The Counsel of Spent by INVENTORY

Use this book as a field guide, lovingly prepared with words and images that do not satisfy but irritate – un vandalisme vernaculaire contre la servitude volontaire – a cavalier text that traverses the cosmological scale and the anxieties of everyday survival under latest capitalism; or, a series of fragmentary yet interconnected rants that repeat the basic banalities that everyone thinks and feels, that are quietly acknowledged in private, but that rarely manifest themselves as collectively organised opposition and concrete action.

We are told that technological change alone will bring the deleterious effects of profit and loss to heel. And so it appears, that unless we are driven to the brink of extinction, there will be no collective counter-attack of lasting value. This is the counsel of spent, asking how far we must be pushed as a species, as a planet, and how much more must be tolerated in the interests of ‘survival’ before we awake and understand that there is no natural evolution under capitalism?

Another end of the world is possible.

Formed in 1995, Inventory was a loosely associated group of writers, artists and theorists, currently guided by the efforts of two artists/heretics, Adam Scrivener and Paul Claydon, who advance a practical and theoretical notion of what they call ‘fierce sociology’.

published by Book Works
designer: Modern Activity
2018, 238 pages, 17 x 11,4 cm