Friday, October 30, 2009

Dissenters

The Arnolfini art gallery, of which I have been but am not currently a patron (despite its excellent bar), emails me with news of an exciting event in its season C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture:

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home - two adults and three children - proposes a holiday for autumn half-term. …Accompanied by eco-Au Pair Branka Cvjeticanin, they will set up an interim activist cell in Bristol with guest dissenters and visitors to take action against carbon, climate chaos and capitalism.

This leaves us with an interesting philosophical and/or semantic question: if every single artist and the government and most of the mainstream media agrees with you about carbon and climate change, can you justifiably describe yourself as a 'dissenter'?

11 comments:

  1. That useful phrase 'circle jerk' occurs to me again...

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  2. Canute capers, trips by coach to the Welsh coastline, sit in your deck chairs and hold back the rising sea level.

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  3. Anti-capitalism is still a form of dissent. Its inclusion with the other 'c' words reveals what's really behind them. It's impressive how anti-capitalist impulses have managed to become mainstream through being smuggled in under the cause of climate change. Sublimation, innit?

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  4. Anonymous11:59 am

    The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home? I believe my son is a member.

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  5. "Climate chaos!" I love it.

    The new credo of the radical: "All Change Is Bad."

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  6. The real dissenters are the deniers.

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  7. Surely not all of them? You'll be turning dissent into a dirty word too, if you're not careful. And it's a nice one with respectable references.

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  8. Oh no I agree, Gaw. I'm trying to rescue the word by pointing out the doubtfulness of applying it to people who, you know, agree with the consensus.

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  9. I am fully against carbon. As a carbon-based life-form, I'm thinking of cutting off my own limbs in order to gain more carbon credits.

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  10. Worm beat me to it. "Take action against carbon"???

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  11. The White House communications director just described the administration's fight with Fox News as "speaking truth to power."

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