xenogothic

Crossing London by train, Amu’s parents and I chat merrily on the way to the quiet commuter town of Ashford.

The summer heatwave has not yet abated. Everywhere, grass has browned due to a “flash drought”. I am looking down at the dust kicked up by my feet, half wanting to apologise to the grass that’s been through enough, when Amu’s Mum points out the sign that reads HMP / YOI Bronzefield. We are already here.

Turning a corner, I recognise Bronzefield immediately from photographs and videos of protests during the hunger strike. My first thought was “Foucault was right” — a constant internal mantra when I was a frequent visitor to HMP Foston Hall. I have not had that thought in a while. All prisons are amorphous institutions – each one is different, with its own nuances, rules and regulations; each also echoes every other institution you can think of.

Bronzefield is “modern”, at least to my eyes — deceptively so. It reminds me of a library, a port, a hospital. It has all the generic fixtures of some sort of government building or public service. The irony, of course, is that Bronzefield is run by Sodexo, a private company, and has an entirely anti-social function. Like all prisons, it is an abomination.

For the next few hours, I will not be able to stop myself from comparing HMP Bronzefield to HMP Foston Hall. I became so familiar with the latter, visiting once a week (sometimes more) over a six-month period. That experience changed something within me drastically. I became accustomed to it, and then suddenly, I didn’t have to be there anymore.

The last time we were there was 27th February 2026. A bail hearing was held at the Old Bailey, throughout which I held my breath. When the judge proclaimed that bail was to be granted to the Moog 4, Nic – one of the four’s prison support buddies – and I went directly to Foston Hall, jumping on the first train to Derby from King’s Cross. We arrived in the evening – the first time I had been outside the prison after sunset – and stood in the rain for two hours, waiting for their release.

I recall this anecdote for Amu’s parents as we wait to enter the visit hall. The staff at the front desk are all smiles and far more personable than their northern counterparts. But we all know how much this system plays with the emotions of those doing whatever they can to support the incarcerated. I tell them about how the prison kept phoning me on that wet February night, repeatedly seeking confirmation that I was there to pick up Juno. Each time, they would offer to open up the family centre, so we weren’t stood out in the rain. They never did. After two hours, I was soaked through. It felt like one final ‘fuck you’, one final gaslight lit.

At Bronzefield, everything feels so much more relaxed. The waiting area is like that of a modern hospital (compared to Foston’s decrepit, underfunded atmosphere). But the sullen faces of other visitors are a familiar sight. The searches are also nowhere near as invasive as I was once used to, and the staff seem far less high on their own power. My photograph and finger prints are taken on entry, and perhaps it is for that reason that they pat everyone down more lightly, rather than stopping just shy of a cavity search, as they did in Derbyshire.

Bronzefield’s visit hall is enormous, like a sports hall at an inner-city school. The ceiling is high, the chairs are comfortable, the tables large. We are spaced out from other prisoners’ friends and families. Screws are not breathing down our necks. The staff are not heavily uniformed, with keys and handcuffs clattering on their waistbands. There is a café, which sells real food and serves real coffee. I can pay for it with a bank card, instead of a bag of loose pound coins.

There are first-timers, like myself, who muddle up the protocol. I arrive into the hall roughly five minutes after Amu’s parents. I suddenly realise that they don’t know what I look like. We’ve never met in person before and have only spoken a few times on the phone.

Clearly, I don’t look like many of the other visitors. Amu points at me immediately from 25 metres away and grins from ear to ear. When I arrive at their table, they give me a big hug, and flatter me: “I only realised before you arrived that I didn’t know what you looked like. I just said to myself I’ll look out for the person who looks really cool.”

It is an exchange that reminds me of the first time meeting Alan in Foston Hall’s pre-visit holding pen. Alan with the cool clothes and the amazing hair dyed three or four different colours. I think Alan was the first person to say hello that day – I felt shy – but we laughed at having already clocked each other with a look that said: “Eccentrically dressed queer person? You must be here to visit a direct actionist…”

The two-hour visit flies by, as they often do, with all four of us talking politics like we’re sitting in a pub on a Saturday afternoon. It’s a delightful visit, but I am caught off guard by how deflated I feel when it is over. Whereas visitors were the first to leave at Foston Hall, it is the prisoners who stand up first at Bronzefield. Amu is nonchalant about it all. We’re just friends, and new friends at that, but I feel an urge to linger and drag out the goodbye.

A range of emotions surge up in me like bile. It’s like there’s a wooden box in my stomach, which I haven’t opened in a while, and when the door opens to let the prisoners back out of the visit hall, the draught blows off a layer of dust and reminds me that the box is there.

My body had forgotten what it is like to have the journey in and out of prison be a part of its routine. Amu is not Juno, but my body does not know how else to respond. There was no hard goodbye, no lingering embrace, no stolen kisses, no tears, no heartfelt reassurances, no repeated I-love-yous. The only thing that remains the same is the deeply held wish that these rotten institutions would crumble. I wish they would free them all.

It is only on leaving Bronzefield that it really hits me. We talk about the prison system for some of the walk back to the train station. Prisons are not places that hold deviants; they are themselves deviant. We talk about the lack of any clarity on the rules, the arbitrary nature of its regulations, the way that you never end up talking to a staff member with any of the responsibility or authority you expect. Everything is always someone else’s job. Every problem is someone else’s problem.

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I remember Deleuze’s essay on societies of control. Yes, Foucault was right, he says. But not only do enclosures echo each other’s modes of operation, they also echo each other’s crises:

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure — prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors — scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.

In light of these new forces, disciplinary structures have given way to more controlling structures. If Foucault was right about how all enclosures echo each other, then Deleuze was right when he emphasised that modern society is less about discipline than it is about control. After all, if British prisons were disciplinary institutions, you would expect the rules and regulations to be concrete and hard, demanding obedience. On the contrary, no one knows the rules, no one will tell you the rules, and the rules are always subject to change. That is control.

William S. Burroughs’ “The Limits of Control” is the key to Deleuze’s argument. I think about it often as well:

I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder — you use it … All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations.

When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will, motivation and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally.

It is telling that England so often remains the prime example for writers concerned with these sorts of contradiction, as the laboratory for imperialist control:

All modern control systems are riddled with contradictions. Look at England. “Never go too far in any direction” is the basic rule on which England is built, and there is some wisdom in that. However, avoiding one impasse they step into another. Anything that is not going forward is on the way out. Well, nothing lasts forever. Time is what which ends, and control needs time. England is simply stalling for time as it slowly founders.

The same contradictions of control, if unfettered, give rise to fascism always. Fascism, Burroughs notes, is similarly a kind of total control that may well undo itself, but also capitalism, which is more generally a measured system of control. “Force, once brought in, subverts the power of money”, he writes. Capitalism is expansionist, and when it can expand no longer in terms of its ideological advance, it turns to militaristic expansion and the cycle of warring over territories, where brinkmanship — another kind of controlling gesture — gives only the illusion of expansion. One step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back…

Burroughs argues that “no modern industrialized country has ever gone fascist without a program of military expansion. There is no longer any place to expand to — after hundreds of years, colonialism is a thing of the past.” This is only half true. The reality of colonialism’s end is felt in all attempts to newly colonise space as the final frontier. Here on earth, colonialism continues to flirt with its own impasses when concerned with the brinkmanship of markets. New technologies arise, which demand new space and new resources to be developed. Old territories are emptied and then reoccupied. Lines shift across maps in accordance with new demands.

Israel is an exception, perhaps — the final, truly colonial endeavour. Those who oppose it or expose it find themselves in control’s rotten core. It is not for nothing that these enclaves of apartheid and militarism are so often referred to as “laboratories”; techno-colonialism prefers to conduct its experiments out of sight, in far-flung places that lack scrutiny, covered over by layers of neoliberal propaganda. Soon enough, their new methods and technologies of control return to us. Those who would dare draw the public’s attention to this secretive system are tellingly locked away out of sight for years.

Burroughs concludes:

I don’t mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary. A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course. It is encouraging that some behaviour modification projects have been exposed and halted, and certainly such exposure and publicity should continue. In fact, I submit that we have a right to insist that all scientific research be subject to public scrutiny, and that there should be no such thing as “top-secret” research.

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By the time we reach the station, we have all descended into silence. I reflect on how difficult it has been to regain control of my own life, not knowing what to do with it now that the pressures of supporting someone incarcerated are less demanding. But there are, of course, many others who need support — not only prisoners, but also those who continue to find themselves on the front lines of prison support.

So much has changed for us, although it is hard to see that change sometimes. This time next month, it will be one year since Juno was first arrested. That means it will have been six months since they were bailed. The time spent outside has passed far quicker than the time inside. Those first six months lasted forever. The six months after have been a blur.

For all that has changed, I realise that I still have so many feelings left unresolved. Proximity to prison is a trauma. It is very different to the experience of being inside. In fact, not knowing what the world is like on the other side of the heavy locked doors is part of the ordeal. I am not yet over it. The system’s disarray infects each person who comes into contact with it. On leaving Bronzefield, I realise just how disarrayed I remain.

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Amu Gib is an amazing writer and thinker. Their incarceration has not stopped them from working. Hidden out of sight, they undertake their own research projects, exploring what they call a “material literacy”. They write in a manner that is post-structuralist without the explicitly philosophical baggage. They understand how structures intersect, and how objects are promiscuous. Indeed, matter becomes a vehicle for linking life- and death-machines, blurring all lines between nature and culture.

Amu is chlorophyll. “To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others”, Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus. Amu slides across processes of production and sifts through what is lifeforce and deathforce. Mechanisms of control and domination are made more visible in the process of writing photosynthetically.

Amu and I recently started working together on their materialist writings. I have been transcribing and editing some of what they write, in order to find a home for it on the outside. The first text we worked on has been published by the Landworkers’ Alliance. You can read it here.

Congratulations are in order for Matt Bluemink, who has recently published a new book, The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & the Creation of New Worlds. Thanks are in order too; Bluemink is kind enough to note how the book partly grew out of a conversation he and I had way back in 2021, and he engages with my work at length throughout.

Back in 2021, Bluemink and I came into contact after he suggested that an artist like SOPHIE, who had then recently passed away, was a representative of a kind of “anti-hauntology“, as a retort to Mark Fisher’s enduring writings on the slow cancellation of the future. But for me, “anti-hauntology” was just another word for “accelerationism”, and it allowed me to go back to my favourite bugbear about how most contemporary critics are still lagging behind where Fisher was at in the 2010s.

It was actually a nice disagreement to have; a cordial and productive one — a very rare thing online, even more so now than then. Frankly, it seems clear that neither of us has ever stopped thinking about all of the ideas that came out of that conversation. In fact, as I told Bluemink recently, when he offered to send me a copy of the book, our 2021 conversation was the unsuspecting catalyst that led me to meet my partner Juno, who wrote their own response to it in 2024, which first got us talking.

Suffice it to say, I owe a great deal to that conversation, but what’s most interesting right now, in reading Bluemink’s new exploration of some of these shared ideas, is that I can still see the same contradictions at work within it, which triggered our blogospheric back-and-forth last time. In fact, it is a contradiction that is all the more heightened in Bluemink’s new book. It has to do with the work of mourning.

What I never really understood about Bluemink’s argument is how an artist like SOPHIE could be held up as an antidote to “hauntology”, especially after her death. “In order to truly break free of the constraints of hauntology we must look at SOPHIE as changing the rules of the game from within”, he writes in the new book, referring to the ‘game’ of our retromanic pop-industrial complex perhaps. But if that is the aim, then how come Bluemink’s relationship to SOPHIE remains so achingly mournful?

“If it hadn’t been for her tragic death, who is to say that she may not have become the next Madonna?” Bluemink asks. (Perish the thought!) “Or rather something else entirely: a totally new kind of pop culture icon? In some ways, she already has.” And I’d agree, but this totemising of SOPHIE, to my mind, remains the most hauntological approach we could possibly take towards the pop she left behind. Far from signifying a shift away from Fisher’s sense of the hauntological, Bluemink’s deferrals to SOPHIE epitomise it for me.

That’s not to say that Bluemink is starting from a dead end, however. He’s not. The point is that neither was Fisher. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of this, but the lack of self-awareness is often telling. Fisher becomes a strawman and the distinctions that Bluemink attempts to make between Fisher’s thought and his own feel largely superficial to me.

What I think this highlights is the entanglement of hauntology and accelerationism that I tried to make the case for back in 2021. We’re five years on from that moment, of course, and my thinking has both changed and deepened since then. To be honest, I reckon I’ve got a book in me about all of this as well. This post is bordering on turning into one… It’s a proper ramble, of the sort I haven’t undertaken in quite a long time… So buckle the fuck up, I suppose.

Postmodernism versus Hauntology

Critics of Mark Fisher still don’t really understand the context that “hauntology” emerged from. I tried to rectify this in the introduction to the reissue of Ghosts of My Life from 2022. I wrote about this last year as well, after reading Liam Inscoe-Jones’ similarly poptimistic Songs in the Key of MP3, and again in issue #500 of The Wire.

I thought these essays were clear enough, but they were still misread, or perhaps they haven’t been read that widely at all. To be honest, I feel like people just can’t let go of the caricature of Fisher that haunts cultural criticism to this day. He’s too useful as a scapegoat and strawman. It’s regrettable.

Ultimately, to reduce Fisher’s argument to simply being the “pessimistic” idea that contemporary culture constantly reiterates the past is woefully inaccurate, but it is nonetheless the popular understanding that has stuck and is now trotted out constantly. It unfortunately makes an appearance in Bluemink’s new book as well.

What was Fisher’s position, which no one seems to acknowledge? He was fated to constantly repeat it, as am I. He insisted in 2010 that his work

isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity).

Fisher’s position is therefore more nuanced than he is given credit for. I have previously compared it to the “salvagepunk” modality of Evan Calder Williams and China Miéville, for example, which I think is a better way of framing the hauntology/accelerationism couplet. Fisher continues:

The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.

This was Fisher’s position, and it is one reflected in the work of someone like SOPHIE. She too sought a (trans) reclamation of modernity. Fisher’s argument, then, wasn’t that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor did he think the past should be off limits to us. Rather, what he thought was that we have been largely subordinated to a spectacle that is reiterative. Not wholesale; not entirely. But this is a major component of contemporary capitalist hegemony. AI is obviously exacerbating this right now especially. But that’s not hauntology! On the contrary, that’s postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson referred to it. Against this, what we need to do is take the past and make it new!

Fisher’s infamous example of how not to ‘make it new’ was the Arctic Monkeys’ “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, where what was weird about the past — an episode of the Old Grey Whistle Test, in the Monkeys’ example — is made familiar through nostalgia and so exists within the present without producing any sort of tension with it.

That lack of tension between past and present was a core element of postmodernity for Jameson and Baudrillard. Hauntology, for Fisher, was something else. “Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts”, he wrote in 2008, “but one of its role[s] is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.” Hauntology was an antidote — we will return to this suggestion later.

More specifically, in the context of mid-00s music cultures, hauntology referred to a swell of invention and innovation that wasn’t simply the return of or a return to the past, but rather a name for a particular socio-technological moment that was inadvertently inventing new ways to inhabit the past and also inventing new pasts to inhabit. This wasn’t altogether intentional. It was a quality of a specific post-Y2K moment; a sort of cybergothic tendency (digital ghosts) noticed by a network of writers, who found that the Internet was changing our relationship to the past and thus unsettling a neoliberal sense of (end-of-)historicity.

Just as popular culture — particularly the terrible ‘indie’ cultures in orbit of 2005 — demonstrated a moribund postmodernism that lacked futureshock and innovation, this was coupled with the observation that new technologies were making our relationship to the past newly participative as well. What disappointed Fisher wasn’t that no one was engaging in new modes of cultural participation, undermining subordination to the Spectacle, but rather that it has been left only to an avant-garde that did not have the same sort of impact on popular culture that he had become accustomed to as a member of the post-punk generation.

There were exceptions — there always are. In fact, Burial was one! His 2007 album Untrue was nominated for the following year’s Mercury Prize, after all. My first contact with Burial was on 2008’s official Mercury Prize compilation, and it massively stood out alongside the likes of The Last Shadow Puppets, Laura Marling, Elbow, even Radiohead.

As a cross-section of the year’s “best” British music, a lot of the tracks are notably mournful. “These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you”, Laura Marling sings on “Ghosts”. “You can’t take it with you”, sings Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s “Reckoner”. “There’s a hole in my neighbourhood / Down which of late I cannot help but fall”, sings Guy Garvey on Elbow’s “Grounds for Divorce”, from their album The Seldom Seen Kid, which would ultimately win that year’s top prize.

There was something in the air; something in the water. But Burial’s “Ghost Hardware” hit different amongst this showcase of bittersweetness. An interesting choice to include — “Archangel” is the track from Untrue that has since become ubiquitous — it felt like a commentary on the compilation itself. It features a vocal sample from Andy C talking about the Metalheadz label: “That record, that record, this mix / You know, it all clicks together“. So did most of the tracks on the Mercury Prize comp, and Burial seemed to be the only one to see that coalescence, which he took a scalpel to.

The mournful qualities of “Ghost Hardware” thus functioned as a sort of black mirror set against all these other tracks, synthesising their collective atmosphere and turning it in on itself. It was the only track that actually connected to a past since eclipsed and thus shone a light on why these wistful songs were having such a moment. Indeed, “Ghost Hardware” took all these feelings and newly located them in a post-rave material context, whereas everyone else seemed oddly cleft from whatever had come before, showing instead how the ghosts and holes weren’t simply in hearts or down streets, but were built into the system’s hardware. This is what made Burial’s Untrue a kind of exorcism for the ghosts in the Y2K machine. It doesn’t have lyrics as explicit as the indie fodder, but for that reason it stirred up a structure of feeling far more effectively.

Things didn’t stay this way. The ‘hauntological moment’ can only really be contained to the years 2003-2008, before then have a revenant return from 2011-2014, when the Occupy movement failed to bear any fruit. (The release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica and The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, both in 2011, encapsulated this for me at the time; the publication of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life in 2014 was a bookend to all of it, not an origin point, as he had already fully embraced accelerationism by that time.)

Nevertheless, after the financial crash, something changed. The difficulty of naming that change isn’t hauntology’s fault, of course, but our constant deferral back to a moment that most of hauntology’s engineers moved on from suggests that, at the very least, we’re not totally cleft from the problems they first identified.

My position remains the same as it ever was in that regard. It’s not simply the case that “hauntology” named a condition we’ve yet to cure, but rather that we’ve woefully misunderstood what it meant and intended to do. We’ve failed hauntology; it hasn’t failed us. Indeed, the fact that we’ve reduced “hauntology” to the thing it first set out to critique, whilst continuing to reiterate the same arguments to the contrary that Fisher and others made twenty years ago, should be far more damning of contemporary critique’s impotence than many can bring themselves to accept.

For example, if Bluemink’s position differs from “hauntology”, it is in the way similar to that of Alex Williams, who first argued back in 2008 that:

Set against [hauntology] we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music, which whilst in some senses would operate in a similar manner, would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning.

This, it seems to me, is what Bluemink wants to pursue also — an aesthetics crucially bereft of the quality of mourning. But Bluemink isn’t nihilistic about anything — in the sense of trying to unsettle all contemporary values, as Ray Brassier did with regards to sonic culture in “Genre is Obsolete”. Instead, he proposes an explicitly positivistic aesthetics of pop music (which is why he defers to Bernard Stiegler over Derrida, more on whom later).

The problem as I see it is that, in still struggling against an inaccurate definition of hauntology, his work ends up being more mournful that it intends to be. But there’s nothing wrong with that. The work of mourning is essential. I just think we must face up to it rather than disavow it whilst doing it anyway.

In that sense, the grief that underlies hauntology — and most critiques of hauntology — is stuck in its own stage of denial. If we really want to overcome it, it’s necessary we expand on all this, so let’s once again return to the moment of hauntology’s emergence in order to better understand what it hoped to do and what it was up against. In particular, we need to better appreciate how “hauntology” wasn’t an impotent reflection on post-Y2K grief, but was rather a participative mode that engaged with this mid-00s structure of feeling far more productively than it is often given credit for.

Ghost Box and the library record paradox

It is not for nothing that “hauntology” was christened after the inauguration of the Ghost Box record label. Founded in 2005 by Julian House and Jim Jupp, the pair began releasing would-be soundtracks to lost media under their respective aliases, The Focus Group and Belbury Poly.

Much of their output looked like newly unearthed library records previously lost to time. For the unfamiliar, library records were albums and compilations of tracks created specifically for film and television studios, which developed in-house record libraries featuring all genres of music, which they then used to soundtrack their various productions. Although ubiquitous, this typically wasn’t music you could buy in shops.

Nevertheless, you’d hear it everywhere. You might not have been able to name song titles or artists, but you’d almost certainly heard plenty of library music regardless. And you knew it, because a lot of it was weird. Delia Derbyshire’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop remains the best example of how this kind of muzak was weird and experimental — and she also bucks the trend of anonymity that most library record producers operated under. As a result, Will Pritchard argues that library music “embodies something of a paradox: it is functional music, churned out to satisfy faceless briefs, yet still regarded as some of the most authentically creative and expressive sounds committed to record.” As such, library records later became collector’s items in their own right.

Since library records had been made redundant in the age of popular music licensing, Ghost Box became a multimedia project imagining an alternative universe where the tradition persisted, albeit inverting Pritchard’s paradox, such that what was once strictly functional was now functionless, and newly advertised not to film and TV studios but to the masses. The result was a library music capable of

conjuring another world (Britain of the sixties and seventies as imagined by Thomas Pynchon perhaps) where a socialist bureaucracy undertook a version of situationist psychogeography.

This was how Fisher described Ghost Box’s output in January 2006. In fact, Fisher had been one of the first to take an interest in the label, as he saw them as kindred spirits to the British blogosphere at that time.

The blogosphere was, of course, constituted by a loose network of writers all with their own personal websites, writing about whatever they pleased. Although this is arguably the most common use of the Internet today, since social media is nothing but a network of microblogs, early contributors to the blogosphere were among some of the first to use the Internet in this way. Prior to the homogenising ascendency of the big social-media platforms, these writers all shared a fascination with the Internet as a new space for DIY cultural production, and were particularly enamoured by the web’s potential utility as a vast archive, where all the ephemera of cultures past could be uploaded and afforded a radically new accessibility.

Case in point: DIY forms of cultural production — which were previously synonymous with the most basic materials and championed for requiring little skill to join in with, like zine-making — had been quietly revolutionised by the Internet. This wasn’t lost on anybody at that time. Speaking personally, I was doing an A Level in Media Studies in 2008, and I was already an active blogger. My “coursework” amounted to producing a “digital zine” — a PDF circulated on a blog, which reflexively looked at how the Internet was changing zine culture. As it became increasingly more likely that people would have access to a home computer rather than a home Xerox machine, this meant that the cyberpunk (or digipunk) world Fisher and Ccru dreamt of wasn’t an outlier or a hyperstitious future dream any longer, but a pervasive reality.

If I parenthetically quibble with the word “cyberpunk” here, it is to acknowledge Fisher’s attempts to distance himself from it also. Bluemink writes about cyberpunk as a dystopian literary genre that Fisher remains associated with from his Ccru days, and this is used to emphasise his pessimism, but he wasn’t so interested in its dystopic sensibilities. As he wrote in 2005:

The term k-punk came out of Ccru. ‘k’ was used as a libidinally preferable substitution for the California / Wired captured ‘cyber’ (the word cybernetics having its origins in the Greek, Kuber). Ccru understood cyberpunk not as a (once trendy) literary genre, but as a distributive cultural tendency facilitated by new technologies. In the same way, ‘punk’ doesn’t designate a particular musical genre, but a confluence outside legitimate(d) space: fanzines were more significant than the music in that they allowed and produced a whole other mode of contagious activity which destroyed the need for centralized control.

Ghost Box fit in well alongside these newly networked developments. Fisher recognised, for instance, “that Ghost Box is about a positive amateurism, where amateurism doesn’t designate a failure to be professional so much as a deliberate deviation from how things are supposed to be done.” It was this attitude in particular that the blogosphere naturally aligned with, not simply because its denizens were sentimental about aesthetic forms synonymous with the past, but because the Internet presented a new way of engaging with older modes of pop-cultural and subcultural production.

Fisher also noted how this was a quality previously associated with television (for his generation at least):

The classic serials of the seventies produced a world you felt a part of, a sense of inclusion to which ‘wobbly sets’ somehow contributed. The professionalism and glossiness of current TV, by contrast, locks you out, subordinates you to Spectacle.

Web 1.0 – ‘wobbly’ in its own right – rekindled an interest in this amateurism. The blogosphere recognised just how different a more contemporary technological landscape now was by comparison, but with forgotten pasts resurging to find new footing in the present, owing to the flourishing of an online ‘archive fever’, Ghost Box became a fitting vehicle through which their generation could interrogate the present’s various points of tension — its various continuities and discontinuities — with the recent past.

This focus on participation is important. It is a core aspect of deterritorialization, after all. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, they write that to ‘deterritorialize’ is

to participate in a movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold [into] a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.

This is what Ghost Box was doing with twentieth-century audio-visual culture. Their “library music” was deterritorialized from libraries and TV shows alike, allowing the form to come undone from its prior associations, whilst nonetheless continuing to evoke what made library records so special and weird. Even the label’s name was fascinating in this regard. It transformed a ubiquitous modern medium into something newly paranormal. As Fisher wrote in 2005: “At one level, the Ghost Box is television itself, or a television that has disappeared, itself become a ghost, a conduit to the Other Side, now only remembered by those of us of a certain age.”

Sure enough, in also recognising themselves as part of the Ghost Box generation, many of Fisher’s peers felt similarly about the aptly named label’s output. Simon Reynolds soon joined in with the adulation for the label as well, writing:

this is serious audio-madeleine bizniz, flashing back to a bygone England that was at once shabbier and seedier than the present one, but also more glamorous and strange.

Their relationship to memory was Proustian in this regard; not simply nostalgic. The Ghost Boxers — producers and listeners alike — were semiological apprentices, and the “deterritorialized flux” that arose as a result was effectuated by Ghost Box’s soundtracks to non-existent media, to screen memories. In undoing the library function, Ghost Box represented a deterritorialized approach to audio-visual culture.

Bluemink talks about this function of deterritorialization in his new book as well, using a definition from Manuel DeLanda that is very similar to Deleuze-Guattari’s own. This, Bluemink writes,

is what happens when cultural forms, especially in relation to music, are pushed to their limits. Perhaps that is exactly the point that certain commentators [*waves*] are making when comparing anti-hauntology to accelerationism. However, I wouldn’t consider the artists I’m discussing to be inherently accelerationist (although there are surely parallels). What producers like Arca are doing is taking, morphing, shifting, and reconnecting disparate aesthetic elements together in creative ways that escape the kind of hauntological spectres of the past that Fisher was wary of.

But again, if that isn’t hauntology — since the spectres have supposedly (and inexplicably) been exorcised — then that is accelerationism. But the question sidestepped is: which spectres being escaped here? Fisher and SOPHIE’s spectres certainly haven’t been circumvented. But spectres are not simply images of or from the past either; our futures can appear spectral as well. This was the tension at the heart of hauntology — a pseudo-scientific name for a sort of digital communion with so many ghosts. The hauntologists were all scientists of sound, tinkering with spectrograms to reveal that is otherwise hidden within the present. They rallied behind Ghost Box; they might as well have rallied behind the likes of Drexciya, as Kodwo Eshun did.

Point being, spectralization and speculation are perhaps two perspectives on the same issue here. Speculation is opposed to predication; ghosts are themselves images no longer predicated on a materiality. Ghost Box, then, was also speculative, precisely because its records were shorn of their predication upon an ultimate destination or utility. They were also “taking, morphing, shifting, and reconnecting disparate aesthetic elements together in creative ways”. In fact, that’s arguably the definition of speculation as well, at least as someone like Hegel would have it.

The New Weird America

Let’s stick with this tension between spectralization and speculation a little longer, by considering how other ’00s sonic currents were dealing with their uneasy entanglement.

Consider, for example, how this unsettled “nostalgia” for past forms of media wasn’t a strictly English phenomenon; it had its American counterparts too. In 2006, Mike Powell highlighted Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti as an example, whose sound on his 2002 album House Arrest “is solely that of a degraded ideal”, or else “a mold, a footprint, a negative, a series of suggestions that function independent of the ideal.”

For decades, pop music had kept pace with the latest advances in recording technology. Undergoing its own industrial revolution, as the studio became a utopic enclave of future-sound cultivation from the 1960s onwards, pop was increasingly associated with a flawless sonic polish that always strove to epitomise the present, and as such, had come to increasingly homogenise it as a non-participative spectacle. The blogosphere had no issue with this in principle – at least in the sense that this perspective might be seen as old men grumbling reactionarily at clouds – but they took note of pop music’s newly deformed mode of the popular, which had shifted from the accessibility of its production to the accessibility of its consumption.

By contrast, Ariel Pink’s sound imagined a world where the accessibility of pop music’s production had continued; where the likes of Daniel Johnston or R. Stevie Moore, in thrall to the contradictory lo-fi maximalism of the Beach Boys or the Beatles, were not outsider artists but megastars, writing infectious pop hits in bedrooms, recorded to 4-track tape. In continuing this style of music into the twenty-first century, Ariel Pink highlighted in negative how this kind of lo-fi pop was even stranger now than it previously had been, retooling past potentials as another way to escape the capitalist present. (Enrico Monacelli’s book on lo-fi remains the best examination of this tendency for my money.)

This was, in Ariel Pink’s own words, “hardcore pop”. Alternatively, a few years later, David Keenan would dub this approach “hypnagogic pop” – a “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory”. Emerging in the 1990s and left somewhat shellshocked by the new millennium, it was a kind of garage pop that fetishized “the outmoded media of its infancy”, often being released on cassette tape in the age of CDs and digital downloads. It also demonstrated a “combination of innocence and experience”:

its drive is to restore the circumstances of early youthful epiphanies while reframing them as present realities, possible futures.

It is worth noting that Ariel Pink has since become associated with the more reactionary potentials of this mid-00s modernism. It is important to note because this more American current was also of a different order to its English cousin, so forgive the detour as we parcel this out a little further.

In passing, Powell later compares the affective degradation of Ariel Pink’s tape deck sound to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. Basinski’s album famously consists of short tape loops, set in motion for sometimes an hour or more, recorded in such a way that he was able to sonically capture the process of the tape’s own disintegration.

Passing through his reel-to-reel machine, the magnetic tape that encompassed each dusty and near-forgotten recording (as it was duplicated and presumably digitised) began to flake and fall apart. The music produced was thus a long meditation on short refrains decomposing in real time, like snippets of Satie’s “furniture music“, except this furniture had since sunk down into a new terrain, like The Backrooms.

Already deeply moving in its own right, Basinski’s project was further mythologised by the urban legend that he had first listened back to the results whilst watching the World Trade Centre collapse on 11^th September 2001. A decade later, Basinski recalled that moment as follows:

This was the end of the world … and we were literally sitting up on the roof all day and into night watching without believing as NYC burned, and listening to the heartbreaking Disintegration Loops … I thought … it’s the soundtrack to the end of the world … I had been assigned the job without knowing the details, it was done, and here we are … The Greatest Show on Earth, Armageddon. We were all literally losing our minds in terror, each person looping onto what holds him or her together … clinging to that which could provide some kind of release or explanation … just as each of the individual melodies in the Disintegration Loops did … at their own pace, seeming to hold onto that which made the melody unique, while letting go of the unimportant sustains or gently adding rests incrementally before the downbeat … it really blew my mind.

Although Powell’s comparison is fleeting, it is nonetheless a telling one. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, America’s avant-garde was beset by a freak-folkish ‘return to innocence’. Basinski is an important corollary here; he captured the moment of disintegration from which this new innocence would emerge. Although Basinski and Ariel Pink are stylistically very different, it is important to note how other bands in their orbits emerged from America’s various noise scenes, each taking on a newly psychedelic approach to pop motifs in post-9/11 America. The likes of Grouper (an occasional tourmate of Basinski’s), Animal Collective, or Joanna Newsom even broke through to achieve relative mainstream success.

Other musicians, like Bradford Cox, known for his projects Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, were notably also bloggers, sharing bedroom demoes and studio notes on personal websites scattered across a democratised Internet. I was especially obsessed with Cox’s blog in the late 2000s, and his haunting track “Children’s Hospital”, whilst drawn from very real experiences, still resonates with America’s more generally disturbing relationship to its own sense of pop-cultural “childhood”.

The respective styles of all of these musicians differed greatly, but even what was shared – an aesthetic naiveite or innocence, in particular – was markedly different to what was shared by their British contemporaries. This was no doubt because, following 9/11, there was a very clear reason why white America especially was pining for an imagined and more idyllic past, which was nonetheless viewed through the geopolitical corruptions of the present.

Things were different, as they often are, for the black music of the mid-2000s. Consider J Dilla’s 2006 album Donuts: its similarly fetishistic relationship to the seven-inch “donuts” that Dilla sourced many of his samples from; his fascination with the library records of Raymond Scott. That record related to the past-futurism of corporate America in a way far more comparable to the approach of the Ghost Box label than anything made by America’s hypnagogic popists.

Nevertheless, the hypnagogic qualities of the ’00s freak-folk scene remain interesting. They represented the new sound of America’s ‘invisible republic’, albeit temporally disjointed. It was the sound of a ‘new, weird America’, which Greil Marcus had previously associated with Bob Dylan and his Basement Tapes – recordings made throughout the 1960s in a secluded basement studio in Woodstock with The Band, which were mythologised in a way that allowed this archive of demoes take on a similar sort of “library” quality.

Later (officially) released to the public, a decade after they were initially recorded, Marcus compared the sprawling collection of rehearsal and demo tapes to Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music: “an elaborate, dubiously legal bootleg, a compendium of recordings” unearthed from the 1920s and ’30s, “originally released on and generally long forgotten by” various major record labels.

Marcus notes how the Anthology “was the founding document of the American folk revival”, reconnecting artists of the 1950 and ’60s with their forgotten forebears. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes ended up having a similar function, albeit with all sense of the passage of time newly constricted, capturing a transitory moment out of sight, when Dylan was in the process of synthesising the past before subsequently “going electric”. The Basement Tapes, in this regard, capture some of the work of mourning, which we’ll turn to soon, I promise…

Poignantly, Marcus notably describes all of these recordings as “ghosts”, adding that, whilst their “presence is undeniable; to most [they were] also an abstraction, at best a vague tourism of specters from a foreign country.” To the contrary, he insists that, rather than being abstractions, these ghostly recordings allowed a generation of folksingers to reconnect with a past all but erased by whatever the major record labels had allowed their audiences to remember. It may have been a past that remained largely intangible, but these folk traditions also became recorded history rather than mere mythology.

Marcus continues that this mythology had previously been utilised to

cut Americans off from any need to measure themselves against the idealism – the utopianism, the Puritans’ errand into the wilderness or the pioneer’s demand for a new world with every wish for change – Americans have inherited.

The same can be said of contemporary poptimists, it must be said. I’d argue they rail against Fisher not because he was pessimistic, as they mistakenly claim, but because his negativity requires that same measuring of an idealism against our material reality. That’s what Burial and The Caretaker did, albeit in different modes. Their foregrounding of a superseded analogue materiality — the prevalence of digitised vinyl crackle, most obviously — was one way in which a new materialism poked holes in a twenty-first-century capitalist idealism.

SOPHIE did something similar, albeit inverting this tendency somewhat as well. By synthesising her sound palette to produce novel sounds that were without imaginable object, her immateriality further heightened and mutated a pop idealism. This isn’t a quality of perforation we should shy away from, no matter the modality used to elicit this sensation, precisely because these are all generative processes. Their ‘negativity’ defamiliarises signs (signifiers and signifieds). It makes both past and present weird again as well. For hauntology, this negativity was intentionally devoid of the pioneer’s demand for a superficial novelty; in SOPHIE’s case, the weird was reconjured through an exacerbation of a ’90s / ’00s bubble-pop superficiality taken it to its limits. One followed the other, but they are not as opposed as many make them out to be.

In all cases, what is disturbed and rejected in a sense of fixity. This is what Greil Marcus rejected also when discussing the new weird America. By “fixing” some notion of a “free America, the true America, in the past”, he argues that an American pop-cultural hegemony had since neutralised what made the past so “weird”. The resurgence of the past inside the present disrupted this. It was a form of disruption that might well be referred to as a “hauntological continuum”, naming a sensibility shared across the Anthology of American Folk Music, Dylan’s Basement Tapes, and — we might provocatively add — Dilla’s Donuts, Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Burial, and yes, even SOPHIE. In this sense, the references or aesthetic particulars shouldn’t be the focus; what mattered was their unmooring from any fixed origin point.

There is more to be said about why an American hypnagogic pop differs from a British hauntology. I think it is important that each engages with a distinct national unconscious. The differences are very subtle at times, but they are vital. Nevertheless, putting these geopolitical contexts to one side, what is shared across the Atlantic is the manner in which the British and American scenes of the 2000s began producing contemporary recordings that sounded like a New Anthology of Pop Music – an invented treasure trove of forgotten sensibilities; a treasure trove capable of reconnecting the present to the past.

To reiterate: what made these sounds so weird was the fact that they were simulacra sounds without origin, placing past and present newly in tension with one another. From Ghost Box to Ariel Pink, what was conjured was an invented past. Unlike the Arctic Monkeys, who made ‘new music’ that was retro without marketing itself as such, the hauntological sounds of the 2000s was consciously engaged with the past in a way that was paradoxically more inventive and generative.

The Unhomely

I’m probably biased, but if British hauntology was more generative and has since (somewhat ironically) aged better than American freak folk and hypnagogic pop, it is because the British contingent was arguably more awake to the unsettling temporalities evoked by their plundering of a national unconscious. In this regard, Ghost Box’s output was especially Freudian in its approach. It took Freud’s Unheimliche impressions of childhood seriously – that is, childhood’s uncanniness, or more accurately, its unhomeliness.

As Jacqueline Rose once observed, we must always remember that Freud “was first brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves as a child.” This is because such memories are always partial and incomplete. Much like Fisher’s description of an amateurish television, the narratives we necessarily construct about our earliest years are an admixture of individual and collectives myths – our understanding of the world that surrounds us is inherently participative, before we come to internalise its various rules and regulations more passively. But as a result, any fidelity to ‘reality’ is impossible because our childhoods are riddled with gaps that the unconscious mind must fill with fantasies. It was for this reason that Freud insisted we are never truly ‘at home’ in such memories. What we more often refer to are only ‘screen memories’. As Fisher put it, these are “memories of childhood, not memories from childhood”.

Ghost Box’s output was explicitly framed as a set of soundtracks to ‘screen memories’ – in more ways than one – and this was no doubt the point, exacerbating their unsettling nature. In this way, the ‘new’ music coming out of the UK in 2005, exploring the sounds and sensibilities of decades previous, was not a historical antidote to a national mythology, as the Anthology of American Folk Music had been. There was no anthology to unearth, at least not at that time. As such, these were explicitly not memories; they were imaginings, perforating the thin filament between memory and hallucination. They were propositions for a kind of national narrative that, contrary to pop’s homogenisation, was left purposefully incomplete, leaving space for new histories and futures both.

This incompleteness also instigated an important function for the listener. Noting how Ghost Box’s output was, “by its nature, incomplete”, Fisher once again reiterated the label’s innately “participative” nature:

Incomplete, because each new contribution to the system … would produce new ‘holes’ which demanded to be filled (a process that is necessarily interminable)…; and participative, because the system is genuinely a system, a collective product rather than the work of a single author. (It occurs to me … that such ‘participation’ is the real alternative to the ‘interpassivity’ of so much digital culture.)

Things changed. The proliferation of rave and jungle compilations in the 2010s was a new sort of anthological tendency that overcame the gaps felt within the 2000s.

For me personally, the 2014 release of Suburban Base Record’s 3CD compilation “The History Of Hardcore, Jungle, Drum & Bass: 1991-1997“, which did not leave my car’s CD player for years, functioned as a new anthology explicitly. Perhaps it was the Burial phenomenon that led these old labels to revamp themselves and show a new generation just how weird the 1990s were and could still be.

But in the 2000s, things were different. Artists weren’t unearthing old records but filling in the gaps of memory, of history, with invented archives. A genre like vapourwave would exacerbate this. In this way, they recognised and affirmed the mythological function of their own generativity.

Digital Pharmacology

I am emphasising this sense of participation because it pulls one of Bluemink’s key philosophical reference points, Bernard Stiegler, back into dialogue with the hauntological moment. Without getting too lost in explication, I want to briefly draw on Felix Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein’s 2022 book, The Politics of Digital Pharmacology, in which they explore Stiegler’s use of the term pharmakon as something which is both (or neither) remedy and/or cure. They write:

we feel that the term “digital pharmacology”, and more generally the concept of the pharmakon, is extremely helpful in attempting to understand human interaction with digital media — and not only with digital media.

What’s interesting to me is that Steigler’s use of the term is explicitly drawn from Derrida himself, who writes in Dissemination:

This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison… This charm, this spellbinding virture, this power of fascination can be — alternatively or simultaneously — beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance — with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy — if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.

Operating through seduction, the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws.

The pharmakon does its work for better and/or for worse. Derrida describes writing as a pharmakon; for Stiegler, this concept can be extended to all of technology. Like Deleuze, who remains vigilant with regards to how a line of flight — an intoxicated escape beyond all habit — can be tripped up by all that it is fleeing, succumbing to an emboldened fascism (cf. Ezra Pound), the question for Stiegler becomes how we might best use technology’s new potentialities to keep ourselves moving, rather than effectuating new methods of enslavement. As Heidenreich and Weber-Stein write:

In Stiegler’s view a skillful way of applying pharmaka would counterbalance a tendency towards entropy: neg-entropy, the process of ‘bringing together’, of gathering, convening, assembling elements is the appropriate antidote against the destructive effects of the digital onslaught. This art of fighting entropy, of working for neg-entropy finds an esthetic expression in Richard Long’s work. When he creates a circle of stones … an archaic technique of ‘bringing together’ is displayed. Working for neg-entropy seems to connect us with the most ancient practices of structuring a life-world, of bringing order into chaos.

Now, again, when Bluemink makes use of Stiegler to evoke this “bringing together”, this inherently participative relationship that seeks to create and not only destroy, why is this core relationship between the ancient and modern — Stiegler’s modernism — left behind and denied its clear resonance with hauntology?

Truthfully, it is Derrida who preserves a gothic Marxist prose when writing about the occulted function of writing itself; Stiegler’s technic writings are very different, and in Bluemink’s hands, take on the bright glamour of the solarpunk. He emphasises a vitalism opposed to Derrida’s “rite of the pharmakos: evil and death, repetition and expulsion”, much like Stiegler does when he suggests:

Derrida argued that the general circumstances of writing set the conditions for critical writing, so there will never be a really critical form of writing, capable of criticizing from the outside. And there is a systematic problem: with Derrida you don’t have any positive discourse on the pharmakon. It is a philosophy of deficiency, if you like: there is no positive side to the pharmakon for Derrida, and this is a problem for me, because in my view the decisive question is how to transform a poison into a remedy.

I’m not a Stiegler expert, but I’m puzzled by this attempt to reinstate a sort of dichotomy into Derrida’s more general ambivalence towards binaries. I don’t think it is fair to say that he was disinterested in the “decisive question” above. Indeed, this is more precisely what is drawn out in Spectres of Marx.

Derrida may not have a clear answer as to how to transform a poison into a remedy, precisely because a pharmakon is both, as it is for Stiegler as well. But the solution is certainly not to ignore what is poisonous or somehow eject what destroys from our considerations of how to create. It is all a question of utility and context, and this is true enough of spectres or phantasms themselves, which are a core “ingredient” of any pharmacia for Derrida. Indeed, to eject what is occulted from an otherwise hauntological analysis seems to carry the same sentiment as Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the Republic.

Derrida:

Let us recall the famous indictment of pictorial mimetics in the Republic. First, it is a question of banning poetry from the city … for reasons linked essentially to its mimetic nature. The tragic poets, when they practice imitation, corrupt the minds of the listeners … if these do not posses an antidote (pharmakon). This counterpoison is “knowledge of the real nature of things” … If one considers that imitators and masters of illusion will later be presented as charlatans and thaumaturges — species of the genus pharmakeus — then once again ontological knowledge becomes a pharmaceutical force opposed to another pharmaceutical force. The order of knowledge is not the transparent order of forms and ideas, as one might be tempted retrospectively to interpret it; it is the antidote. Long before being divided up into occult violence and accurate knowledge, the element of the pharmakon is the combat zone between philosophy and its other. An element that is in itself, if one can still say so, undecidable.

What is undecidable is a phantasma; is a pharmakon. Alex Williams, in his rebuttal to hauntology, similarly proposed “a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.” I think it must be acknowledge that this can include the past: those historical situations that are spectrally present “within our current time”.

Vigilance remains essential. Notions of past, present, future — all can hamper us just as readily as they might empower us. Hauntology’s virtue, at the very least, was its vigilance in this regard; accelerationism was proposed as an antidote to hauntology, but in too readily rejecting the work of mourning, it far more disastrously fell victim to all that it was trying to critique. This is why I think hauntology and accelerationism must remain coupled. Each has a function of mitigating and accounting for the risks involved in the other’s undecidability.

Taking all of this together, Ghost Box and their disparate allies weren’t simply archivists looking to preserve the past or mime it. They addressed the analogue pasts inside the digital present as a pharmakon, trying to alchemically discover an antidote to a hegemonic retromania. As it was for Fisher, if “postmodernism” is the name of our sickness, then “hauntology” was itself an antidote — an element extracted as a surplus that could counteract the postmodern.

Making the case for this, contrary to Stiegler, let’s now consider how Derrida’s hauntology sought to address this decisive question, then, of turning a poison into a remedy.

Spectralization and the Work of Mourning

As everyone now knows, ‘hauntology’ was a term borrowed from Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which dealt with a very different context to that of its new musical sibling, if nonetheless sharing certain mannerisms with it. But despite this source now being common knowledge, it doesn’t seem like anyone bothers to go back and read what Derrida had to say.

Similarly to Fisher, Reynolds and co., what Derrida sought to name was a condition — a “sickness” — afflicting a new post-Soviet world order, following the so-called ‘end of history’, after which capitalism began to conjure up spectral images of an enemy already vanquished. A “new ‘world order’ seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new disturbance [dérèglement] by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony”, Derrida writes. This disturbance was the fall of the Soviet Union, which left a hole in the world order that capitalism had to fill to assume its global dominance, since it was now without any major (systemic) socioeconomic competitor. But capitalism also arguably loses some of its purpose at this moment. Capitalism had long positioned itself as an “antidote” to the sickness of communism, after all — just as communism was the antidote to the sickness of capitalism. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, what becomes an antidote that no longer has anything to cure?

A paradox arose. In order to stabilize itself in this new context, or otherwise retain some sense of post-Cold War continuity, what was necessary was that capitalist culture conjure up the idea of communism anew, in order to have something to do battle against; something to preserve from its formerly dialectical sense of progress. This is to say that, even whilst capitalism was claiming total victory, a narrative was still needed – an altogether incomplete narrative – to fill the hole left by Soviet communism in the new world order, not so that communism could keep ‘living’ but so capitalism could preserve the illusion of its own ‘development’.

As a result, since this battle between political systems and ideologies was essentially one of competing images, competing imaginaries, it is also a battle fought within the media. Derrida argues that “the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, tele-communications, [etc.])” conjure political ideals as things “neither living nor dead, present nor absent”. (The idea of capitalism itself is necessarily a spectre as well in this regard; the lofty ideals by which it claims supremacy are hardly tangible to most.) It is for this reason that contemporary media “spectralizes.”

Derrida’s hauntology thus named a pervasive attempt “to ontologize remains, to make them present … by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead”. Put another way, if communism was ‘dead’, then capitalism had to set about erecting a tombstone for it – an abstracted ‘final resting place’; a symbolic presence attesting to its real absence; a monument that enabled the work of mourning; a site that we might pay a visit to, but which enables the spectre’s re-visitations upon us as well.

What I find so ironic about Bluemink’s argument — and the arguments of others who take a similarly poptimist path — is that hauntology itself is hauntologized by these writers. Hauntology itself becomes the vanquished spectre they must continue to do battle with, despite the fact that we have clearly long since moved on from that ‘hauntological moment’. This is why Bluemink’s argument struggles to make sense to me. He ontologizes hauntology’s remains, locating hauntology in a present that is not its own. This is another way in which his “anti-hauntology” remains predicated on the very thing it is set against.

It is difficult to parse out all of my contentions here, because Bluemink’s argument is broadly correct. I just take issue with its overstated Stieglerian vitalism. The issue is that, to secure this sense of vitality, he must constantly evoke Fisher as a figure simultaneously to be overcome and already overcome. He has to persistently ontologize his remains in order to ground his more contemporary perspective, but he often protests too much.

There is always a quibble about how things are now so different, which tries to force a break where there is instead a continuum — not a straight line, but a continuous percolation, a deterritorialized flux. This frames “anti-hauntology” to an idealistic and under-defined path to final victory, which neglects the manner in which Fisher and others adeptly kept pace with the present and ended up much further down that path than the poptimists do. In this way, their mode of hindsight does a lot of heavy lifting, instituting oppositions that really aren’t all that necessary.

What’s more, this is precisely the way Bluemink utilises SOPHIE as well — both in 2021 and in the new book. Even though she is held aloft as an antidote to Fisher’s theorising, she is sadly no longer with us, and so it is SOPHIE’s remains — her sonic remainders — that Bluemink ontologizes and spectralizes as well, in order to conjure a poptimistic vision of the future that is similarly hauntological. He erects a cult-critical tombstone for SOPHIE, which he repeatedly visits, laying flowers all around her, and enabling her revisitations upon us as well. But if his writing isn’t explicitly mournful, it is in the same way that people sometimes frame funerals as “celebrations of life”. The sentiment is comfy, but it’s still a funeral, an act of memorialization. Beneath the semantics, it remains hauntological.

To be clear, I take no issue with this. Bluemink’s book can be both mournful and future-oriented, and that’s fine. My first book Egress was similar. I remember one reviewer claiming that my own mournful prose meant I couldn’t break free from my own grief, despite trying to write myself out of it. But that’s also the function of mourning. The work of mourning may feel total in the book itself, but writing it really did help me. I was able to move on and overcome the depression that Fisher’s death tripped me into. It was great. It really is okay to cry! But that’s what I find strange in The Future is Not Lost: so much energy is given over to euthanising the elephant in the room — that is, the work of mourning.

My point in 2021 and my point now is that it was through this work that Fisher approached the past, present, and future as well, and the further irony is that Fisher himself is another spectralized figure that the present and future still has to deal with. We must arrive to meet Fisher and SOPHIE now precisely because their work is made newly strange. They are no longer of this world, just as rave, library records and tape cassettes weren’t of the mid-2000s. Although these things have all since made a comeback, owing to the power of corporate nostalgia to “spectralize”, the innovation of a ‘hauntological’ music was to repopulate these temporarily (or temporally) emptied territories with new revenants.

In this way, the new music of the 2000s exacerbated what made the prior cultural forms or moments their music referred to unique. Therefore, they also emphasised the ways in which these forms and moments were made newly unfamiliar — that is, again, no longer of this world. The likes of Burial and The Caretaker, whom Fisher is now synonymous with, may now be canonical, but they were doing something new with the past at that time!

This music thus localised and identified the culturally ‘dead’, enabling the work of a digital mourning whilst also allowing the specific aesthetic and material qualities of these mediums to haunt us. ‘Hauntology’ was clearly an apt descriptor for this paranormal phenomenon. As Reynolds later acknowledged in his book Retromania: “the ‘-ology’ suggested solemn laboratory researchers investigating the sonic paranormal”, echoing Fisher’s fondness for Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape.

Writing about the BBC serial in 2003, Fisher claimed:

All recordings are ghosts.

But are we really more substantial than they?

It’s a question that bears repeating. SOPHIE’s sonic syntheses might be less explicitly haunting or haunted — although they have become more so since her death — but as I wrote back in 2021, her debut album is nothing less than a record that questions the “substance” (or lack thereof) of postmodern identity, particularly as it pertains to gender identity. (The same can be said for Arca, also a transwoman.)

Any trans person will tell you that there are two temporal directions of travel involved in transition that are difficult to separate. For all of accelerationism’s association with trans women — that is, the gender-accelerationism of digitally exacerbating the disintegration of a prior identity — there is a concomitant experience of carrying your past around with you all the same, through buried “dead names” and old childhood photographs. Just because no one else sees this anymore doesn’t mean it’s not within you.

Transing your gender gives you a radically new (and queered) relationship to time in this way — to the past, the present, and the future. You repeat what most people never will – puberty – and find yourself reborn. To be trans is thus to be both radically future-oriented and also mournful. Transitioning necessarily involves putting in the work of mourning a past self. In truth, this is more generally a core component of getting older; all of us move through life facing both backwards and forwards. What is “accelerationist” about transness is how it exacerbates this universal experience to produce wild new possibilities from its scrambling of present conditions. What Bluemink’s book struggles to balance, I fear, is a productive awareness of the fact that these more mournful qualities aren’t anathema to the solarpunk bandwagon he jumps on, but rather essential to any process of transition. We can’t move on without first doing the work of mourning.

This is what it means, for Derrida, to ontologize remains:

all ontologization, all semanticization — philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical — finds itself caught up in this work of mourning but, as such, it does not yet think it; we are posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlet’s or Marx’s, on this near side of such thinking.

What is at issue, then, for me, in the present’s poptimism, is an assumption that we don’t need to speak to spectres, whether it be Fisher’s or SOPHIE’s. We disparage one and laud the other, but we don’t question the understandings of their work we have inherited, and in that regard, we’ve yet to properly think with or against them. We don’t yet have sufficient knowledge of what they effectuated beyond what has been absorbed by a pop hegemony.

As Derrida continues:

One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge… Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies — for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. Hamlet does not ask merely to whom the skull belonged (“Whose was it?” the question that Valéry quotes). He demands to know to whom the grave belongs (“Whose grave’s this, sir?”). Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where — and it is necessary (to know — to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more!

This is why most critics of Fisher fail (even if they do not recognise their own failures). They do not know where the bodies are buried. They misidentify the burial sites. They misattribute arguments to Fisher that he never made, or otherwise moved on from himself. They misplace SOPHIE as still being current, eliding her death.

On the contrary, when they were alive, Fisher and SOPHIE themselves knew where the bodies were buried, and having done the work of mourning, they moved into new modalities. We will continue to get nowhere if we don’t consider this essential process. We can’t just position ourselves in some imagined future and forget how we got here.

As a result, although Bluemink insists that the futures are not lost, as he proceeds through his argument, it is the past that becomes newly garbled. How can either past or future be (re)found(ed), if we’re looking for them in the wrong places? As a result, I’m not convinced he has successfully located past or future alike, which leaves his present less generatively unsettled than he otherwise wants his reader to believe.

The Fisherian Zeitgeist

Fisher’s spectres, his spirits, were multifaceted. Like Derrida, he knew that

the thing works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the “spirit of the spirit” is work. But what is work? What is its concept if it supposes the spirit of the spirit? Valéry underscores it: “By ‘Spirit’ here I mean a certain power of transformation … the spirit … works.”

Fisher’s spirit has not yet been exorcised because we’ve failed to face up to the futures he wrote about and also lived through — not simply his “lost futures”, his screen memories, but the more proximal ones he was equally fascinated by and actively helped midwife. He followed ghosts, yes, but why do we never ask what followed these ghosts in turn? What followed, that is, in a dual sense: what stalks us, and what comes after?

Derrida again:

What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading? Here again what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back.

This was the same paradox Fisher did the work to elucidate, and it’s that same future arriving from the (accelerationist) past that I have repeatedly tried to contend with as well. Without also doing this work for ourselves, we continue to be stalked by the very figures we hope to vanquish.

Here, in closing, I want to quote Fisher at length again, honing in on his renewed approach to hauntology at the very moment that accelerationism arose to supersede more hauntological discourses. Here, Fisher again defines hauntology is a way that is anathema to the more popular way it is understood today. In reading Fisher properly, we find that he already offered up revisions that Bluemink and others are trying to conjure less successfully elsewhere. Their attempts to bring the future into the light rise up more powerfully from a last where Fisher said far more than is appreciated.

As he wrote in 2008 (with what is bold being my emphasis relative to Fisher’s original italics):

For me, hauntology is best conceived of not as some political aspiration, but rather as a zeitgeist, something which is already in place and which demands critical commentary (and extrapolative extension). Hauntology is not something that is aimed towards, so much as where we are starting from (the End of History and its escape). Hauntological theory is an attempt, for instance, to account for why the Burial records have captured a mood, a malaise, this decade. The claim is not that hauntology is ultimately preferable to some accelerationist model of culture (although the Burial records are in many respects actually superior to the accelerationist Jungle they spectralise). On the contrary, one of the things that you can hear in hauntology is the spectres of accelerationism itself.

To turn Alex [Williams]’s question about the political correlate of hauntology around — what is the cultural equivalent of accelerationism now? It was precisely the lack of any cultural exemplars of accelerationism that led to spectrality in the first place. The paradoxes that Alex refers to are not a problem for hauntology; or rather, the problems they indicate are constitutive of a hauntological moment which makes the only resistance to the nostalgia mode look like a nostalgia for modernism. Hauntology is not, therefore, opposed to accelerationism; rather, it is the only way, at the moment, that culture makes any kind of contact with it.

Neither is there any opposition between “the return of modernism” that Alex decries and “the arrival of a new (perhaps, or at the very least) a currently properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme” which he calls for. What is modernism if not that which generates a “properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme”? Modernism (and Badiou’s theory of the event has been characterised as a late arriving philosophy of / for modernism) can return as a recirculated obsolete style, but it cannot ‘return’ as the unthinkably novel without puncturing a hole in postmodernity.

This is the paradox that stalks Bluemink’s book as well. Although he doesn’t like the term “accelerationism”, no doubt owning to its poor appropriations that distance it from its original concerns, it is only through his work of mourning SOPHIE that Bluemink is able to make contact with more contemporary (and still accelerationist) currents. He returns to a “new” that died or is dying. He fetishises a moment in the recent past that is meant to be indicative of how good the present is, whilst sidestepping all of its flaws.

Nevertheless, it is true that SOPHIE’s death isn’t the end of her relevance. Nor is Fisher’s death the end of his. Rather, I’d argue that their deaths must be allowed to more powerfully register within our collective psyches as the closures of two recent eras. That takes more work than a quick disavowal.

This moment arrived for me in 2021. I’m reminded, as ever, that SOPHIE’s death was announced on the same day we organised a For K-Punk edition at the ICA, held online and featuring Oneohtrix Point Never’s resurrection of his Chuck Person project, talking about how “the future is uncertain” at the height of the pandemic.

We were all hanging out on a Discord server that night, and I was sat in my basement kitchen in Huddersfield slowly drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels to myself. Owing to the general shock of SOPHIE’s death, and recognising that we were all already engaging in the work of mourning, we created a split, with one channel discussing Mark and the audio-visual commissions, and another discussing SOPHIE. Unsurprisingly, all present loved them both.

What has since happened, after their deaths, under the work of mourning, is that they have been increasingly distanced from each other. Fisher, who advocated for accelerationism more passionately than anyone, is frozen in the late 2000s. SOPHIE is frozen in the mid-2010s. Both of them were pioneers at one point, cultivating and articulating what was otherwise unformed, inchoate and unthinkable in their respective presents. We can’t go back to those moments. We can’t return to that moment when SOPHIE was unthinkable, confounding all contemporary sensibilities. Still, if she represents a paradigm now, it’s because her death and the subsequent work of mourning has allowed us to monumentalise the future-shock she stood for.

No matter whether a writer wishes to be poptimistic or negative, we’re all out here orchestrating exorcisms for the spectres we ourselves have conjured. It’s okay to own it. We might better understand our present moment if we did. But currently, I’m not sure anyone’s really got as good a handle on it as they think they do, because we’re still not over a twenty-year-old debate about recorded ghosts.

Coda

It was my partner Juno, writing in response to my conversation with Bluemink, who shook me from my own mournful stupor. Admittedly, it took me a long time to get over the pandemic. It led to a protracted period of hermitage that continued long past the pandemic’s “end”. The pandemic forced me to start working remotely — as it did for many us. Beyond a two-year stint in my local pub whilst working on my PhD, I am still working remotely to this day. I continue to struggle with it. But at the same time, I’m roughly three years into transing my gender, so it’s not all rubbish.

What Juno showed me was how a new generation had better dealt with and overcome that moment. As we were sitting on Discord servers mourning SOPHIE and Fisher in tandem, a second wave of hyperpop artists had transformed Discord into a supercollider. The result, Juno argued, was dariacore, which was the “robbing of hauntology’s grave”.

In particular, they write about how Leroy’s 2023 album Grave Robbing “evokes an image of death as a horizon for renewal.” It was an album they played me on one of their first visits to Newcastle in 2024, and it overwhelmed me so much that I literally had to take a break for a lie down. Once I’d gotten over the shock, I became obsessed with all the SoundCloud oddities they excavated (and continue to), feeling myself reconnect with contemporary music in a way that I thought the pandemic depressions had ruined forever.

Their essay also helped me to contextualise all these new sonic experiences alongside the blogospheric heritage I continue to carry around. Producing a new hauntological/accelerationist continuum, which foregrounds a shared methodology of sampling and deterritorialisation from plunderphonics and hiphop through to hauntology and hyperpop, they ultimately give credit to Jane Remover (AKA Leroy AKA venturing AKA et al.), whose trajectory to date oscillates between the destructively mournful and the hyperactively joyful much like Fisher’s writing did:

I want to credit Jane Remover’s Dariacore for … translating the lived experience of capitalist realism in the show Daria into music that transforms the mournfulness of nostalgic hauntology, to a regeneration of joy and new possibilities of being. I want to credit Jane Remover’s repurposing of neoliberal-market driven music used in the plunderphonics of Dariacore as an intervention in the neoliberal process through which this music is made in the major label, copyrighted system, which has been outlined in this essay as a historical function of colonial extraction and an exertion of the neoliberal claim to privatising cultural property.

What I loved about the essay was the way in which Juno openly wrestled with the contradictions of the present, especially the work of mourning involved in our pursuit of the new, and also a properly accelerationist modality that locates the dead in order to rob graves — SOPHIE’s included. That, to me, is the best encapsulation of where a properly contemporary music has moved onto since Bluemink and I had our conversation in 2021. I think it is a far more honest approach that remains material and avoids being seduced by newly vitalistic ideologies.

Attempts to circumvent nostalgia don’t exorcise these spectres; they produce new ones, utopic ones, that only displaces the work of mourning, which is essential if we are to truly avoid repeating all the same mistakes or arguments of the past. We don’t have to pick sides. We can do both. Much contemporary music is adept that doing both as well. Why isn’t contemporary music criticism…?

Having spent most of the last year in London, trying to navigate chaos, I returned to Newcastle for a three-week stint at the start of July in order to do a nervous-system reset and make some moves to jumpstart life’s momentum forwards.

One of the first things I wanted to do was renew my driver’s license, which expired two years ago. After doing so, a shiny new card in my possession, I proceeded to plan an anniversary trip for Juno and I, renting a car for the day so we could travel to Dungeness together. It felt like a way to bring us full circle after all that has happened since this time last year. It was an anniversary date, but also a second first date; a way to start over, whilst continuing to cherish all that has come before.

For two years, I have been promising this trip to Juno. When visiting me in Newcastle during the early days of our relationship, they had asked for a copy of my book Narcissus in Bloom. Before they boarded a coach back to London, I presented them with a copy, which had an affectionate message left inside the front cover, directing their attention to a page towards the end of the book.

The epilogue to Narcissus features an excerpt from John Donne’s poem The Sun Rising. It is about two lovers who shun the sun to stay in their bed, vowing to live in accordance with non-heliocentric temporalities. It may well be my favourite poem ever, taking on a personal resonance, but one nonetheless borrowed from Derek Jarman, who installed part of it on the outside of his home: Prospect Cottage in Dungeness.

The epilogue to Narcissus in Bloom sometimes feels like the last thing I wrote. I’ve written plenty since, but that concluding essay is more than just a line drawn under a book project; it was a line drawn under a period of life that had come before. I’ve said many times since how it was a veiled coming-out, but as a result, much of the writing that has come afterwards has felt like new juvenilia, as I figure out a new sense of self.

For that reason, I periodically return to the epilogue of Narcissus as a comforting piece of writing. It was written by someone casting off into a new world, as if it was in Dungeness in 2018 where I found a glimmer of something new, setting sail from its shores into a vast unknown. It may well be the one essay I do not cringe at when reading it back to myself. Years later, it encapsulates a transitory moment in my life, and in such a way that it truly feels like something written by someone else. A gesture of farewell that I continue to find heartening.

Returning to the barren shoreline at Dungeness so many years later was wonderful. It is three years since I last thought about Dungeness; seven years since I last set foot on its shingle. It was especially wonderful returning there with someone who means so much to me.

We change. We adapt. We are traumatised. We walk onwards. We overcome. The balancing act that Narcissus in Bloom left me contemplating was a desire for a sense of rhythm in an unstable world. Change is the only constant — that much is true. But I treasure the opportunity to engage in a dance amidst it all. Everything changes constantly, in the world and in ourselves, but that does not mean that journeys in parallel are impossible. I’ve found it is the only dance that makes the effort required to navigate the chaos feel worthwhile.

Dungeness is a sort of monument to that feeling in my mind. It is the edge of the world, where what matters come into focus anew.

---

The pictures below were taken on 19th July 2026. What follows them is the epilogue to Narcissus in Bloom, written in spring 2023. It contains various references to a few figures discussed earlier in the book, shorn of their context, but it still works on its own. As such, it also feels about time to jailbreak it from the covers of that book written under an old name and let it stand on its own somewhere new.

It is a piece of writing that enacted such a jailbreak for its author, after all…

Epilogue

On Thursday 23 February 1989, Derek Jarman walked out into his garden. Completely surrounding his home at Prospect House, he had spent years carefully coaxing a wide array of plants from the otherwise barren shingle beach that engulfs Dungeness, a small and declining fishing village jutting out from England’s most south-easterly point. “Brilliant sunshine”, he later wrote in his journal, recording the weather that day, with “skies so clear your vision is stretched to the horizon”. Spring was in full bloom, and so were Jarman’s daffodils.

Dungeness was a little-known wilderness until Jarman made his home there. The barren nature of the headland has popularised a myth, repeated by almost all tourist brochures and travel guides, that it is technically a desert — England’s only one.

This is not true, but even if it were, like so many deceptively barren landscapes, Dungeness is far from lifeless. It is instead an area of great ecological significance, with the beach home to a variety of shrubs, succulents and other forms of life that are seldom found elsewhere in the UK. It would prove to be a fitting home for Jarman, who was something of a rare creature himself: a queer punk and polymath of international renown.

Still, further surrounded by eerily flat plains, military installations, the rot of old industry and a decommissioned nuclear power station, the atmosphere at the hamlet today is nonetheless that of a world-without-us. It is a village that time forgot, a hamlet at the end of the world, where the regimens of normal life have run aground, leaving you to trip and fall over the tentacles of capitalism’s flailing grasp.

That being said, though it may feel like nowhere else within the British Isles, Dungeness is still prone to quintessential turns in the English weather. Jarman’s day may have started with brilliant sunshine, but this was later overshadowed by hail. “My poor daffodils”, Jarman lamented, “are now beaten to the ground”.

The battering of Jarman’s daffodils leaves him anxious. It feels like a bad omen. Struggling with declining health and an AIDS diagnosis, the fate of his flowers seems oddly tied to his own. Looking for something to soothe him, he calls his friend, the photographer Matthew Lewis, to

ask him if he would take a photo of a young man holding a daffodil. Last year he took a beautiful portrait of a handsome Italian, stripped to the waist, holding a lemon, the juice of which he used to dissolve heroin to fill his syringe. Narcissus, narcotics, self-absorption: benumbed retreat into self.

A few weeks earlier, Jarman had first noticed his daffodils beginning to appear. “I counted well over 50 buds on the daffodils I planted last year”, he writes on 7 February. He was enthralled by their seasonal nature. “Daffodils ‘come before the swallows dare and take the winds of March with beauty’”, he writes, quoting Shakespeare.

However, Jarman also mourns their artificial cultivation by some horticulturalists. “One of the joys our technological civilisation has lost is the excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now things of the past, along with the precious moment of their arrival”. Jarman was not some kind of anarcho-primitivist, however, bemoaning humanity’s agricultural development. He greatly appreciated the abundance brought by modernity. Mushrooms, for instance, “once a luxury, are ladled out by the pound … But the daffodil, if only the daffodil could come with spring again”.

What Jarman feared most, perhaps, was a silent spring, when the rhythms of life on this planet would be reduced to a consumerist homogeneity, like so much else today. He despised capitalism’s impact on the natural world and its biorhythms in this regard. In a journal entry from 1982, penned whilst visiting California, he writes with disgust of Los Angeles’ artificial sprawl, a city where the “sweet dream of capitalism curdles — where the seasons are scrambled”. There, time is out of joint, and different flora flourish incongruously alongside each other, regardless of the season. “Palm trees and daffodils”.

Many have argued, over the decades, that capitalism’s intrusion on nature’s circadian rhythms disturbs and corrupts the very thing necessary to our self-overcoming: time. Maurice Blanchot, for instance, in a defence of communism, which he enigmatically defines as our “material search for communication”, argues that a new sense of time is essential if we are to fully comprehend the enormity of the task at hand — a task that should now be familiar to us:

The immensity of the effort that must be made, the necessity of again putting into question all of the values to which we are attached, of returning to a new barbarity in order to break with the polite and camouflaged barbarity that serves as our civilisation, the unknown toward which we direct ourselves — for we absolutely do not know what man could be — the terrible violence that the inequality in the satisfaction of needs provokes, the enslavement to things, the governance of things, as well as the dialectic proper to technology, the inertia, finally, the fatigue: everything would contribute to putting off the realization of such a movement to the time of reckoning of a dream (or of blood), if the pressure of needs did not represent a force, a reserve of great duration. One could say that the speed of the movement’s progression is surprising, but in any case, time is required for it…

Though we might wonder what relevance communism has to all that we have discussed so far (besides being yet another term dogged by negative connotations for so many today), it is arguably only one more name for the event-horizon we have been striving towards. Indeed, it is a political theory relevant to everything discussed thus far, from our entrapment within a Protestant-capitalist individualism to our dreams of a new and unrestricted kind of social relation, which far exceeds the bounds of our communicative-capitalist enclosures.

For Blanchot specifically, his vision of communism is principally focused on a new communality, on a new collective subjectivity, on radical friendships and infinite conversations, on subjective relations that escape the bounds of capitalist utilitarianism, that escape an understanding of life now reduced to a source of energy to be plugged directly into the impersonal machinations of capitalist production. Communism, then, is a name for a political project that demands more of the luxuries and intimacies that capitalism insists we do not have time for. To deny ourselves these things — the activities we confine to our “free time” — is to limit our potentials most brutally.

This is the violence inherent to all capitalist capture, felt most palpably when a person accepts their thingness, their toolness, their usefulness for the system of which they are a part, when the individual “not only breaks off communication with one who is similar or dissimilar to him but breaks off communication with himself ”, having little sense of the self that they are, at least outside the restrictive context of economic relations. It is this interpersonal sense of alienation, most fundamentally, that communism, as the material search for communication, must first seek to remedy today.

It is for this reason that Blanchot is so hostile towards capitalist time. What interests him instead is time in itself, in its “metaphysical nudity” — the peculiarity of a life-time; “not only the time that shows itself to human consciousness but the time that is the basis of all consciousness, not time that is expressed in history but time in which history is made”. It is a sense of time that questions how much agency we have as capitalist subjects — that which, today, we all are by default. It is a sense of time that asks: what sorts of projects, which might produce a radically new subjectivity, do we really have time for?

Art and philosophy have produced myriad responses to this contemporary dilemma, but the popular understanding of our ordeal often leads to pessimistic appraisals of our various crises, as if the only response to this suggestion that we take time is to act slowly and see what happens, to be patient, when time is clearly running out. In fact, the reality is far more nuanced.

What Blanchot emphases is the innately tempo-ethical dimension of communism. He suggests that we must take time in the sense that we must seize time as that mechanism which capitalism reduces and uses to administrate the day-today, but also, in a more radical sense, time as the ground of all creation. We must seize anew the temporality — the speed, the time-signature — of our present moment.

But to what extent is our seizing of time even possible today? Put another way, how is a politics of time possible at all? At the very least, what we need most of all is an ethics of time, through which we might broaden the political scope of our philosophies and our self-images. Trapped within the enclosures of capitalist time — wherein time = money — we must reorient ourselves to understand time itself differently — that is, anti-capitalistically.

This is something that Jarman (just like Guibert) actualises through both his green-thumbed activities and a new awareness of what little time he has left. Indeed, after spending any amount of time with his journals, documenting life, death and gardening, it becomes clear that spring was the time of year he treasured most: it allowed him to once again commune with himself, his place in time, his hopes and dreams, his creative endeavours. The arrival of spring flowers, as a harsh coastal winter draws to a close, announces this time to him, with the presence of daffodils in particular being so ubiquitous throughout his life.

Not only were spring flowers Jarman’s “first memory”, daffodils also reminded him of his parents and their love for one another. A compulsive self-mythologiser, the story of his parents’ wedding is retold time and time again throughout his journals. Though stray details change here and there, their wedding photograph is always present, crisp and clear, like a flash of lightning through memory’s haze. On 30 March, 1989, he marks their wartime wedding anniversary:

On this day nearly 50 years ago my parents posed for their wedding photo under a daffodil bell hanging in the lych gate of Holy Trinity, Northwood. The photo, with my father in his RAF uniform and my mother holding a bouquet of carnations, her veil caught in the March breeze — captured the imagination of the press. It appeared in the national newspapers — hope at a time of encroaching darkness.

Year on year, daffodils bring hope to Jarman’s encroaching darkness too. His journals, though primarily about his art and garden, are haunted by his seropositivity. As the seasons repeat their cycle, his health deteriorates. But daffodils linger regardless, in vases, in childhood memories and in his garden. Their annual reappearance marks another year survived, but also encourages him to keep going too, if only to see the next year’s crop.

“The sun came out and I crept along the traffic-jammed streets to St Mary’s, glimpses of daffodils in parks and squares”, he writes one day. “For a moment I decided to fight back, push the exhausted depression that has clung like the February mist”. But on years when spring is late, his impatience is palpable. In 1993, a year before Jarman’s death, the entry from 30 February begins: “I’m holding my breath, like the weather, for the first daffodil”. Each and every year, they “flare into life to illuminate the spring”, as well as Jarman himself.

We would be remiss not to mention Jarman here before this book comes to a close. In many ways, he warrants far more attention than we are to give him here. But what Jarman’s example offers us, perhaps even more explicitly than those we have considered thus far, is a narcissism that understands itself not through a self-limiting insularity but rather as a form of eccentric speculation that takes place in a time beyond that restricted by capitalist life. It is a narcissism that emerges from within the depths of things, allowing us to see not just ourselves but all that flows through, with and around us, even as he grows more aware that the full actualisation of this narcissistic process takes a time that he is to be ultimately denied. It takes the time that writing and photography can only gesture towards, that capitalism can only administrate, but which the self can feel more intuitively, and in a manner prone to creative disorientation, given the right conditions.

Though we might assume Jarman only discovered an appreciation for narcissism at the moment he came face-to-face with his mortality, much like Guibert, it is in fact one of the defining concerns of his whole career. Prior to making his 1986 film Caravaggio, for instance, Jarman writes in his journal of his intentions:

The film will dig and excavate and make no attempt to hold the mirror up to reality. When Caravaggio paints the reflection of Narcissus it is no true reflection but a comment on all vanity and our film should treat his life in a similar way, penetrate the surface.

Here, narcissism once again becomes a tool of the self’s undoing. A few years earlier, writing about his plans for his 1981 film, In the Shadow of the Sun, we find a similar sentiment: “A third and final image of Narcissus, a mirror which flashes the sun into the camera so that the image explodes and reinvents itself in a most mysterious way”.

In a study of Jarman’s work, Steven Dillon emphasises further how Narcissus is a near-constant preoccupation in his life and films. He does not find, in the self ’s encounter with itself as other, the quicksand of self-love and its emotional molasses, but rather an apocalyptic explosion that destroys worlds. It is for this reason, Dillon writes, that “Jarman reproduces the image of Narcissus throughout his cinematic career, from Sebastiane to Edward II”, but Jarman is nonetheless “wary of the negative reading of Narcissus from the very beginning — that the desire for the same is flawed, egotistical, a kind of self-absorption”. Jarman, however, attacks any suggestion that same-sex love provides a stable and conservative homogeneity. He injects back into Paul Näcke’s initially homophobic narcissism a vibrant political volatility, emphasising the apparent dangers that queerness poses to the actually existing stasis of heteronormative society.

This is no more true than in Jarman’s love of his garden, where the return of his daffodils, those same flowers year on year, does not signify the return of the same but nature’s capacity for rebirth and self-renewal. Though they are so instantly recognisable, so familiar, these daffodils are not the same daffodils he has encountered before. They are always simply this year’s daffodils, which must eventually fade away, only to be reincarnated the following spring. The travesty of capitalism, in its capture of humanity and nature, is that it hopes to perpetuate a kind of “natural” stasis quite to the contrary. Capitalism wants daffodils all year round. It wants to exacerbate stasis by obscuring time’s advance. But we cannot live in a perpetual spring, caught in a short and oppressive loop. Flowers must die so that they can bloom again, just like our very selves.

Derek Jarman’s garden at the end of the world has thus become a beautiful site of pilgrimage to people everywhere. His former home remains, long after his death, a testament to another way of life, cultivated both in collaboration with and against the natural and capitalist worlds that surround it.

It is fitting, then, that on the outer walls of Jarman’s former home, which he shared with his partner Keith Collins, we find the final lines of a 1633 poem by John Donne. The poem, in an irregular meter, expresses two lovers’ defiance under the gaze of the rising sun, which hopes to coax them from their bed.

“Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us?” the poem begins. “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” The narcissism of “they look at each other” soon comes to override all other worldly expectations.

It is a strange poem for a gardener to immortalise in a space so dependent on the sun for life, but against the heliocentricity of our world, the poem insists that other lives are capable of being lived under its glare regardless. Here the sun’s gaze comes to signify more than the personification of nature, but the normative gazes of society at large, which love must always overcome. Why not orient oneself and one’s life to a bed shared with a lover, rather than the administrated rhythms of night and day? The poem ends as defiantly as it began:

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Love, like time, is eternal. It far exceeds the bounds that capitalist time calcifies in order to contain us. The beauty of flowers, too, lies in their blooming and fading; as much in their promised return and transformation as in their first appearing.

Jarman died on 19 February 1994, likely less than a fortnight before his daffodils were scheduled to bloom once again. Though he may have passed away, missing the rebirth of spring, his flowers outlived him and continue to. His garden may have been one of the last “projects” he embarked on before his death, but his house and garden are still actively maintained today, still strewn with his plants and various sculptures. Long after his death, it is fitting that it has become a memorial so full of life. The narcissism of “they looked at each other” — of lovers, of nature itself — prevails over the singularity of one man’s gaze, of society’s heteronormativity and its increased hostility to other forms of life. The narcissism of Narcissus cannot be thwarted or moralised away, no matter how we may try to restrict its loving rhythms. Time is not abolished by its denouncement but rather inherited in its affirmation.

---

I first visited Jarman’s garden in 2018, then once again in 2019. The first time I was there, my girlfriend and her family in tow, I was embarrassed to be struck down by a panic attack, as the eerie landscape felt all the more barren and disconcerting then, relative to the constant activity against which we steeled ourselves in our south-east London home.

The silence of the place removed all habitual defences, shunted between world and self. I found it a disturbing place, to say the least. But once this momentary existential crisis had subsided, Jarman’s garden soon became one of my favourite places in the world.

Memories of the garden returned to me again and again as I began to write down my inchoate thoughts on narcissism a few years later, whilst living in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, during the spring of 2021. At that time, I had already written a book on community and grief, which was published just one week before the UK reluctantly implemented quarantine protocols to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. That, too, was a disorientating experience, which played havoc with my mental health. Having garnered some media attention, I felt overly sensitive to any and all criticisms that the book may have received, even in otherwise positive reviews. Stuck inside for months on end, to have this book on community appraised during a period of intense isolation was deeply troubling. Narcissus was in bloom that spring, in more ways than one.

This book was eventually finished at the start of spring in 2023, in Newcastle upon Tyne, one year after first moving to a new city after the end of that long-term relationship. As I moved further and further north, I often thought and felt sad about the fact that Jarman’s garden was increasingly out of reach to me. But his journals nonetheless encouraged a new enthusiasm, as I tracked the emergence of each year’s daffodils wherever I lay my head.

Though the writing of this book has been repeatedly delayed, coming out long after I thought it would, it feels nonetheless apt to write these final words, after a tumultuous year, when spring is on the cusp of coming again. Time was so necessary to its gestation, and for so much more besides. Indeed, when I first arrived in the north-east of England, I felt torn about my situation and the crossroads at which I found myself. I was as excited to start my life over as I was bereft following the failure of a love for another. I was quite unwell for a number of months that followed, suffering again through a far more acute mental health crisis than I had ever experienced previously, which was less a direct product of the end of my relationship than it was of the more general ways in which life felt totally detached from its habitual moorings.

Throughout it all, this book lingered on the desktop of my laptop, onto which I had uploaded a photograph of some daffodils taken at night, close to my new home, in nearby Iris Brickfield Park. The book changed a great deal then, and though I have done all I can, up until this point, to remove any reference to the self that I am, writing it has been a healing process, and I am left, at the final hurdle, wanting to acknowledge the ways in which it has given me permission to rebirth myself.

As we emerge from the pandemic, with the virus nonetheless still circulating as we return to our communities and a depressingly familiar sense of capitalist normality, I have found myself newly attuned to and reactivated by each new spring. It is only through an awareness of these seasonal transformations that I have been able to throw off the self I was and affirm something new — new modes of expression, new selves, new worlds.

A narcissistic self-concern persists here, nonetheless, but I am all the more aware now of how such a concern cannot rest upon itself. Narcissism does not and cannot stop at its own apparent impasses, but must necessarily push onwards into something greater than itself. And we will all, at one time or another, become overly preoccupied with ourselves in this regard, as we consider how best to move on with our lives, in good times and bad, building new ways of living that are less defined by the poor time of capitalist drudgery that bites persistently at our heels.

But narcissism is not an end in itself, as we so often think. It is only a means. It is a process, defined by the blooming and wilting of selves, which we should not mourn or moralise, just as any gardener, like Jarman himself, must learn that you should never mourn flowers or berate them for their fleeting lifespans. Though we may cut them, dry them, decorate our lives with them, hoping to hold onto the affectations of spring, anything cleft from its roots will surely fade. But we must remember that spring will always come again.

The title of a 1953 novel by Flannery O’Connor proves perennial: a good man is hard to find.

In an attempt to address the complex issues surrounding Karim Khan’s arrest warrants against Israeli leaders alongside his own allegations of sexual misconduct, I ended up writing about failures of accountability I see everywhere for the Canary.

This is an issue that keeps coming up in life at the moment. Individuals and groups, whose whole raison d’être is supposedly accountability, need to get their houses in order. From prosecutors to club owners, from politicians to activists, there are hypocrites all over.

Far from being disparate issues, all it does is kill hope for the future and show that a lack of accountability — or a lack of the processes in place to achieve it — is endemic. We need more groups capable of leading by example, not implementing hierarchies of horror and disappointment. Otherwise it is difficult to maintain faith that those claiming to fight for a better world are at all capable of building one.

A thorough and heart-warming report on the trial of the Moog 4 from Declassified UK — featuring a brief interview I gave to John McEvoy outside Birmingham Crown Court.

The temperature at 9am was already approaching 35°C. Outside the Old Bailey, a Serco van was glowing white-hot in the glare.

From 200 yards away, you could already hear the banging. Inside, someone was hollering. I could not make out their words, but it wasn’t hard to imagine them. I could not think of a worse place to be stuck on the street today.

Fists hit the inner wall and reverberated down the busy street. People passed, going about their days, paying no attention to the sounds of distress. The driver of the oven picked his teeth nonplussed in a wing mirror.

---

Inside, the prosecution was running through its evidence in the second group trial of the Filton 25, tracking their movements over three or four days in August 2024.

Every time their repurposed prison van was mentioned, I smiled.

After over seventeen hours of deliberations, the jury in the trial of the Moog 4 were discharged by presiding Judge Wall. They had failed to reach a verdict.

The story of their non-arrival is an interesting one, but given the likelihood of a retrial, reporting restrictions still apply and much of what was said outside of the presence of the jury cannot be discussed, perhaps for some time.

It may nonetheless be on the basis of what the jury did not hear that they failed to reach their verdict.

---

Day one was undoubtedly the most pivotal day of the trial. Unfortunately, after the jury were sworn in that morning, they were immediately sent home.

On day two, the prosecution began to present its argument. The question the jury had to ask themselves, in the prosecution’s own words, was “simple”: did the four defendants cause damage to Moog’s Wolverhampton premises “without lawful excuse”?

The answer was far from obvious, and the jury themselves seemed puzzled as to why they did not eventually hear any examples of what a lawful excuse might be. In open court, they asked the judge why this was the case, but he did not provide them with an answer. The jury even asked about evidence they may not have seen or heard. The judge explained to them that they had everything they needed to decide on the issues of this case, “as I [Judge Wall] have defined them”.

Did damage occur? Both prosecution and defence agreed that the answer was yes. It made for a bizarre spectacle. The jury may well have been asking themselves: “why are we even here?” It wasn’t until the closing speeches that the importance of their role became clear.

Starting as they meant to go on, the prosecution ran through its case in a perfunctory fashion. They began by calling two witnesses: the lead case officer from Staffordshire police and a data analyst. Together, they spent the next few hours boring the court to tears with ANPR and cell site data, in order to establish the four defendants’ movements in the lead up to their action.

This data was presented in a technical manner, but it was not watertight. The prosecution’s evidence included CCTV footage of an unidentified car pulling up outside the Moog premises in the early hours of 2nd August, for example. Although the vehicle was largely obscured by darkness and a hedge, the prosecution alleged it was driven by the four defendants and announced their arrival before doing “reconnaissance” at the site. It would later turn out that, whilst the four did not deny doing a recce on that day, the car did not belong to them at all. They conducted reconnaissance on foot, they said.

After hearing from the prosecution’s two witnesses, the second day of their presentation amounted to over an hour of police drone footage, alongside social media posts made by the four, all of which showed their action in great detail. This was presented largely without commentary from the prosecution itself. Everyone present simply sat and watched this beautiful action unfold, culminating in a cinematic shot from a drone of three individuals dwarfed by the gargantuan roof they occupied, a hand-painted “Free Palestine” banner hanging alongside Moog’s giant logo. The white dots covering the solar panels were broken glass, the jury were told, attesting to the “significant” damage caused. Behind them, the sun rose on 26th August 2025.

---

After two exhausting days in court, the weekend offered a short reprieve.

Juno and I wandered into Birmingham city centre separately. I bought myself some underwear and later found myself in Waterstones, where I picked up a notebook and began writing down my thoughts on the trial so far. Later, I rendezvoused with a dissociative Juno, who was feeling the pressure of their ordeal. I suggested we do something nice with our afternoon.

“How about the cinema?”

Sitting down in the dark with our popcorn, we watched The Backrooms. (Spoilers to follow.) In the film, we meet a struggling furniture salesman whose wife has left him. Sleeping in his warehouse store one night, which has been plagued by strange electrical faults, he discovers a portal to another reality. Inspecting a wall in the basement, he ‘noclips’ through it into a seemingly infinite, nonlinear, at times non-Euclidean and near-empty warren of generic office spaces.

The film is Kafkaesque — explicitly so. “The world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms is Kafka’s world,” writes Walter Benjamin. The figures who find a home there vegetate, he continues, “somnolent and unkempt”, as do the zombified figures in the store owner’s backrooms. They are the “holders of power in Kafka’s works”, Benjamin continues, “who live in the attics as judges or in the castle as secretaries”. He adds: “no matter how highly placed they may be, they are always fallen or falling men…”

The furniture store owner is himself a fallen man. King in his domain, he is nonetheless the most vulnerable and browbeaten by its nonsensical rules and bureaucracies. He is the impotent father Kafka feared and despised most of all.

In therapy, we find the shop owner filled with anger at his wife, who has “kicked me out of my own house”, and whom he clearly resents for all the financial support he has provided her with. It is for this reason, he suggests, that he hides at work and drinks too much. He sees himself as a man carrying the weight of the entire world, and doing only what he must in order to cope with his burden. His wife no doubt sees an emotionally unavailable drunk, who has absconded from the responsibilities he claims to uphold above all else.

Benjamin too considers the contradictions that befall these already fallen men. “Why do they vegetate?” he asks.

Could they be the descendants of the figures of Atlas that support globes with their shoulders? […] But it is not the globe they are carrying; it is just that even the most commonplace things have their weight.

In The Backrooms, the most commonplace things have a gravity that makes them clump together, sinking into floors, distorting and fading into nothingness. The shop owner later posits that this is because they are things half-remembered, strained for, their forms only half formed, like names on the tip of one’s tongue.

The backrooms, he realises, are an external iteration of his own unconscious. It is all the more fitting, with this in mind, that the objects he finds there are functional pieces of furniture — furniture that has an essential utility, providing comfort and position in space, but taken all the more for granted for that reason.

The shop owner, arriving at something resembling self-consciousness in therapy, soon understands that the backrooms are a representation of his same predicament in the ‘frontrooms’ of regular reality, where he not only sells furniture but is furniture in the lives of others. Most horrifying is his confession that he feels especially ‘at home’ in the backrooms. The fallen man recognises the unheimliche nature of his own existence and hubristically believes he can master this sunken place. But this world is death to most others who enter alongside him. Of course, it also kills him eventually as well.

---

Birmingham Crown Court is littered with fallen men. The weight of the world sits on their shoulders too, but with little grandeur (in spite of all institutional pretensions), for it is the weight of a world unseen by most.

Judges bear this weight most of all. We have encountered many of them over the last few months, supporting friends at various hearings and trials. The atlas held up by each of them constitutes a decrepit architecture; a law held aloft precariously, like a capstone atop a ruin. To look upon them, wearing blood-red robes and twisted scowls, is to see fondlers of an utterly non-sensuous and deadened economy.

I think of the way Deleuze and Guattari insist

that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate, the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on.

When Juno enters the dock in a keffiyeh on the second day of trial, I watch how Judge Wall scowls, as if they are displaying a passive resistance to his advances. But he does not comment on Juno’s attire; he only makes generic threats of “contempt of court”, aimed both at the defendants, their barristers, and the public gallery, which he suggests we also share with the protestors gathered outside to support them as well. It is almost sad to watch someone secure deferral through threats of persecution.

It is difficult to contain one’s emotions, especially under the current circumstances, since the persecution of peace activists is inherently contemptible. To make it a criminal offence to express the very feelings inculcated by the system itself reminds me of the sorts of violent frustrations Juno had with the prison system. It is the most fickle form of power and control.

---

Prior to the defence presenting their evidence to the jury, more closed discussions are had. Then, each of the four defendants take it in turns to speak to the jury from the witness box.

In essence, the defence presents each of the four’s “good character”. This is all that they discussed. Little was said about the events that took place on 26th August 2025, as the prosecution had already presented their narrative, which was (largely) not in question. Instead, the four defendants spoke to their motivations — not on the day of their action, but in life.

Everything about this was strange. It is difficult to make sense of an act with such little context. The narratives given by each of the defendants nevertheless took the jury through their backgrounds, their upbringings, and their previous involvement in protesting. Was it the full story? It felt more like being led through was a generic corridor, a sort of liminal narrative, made uncanny by the myriad gaps in its presentation.

We entered our own judicial backrooms.

---

Deleuze says: “To act for liberty, to become a revolutionary, yes, is to operate in jurisprudence.” Jurisprudence, he suggests, is the beating heart of any legal apparatus, albeit one too often neglected by the law’s own lack of sensuousness. It is an approach to the law that begins (or at least should begin) from singularities. Indeed, jurisprudence proceeds on a case-by-case basis.

Jurisprudence is the law’s own philosophy. It is the principle that presumes innocence and proceeds impartially on the given facts of a particular case. Each case, from this perspective, is a singularity that is not formed by pre-existing laws but is rather considered in order to test and even “break” them. Even when concerning the most serious of crimes — murder, for example — jurisprudence insists that the death of one person at the alleged hands of another is not predetermined. ‘Murder’ constitutes a problem; an event to be proven. It is not a categorisation established in advance with any finality, but an unsettled proposition — a problematic — within which a singularity is judged and subsequently located only if appropriate, and is thus given its precise location upon an axis or within a legal framework, over which a presiding judge holds dominion.

In order to resolve this problematic, determining the circumstances of an alleged crime is everything. The trial of the Moog 4 — like that of the Filton 6 before it — was a humiliation of this principle. It is argued by the prosecution that their alleged “crime” follows a wider pattern of “crimes”. In some respects, that may well be true; they are another group of activists who have acted to disrupt an arms factory. But which activists? What disruption? Which operations? Which factory? These particularities, to be drawn out of their singular action, are essential to understanding the case against them, no matter one’s a priori assumptions.

When taken together, these particulars tell a story of a criminal company, indispensable to the operations of the Israeli Air Force; a criminal company not merely complicit in distant crimes, but which actively facilitates a genocide against Palestinians from locations on British soil by providing essential parts to the aircraft used to train pilots and the aircraft flown to bomb half of West Asia. They are company embroiled in crimes against various peoples, the land upon which they subsist, the infrastructure — homes, hospitals, schools, places of worship, shops, etc. — that sustains their lives. These actions, all protestors argue, constitute a crime at home as well as abroad.

The Moog 4’s action was singular, because the criminal company involved is singular. It is Moog, and not the Moog 4, which constitutes a problem for the law. The actionists sought to bring this problem before a jury. They acted because Moog is a problem ignored. They are no longer being ignored outside the courtroom; inside it, they receive barely a mention.

To secure a conviction, the trial proceeds by way of moribund abstractions, crushing all singularity into a grey debris.

---

In The Backrooms, the titular location is presented as a singularity where all laws break down. The breakdown does not occur immediately, however. The backrooms retain a semblance of order, even if it is readily apparent that it is a semblance only, uncanny in its presentation.

Nevertheless, the piles of furniture that litter the liminal are far more significant to the shop owner than to the viewer, or any other explorer of this realm. At first, the shop owner even describes the backrooms as an “extra space” where his shop — singular; possessive — merely continues.

This is demonstrated through the furniture that clumps together in the backrooms. Furniture, by definition, is a category of movable object that supports everyday activities. Chairs, sofas, tables, beds, desks, even stray signage used to navigate space… All are vital, but they populate the background in the course of our lives. In the backrooms, they lose their utility, and what’s more, their context.

We may not necessarily think about furniture when it is there, but we certainly notice when it is not. We notice it all the more when its functional context is displaced. The shop owner sees himself as furniture in this way. In the backrooms, he is newly confronted by what is commonplace, both in terms of the objects found therein and the repetitious compulsions that constitute his daily motions in general. Although he has made the sale of furniture his livelihood, his second nature, he is disturbed by its uncanny presence anew. His repetitions, the generic objects of his livelihood, lose all singularity. It is this loss that leads the commonplace to become disturbing.

But the shop owner is not only a furniture salesman; he was also trained as an architect. Furniture and architecture both fit the same definition above, but the sale or construction of the former lacks the grandeur of the latter. This reflects the shop owner’s sense of self too. He wants to be an architect — indeed, he insists he is an architect. He wants to be a husband and a father too — and insists he is also. He doesn’t want to populate the lives of others absentmindedly; he wants to be a far grander kind of support. Instead, he sells what is sat on, rather than designing and maintaining the more essential infrastructure that protects those he claims to love from the elements.

The issue, perhaps, is that he is not aware of the manner in which he already embodies the dereliction of his own hopes and dreams. He passes through ruins like a stranger in a strange land, only half aware that his new locale is a continuation of everything on the other side of the wall he has noclipped through.

The store owner thinks he has been transferred into an outer space; the true horror of The Backrooms is that it is an inner space he staggers through.

---

Judges do not want to be furniture; they want to be walls. They see themselves as a grand and supportive structure — one that is load-bearing, vast, integral. But to look at them, as a law unto themselves, is to see the walls of a grey back alley, an embodiment of the liminality of power. Structurally integral in principle, they just as often contain and imprison, rather than support.

A judge-wall supports a faded bureaucracy, papered with benign rules and regulations. Their facial expressions read like generic orders of NO LOITERING or NO PARKING or CCTV IN OPERATION. The judge-wall is a wall in the sense of a bland space where warnings are plastered, no doubt ignored until your face is pressed up against it by power, once a surveillance architecture has caught you committing some banal infarction. They are a manifestation of a cold, concrete façade; the wall of the law.

A wall is a wall is a wall.

---

Walls are blockages. For Lefebvre, jurisprudence is a principle “capable of unblocking the movements that law arrests”, operating “as what we might call an institutional line-of-flight, a sanctioned yet deterritorializing power that ‘constantly threatens to bring what’s been established back into question…'”

This is perhaps why the law is so sick to the back teeth of direct actionists: they bring the fight for justice back into the judicial realm — a fight that more often takes place on the streets outside the walls where power rests, where it is more easily ignored.

Trials are continuations of actions for many actionists in this regard, but to interpret this merely as an act of additional disruption fails to consider the vital perspective actionists (hope to) offer in the courtroom, which is distinct from the perspective supplied from a factory roof. Colliding directly with the impotence of the wall of the law in its own domain, which only serves to contain the circulation of capital and exclude a wider morality, direct actionists seek to set a moribund law back in motion. Actionists break down walls. Through a citizen’s jurisprudence, actionists seek to team up with juries amidst the rubble, in order to highlight how the “justice” system, when resting on its dusty laurels, too often entrenches its opposite.

This is most obvious in this new brand of protest trial, where the law goes to war with its juries out of sight. What is made visible to jurisprudence is decided in advance. The whole truth? Hardly… Jurisprudence is left blind — not in the supposedly impartial sense of a blindfolded Lady Justice, but rather in the sense of being left utterly in the dark.

Peter Hallward, in a recent essay for Communis, cuts to the chase:

This is the crux of the matter. Activists accused of resorting to civil disobedience or direct action are no longer allowed to talk to a jury about the reasons that led them to do what they chose to do, and a jury is no longer permitted to listen to such reasons or intentions — perhaps because such reasons, when it comes to opposing genocide or saving lives, might strike most people as rather compelling. Defendants accused of direct action are no longer permitted to defend their actions. Even to call people put in such positions “defendants” now sounds rather out of date.

This is not how the law should operate. Even those who are against direct action in principle can surely agree.

---

The day after the sentencing of the Filton 4, Juno and I wander down Upper Richmond Road to get impulsive matching tattoos: the words “Free Them All” in clichéd cursive.

Showing him where I’d like my new tattoo positioned, the tattooist, who is a bearded Italian man, sees my “Acid Communism” tattoo — acquired the day before Juno’s action, as it happens — and jokes about arguments he has with his colleague, who is “centre-left”, whereas he sees himself as “centre-right”.

“I call him a communist; he calls me a fascist,” he laughs. We join him in the joke awkwardly, exchanging tired glances.

As Juno sits for their new tattoo, together they debate a mundane politics. Juno talks about victims of circumstance encountered in prison; the tattooist openly expresses distain for petty criminals, who have no excuse to rob and steal to feed themselves or their families, since the British state will “give you everything” if you ask for it.

On the topic of Israel, he hardly seems like a Zionist, but he believes that the project of a Greater Israel is unstoppable. I later note the irony of an Italian émigré who cannot foresee the Fall of Rome.

His personal opinions aside, the tattooist is clearly fascinated by the Filton 4’s story. We explain the particulars of their case and he hardly agrees with their actions — although he does agree that the problem with the left is that it too often appeals to morality, when the only way to get anything done in this world is to hit the money-filled pockets of the powerful. However, when it comes to our report of their trial, even he is left in disbelief when I explain how the defendants were left defenseless.

Even he appreciates that, in a courtroom, jurisprudence should rule supreme.

---

Lefebvre argues that:

rather than strict in opposition, law and jurisprudence must operate together, in that laws create the axioms that jurisprudence engages case by case. The case, then, comes to signal the site of engagement between law and jurisprudence.

When the courts rule defences inadmissible, pre-determining the material — that is, the evidential — basis upon which a jury is set forth in its operation, a case is not actualized before the law.

The jury is not directed to convict, of course — that would be unconstitutional — but like a wild horse tamed by power and control, they are left blinkered. Justice is no longer blind; only the jury is. In light of Lefebvre’s analysis, we are left with a law that is dead on arrival. He argues that “the law lives only in the inventive actualization of jurisprudence (the life of the law)”, and so “a law makes sense and achieves a determination only through problems.”

Lefebvre adds forthrightly:

A case is nothing but a problem of law and of its sense. Neither the case nor the law can determine itself without the constellation of the other (the problem of law).

When judges deny juries access to the problem, they render an environment in which twelve ordinary people cannot make sense of a case except on the most narrow and reductive grounds. A judge will guide them to their verdict regardless, just as they have guided the case from the start.

When our jury retires, the judge supplies them with a stringent “route to verdict”, asking them to answer two “simple” questions:

1. Did the defendants cause damage without lawful excuse?
2. Did the defendants intend to cause damage without lawful excuse?

In its closing arguments, the prosecution once again reiterates to the jury that this case is “simple”. As Lefebvre highlights, however, all notions of “easy” or “simple” cases, no matter the context, betray the law to be asleep at the wheel:

Such ease poisons the dogmatic image of law. […] Following [Henri] Bergson, we call the designation of an “easy case” an instantiation of legal habit memory. In such memory, a “ready-made response [a habit] renders the question [or the problem] unnecessary [inutile].” Here, the case is condemned to have applied to it a ready-made solution in the form of a set precedent or a perspicacious reading of a statute. Law steamrolls the case, the latter serves as mere instantiation or application. The law overcodes […]; the law compromises its universality to render a verdict in a particular case but in so doing, instantiates its force and rule. The easy case bears only the shadow of its genetic nature, reduced to a transcendental opportunity for the law to gain its relevance and existence. This merely “habitual” application forfeits the problematic genesis of law from a case in order to instate law over a case; law becomes its own bare or brute repetition. Such a case is truly non-problematic: its ease (habitual resolvability) expresses the emergence, application, and instatement of the dogmatic image of law.

Lefebvre continues:

The easy case additively sharpens and instantiates ready-made, preexistent laws and legal decisions. Such an understanding of the law, cases, and problems misses everything essential to legal judgment and to law itself. To understand how law functions, we must grasp the nature of the problem as it appears in a case/encounter.

---

Before the judge sends the jury out to deliberate, the court hears five closing speeches: one from the prosecution; four from the defence. It is here that the encounter tentatively emerges, only at the very end of the ordeal.

Rupert Jones KC, acting for the prosecution, was the first to deliver a closing speech. As John McEvoy reports for Declassified UK:

The prosecution’s lawyer noted how “there is no dispute that these defendants… believed that the business they targeted was involved in the supply chain to Israel”.

But the trial, he said, “is not about Israel, it’s not about Palestine… It’s simply about whether they unlawfully damaged property”.

There’s that word again: “simple”. But what may appear “simple” to men so “learned” paradoxically complicates the jury’s role as the law overplays its hand. The jury, expected to defer to the law’s authority, are simultaneously expected to perform their gesture without thought or guile. They have nonetheless arrived at Birmingham Crown Court, through no choice of their own, to be burdened with a great responsibility. Their decision could send four people of conscience to prison for years. Can any such decision ever be so simple?

As one of the defence barristers would later insist, the jury’s role is not that of a “rubber stamp”; they are the last line of defence against power and its overreach. On this point, the defence still has a hand to play, and so they lean into the weight of the task that now befalls the jury themselves. In so doing, they delivered four rousing speeches that awake the jury from their slumber, bored by the prosecution to such an extent that one might expect them to walk the “route to verdict” somnambulant.

---

In The Backrooms, the furniture shop owner’s therapist becomes worried about his demeanour during their last session. He appears crazed; delusional. When he appears to go missing, she enters his store and finds his basement camp, littered with research and hastily drawn maps of the labyrinth.

The author of a self-help book, she lives by a path-breaking motto that seeks to intervene in the “repetition compulsions” of her clientele: “The moment you believe change is possible, you’ve already begun.” When she encounters her analysand in the backrooms, she is quickly horrified by how utterly embedded he is in its liminal architecture, accepting the horror that surrounds him and believing inappropriately that he can make a new home there. He doesn’t have to change.

She tries to reason with him, but is unable. He dies at the outsized hands of his id — a monstrous pirate-self; a child-like giant version of the character the store owner plays in his commercials, trying to drum up new business, trying to activate the other’s desires. It is then left up to her to find a new pathway out of the labyrinth. In an environment truly unfamiliar, she path-breaks necessarily. Less banal self-help guru, more researcher of another’s unconscious, she seeks the truth of escape.

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One of the defendants, Frank Sherman, sacks their barrister and decides to self-represent, in order to speak to the jury directly one last time and break a path set out by the prosecution. Before they take the stand, with the judge not yet sitting on high, the public gallery quietly chants: “Give Frank a wig!”

The narrative constructed by the defence in their closing speeches — Frank included — is powerful. Indeed, each of their speeches is concerned with power above all else. Whereas the prosecution’s closing speech is short and half-arsed, the defence barristers, on the contrary, repeat the defendants’ own words back to the jury and elaborate on just how complicated this case is (despite appearances).

Summarising both the defence’s evidence and its closing speeches, John McEvoy reports:

Sherman, 23, told the jury they would always believe disrupting the factory was “not criminal” and that any repercussions they may face could not “compare to how I would feel if I had not taken action”.

Lawyers for the other defendants reminded the jury of its powers — referencing the Magna Carta and the Bushell case, a landmark ruling from 1670 which established the independence of juries.

Tom Wainwright KC, in telling a story that went as far back as to the Magna Carta, leaned on the technical, as is his style. He referred to the 39th clause of the Magna Carta in particular, which — according to the website of the UK Parliament — declares:

that no free man could be imprisoned ‘except by the lawful judgment of his peers’ – social equals – ‘or by the law of the land’. This evolved into the principle of trial by jury, which was later confirmed in the Habeas Corpus Act 1679.

Wainwright noted further how:

The history of trial by jury [is] not taught about in school compared with other rights and liberties. But it is marked by control being wrested away from those in power and back to the local community.

He also reminded the jury of his client Iain Evans’ expertise and background. McEvoy summarises:

Evans, who previously worked in the aerospace sector, told the court: “We believed the longer we stayed up there [on the roof], the more lives we would save. The idea was that the longer we stay on the roof, the longer the factory would be shut down”.

He intimated at the importance of direct action with reference to the concept of “just in time” supply chains, wherein items are delivered right before they are needed in order to reduce stockpiling costs.

“Any delay in that process, if [a company] is late in delivery, that has knock[-]on impacts because obviously they’re not keeping a stockpile of parts in a warehouse”, Evans said. That means “immediate impacts on the supply chain”.

It was Mira Hammad KC, building on Wainwright’s argument, who referred to Bushell’s case, which further established the independence of juries. She also reminded the jury of her client’s background. McEvoy again notes that Hisham Alkhamesi

explained how his life had been shaped by his grandfather, Abdullah Alkhamesi, who founded the Yemeni Red Crescent in 1973.

Alkhamesi’s grandfather died in 2017 because he was unable to receive healthcare in Yemen amid a military blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia.

The court also heard how Alkhamesi contributed money left to him by his grandmother to fund the direct action campaign against Moog.

Hammad’s presentation was inspiring and empowering. She connected Hisham’s evidence — attesting to his good character, and his grandfather’s inspiration — to the jury’s role in proceedings.

Abdullah Alkhamesi was an ordinary man who trained to be a doctor in Ukraine, before returning to Yemen to establish an independent healthcare system. Yemen, as the only communist country in West Asia following the Second World War, was hamstrung like all communist nations at that time; its development was hampered by external powers. Abdullah Alkhamesi acted regardless to establish an operation to help the country’s citizens, who had been abandoned by the rest of the world. For Hammad, Hisham’s motivations in life have long followed that example. Like his grandfather before him, he has taken his civic duty to help others very seriously. The jury themselves, independent from the judge guiding proceedings, has a similar responsibility.

Hammad’s closing speech was powerful, so much so that someone in the public gallery erupted instinctively in applause when she was finished.

“Stop that right now”, Judge Wall barked, immediately ejecting her from the courtroom and threatening contempt upon anyone who acted similarly.

Frank Sherman took it upon themselves to define direct action in their own terms. McEvoy writes:

Sherman explained that “the care that we as a group put into the direct action that we took can only be spoken of by one of us”.

Sherman, who previously volunteered in support of refugees in Athens and Calais, told the court that: “The reason we are here standing trial is because we took direct action”.

Direct action, said Sherman, is akin to seeing “a room is flooding because the tap is turned on and you spend time ringing people to try and get them to turn off the tap, but they are refusing to come even though you can see the damage it’s causing. Direct action is turning off the tap yourself”.

With reference to their co-defendants, Sherman continued: “As Iain told you, the longer we stayed up there, the more lives we could save; as Hisham told you, we intended to disrupt shipments, disrupt production; and as [Juno] told you, we disrupted only what we deemed to be criminal”.

Sherman declared: “I will always in my heart know that using care and intention to disarm the factory is not criminal”.

They closed their statement by reading the poem “If I Must Die”, by Palestinian author Refaat Alareer. 

A number of jurors wiped tears from their eyes as Frank returned to the dock, humble but triumphant.

Finally, Rosalind Burgin KC spoke to the jury, representing Juno.

In the course of their evidence a few days prior, Juno spoke of their interests at school and university, studying English literature, philosophy and fine art. They explained that their mother’s upbringing in Korea, when the country was under a US-backed military dictatorship and had been partitioned into communist and capitalist enclaves, honed their interest in the power of stories, whose stories get to be heard, and how power itself shapes the stories we hear in the course of our lives.

Referring back to this in her closing speech, Burgin emphasised the jury’s role in shaping the narrative of this action. Numerous chapters have already been written, she said; the final chapter is for them to pen. They have the opportunity to shape the ending of this story, and it is an ending that does not have to follow the plot so far advanced by the powerful. The power is now in their hands. What story do they wish to tell?

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After Judge Wall summarised the trial and provided his “route to verdict”, the jury disappeared into the backrooms of the court. Out of sight, the four defendants were bailed to the courthouse, unable to leave the building, since they could be called back into the dock at any moment.

We sat on metal benches outside Court 9 for the next two hours. Wishing to avoid too much gallows’ humour, we played a “non-violent” version of the game Hangman — which Frank referred to as “Man in the Window” — waiting to see if the jury would reach a verdict as quickly as the judge and prosecution expected them to.

After an hour of deliberations, we returned to Court 9 in order to hear a note passed to the judge by the jury. Reading the note aloud in open court, the judge revealed that the jury wanted to know why they had not heard any evidence of a legal defense from the defendants themselves, and what an example of a “lawful excuse” might be under the circumstances. The judge told the jury that, since the law is his domain, he had already ruled in advance that there were no lawful excuses in this case. On that basis, he did not think it was necessary to provide them with an example of what a lawful excuse might look like, as this would not be “helpful”. The jury returned to the backrooms to deliberate for another thirty minutes.

Outside the courtroom, we breathed a sigh of relief. The defendants’ fates still lay vulnerable in the jury’s hands, but they had asked the one question we had hoped they would. As one barrister surmised, the jury’s question could be interpreted as a request for the judge’s assistance. Presumably finding his “route to verdict” too narrow, and unable to make sense of the narrative presented to them in the courtroom, they were looking for help from the judge in how to find the four defendants guilty or not guilty. In response to this cry for help, the judge had responded curtly with a “no”. The jury failed to reach a verdict that day, and court was adjourned for another long weekend.

It was difficult not to speculate on what was going through the jurors’ minds. We tried to resist the temptation. “Don’t bother; it’s like reading tea leaves,” one of the barristers said.

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The following day, Juno and I attended the protest outside Woolwich Crown Court in support of the Filton 4. One reason why our jury was not sitting that day was because both Tom Wainwright and Mira Hammad were representing two of the Filton defendants as well.

Having been found guilty of criminal damage six weeks earlier in a widely publicised retrial — the jury in the first trial failed to reach any verdicts — the Filton 4’s defence team was to argue against Judge Johnson’s application of a “terrorism connection” to their case.

The Guardian reports:

Representing [Charlotte] Head, Rajiv Menon KC had told [Judge] Johnson that it was unprecedented for the prosecution to apply for a judge to sentence a defendant as a terrorist for a non-violent offence. Menon said it was “an invitation to chilling, creeping authoritarianism that undermines the very fabric of our society”.

In written arguments, Mira Hammad KC, representing [Ellie] Kamio, said the defendants had initially been arrested on suspicion of involvement in acts of terrorism but not charged with those offences “showing that a deliberate decision was taken not to submit the crown’s case [that there was terrorism] to the arbitrament of a jury … [therefore] the court should not allow the crown to use [section 69] as a vehicle for enhancing sentence in circumstances where it has determined that a conviction for the same offence by the jury is unlikely”.

Tom Wainwright KC, representing [Sam] Corner, said a terrorist connection finding against the defendants would also mean the suffragettes, the Greenham Common women and the Trident Ploughshares movement were terrorists. “It’s wrong for someone to be sentenced for a more serious offence of which they have not been convicted,” he added.

After the terrorist connection finding Menon wept while speaking of Head’s character. Wainwright said of the destruction of drones: “They may have been involved in taking the lives of men, women and children in Gaza. That is why they acted. That’s something that — in a sane world — would be commended.”

John McEvoy later wrote on Twitter:

Being in court yesterday felt akin to witnessing a colonial crime: punishing activists with terrorism offences in order to set a precedent that taking direct action to stop a UK-backed genocide will not be tolerated.

It was harrowing to be present outside the court as these deliberations took place. After a week embroiled in our own trial, we did not have the energy to stay the course, chanting on a grassy knoll well into the evening, when Judge Johnson’s disproportionate sentences were eventually handed down.

But we held out hope. The outcry in the aftermath was pervasive. Indeed, we hoped only that our jury would hear the echo of Filton in the narrative gaps they could not fill. If they too felt that Filton was disproportionate, they now had the opportunity to stop anyone else suffering under this new authoritarian regime.

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We wondered what else our jury might encounter over the long weekend. What might they make of the encounters already experienced in the courtroom? Dare they make themselves worthy of the task presented to them, unclouding the law’s various obfuscations? It was no easy task, and no one would blame the jury for any decision they arrived at.

Lefebvre offers guidance that I am certain none of the jury would read by accident, but it summarises my own hopes for the jury’s comportment come their return to court on Tuesday morning:

the first condition for a new image of law is to base its emergence upon the notion of an encounter. If jurisprudence is to proceed case by case and heed singular demands, it must necessarily find its support and inspiration in the specificity of a problem or an encounter before it. What is said of thought in [Deleuze’s] Difference and Repetition holds mutatis mutandis for law and jurisprudence: “There is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world … Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think.”

We respect this jury because they have already demonstrate their willingness to think, reflect, and scrutinise the facts of this case, as minimal as they have turned out to be. During the prosecution’s evidence, for example, a juror presented another note to the judge asking about a time discrepancy: the time recorded on police body-camera footage was an hour earlier than recorded in the evidence. This, the prosecution explained, was due to the body-cameras not being updated to reflect daylight saving time. It was a discrepancy that no one else in that courtroom had noticed.

This too was heartening. The jury was paying such great attention to the material before them, they were noticing gaps that had passed us by completely. But this was a question asked by only one juror. To account for the mindsets of all twelve was indeed like reading tea leaves. We could only hope that they do not feel the same way about the four defendants whose fates are before them.

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After sixteen hours of deliberations, the jury returned to the courtroom at 3pm on Thursday 18th June. The judge asked them to think hard about the prospect of them returning a majority verdict. Forty-five minutes later, they returned to court once again to announce that the prospect was unlikely. The jury was discharged and the court retired. The defendants would have to return to court on 3rd July 2026, when the prosecution would announce if it intended to pursue a retrial.

Walking down the front steps outside of court, the crowd of supporters outside chanted “Moog 4, you make us proud.” A minute’s silence was held for all Palestinian martyrs, then Juno and Frank gave speeches of thanks, encouraging all present to show up for other cases as they had shown up for us: the Filton 25, the Brize Norton 6, the Keysight 3, the Instro 6… Theirs is but one case within a litany, after all. But each case is also singular. We received one of three results that day. It was not predetermined that the others would receive the same result as us.

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In a daze, we ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant around the corner from the court. Finding it difficult to unplug from the frenzy of the past two weeks, we forced ourselves to put our phones away, as various news outlets began publishing reports of their own, detailing an ordeal that had been paused for us for now.

In the car on the journey back to London, we speculated on what the final “score” may have been. The judge sought a majority verdict of 10-2. How many jurors had backed the Moog 4? 3 to 9? 4 to 8? Was their more chance of a majority acquittal or a majority conviction? Which jurors did we think saved us? Who cried in court after Frank’s closing speech? Who smiled sheepishly at the defendants as they filed out of the courtroom one last time? Who asked questions? Who complained about the protestors outside?

We would never know the answers to these questions. What occurred in the backrooms of the court would forever be a mystery to us, just as what occurred when the jury was not present would always be a mystery to them.

It is all too easy to torture yourself in trying to reason with the various gaps in a narrative. During the jury’s deliberations, I spoke to Frank about the shadow of my psychoanalytic PhD, thinking that we are all engaged in a kind of low-level psychosis. For Lacan, after all, psychosis is defined as

the emergence in reality of an enormous meaning that has the appearance of being nothing at all — in so far as it cannot be tied to anything, since it has never entered into the system of symbolisation — but under certain conditions it can threaten the entire edifice.

We seek to find an enormity of meaning in the most superficial of signs. So did our jury, I suspect. I suspect that it is also a rarity, in any trial, for these unanswerable questions to be shared. The jury may have wondered about the defendants as circuitously as we wondered about the jury themselves. Just as we will never be able to make up our minds on the nature of our jury, so too could they not make up their minds on the nature of this action.

But like the furniture store owner’s therapist, at a certain point the mysteries before us lose all charm. We are grateful only to have escape the backrooms with our lives.

I hope we do not have to return there ever again. But I suspect, one day, we will.

Juno and I went down to Woolwich Crown Court for the sentencing of the Filton 4 today, after getting back from Birmingham last night. My thanks to D’am for inviting both of us to speak about the Moog 4’s case and the Filton case.

This is a short talk given at the ICA on 29th May, as part of an event coinciding with the exhibition ‘Genuine Fake Premium Economy’. It’s a summation of a few ideas that have been kicking around this blog so far this year. If you happen to be an avid reader, it will be familiar. Consider it a TL;DR for everyone else.

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How would Mark Fisher have approached our broken economy?

Fisher is hailed today as a diagnostician, following the publication of his first book, Capitalist Realism, in 2009. Specifically, he introduces, analyses and makes accessible Fredric Jameson’s claim that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, which speaks to the fact that capitalism has become so ‘naturalised’ as an ideological position that we cannot ‘think’ beyond it. It is a work of ideology critique, in that regard, which wrestles with the same problem that Karl Marx sought to overcome when he turned a Hegelian idealism on its head. Fisher’s great achievement, nonetheless, was revitalising that position for a new generation in a new era – one left baffled by the seemingly inconsequential nature of the financial crash of 2008.

Having offered up this diagnosis, what was the treatment? Admittedly, Fisher didn’t really get around to it in any of his subsequent books, but he was actively working on his argument for almost a decade.

The one thing few people appreciate about Fisher’s published works is that they should probably be read a reverse order. His second book, 2014’s Ghosts of My Life, is really the precursor to Capitalist Realism, detailing the emergence of a sharpening cultural contradiction in the mid-2000s, whereby our sense of neoliberal stasis and the apparent closure of any alternative to capitalism is made self-evident by a culture that also acts like we’ve achieved everything we’re able to and are now living at the end of history. It’s central concept of ‘hauntology’, borrowed from Derrida, is intriguing in this context, because the spectres of so many alternatives nonetheless break through capitalist realism’s libidinal skin constantly, and perhaps more convincingly in Fisher’s cultural application than in Derrida’s more politically philosophical one. Indeed, various spectres of cultural and political alternatives continue to haunt us, and it was Fisher’s ultimate goal to do the work of materialising them. His final book, 2017’s The Weird and the Eerie, is based on some of his very early blogposts from 2003–2004, but is also a culmination of that hauntological project, naming the aesthetic categories where alternatives visibly break through our malaise most monstrously. Suffice it say, when reading Fisher’s work, time is constantly out of joint.

But that was Fisher in the 2000s. As his books travelled backwards, his blog kept moving forwards. 2015, in particular, was an interesting year for him. He appeared newly radicalised by the electoral defeat of the Labour Party during that year’s general election, and so set about writing a plan of action. But as is often the case with Fisher’s work, his tone far from preachy. He is writing as much to convince himself of what he has to say, dragging himself out of the depressions that inevitably follow another electoral defeat. Returning to the concept that made his name, for example, he writes about how:

Capitalist realism is not about people positively identifying with neoliberalism; it is about the naturalisation and therefore the depoliticisation of the neoliberal worldview … To break out of this, you need a repoliticisation, and this requires a popular mobilisation…

There was some evidence of popular mobilisation at that time, in Fisher’s view. Contrary to the pessimism that is often seen as foundational to his work, Fisher identified a new “popular enthusiasm – an enthusiasm that capitalist realism is set up to prevent emerging”. It may not have been strong enough yet to forestall the Tories’ ascendence in 2015, but it was still emerging. Something was rushing into view, Fisher argued; “something that, for a long time, there hasn’t seemed to be any glimmer of in England: the future.”

To encourage the emergence of a world struggling to be born, Fisher advocated for various strategies and tactics that are broadly uncontroversial: the development of “hub struggles” – like the Miners’ Strike – “talking to opponents”, the creation of new “social spaces” and “knowledge exchange labs”, where people can learn more about the nature of our socio-economic system beyond the enclaves of higher education.

Most interesting to me, however, out of Fisher’s various recommendations for encouraging popular mobilisation at this time, is No. 7 on his list: “Engage in forms of activism aimed at logistical disruption”. Expanding, Fisher writes:

Capital has to be seriously inconvenienced and to fear before it yields any territory or resources. It can just wait out most protests, but it will take notice when its logistical operations are threatened. We must be prepared for them cutting up very rough once we start doing this – using anti-terrorist legislation to justify practically any form of repression. They won’t play fair, but it’s not a game of cricket – they know it’s class war, and we should never forget it either.

Reading this 11 years later in 2026, it is striking how prescient it feels. Fisher is of course talking about direct action – a form of protest that does not seek recourse to influencing government policy through the pressure of civil disobedience, but rather acts directly upon capital’s logistical infrastructure. It has a long and celebrated history in this country, with the Suffragettes always being the go-to example. But today’s direct actionists are defamed as ‘terrorists’ and imprisoned under repressive counter-terror regimes that seek to isolate, disenfranchise and break apart ‘ideological’ movements on the grounds of their apparent ‘extremism’ and threat to ‘national security’. It is a 21^st century revamp of commonplace anti-leftist suppression, hardly that different from American McCarthyism, South Korea’s 1948 National Security Act, or the widespread imprisonment of Italian leftists in the 1970s.

As we know, these regimes readily employed propaganda campaigns to further delegitimise these movements. For this reason, alongside Fisher’s predictions regarding direct action, he also reiterates a further point, key to his work overall: new counter-narratives are essential to support these logistical disruptions and embolden activists themselves.

Capitalist realism isn’t a bricks-and-mortar system, after all. As Marx also pointed out, capitalism is also an ideological regime that installs the ideas of the ruling class as the foundation of all ‘common sense’ as well. The rise of social media as a new battleground for ideas in this regard was something that tentatively excited Fisher in the 2000s, as significant in the establishment of new repressions and freedoms as the invention of the printing press was. But by the 2010s, he understood its central function more as a kind of “Touchscreen Capture” – that is, the further entrenchment of depoliticization via neoliberalised communications technologies in the 21st century.

In his blogpost following the 2015 general election, Mark raises the same argument. It’s all very intentional, he says.

This is why the intensification and proliferation of the capitalist technologies of reality management and libidinal engineering in the 1980s was not merely some happy coincidence for neoliberalism; neoliberalism’s success was inconceivable without [new communicative] technologies.

This is because logistics and narrativisation are two sides of the same coin: one allows capital to circulate; the other allows its ideology to circulate. It is for this reason, Fisher continues, “that direct action, while of course crucial, will never be sufficient: we also need to act indirectly, by generating new narratives, figures and conceptual frames.”

This tension between a direct and indirect action was a focal point of Fisher’s work during the 2010s. In another essay, titled “Indirect Action: Some Misgivings About Horizontalism”, he is especially critical of any leftist tendency that disavows any engagement in narrativization – or more specifically, the left’s authoritative advancement of its own ideas and the time it takes to formulate them – instead deferring to an unwarranted faith in spontaneity and face-to-face interaction – something that social media itself has encouraged within us, albeit through a kind of reverse psychology, where touching grass and doing it for the ‘gram both encourage the same kind of passive participation. Art and culture have a particularly important role to play here. Given the additional context of Fisher’s role as a lecturer in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths – which I know from experience is not lacking in students who want to be curators – he tellingly adds:

Never has the word ‘curate’ been so widely used in cultural circles, but never has there been less confidence in the validity of the concepts inherent in curatorship: the linking of management with care and authority.

It was on this basis that Fisher saw the Occupy movement, emerging in response to the financial crash, as especially disappointing and toothless. Occupy asked for alternate forms of democracy, corporate accountability, and reform, but it wasn’t so good at making authoritative demands. In fairness, Occupy was also a reckoning with a newly digital world. The lack of interest in authority may have also come from a feeling that people didn’t know what was to be done. Who did? Even Fisher writes with the benefit of at least 5 years’ hindsight.

Nevertheless, in reflecting on the Occupy movement for himself, Fisher was more forthright a few years later. His accelerationist view – which explicitly counterposed his hauntological writings – was that no political project of resistance will achieve much of anything if it abstains from involvement with new communicative-capitalist infrastructures.

This is one the sharpest contradictions we currently face. Social media is a hellscape, more so now than ever, as the enshittification of everything intensifies, but how can a movement spread through networks it otherwise wants to abstain from? That’s not to say that posting alone will change the world — we know it won’t — but Occupy also demonstrated that not having a clear message or narrative made its forms of more direct action broadly impotent. Indeed, Occupy was lacking both direct action and indirect action.

Mark continues:

If the aim is not to take over or even influence the State, then there must be a faith in the practical sufficiency of the movement itself. The point is not to direct demands towards, or protest against, an Other, but for the movement to constitute itself as an immediately effective collectivity. Yet, this faith in immediate – which is to say, unmediated – action betrays a lack of faith in the efficacy of indirect action.

That lack of faith is understandable, of course. What we’re dealing with, most often, when engaging in direct or indirect action, are abstractions – both rhetorical and real. In another essay, entitled “Politics Beyond the Street”, Fisher borrows a question asked by McKenzie Wark during the Occupy movement – ‘How do you occupy an abstraction?’ – and adds:

We’re now very aware that, far from threatening neoliberalism, the financial crisis of 2008-9 has led to the intensified form of neoliberalism known as austerity. We should also be aware of the limitations of the idea of taking direct action against capital. If capital is essentially abstract, then what would such direct action entail? Capitalism is a system of virtualities. It cannot be directly experienced, even if it conditions most of what we can now experience. (It may be difficult to conceive of what really occupying capital might involve, but we can be certain that capital occupies us.) Successful action against capital must therefore be of an indirect sort — it must involve challenging and replacing the machineries of mediation which impose capitalist reality upon us.

The pro-Palestine movement of the 2020s has made considerable headway in developing this kind of struggle. It is a “hub struggle” uniting and expanding the left as a whole. It has brought the virtuality of the arms trade — anonymous UK factories ideologically and physically distanced from the atrocities they facilitate abroad — firmly into touching distance. Actionists themselves like to say that the trials they inevitably face on criminal damage charges are extensions of their actions, but here too, the action is of a more indirect sort. The judiciary clearly knows the power of indirect action in this sort of space, because it has resorted to denying many actionists legal defences. In essence, actionists are denied the opportunity to tell their own stories in a court room.

That makes the stories we tell outside of court all the more important. Advances have been made here too. Israel’s genocide has revealed the true horror of their exaggerated political system — that is, as the sharp edge of Western-imperial geopolitics overall — to a world that has, on the whole, been largely ignorant of its injustices for decades. Palestinian solidarity has never been more popular as a result, even if there is a lingering grief regarding how overdue that solidarity is. Grief aside, however, it is clear that various improvements have been made — improvements demonstrable given the fact that the pushback against them has been more authoritarian than anything the left has seen in decades.

The strength of the Palestinian solidarity movement is also found in its diversity. Activists, actionists, journalists, investigators, academics, social-media influencers, artists, writers, organisers, etc. – not only are all present in the movement, in active face-to-face communication with one another, but many individuals occupy multiple roles at once. It’s been my recent pleasure to get to know the Moi Ko theatre company, for instance, whose members have both engaged in direct action themselves and also produce street theatre telling their stories as to why. It’s a movement that has also utilised social media both proactively and effectively.

A networked politics has since formed whereby footage of direct action goes viral on social media, leading to concerned citizens doing their own research. But the flow of information is not one-directional. Investigative journalists inform actionists who transform abstract structures into real-world locations. Both materially and ideologically, there is no space for business-as-usual. What has been hiding in plain sight is made newly visible. Direct and indirect action, far from being opposed, are now immersed in collaboration. The successes of this collaboration speak for themselves. For all the government’s draconian clampdowns on those mobilising for life, I cannot see them being defeated. Clampdowns on direct action only emboldened indirect action, which encourages more to take direct action themselves. Far from being maligned, these movements explicitly seek to answer one of the central questions that preoccupied Fisher in the mid-2010s:

How can the politics of street protest make any contact with the abstract structures of capital that appear to be immune to direct action?

It’s a striking approach to a broken economy, because it is proceeds somewhat counterintuitively. Our economy is broken, and part of the reason that Keir Starmer has come down so hard on direct actionists is because he has sought to use the flow of capital through the so-called ‘defence’ industries to address this. As far as Starmer is concerned, direct actionists are setting out to break the things he hoped would fix the country. But it is precisely this approach to a broken economy – broken not just practically but morally, because it is soaked in blood from the Global South – that offers up a clear demand for an alternative. It doesn’t so much demand but declare that the economy the right seeks to fix through more immiseration will only be broken more and more frequently by a newly revitalised left. If Fisher was partial to Nietzsche’s strategy of philosophizing with a hammer, our contemporary protest movements have taken that sentiment literally. Neo-luddites aren’t just blowing up data centres but smashing up factories and their insurers and all the logistical nodes that normalise capitalist realism.

As ever, I’m ultimately left wondering what Fisher would make of the present. If he was here, I think he’d be no less horrified at the state of the world, but he’d also be hugely pleased by what he saw – at least as far as the left’s newly militant approach to logistical disruption is concerned.

Thanks.