularly (for me at least) the overview of punk zine culture in relation to situationism, and the argument that punk is a logic rather than a set of encoded practices, that it has “faked its own death” to evade recuperation and will do so again. the appendices of the book also contain interviews touching on daily life in a squat and participation in occupy oakland.

isaacson, johanna, 2016, the bull and the ballerina: anarchist utopias in the age of finance, repeater books