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.
Prison Van
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.
The Trial of the Moog 4:
A Journey through the Judicial Backrooms
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:
- Did the defendants cause damage without lawful excuse?
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Direct Action is not Terrorism: Filton 4 Sentencing at Woolwich Crown Court
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.
Mark Fisher on Direct & Indirect Action:
Short talk at the ICA
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.
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 21st 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.
I Love You More Than I Hate Prison: XG on Voices Radio
I was on Voices Radio earlier today after getting an invite to come down from the lovely Nida Jafri. Neither Nida nor Juno could join me today, unfortunately, but the show was basically a live rendition of the new mix series that Juno and I have been occasionally putting together.
That series has so far been tracks that have been defining this new “bailed” period of life; this was an hour of tracks they requested down the phone whilst on remand in prison for six months from the end of August 2025 to the end of February 2026.
Their trial starts this week, so we’re heading up to Birmingham tomorrow, and I’m trying not to be overcome by the “you’re about to go off the edge of a big drop on a rollercoaster” feeling that’s been in my stomach the past few days. Who knows what will happen… If this is all news to you, you can learn more about their case here.
Shouts to Hiren for producing and saving me from hapless tech dramas.
Tracklist for today’s show below:
- Nina Simone — I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free
- The Microphones — Microphones in 2020
- Dean Blunt — Imperial Gold
- Blood Orange — Vivid Light
- Aphex Twin — avril 14th reversed music not audio [tapedel] played & programmed modified yamaha disklavier pro, recorded to Nagra IVS 5″
- kmoe — Gloves
- DJBBOY X ML Buch — High Speed [Outro Blend]
- Abysmal6Years x Eighte — You can do anything
- Samira — house in Nebraska #jerseyclub
- Angel Emoji — I Want Wind to Blow (Jersey Edit)
- Mvntana ft. Jdub — Misery Business (Jersey Club Remix)
- (2)dltzk — I just wanna go back… back to 21
- DJ Elxnce — Brings Back Early 2021 Vibes (Lituation Mix)
- OJC — Bad Habit (Jersey Mix)
- Syzy — Dariacore for my friend Weed, because it’s his 22nd birthday
- The Microphones — (Instrumental)
- The Durutti Column — Lips That Would Kiss
- Caroline Polachek — Go As A Dream (Live on KEXP)
- Cleo Sol — Know That You Are Loved
- Operelly — If someone’s gonna love you
- Oneohtrix Point Never — The Body Trail
Fake Patriot Slop:
On Boards of Canada’s Inferno
On 28th May, the White House used part of a new Boards of Canada track in a promotional video. Resident Advisor reported on the outrage that emerged from the group’s fanbase:
Comments underneath the video were predictably scathing, with Boards of Canada fans angrily demanding the duo’s music isn’t used for “authoritarian fascist bullshit” and “zoomer edit fake patriot slop.” Another X user described President Trump as “posting movie trailers for World War III like he’s running a Michael Bay fan account.”
There’s an obvious irony to it all. For a group that turned the hypnagogic sampling of public service broadcasting into an artform, is it not apt that they be appropriated in turn by Trump’s psychedelic-fascist social-media team? To be outraged at this development suggests a petulance on behalf of the average BOC fan: our nostalgia must not be sullied with your nostalgia; our postmodernism must not be sullied by your postmodernism.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 28, 2026
In truth, the further we have all travelled from BOC’s warped late-20thC sources, the more inapposite their whole project has become. In the end, it only lends more weight to Alex Williams’ critique of hauntology from 2008:
In a sense Hauntology’s ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning, deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories etc) it is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive.
This argument was seductive 20 years ago… Is it still? How could it be? Even in 2008, Williams concluded:
For this perspective, Hauntology is a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form. In summary, hauntology cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose, because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible, and as such we are to make the best of this (and that the best we can do is to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach — with all the pseudo-messianic dimensions this involves).
This is the central tension between retroism and hauntology. In this moment of Trumpian appropriation, it is on full display. Retroism lusts after past magnificence as if it ever really exists; hauntology reckons with the unsettled and self-aware acknowledgement that the past is uncanny precisely because it is a weird fiction.
Within BOC’s ambiguous evocation of ‘screen memories’ — both the elder-millennial nostalgia for cathode ray tube TVs and VHS tapes, and the Freudian notion that we actually have no memories of our childhoods — there has always been a risk, as Mark Fisher argued, of “legitimat[ing] and propagat[ing] a radically unSpinozist notion of being free: i.e. give free reign to your Inner Child = yr Inner Fascist.”
This hardly describes Boards of Canada especially — more so the attitudes of hauntologist-cum-January-6er Ariel Pink — but such is the irony of a man-child like Trump, in his supposedly outrageous recontextualization of their music, being the one to take their sound a few steps further than they’ve dared to for twenty years… Maybe a little bit of free reign in their own production style wouldn’t hurt!
Boards of Canada have clearly not licensed their music to the Trump administration — which has a habit of using unlicensed music in this sort of context — but their appeal to that regime is hardly unsurprising. The uncanny nature of the past (especially an inner childhood) is a core hauntological predilection — one that easily serves the reactionary nostalgia of North America in particular, as a ‘young’ nation always lusting after simulacra forms of its adolescence.
For Trump to utilise BOC for his propaganda makes sense, unfortunately for them, and it is also perhaps the most unsettling the group has been in decades. In that sense, Trump has inserted uncanniness anew into BOC’s oeuvre. The irony, then, is that it took Trump — and not BOC themselves — to properly unsettle their fanbase.
Boards of Canada’s new album Inferno bears all the classic hallmarks of a BOC release. There is some movement, some development, but it is hardly perceptible. It’s that old thing you liked… made great again? The sweeping synth vistas evoke Vangelis tracking shots across cyberpunk dystopias, but those visions of a future Los Angeles seem like a far more moribund future-past than ever before.
That doesn’t make it bad, but I’ve heard it all before. Actually, if I was to compare Inferno to any other release, it would be the soundtrack to the 2015 videogame Dying Light — the cheesy postmodern zombie game that’s like Die Hard with the undead, set in a nondescript orientalist North African shanty city…
Above all else, Inferno is charmingly neo-reactionary. A new Boards of Canada album that triggers all my nostalgia for an old Boards of Canada album. Again, it’s not bad. But this return to “the past inside the present” isn’t anywhere near as enthralling as it was twenty years ago. It’s perfectly pleasant, and in some cases, there’s nothing more annoying than that.
It’s not more than I’d have hoped for, nor less — it’s exactly what I’d expect. All of the tracks presented on the new release could have been made twenty-five years ago. Perhaps they were. It feels more archival than a psychedelic offering for 2026. It feels contradictory to refer to it as a “new” record at all.
It’s hard not to be disappointed by that fact. Boards of Canada are, of course, a duo that have an unmistakable sonic signature. They sound wonderfully like themselves here and they own it. It’s not always necessary that a band oscillate wildly, trying to sound like anything but themselves. And yet, they so firmly embody the cancellation of their own future, it’s almost perplexing.
The only reason I can give for why they take so much time between albums is probably that even they get bored with their own sound. There’s clearly no rush to finish a record and move onto the next thing. But rather than try to revitalise themselves, it’s as if they know it’s best to wait for their hype to completely ebb away, until the moment arises when more of the same becomes an exciting prospect again.
At a certain point, it stops being hauntological altogether — and BOC have the last group that warrant an association with that term. Indeed, at its best, ‘hauntological’ music has always been uncanny — not in the sense of its simulacra invocations of the past troubling any sense of authenticity, but in the sense that the uncanny is unsettling.
Inferno‘s album art is, strangely, the most insistently “unsettling” artwork they’ve ever produced. Blind children leer out at you, in AI-slop advertising for the year’s most clichéd horror movie. It makes the banality of the music itself all the more jarring.
By way of a comparison, the best Boards of Canada track, for my money, has always been ‘Happy Cycling’. It’s off-kilter, clipped, jabbing opening produces a tension that unnerves me. When their more standard synth washes float into the mix, that tension is released and gives way to euphoria.
Music Has The Right To Children works as a whole because it dances around that tension pretty well. It’s a haunted record, and the closest they’ve gotten to what Fisher adored about the Ghost Box label:
The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the confabulated. Listening to sample-based sonic genres like jungle and (the pre-banal) hip-hop you typically found yourself experiencing déjà vudu, in which a familiar sound, estranged by sampling, nagged just beyond recognizability. Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s. Not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box‘s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing; lost programmes, uncomissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up.
It’s something mainstreamed by Boards of Canada, albeit without any of the specific context provided by Ghost Box releases, and so they’ve never managed to make anything with Ghost Box aplomb. And for all of their breakout’s strengths, they’ve also never managed to repeat it, swapping out that album’s uneasy listening motifs for something far more placid and predictable. Geogaddi, for example, is more like a tribute to nature documentaries than anything especially haunted, but the production is at least inventive in that context. It felt like an attempt at a new direction, a new sound, before they later fell into a comfort zone on The Campfire Headphase, which was nice for what it was, but they’ve hardly budged since and it has led to a series of drawn-out diminishing returns.
Truly, for them, the long 1990s never ended. They exist crystallised at the end of their own history. Something has to give, surely? Have you never felt comfort curdle into claustrophobia? Have you never resented your own predilection for what’s familiar?
There’s nothing uncanny here. Nothing unsettling. Nothing weird. Truly, nothing hauntological. To herald BOC’s Inferno as the welcomed return of a twenty-five-year-old aesthetic sensibility is only more confirmation of how distant we are from the moment when they first made an impact. They weren’t all that ‘hauntological’ then — they were an act mentioned occasionally on the periphery of those discourses, and came to the fore in those contexts only as the most mainstream act to latch onto when ‘hauntology’ left the blogosphere to have its hype moment. It says everything that Trump is more ‘hauntological’ than they are now.
Doing Gender: XG in the Canary
There is a familiar refrain that follows my partner and I as we navigated the UK’s public bathrooms. As a gender-nonconforming couple, we’re painfully aware of the transphobic discourse that overshadows our daily lives. Approaching a set of bathrooms whilst out and about, and not wanting to draw more attention to ourselves, one or both of us will groan, before announcing with resignation: “Time to do ‘gender’…”
I have another new article in the Canary on the EHRC’s update to discrimination guidance and how it impacts trans people.
You can read it here.
Mobilise for the Moog 4: Video Explainer
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Transcript below:
My name is Em and my partner Juno is one of the Moog 4. Their trial starts 2 weeks today on June 4th at Birmingham Crown Court. They face a single charge of criminal damage. At least that’s what the jury will be told.
Maybe you’ve heard about their case, maybe you haven’t. Admittedly, they were arrested during a busy summer. You’ve heard of the Filton 25, you’ve heard of the Brize Norton 5, you’ve heard about the proscription of Palestine Action, you’ve heard about the hunger strikers. You need to hear about this case too.
Moog supply parts to the global F-35 programme and they also supply parts for the M-346 aircraft — specifically, flight actuators. These are essential parts that no other company makes. To suspend Moog’s export licenses would greatly hamper their facilitation of genocide, but this has not happened. Although the UK likes to bang on about the licenses it has suspended, this is basically for goods that Israel can just go buy on Amazon. On that front alone, the UK government have misled the public. But there’s so much more to tell you.
The M-346 is a trainer aircraft — it trains would-be Israeli fighter jet pilots, who have carried out much of the destruction of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. It’s a hi-tech trainer aircraft that makes training pilots a quick process. The Israeli air force itself, always prone to brag, claims that they can have pilots go from training to live deployment is as little as six months. That’s the same amount of time that the Moog 4 have already spent in prison. How many new pilots were trained by Israel during that time?
The UK government knows all about this. In an internal briefing written by the Foreign Office, they conclude that the M-436 “facilitates the development of an offensive capability”. In their own words, the M-346 facilities genocide, but they have spent more time prevaricating about what the words “facilitation” and “genocide” mean rather than doing their due diligence to halt even the risk of the slaughter of Palestinians, as is their duty under international law.
Chris Bryant MP was asked about all of this during a select committee meeting. He said “the assessment is that the training of an aircraft pilot on such equipment would take so long that they would not be among the people who would be engaged in fighter combat in Gaza”. This is also misleading. The briefing Bryant received on the M-346 does not mention anything about the time taken to train pilots, and if he’d done his own research he’d know it does not take long at all, so it appears Bryant was simply making this up on the spot.
The only argument that Bryant’s briefing made was that, since these trainer aircraft are not used over Gaza themselves, because they have no direct combat utility, then exports can continue. This contradicts the government’s own assessment of the M-346 facilitating an offensive capability.
Moog ship their M-346 parts directly to Israel. We know this because we have literally the receipts. Last year Declassified reported that they had records of 10 shipments going from Wolverhampton to Israel. Now, we have a whole lot more. We know that Moog has done everything in its power to keep its shipping routes open, with the full support of the UK government and its courts. For instance, Moog took out an injunction last year that makes any disruption outside the factory illegal, and changed their shipping patterns numerous times. If they did this to avoid scrutiny, they probably shouldn’t have started shipping parts via Belgium, which does have a full arms embargo on Israel. Caught in the act, a criminal investigation has been opened in Belgium into Moog’s activities.
This hardly comes as a surprise. We already know Moog is flagrant in disrespecting the law; in 2024, they were fined almost $2m for bribing Indian officials to acquire public tenders. This is a company that will do anything to maintain its profits, with no concern for ethics or human life.
Despite all of this, Moog are not on trial or under investigation — at least not in this country. The UK government seeks to convict 4 people of trying to do what they should have done two years ago, which is stop Moog’s facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
We have a lot more questions going into this trial. Given that 4 of the Filton 6 may be sentenced as terrorists for their direct action at an Elbit Systems factory in 2024, we are asking ourselves whether our loved ones will face the same repressive treatment. There is a clear pattern in this country showing that the UK wants to designate protestors as terrorists, when all they have done is try to uphold international law and save Palestinian lives. Many of them have likely succeeded in doing the latter, our 4 included. Under their scaremongering use of the Terrorism Act, which is having a chilling effect across this country, what is really happening is that the moral conduct of concerned citizens is being outlawed by a government that would rather sit on its hands and rake in profits. They will brutalise anyone who puts human life before their pockets. We cannot allow this to continue.
Come to Birmingham Crown Court from June 4th and rally for the Moog 4. The trial is scheduled to last for three weeks. You can use that time to let this government know that it cannot continue to shirk its responsibilities and persecute people of conscience. The Moog 4 are the best of us, and they deserve our support.
A Wolf in the Throne Room:
On Discourse and Militant Dysphoria
Let me start by getting something off my chest… I’m frustrated with my PhD at the moment.
My funding stopped at the end of March. As a result, I’ve had to get a new job to pay the bills. The job is great, but I am left wondering why anyone’s PhD funding would be stopped at what is probably the most crucial time for concentration. Ridiculously, this is entirely usual. I knew it was coming. I’d even planned to finish my thesis before my funding ran out, but there were inevitably a lot of corrections to be made to the manuscript submitted back in February. Now I don’t have the time to make them. I’m especially annoyed about it because I’ve persisted with this project in a timely manner through so much personal turmoil. It would be so ironic (if fitting) if it was the university itself that made me fall at the final hurdle.
At this point, I don’t even know what I’d do with a doctorate anyway. Not just with the title of Dr. — although it is attractively gender-neutral — but with the thesis itself. Since Repeater Books succumbed to the censorship of its Zionist owners, relegated to a zombie press engaged with only by those ignorant of or indifferent to that context, I no longer have a home in publishing. I could send the thesis to a more academic press, but adjacency to academia has never been something I’ve wanted. I went to art school. My Masters was a brief stint of writing practice that left me looking for an undercommons. When I started my PhD, I was homeless and directionless post-pandemic, and mostly did it for the money and time afforded to put my life back together. In that regard, it has already served its purpose. Meanwhile, academia has remained on its knees, reduced to a swamp of immiserating bureaucracies. Four years as a postgrad has not persuaded me that it’s worth engaging with any further.
Still, it feels like such a waste of energy to leave this 100,000-word monstrosity in some folder on my laptop gathering digital dust. But maybe that’s fate. It’s not been a complete waste of time; I’ve learned a lot, that’s for sure. But I do have mixed feelings about having nothing publishable to show for it. That was what I’d hoped for. But the world also feels so different from when I started with that humble aim. From the vantage point of 2026, it feels less humble and more myopic.
At least I still have my blog. But who reads it? Yes, the death of the blogosphere has been declared many times, but now it seems assured. Even Substack, which briefly dominated as a side-hustle space for all sorts of jobbing commentators, feels increasingly irrelevant. I don’t remember the last time I felt moved to read one. The Internet has instead become an energetic wasteland. In many ways, it always was one. But I see no positive value in it whatsoever anymore. Nothing truly fruitful has come out of its discourses in years.
There is still so much to write about and talk about, but what is the point of writing about it here or there? What good comes from flinging things online? Or sequestering them away in academic journals? Who has the time and resources necessary to sustain a writing practice in any regard? I certainly don’t. I know I published three books not that long ago, but you should have seen the state of my personal life by the time they were done with. It would be nice to have the time again one day, but I’m done with suffering for a craft. There’s enough suffering to be experienced already, which results in a sense of urgency that writing does not alleviate.
Do I sounded jaded? Frustrated? Disheartened with everything? I am. The Gaza genocide has changed everything. The years spent blogging feel like a decent education that now needs to be put to better use.
I write anyway. I try to write myself out of a persistent year-long disillusionment.
THe University Discourse
Part of me blames Lacan for all this. I have spent the last four years largely getting to grips with him, which has mutated the direction of a PhD that I originally intended to be about Deleuze. The endless explication needed to demonstrate my knowledge of a figure I intended to be marginal feels like quicksand. It has taken all energy out of a project I was initially excited about. That is the Lacanian trap.
Don’t get me wrong: I might be grumpy, but Lacan is useful, for sure. Wrestling with the issues he raises is a good exercise in sharpening one’s wit (even if it is one only appreciated by a specific in-group). Still, it hardly feels indispensable. The inexhaustible task of elucidating the system he produced only makes one primed for co-optation by a university machine. At the risk of throwing stones from my glass house, I feel frustrated with this sort of thing precisely because I almost walked zombie-like into the same situation.
Lacan may have also been onto something when he built a body of work, like that of James Joyce, that remains a veritable honey trap / gravity well for academics. Frustrating them is the point! But speaking personally, I really don’t want to fall into all that, thanks very much.
Still, there is one piece of Lacan that I have found useful, at least in framing the frustrations I have. (The paradox of structuralism is that it is always well placed to frame the consequences of its own shortcomings.) For the past few months especially — whenever I’ve had the time — I have been immersed in writing a chapter on Lacan’s four discourses.
In particular, there is Lacan’s theorisation of the ‘university discourse’. Here, ‘knowledge’ itself becomes the agent of discourse — there is no clearly defined hierarchy or jostling for symbolic power. Everything is made more diffuse. It is a discourse that signifies a major shift in the production of knowledge that, for Lacan, epitomises modernity. As Adrian Johnston writes, it describes “a shift from the dominance of ‘the discourse of the master’ qua social bond” — which is “structured on the basis of traditional pre-twentieth-century paternal-style authority” — “to the hegemony of ‘the discourse of the university’ qua social bond” — which is “structured on the basis of anonymous bureaucratic and scientific authority underpinned by allegedly neutral, objective knowledge”.
The main problem that Lacan’s ‘university discourse’ represents, of course, is that, whilst the university may epitomise this sort of knowledge production, it does not ‘own’ it. In fact, for Lacan, it was the USSR that epitomised the university discourse on a global scale. But here he betrays his own biases, doing a sort of psychoanalytic version of an admonishment of communism that is far more applicable to capitalism. Indeed, today, the university discourse feels more appropriate to the late-capitalist world in which we currently live: the world of a ‘technocratic’ capitalist realism, beholden to its own sense of ‘grown-up‘ politics, which is no appeal to parental authority, but rather a kind of sickeningly Millennial ‘eldest daughter’ sense of responsibility.
You need only look at the attack ads circulating around the recent local elections in the UK to see this discourse in full view, wherein Labour centrists decry again and again the crisis of ‘sectarian’ politics afflicting the nation. As Slavoj Žižek once argued:
One of the telltale signs of university discourse is that the opponent is accused of being ‘dogmatic’ and ‘sectarian’. University discourse cannot tolerate an engaged subjective stance.
In the form of the Labour Party, it’s a politics beholden to the focus group, fiscal responsibility, lofty centrism, the ‘professional-managerial class’… It’s capitalist realism built on a foundation of ‘think tanks’. It’s why Labour’s likely forthcoming leadership contest is little more than an exercise in changing the window dressing. Contemporary politics puts big, dumb inflatables in suits on display, but it’s typically rudderless and leaderless.
This suits a university discourse, because it makes superficial reboots and revamps easier to pull off. After all, a further mechanism of university discourse in this regard is its quintessentially capitalist mode of ‘reterritorialisation’, albeit at the level of knowledge production, which feeds upon those most resistant to the institutions of knowledge production themselves. Mark Fisher’s brief stint within Labour’s technocratic machinery feels like an example, but it is one that is again epitomised by the university itself. Žižek notes, for example, how figures like “Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Benjamin” are “three great antiuniversitarians whose presence in the academy is today all-pervasive”. Together with many others, they “demonstrate that the ‘excluded’ or ‘damned’ authors are the IDEAL feeding stuff for the academic machine.”
It’s why the lauded para-academics of the twenty-first century — the Ccru, for example, and those who came after — are now everywhere in academia, and even provide an intellectual cornerstone of the Big Tech companies that the Ccru lampooned. Hell, I’m even aware that my own work has been taught on university courses, leading to various assumptions that I’m part of that machinery. In light of this, Žižek suggests that one aspect of Lacan’s ‘university discourse’ is that it serves as a mechanism of institutionalised knowledge-production “endeavouring to integrate, domesticate, and appropriate the excess that resists and rejects it”. Speaking from experience, it’s hard to argue with that. But what are we — what am I — to do with the resentful disillusionment that inevitably follows?
The Four Discourses (of Web 2.0)
Thinking more about the present, Lacan’s four discourses have led me back to Mark Fisher’s (oft-ignored) schema of Y2K social links, which can perhaps be read as a less formal attempt to update Lacan’s theses for the social-media era.
What Fisher presents us with, in 2009, is a schema of fans, vampires, trolls, and Masters. Like Lacan’s four discourses, Fisher’s symbolic figures can be framed as stand-ins for certain types of social bond ensnared within a diffusively networked master’s discourse.
“The dominant modes of subjectivity at the end of history / web 2.0 are those of the Troll and the Grey Vampire, the two faces of the Last Man”, Fisher begins. He first analyses the Troll, suggesting that the “academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence”:
Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity (opposed, in their minds, to the allegedly infantile attachments of The Fan). But there is nothing more adolescent – in the worst way – than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from – the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only […] in terms of time and energy wasted – the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them).
Trolls are everywhere. I could not possibly count the number of times someone has tried to shame me for being a ‘fan’ of Mark Fisher, for instance. But my allegiance, even when critical, is steadfast. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. My investments run deep.
Fisher continues by discussing the Grey Vampire, who is “related to” the Troll, “and in some ways even more dangerous”:
Grey Vampires are creatures who disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but [are] unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Troll, the Grey Vampire’s mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is … moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive – everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything.
The great irony of Fisher’s posthumous interpretation, especially amongst a particular brand of American para-academician, is that the Troll and Grey Vampire are pulled adrift from Fisher’s wider libidinal schema and weaponised to always apply to everyone else. The Grey Vampire, as per Fisher’s infamous “Exiting the Vampire Castle“, may still apply to a certain type of moribund too-woke leftist, but when detached from his wider schema, we fail to see how it is Trolls themselves who have utilised this image of the vampire for their own immiserating aims. In fact, Fisher already predicted that this blurring of his schema might best apply to the
postmodern academic, complicit with the system that immiserates them, reflexively impotent, [who] is required to oscillate between being Troll and Grey Vampire, between hyper-critical scholarliness and convivial sociality, kept locked into the system by just the right level of prestige and self-loathing. That’s why most of the interesting work done in institutions is achieved by people who have infiltrated the academy after periods of (intellectual and subjective) destitution.
Fisher counts himself amongst this crowd, of course. He long sought a position within the academy, even whilst he was critical of it, and it is no doubt for this reason that he hated the way he, like so many, longed for its degraded promises. After all, what is the alternative? Is it not better to find fulfilment doing what one loves in an imperfect system than affirming one’s impotence resentfully from outside it? One of the more acute crises Fisher faced towards the end of his life was undoubtedly that he loved teaching and he loved his students, but he also found the academy’s bureaucracies immiserating and Kafkaesque. He seemingly never resolved that tension at the heart of his precarious dayjob.
My reason for returning to Fisher’s informal schema is that I want to resist the transformation of my own disillusionment and resentment into any of these negative figures. I see bits of myself in each of them. With regards to a particular relationship to the university, the schema suitably draws on universals. Any ‘truthful’ answer to the questions above is always going to be personal. Let each individual find a way to make peace with their own relationship to the university, whether inside or outside of it.
I feel like I have made my peace with being on the outside. I have loved my PhD for the space and funding it provided me to pursue a long-form project I’d likely never have gotten round to otherwise. But I have hated the bureaucracy of the whole process and I have struggled to force an interest in its communities. I realised long ago that I’d have preferred to just write another book whilst being left alone, as I had done previously. But that is hardly a solution to the problems raised.
In truth, I have been experiencing a reckoning that sees this process of disillusionment as inevitable, even essential. The task, however, is not getting stuck there. On the one hand, perhaps all of this is merely the self-loathing impotence of a ‘Last Man’, in Nietzsche’s formulation, but I also see a vent in this position that acknowledges it in terms of being a ‘Last Man’ in a particular era, which has come to a close.
The future is already here, and to occupy it is to feel oneself ejected from a moribund present — for better and for worse. It necessitates a loathsome subjectivity that wants all prior fixations and habits to be torn asunder.
I hate the world as it currently is, but remain impassioned that there are other ways of comporting ourselves to midwife a new world struggling to be born.
That hatred is essential. I want to betray the present.
Militant Dysphoria
Continuing to elucidate his schema, Fisher writes:
Betrayal is just as important a cultural engine as fidelity; hate is just as important as love. But only the fan can betray, only the lover can hate. That’s why betrayal and hate are as alien to the Troll as they are to the Grey Vampires.
The fan is neither loved nor hated. The trolls, vampires and Masters are largely indifferent to the fan’s chattering, since “the vicissitudes of fan-adoration have no relationship to proper philosophical discussion, and fan exasperation, the nihilation of the former idol, is somehow juvenile.”
Staking a claim, Fisher was as defiant on this point as ever:
I am a fan, and this holds for my philosophical, as much as my cultural, investments. The two are in any case interchangeable – there is a philosophy implicit in any cultural product worth its salt…
In parentheses, he briefly alludes (with admiration) to the late-00s fanaticism of Dominic Fox, Alex Williams and Reza Negarestani, demonstrated via “their method-analyses of Black Metal,” which takes on the form of a “black mirror reverse of the overground kingdom of Trolls and Grey Vampires.” As provocatively as ever, Fisher adds that “the anti-social dysphoria of Black Metal – being no-one – has far more to offer any 21st century Marxism than the moralising homilies of clubbable, pubbish socialism…”
On this point, there is much to quibble. Fisher himself did not remain immersed in this social dysphoria and, as far as I can tell, was never much of a ‘fan’ of Black Metal, even if he enjoyed the writings of those who were. Indeed, “the moralising homilies of clubbable, pubbish socialism” arguably took a hold of Repeater Books — and, relatedly, Tribune mag, which might epitomise it in the present — a decade on from this point. But since the former project succumbed to a lack of vigilance regarding the Zionists in its midst, perhaps there is a truth to — or at least a worthy return of — the “social dysphoria” he entertained in 2009.
Fisher was especially interested in this ‘dysphoria’ at that time. Following the publication of Dominic Fox’s Cold World, Fisher organised a conference at Goldsmiths on ‘Militant Dysphoria’. Alex Williams’ contribution to that event — the only one still online, as far as I can tell — helps clarify the stakes.
Militant dysphoria speaks to a symptomatology defined by
the collapse of the familiar paradigms of leftist politics, be they democratic parliamentarian, or street-protest based. Though neo-liberalism as reality principle might well appear to have imploded following the economic crisis of 2008, in the West we have pointedly not seen a serious renaissance of the left … Thirty years of triumphant post-Fordist neoliberalism seem to have critically weakened the usual avenues for left politics, to have driven those who keep faith with the truths of Marxism or Socialism to either an in-denial fervour for the theatrical acting-out of a party in the street, or a kind of numb remove, an immiserated state. So the left is trapped in a sort of depression, in a dysphoric state itself. Here “militant dysphoria” means the dysphoria of the militant. The hope arises that it is through a radicalisation of this very negative state that a future emancipatory politics might be born. A radicalisation in what sense though?
Williams’ question is less open-ended in the present. As I’ve noted recently, I do not see a contemporary left as having imploded in this way before the challenges that it now faces. The tandem vanguards of direct and indirect action have shaken up British politics profoundly, despite — or even because — the political establishment has sought to imprison all those who throw their weight behind these currents.
Regardless, leftist politics has been strengthened as a result, achieving considerable gains after the failure of the Corbyn project a decade earlier. We live in a very exciting and nerve-wracking time as a result. Nerve-wracking because the forces of reaction have also intensified to meet the left’s defiant advances. Exciting because it is also the emboldened forces of reaction that have led to a new ‘militant dysphoria’ biting at our heels.
Williams continues:
One interpretation of a militant dysphoria would hold that dysphoria acts to separate the subject from their world, and that [subject,] once suitably energised by this negative relation … might act to change it. In this sense of “militant dysphoria”[,] dysphoria is a necessary stage of subjective transformation, a making[-]strange of the everyday world of life and the vital, a subtraction apart from its quotidian ensnarement and the first step on the path towards its transformation. Here then, militant dysphoria breaks down into first dysphoria, then militancy, in that order.
It is a process of subjective transformation that is very familiar, and one I admittedly have a tendency to forget about when the dark cloud looms overhead… Which is ironic, as it is a process intuited at the very heart of what “xenogothic” was always meant to refer to: a world-dysphoria that has an eye on its outside, on a transformation beyond the capitalist-realist chrysalis, which also wrestles with the difficulties of starting from a dysphoric position. As Williams writes:
The primary difficulty here is to think the transition from the moment of refusal, of separation, of scission, and the conversion of this negative energy into action, the shift from rejection and dejection to engagement. Here we would certainly need the supplement of a form or vessel into which this negative energy might be poured, a structure, a party, a battle group, some degree of institutionalisation of negativity which would serve to give form to the otherwise potentially solipsistic tendencies of the dysphoric.
For me, more recently, the Palestine solidarity movement has been serving precisely as that vessel. Many new friends I admire have enacted this transition from depression to action emphatically, when faced with a genocide. Nevertheless,
the politics of this form of militant dysphoria is deeply paradoxical, and seemingly always in danger of either sliding back into the logic of the vital or its dark inverted doppelganger, a reification of dysphoria itself.
It is a tension found at the heart of many writers who take a blackened (and even cold, metallic) view of the world. Fisher nods to Fox, Williams and Negarestani; Williams himself nods to Thomas Ligotti:
At the level of content there is a radical denial of the vital [in Ligotti’s writings], and yet this very disavowal enables the works to pulse with [a] certain inhuman vitality. Within the libidinal economy of the depressive mind, whilst life itself is refused, the life of the depressive economy, of the inverted libido, becomes omnipresent, becomes a new kind of life. Ligotti, for example, whilst claiming an absolute anhedonia, a freezing[-]up of the machinery of desire and enjoyment into a crystallised, timeless, ice-like tableaux, at the level of productivity remains motivated. Fundamentally[,] of course, Ligotti still writes. Instead of a refusal of the vital, of enjoyment, the dysphoric libidinal economy seemingly learns to enjoy displeasure, to metabolise disenchantment itself as a new kind of alternative energy source.
It is relatable, even if embarrassingly so — I wish fewer posts on this blog began with dejection, only to write my way out of it, but that is a precious function of this blog, which I’ve long made peace with and, yes, actively enjoy…
The Analytic-Hysteric
Taking this militant dysphoria together with Fisher’s informal Y2K schema of social links, we can also return to Lacan’s four discourses — in particular, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse.
Here, a bit of explication is necessary: the position of the dysphoric militant resembles the Lacanian ‘hysteric’s discourse’, that is, the position of someone who says, “I am the master of a master become impotent”. This position contains its own jouissance, in that this subordination to a decaying master’s discourse can nonetheless be enjoyed.
Alenka Zupancic frames the hysteric as follows:
The hysteric’s indignation about the master really being just this miserable human being, full of faults and flaws, does not aim at displaying how castrated he is; on the contrary, it is a complaint about the fact that the master is precisely not castrated enough – if he were, he would utterly coincide with his symbolic function, but as it is, he nevertheless also enjoys, and it is this enjoyment that weakens his symbolic power and irritates the hysteric.
But is there not something else at play here?
Lacan’s hysteric’s discourse takes place in a world where a master’s discourse is decaying, and an awareness of this fact — the sense that one possesses a privileged knowledge of the master’s deprecation — amounts to a sense of usurping the master’s discourse with one’s own. It is a discourse no less susceptible to co-optation by the university discourse. In the context of the Palestine liberation movement, it is where distain for NGOs and researchers sometimes comes from, who risk only ever trying to hold the master to account in the context of his own legislature. The hysteric may well take the place of the conmen in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ in this regard, — the ones who exploit the master’s vanity, like jesters of the court, ridiculing but hardly overcoming, because the emperor is more than capable of withstanding the jeers of his subjects.
The dysphoric militant is less a jester than a wolf in the throne room. Lacan’s position is one of knowledge, interpretation, and always vying for meaning. The dysphoric militant may well take on a more nihilistic position that gladly sees meaning — especially a ‘masterful’ meaning — emptied of its pretensions.
A Wolf in the Throne Room
Lacanians would undoubtedly tightened the trap here again. There is no escaping the knot of language. Even Fisher knew that action was nothing without its proper narration. Maybe this is a flaw — actions speak louder than words — but Lacan too noted how the meaning applied to language was a human predilection. The system itself (whether of language, as that which is most fundamental, or any other other system for that matter) does not need meaning to function; only we do.
But do we, really? In the late-00s speculative-realist blogosphere, we must remember that nihilism was also newly affirmed. Ray Brassier offered up the most salient rallying cry for the new nihilist when he argued:
Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter.
It is a view affirmed also by Badiou — a notable Lacanian with formerly Maoist tendencies — whom Bassier quotes. Badiou writes:
As far as nihilism is concerned, we shall grant that our era bears witness to it precisely insofar as nihilism is understood as the rupturing of the traditional figure of the bond; unbinding as the form of being of everything which acts as a semblance of the bond.
Which bond? Social bonds? Perhaps…
All of this lingers in the background of Williams’ militant dysphoria too when he writes how
a world protects its consistency by rendering itself a black box, invincible and invisible, taken for granted. The human world is one determined by vitalistic principles, and it is these which are undone in dysphoria, hence undoing the world which they construct. If capital has subsumed the world of life, has exploited and manipulated its processes to such an extent that it becomes synonymous with life, and indeed a form of life itself, then perhaps the way of death, of non-life, of the freezing[-]over of the vital offers a way out of its particular strictures. It is certainly true to say that capitalism as it stands now requires a degree of acquiescence with the “big other” — to at least pay lip service to the affirmationist common sense. This means that at the level of microeconomics, we must “enjoy” or at least pretend to do so, and at the level of macroeconomics that the dogma of growth of gross domestic product as strictly equivalent to the common good and the elevation of the general standard of living of humanity must be maintained. So in identifying with the state of dysphoria itself and hence to subtract from this world, the militant dysphoric effectively abandons a world already made cold by capital’s alien life, and then perhaps, undoes it. Perhaps.
I find all of this clarifying… I hope I’m not the only one.
Again, as I keep repeating as of late, this sort of militant dysphoria — as a process of transformation — that can only result in direct action, which does not petition the master to fully cohere with his symbolic function, but rather acts when and where he won’t. In many ways, it is all the more fitting that this is a position that the master cannot understand. He sees every would-be usurper as a hysteric. This will (hopefully) be his downfall.
Coda
Writing time is precious. It does not present itself so often these days. This post has become a kind of cork in latent energies that I’ve been desperate to release somehow. It barely takes the edge off, but it is better than nothing.
The world is cold. It’s nearly June, but it feels like summer came and went over a few days in early May. I pick up my phone and my headphones and scroll through iBroadcast until I find Wolves in the Throne Room. I’ve not really been in the mood for metal in years. I’m in the mood for it again now.