About Les Misérables

I’m really not sure whether Just Stop Oil’s protests ultimately do any good, but when people watch a show celebrating political protest and then complain when it’s interrupted by an act of political protest, a modest irony klaxon ought to be sounding somewhere.

(Long-term readers of this blog, both of you, do not need to be told that the rendering of the June Rebellion as a piece of uplifting theatrical bombast is what Situationism would define as recuperation, the process by which a subversive act is made palatable to mainstream society; and that last night’s protests were its antonym, détournement, subverting a product of the mainstream. Of course what we need now if for someone to make a facile, glossy musical about Just Stop Oil and the whole process can repeat itself ad infinitum until we all burn to death.)