Photographs from my recent trip to Berlin. Prior to the discussion held at Brecht-Haus, on “Sehnsucht nach dem Kapitalismus“, the German translation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures, I spent an hour with the graves of Marcuse, Hegel, Fichte and Brecht. It was beautiful there.
A childhood spent driving to all destinations, no matter the distance, has meant that flying never gets old. From my seat by the window, the sun glamours in rivers and ponds. The speed of it all. Forty-five minutes in the air to cover most of an island home I have yet, in thirty-two years, to see the whole of.
I can’t turn my eyes away from the water below. It burns wet meanders against my retinas, and I sneeze. Little land capillaries are now everywhere I look.
I know the sun is so unfathomably distant, but I can’t stop thinking about how I am blinded by its reflection a mile below. For a moment, that mile below seems more distant than any other glanced up into, high above. Everything expands again into lightness. I gained so much weight after the fall. It is shed as I come to know another life.
The sky is the first source of knowledge. Jacques Lacarrière on the Gnostics lies open on my lap. Here are my underlinings:
A quest to know is “launched against the entire universe, against the immensity of the firmament, against man’s original alienation and the falsity of systems and institutions”.
“All the beings of our world are … the sediment of a lost heaven.”
“Weight, cold, and immobility are at once our conditions, our destiny, and our death.”
“The task of the Gnostic [is to] discard or lighten all the matters of this world”; to “break the ancient curse which made the world a cheat and a sham, and cast us down, far from the sparkle and blazing illumination of the hyper-world”.
“Let us begin at the beginning … with the sky.”
On Saturday 27th April at 2pm, I will be chatting to Jon Greenaway at the Lubber Fiend in Newcastle upon Tyne, all about his new book, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch.
Come through! It’s free.
Following the recent Spanish translation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures, I was interviewed by Luciano Lahiteau for Revista Ñ, the cultural supplement of Clarín, Argetina’s biggest newspaper. We talk about the lectures, how they came about, and unpack some lingering questions around Fisher’s approach to class and desire. You can read the interview here.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Luis Diego Fernández has a review of the lectures themselves.
Last year, Lighthouse, Edinburgh’s radical bookshop, selected Narcissus in Bloom to be a part of Beacon, their current affairs subscription bundle. To introduce the book to subscribers, they sent me over a few questions and I recorded some answers. They’ve just recently uploaded that video to their YouTube channel.
A few months later, Lighthouse invited me to take part in a panel discussion, alongside Nathalie Olah and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, on “The Stories We Bring” for the Edinburgh Radical Book Fair. You can watch that here.
A DJ Seinfeld edit of Burial’s “Archangel” has gone viral and deeply polarised opinion online. Within a few hours, Seinfeld (even with a name like that) had to say something to the effect of “sorry, I guess, but it’s really not that deep.”
I feel bad for him, honestly. Personally, I think the track bangs. It infuses a bold new life into “Archangel”, as any good remix should. I don’t think that’s a sacrilegious thing to say when talking about an artist otherwise synonymous with “the (un)death of rave”. The tension under discussion at that time — and arguably making a return — was the capacity for a “degraded ideal” (as hauntological music was described) to still make something new. Whether the edit is to your tastes or not, I think it is really interesting to imagine what that original ideal might have been, as if making an un-degraded version of what “Archangel” sounds like. It takes nothing away from the original; it literally add to it.
Seinfeld makes the point perfectly in his tweet when he says:
Go listen and enjoy Burial. He made his tunes imagining what the clubs were like from the outside (yes ive read Mark Fisher too), and I simply always enjoyed imagining his tunes playing inside of the club.
Is it really such a bad thing to — with tongue firmly in cheek — bring Burial “to life” in this way? To emphasise rave’s undeath, which Burial’s sound has increasingly been doing, only to throw aside its wistful core? Does it miss the spirit of Burial, or is Burial not the haunted spirit of that big room sound? DJ Seinfeld has boldly inverted Burial, and I think this makes the edit genuinely interesting. It’s an edit that makes a classic track new and more appropriate to now.
We’re emerging from a global pandemic, after all, during which many of us didn’t go clubbing for almost two years. A whole generation of teenagers missed out on messy informative experiences I know I took entirely for granted. We’ve only recently emerged from a time when many of us — whether we’d been to a million raves or none at all — were stuck daydreaming of big sound systems and the pressure of bodies against bodies and the sweat and the joy and the freedom to move and breathe however we want to. It was a time when Burial’s music made a (re)new(ed) kind of sense, and the Tunes 2011–2019 compilation was my go-to driving record for most of that time.
In light of all that, I think there’s something wonderfully symbolic about marking a return to the dancefloor with a fat edit, on which the bass isn’t a haunted memory but a new lifeforce. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier, or at least in a way that has so quickly caught our collective ear. (Credit where due, Kode9’s remix of “Rodent” might even be better than the original, and I loved hearing him play it out over the months that followed its release. I also think DJ Seinfeld’s edit of “Archangel” is better than the Asa & Sorrow one that usually gets applause from Reddit lurkers. In fact, the only remixes that please the fans are those that don’t mess with the formula too much. But I couldn’t be less interested in those, personally…)
In a similar vein, I’m curious as to whether this backlash also illuminates a tension that has always been present amongst Burial fans. What continues to make me laugh, for all my deep love of Burial’s entire output, is that Untrue is one of the few “electronic music” albums a lot of my rockist friends will tolerate and even enjoy. In fact, it was a gateway album for a lot of people I knew when it came out. They’d never really listened to dance music in their lives and thought it was all boring, repetitive shit anyway. But Burial — much to the surprise of everyone, I’m sure — broke down that barrier for a moment. No doubt this was helped by the weird unsettled pop-culture moment it arrived into. Burial doing a remix for Bloc Party, for example, feels like a bizarre blurring of boundaries that could only have happened in the late ’00s, when everyone my age was mainlining the latest season of Skins and pirated Adam Curtis documentaries, whilst being bombarded with the suggestion we were living beyond the end times, but his haunted two-step shuffles really do sound good on anything.
Burial converted all the rockists (and the rock stars) to a bold new popular modernism. People who had no real interest in UK club culture suddenly heard this beguiling album and wanted to know what it was mourning or haunted by or dreaming of or what this anonymous producer was straining so hard to hear. It spoke to the experience of the uninitiated, those on the outside, on the threshold. For a certain generation, this outsider position was that of younger siblings fascinated by a strange music coming from bedrooms they were barred from. (The joke now doing the rounds about Burial apparently never going into a club misses the point of hardcore’s hazy continuation outside of that space.) As DJ Seinfeld mentions, Burial has spoken about being the younger sibling of a passionate raver; an older brother who regaled him with stories of another, more nocturnal world that Burial the younger could only imagine. He talks about loving that music just as much as his brother did — darkside jungle in particular — but he also had a very different, more solitary relationship to it as a result, hearing it in bedrooms rather than on dancefloors. But that context is no less valid. Kodwo Eshun talks about this in More Brilliant than the Sun: both the dancefloor and the bedroom were established as laboratories of chemico-libido-cultural engineering in the 1990s, and both spawned strange mutations across the hardcore continuum. These spaces should — and did — speak to each other. But the Burial purists don’t seem to agree.
Lee Gamble is another example of someone who has also spoken about this kind of relationship to dance music, in the context of his own oneiric post-rave records. Even I’ve written about my experiences of being a ’90s kid and hearing this weird music drifting across estates or out the windows of passing cars or only hearing it properly once a year at Hull Fair. For a long, long time, I only associated jungle and hardcore with fairground rides, and I’d remember the relative calm of the car ride with my Dad before the sensory overload. He’d put on Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy as we drove toward the big lights and fast sounds, and when I’d listen to that album in my room, “No Quarter” always evoked the shadowy breakdowns of darkside jungle in my imagination. The bedroom-bound imagination built aberrant connections to barely experienced worlds outside, which made albums like Lee’s or Burial’s make sense immediately when I first heard them, because I knew what it was like to dream of raves as not even a teenager and imagine a foggy spectral music in between the bedroom and the car and the dancefloor, yet understanding all of these as liminal sites for the emergence of the carnivalesque.
Beyond those informative experiences, I didn’t go to my first club until after dubstep had hit its peak, around 2006, doing most of my young adult raving to Welsh mutations of a now-classic Bristolian sound in tiny, grubby clubs from 2010-2013. But no matter what time period I bring to mind, it is always weird and wonderful to come from the periphery and go chasing rave’s white rabbits across cities you can’t afford to live in or contexts you barely understand. It’s an experience to be wholly affirmed, because dance music is always at its most exciting when its chasing the wisps of an imagined ideal and trying to bring it into being from “nowhere”.
But it seems that this expression of an outsider ear has also resonated with those who fail the promise of those dreams and, in bringing their rockist sensibilities with them, give way to purist tendencies that have always been anathema to dance music in general. An album like Untrue becomes a melancholic ode that is loved by people who couldn’t give a shit about the thing it’s pining for in the first place! That’s not a hauntological response; that really is just postmodernism. And that’s what leaves a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to the transcendent popularity of Burial. Compared to that bullshit, DJ Seinfeld’s edit is harmless. I’d even argue that Burial’s music, as the expression of the undeath of rave, its rhythmic shuffling onwards, has been asking for this kind of big fun defibrillation for a while — just as rave culture in general has, since death certificates are continually being written in spite of all assertions to its actual lifeforce. “Hardcore will never die” gives way to a peculiar unlife all the same. With that in mind, yes, this playful exercise in putting meat back on the wistful bones of Burial’s hallucinatory sound might even be interesting! It’s sad to think that that kind of generous ear — and the hope I’ll get to dance to it in the club soon — would be an affront to anyone.
But again, none of it is that deep. It’s fun, and I refuse to believe that anyone would stop dancing, cross their arms and scowl about it, if it ever came on in a club. The rave only dies when we stop dancing anyway, and this edit definitely isn’t going to manage all that.
An hour of woozy tracks for the faltering arrival of spring; the disorientated return of a world in delay.
Tracklist
Rafael Toral, “Fifths Twice”
Bishop / Rezaei, “Bulgar Rose”
Ulla, “Song”
Burial, “Unknown Summer”
Mhm, Mhm, “Demonstrate”
William Basinski, “A Red Score in Tile”
Kode9, “Astro-Darien (Part 2)”
Silvia Kastel, “Xantharmony”
96 Back, “H34RTBR0K3N (9696 <3)”
Eye Measure, “Why Do People Vomit? (Rian Treanor Remix)”
DERECHO Rhythm Section, “D Groove (Loraine James Remix)”
Astrid Sonne, “Everything is Unreal”
Raum, “Revolving Door”
Tara Clerkin Trio, “World in Delay”
Wollen wir wirklich, was wir zu wollen behaupten? Diese Frage stellte sich der britische Kulturtheoretiker Mark Fisher in seinem letzten Werk »Sehnsucht nach dem Kapitalismus«, das dieses Jahr erstmals auf Deutsch erscheint. In der Diskussion mit dem Herausgeber des Buches, Matt Colquhoun, geht es – in einem ideengeschichtlichen Ritt durch das Denken der Neuen Linken, der postmodernen Theoretiker*innen und der konservativen Reaktion – um die Rolle der Begierden.
I will be in Berlin on 24th April 2024, talking with the team from Jacobin about Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures, recently translated into German and published by Brumaire.
The event will start at 19:30 and be held at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus. You can find more information here.
On 20th March 2024, I will be talking about Mark Fisher at the invitation of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Circle and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It will be a keynote address preceded by a discussion featuring Sinaí Banda Bernal, Jacqueline Calderón Hinojosa and Edgar Morales Flores, and moderated by María Alejandra de la Garza Walliser.
I’m going to talk about post-capitalism, depression, and the search for lost time. The talk will be in English but there will be live translation to make up for my monolingualism. You can register for the online stream here.
