The closing text of Break/Flow 2 is an experiment in theoretical fiction that attempts to summarise some of the themes that preceded it: namely voluntary servitude as it coincides with sado-masochism. This latter is rendered as a metaphor for capitalist social relations, their criticism and transformation.
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This speculative text from Break/Flow 2 discusses notions of the unconscious as a dialectical dynamic to be embraced rather than as a forbidden zone to be feared. This latter, propagated in part by Freud, leads to a self-censorship that curtails the auto-theorisation that ensues from creative and political engagement. Music eventually comes to figure as that which frees-us-up.
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A number of factors led me to read this novel. Not least was Félix Guattari offering that to read À la recherche is more worthwhile than to read all the works of Freud. He wasn’t wrong as this novel, seen as the apex of the Haute-Bourgeois, turned out to be not only a decimation of that class, but an affective tour-de-force in which listening to music is a central and organising theme throughout all its pages.
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This text was written to give due to Factory records and their influence on the many music
scenes that followed (not least ‘electronic dance music’). It also aimed to ensure that its cultural and political force was remembered as being drawn from the orbit of The Situationist International. What followed was the post-punk revival and the return of Factory as farce, but nonetheless it is remembered as an ‘anti-university’ by some.
This text explores the enigmas and quirks of Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Castle. It is striking how this novel manages to meld together an endangering desire for knowledge with a depiction of the arcane workings of an institution. However, the key here, and its opening towards a new politics, is how it brings unconscious motivations and unquestioned servitude to the fore.
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Even as far back as the late 90s an aura of spirituality and/or neurotic existentialism still
clung to the writings of Kafka. Re-reading his short stories at this time revealed an author
acutely sensitive to the psycho-social dynamics of power and resistance as these are
encountered in an everyday life not solely restricted to the world of work and bureaucratic
institutions. This version includes three appendices that have never appeared on line.
This text was written in early 1999 at a time before the upswing of anti-capitalist protest at
Seattle, Prague, Genoa and at the Carnival against Capitalism in London. However, its far
from exhaustive critique of Left groupuscules inaugurated a long term writing and research
project that, combining psychoanalysis and literature to reassess capitalist social relations,
has gone by many names over the years: Micropolitics, Psyche-Pol, Affective Class etc.
LIBREVILLE – introduction – counter/induction is the introductory text to the second print issue of Break/Flow from 1999. Written by Break/Flow editor Howard Slater.
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Break/Flow in the Shadow City is the introductory text by Howard Slater for the first print edition of Break/Flow from 1996.
‘Break/Flow is an autonomous publication that hopes to function in several spaces simultaneously. Though inspired by music, theory, politics, and the literary, it is intensified enough to follow trajectories out of these never once isolatable spheres and inhabit the connections between them. The record is read. The text is played. The historic expands into the present.’