He’s here. He’s back. Robin Mackay returns to the blogosphere.
It’s almost three years now since I decided to rescue the many texts that for years had been written, sometimes appeared somewhere obscure, been forgotten, copied from one laptop to another, ignored, shuffled around, occasionally reread and then forgotten again.
The site contains all of my writings, translations, along with a few audio and video pieces. The full text is included wherever it was possible and was not legally dubious to do so. I’ve tried to avoid too much overlap with my other home at Urbanomic.
Every time I’ve come back to edit the site I have remembered other items I hadn’t added yet, and this will probably continue for some time.
But why? In the aftermath of Mark Fisher’s death in 2017 and the remembering of earlier periods of life and self-reflection that had inevitably set off, I initially conceived of this archiving project as a response to my distress at the fact that dealing with other people’s words as editor, translator, and publisher, not to mention just dealing with life, existence, and money, seemed to have made it impossible for me to commit myself to any “serious” research that I could consider “mine”. That’s partly what you might call “facilitator’s syndrome”, and partly an excuse for my own somewhat unsystematic style of thinking (and maybe that seriousness is anyway just an outdated idea, a phantasm that no one can genuinely realize today). But at the same time, in the gaps in between all this other stuff, I had actually produced a substantial amount of writing, most of it as a result of external provocation, often commissioned, generally executed under pressure, and usually on subject matter that was at some tangent to my own interests (in so far as I had any idea what those were; and many times it was these tangents that reoriented and reenergised my own vector).
I’ve been waiting for Robin to rejoin the blogosphere for months. It might even be over a year since he first mentioned his plans to return.
Robin’s “facilitator’s syndrome” is strong. Even over here in this corner of the internet, Robin’s comments and ideas have directly informed much of what has appeared on this blog, including some of my most popular posts, such as “State Decay” and “A Note on Eerie Agentic Capital“, which wouldn’t exist or even have been started without his diffuse input.
Suffice it to say, I am very excited he’s back in our area.
Read the rest of Robin’s introductory post over at readthis.wtf and dip into what is a really amazing archive of stuff. Robin’s also got a separate Twitter account for himself now as well: @readthiswtf