About Fired at the Dials
EDIT: I wrote the very high-minded description below when I first set this Substack up. Since then, all I have managed to write is a 2,000-word Marxisant review of the new Batman film, so who knows what this newsletter will actually be about? Subscribe if you want to find out I guess.
Fired at the Dials is a Substack about history, politics and culture. Like William Morris, ‘I call myself a Communist, and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it.’ I live in Scotland, which will inevitably inflect much of what appears here. The title is taken from On the Concept of History (1940) by Walter Benjamin.
For Benjamin, the phrase ‘Fired at the Dials’ is connected to the revolutionary project of ‘exploding the continuum of history’; to force, in Michael Löwy’s words, ‘a sort of historical short-cut . . . the break in historical continuity [in which] both tradition and a new beginning coincide.’ Committed as I am to exploding the continuum of history in this way, I make no such grand, messianic claims for this modest newsletter. For me, trapped like everyone else in the late capitalism of the early 21st century, the July Revolution’s ‘new Joshuas’ taking aim at Paris’s clocktowers can also symbolise a humbler though still heroic impulse: to slow down, to take time to think, to reflect, to feel; to disarm, however temporarily, capitalism’s authoritarian timekeepers.
The incessant hamster-wheel of 24-hour content (rapidly decreasing proportions of which can seriously be called ‘news’), colonises our every waking moment and, as insatiable as Erysichthon, jealously eyes our dreams as well. My friends Calum and Neil hope that Substack signifies a return to the spirit of the more thoughtful, expansive blogging culture of the 2000s. I hope so too.
