On The Ballerina and the Bull
Created: 2024-02-17 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-13 (17:09:55)Status: completed
An overview of anarchist and do-it-yourself movements over the last half-century and of their complex relationship to capitalism. Isaacson argues these practices prefigure other possible worlds and ways of being, while also self-critically mapping out their own limitations as they run up against the dominant logic of capitalism and hence representing the ballerina to wall street’s bull. She nonetheless considers them practices to form an optimistic, expressive negation.
isaacson positions these practices against anti-utopian and capitalist realist narratives and statements,like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” or Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative.” This is framed as a politics of style and mediation, responding to discourses of pragmatism and maturity that only serve to foreclose alternative possibilities. The book traces a line through situationist and countercultural zines, Bay-area do-it-yourself and punk scenes, riot grrl and queercore, finally into the black bloc and the occupy movement. Movements that were all in some way criticised for their refusal operate in a “mature” register.
There are a lot 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 fascinating firsthand accounts from squatters and a participant in the Occupy Oakland protests.
See also
References
- Isaacson, Johanna, 2016, The Ballerina and the Bull: Anarchist Utopias in the Age of Finance, Repeater Books
Endmatter
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