Corpsey

bandz ahoy
luka's boy Heath Ledger's Joker was a disruptor.

Nolan's batman films all flirt with this theme, especially in "The Dark Knight Rises" where the disruptors want to bring down capitalist society, including megarich oligarchs like bruce wayne.

But of course he portrayed this as just a cynical power grab by covert reactionaries - which actually I suppose you could say was prescient, given the disruption we've seen from the Right over the last five years in particular.
 

version

Well-known member
Henri Ducard: Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.
Bruce Wayne: You attacked Gotham before?
Henri Ducard: Of course. Over the ages, our weapons have grown more sophisticated. With Gotham, we tried a new one: Economics.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Sean Connery's barbarian in Zardoz is clearly not a nerd, but he is an interloper - fairly explicitly in this case a figure of class mobility.
 

luka

Well-known member
Sean Connery's barbarian in Zardoz is clearly not a nerd, but he is an interloper - fairly explicitly in this case a figure of class mobility.

Yes, like John the Savage he is the representative of virility and action in a society which has lost touch with those things. If there was hope it must lie in the proles. By personifying the qualities they have lost he disrupts, destroys/rejuvenates
 

luka

Well-known member
This is very much the Cummings pose, in an impotent, senescent system he is fecund, erect, cumming
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Cummings and I have in common the happenstance of having had a special needs teacher for a parent, but he also has a Lord Justice of Appeal for an uncle. He may be from one of those families where different class backgrounds meet. And then there is the ascent via private school and Oxford into public life. It seems fair to say that he is not entirely of the class into which he has inserted himself.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Yes, like John the Savage he is the representative of virility and action in a society which has lost touch with those things. If there was hope it must lie in the proles.

i think i've said this on here before but the sheer level of constant, unmitigated disruption that afflicts working class people's lives is astonishing. my aunt and cousins are like this; their lives are just a constant string of boyfriends going to prison, getting unexpectedly pregnant, bipolar breakdowns, medical problems, domestic violence, unexpected babies, people not speaking to each other, losing jobs, getting kicked out of the place they're renting, etc. some of my mates have similar things.

relentless disruption. the thing of not even being able to "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps" even if you want to because of it.
 

version

Well-known member
Cummings and I have in common the happenstance of having had a special needs teacher for a parent, but he also has a Lord Justice of Appeal for an uncle. He may be from one of those families where different class backgrounds meet. And then there is the ascent via private school and Oxford into public life. It seems fair to say that he is not entirely of the class into which he has inserted himself.

It's been suggested this is partly why Farage dislikes Cummings. He's managed to work his way into Westminster and the Tory party in a way Farage couldn't.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
disruption is usually the weapon of the relatively impotent.

insurgents asymmetric warfare. little siblings annoying older ones. the plp during corbyn's tenurship. union workers. protestors
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Geoffrey Hill's is a notably similar posture - voice of the uncouth amongst the couth, perpetrator of "farouche lexical outrages". Of that generation also Dennis Potter, Alan Garner. Grammar school boys. Gove and Cummings, obsessed with the levitating power of academic accomplishment.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't think, for what it's worth, that the disruptor need come from a different class. This is what separates Shevek from John and Sean Connery and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
 

luka

Well-known member
disruption is usually the weapon of the relatively impotent.

insurgents asymmetric warfare. little siblings annoying older ones. the plp during corbyn's tenurship. union workers. protestors

In the economic sphere you are waging war on established cartels. Perhaps the difference here is you may have enormous resources at your disposal. Eg uber loses £40,000 a second or whatever it is. Amazon likewise was only able to achieve market dominance by having bakers willing a to sustain huge losses for as long as it took.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The instinct Trump exploits, that politicians are mostly educated elite liars who use fancy words to obfuscate and even dignify their greed, is sound. There is a swamp in Washington. There's a swamp in Westminster.

But of course the people claiming to save us from this corruption are even worse. Disruption for them is just knocking over the ladder to power so they can get up it while everyone else is flailing.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
They must be an interloper of some sort, detached from one context and never quite at ease in another. Edward Said's thing about the intellectual as exile massively resonated for me when I first heard it, although not all intellectuals are "exilic", and certainly not all exiles are "intellectuals".
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I wonder then about the Ivy League VC fund-grabbing Silicon Valley would-be "disruptor"s. They seem a different kind of beast mostly, Zuckerberg's towering sperghood notwithstanding.
 

luka

Well-known member
You hear a lot in documentaries etc about the horde of Essex lads Thatcher unleashed on The City.

Which is also tied to the idea of America and American vigour and success. Not caring for how things are done, the old ways, traditions, taboos, superstitions. The renegade cop. The mad inventor. The gold prospector. The self made millionaire.
 
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