Month: February 2018

Responses to ‘LD50’

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I’ve been surprised and amused by the responses to my LD50 post from the other day from the gallery’s supporters.

Below are various Twitter comments posted here for posterity.

Also, I’d rather not leave any misunderstandings or bad readings to fester on the timeline so it seems sensible to clarify things as they come up.

More tweets might appear if I manage to inadvertently irritate anyone else.

I have a longer post on “justice” brewing too.

LD50

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When I was writing about the effect of Mark Fisher’s death on communities at and around Goldsmiths last year, there was a notable exemption from the timeline of 2017’s events.

LD50.

I’d thought about including it, as the drama surrounding the gallery and its exhibition and events programme (which Goldsmiths was directly implicated in) was a topic of conversation that persisted for weeks, months even… but it ended up on the cutting room floor.

There was something of an institutional paranoia about being inadvertently caught up in fascism that the intense reaction to LD50 epitomised: the desire to retain some sort of mythical political purity.

It’s amusing in hindsight, in much the same way a lot of my notes from lectures on the Ccru include transcribed questions that ask whether this or that element is inherently fascist (because of Land’s involvement alone).

It’s a wonder anyone managed to get anything done.

I found my notes about LD50 recently, written early last summer:

LD50 has been a major part of this community.

Analysis of right-wing political projects has been very abstract. LD50 brought it right home.

The crisis of Mark’s death brought to a head a number of other crises that preceded and exceeded his death — LD50, Trump, Grenfell. Neo-fascist digital infrastructure and support for it; neo-authoritarian American politics; austerity.

LD50 is a flashpoint within the struggle for Land’s thought. Three groups are fighting for it. LD50 brings this home.

The focus on community in and through grief is correct. The struggle to inhabit the turbulence of this moment and to let it work upon you and make it an intervention. To make your life an intervention.

Even if it’s just a footnote, make concrete the right-wing abstraction.

LD50 brought what many think of as an American thing to our doorstep. Taking on an invasive proximity. Reaching right into the question of the struggle of Acceleration and what to do with melancholy.

It is interesting how dissipated that paranoia now is and how the fight is over having been “won”.

What LD50 brought home has been absorbed but not processed. “Shutting down” the gallery felt like an act of collectivised and externalised repression. Rather than properly coming to terms with what people feared most about themselves and their own politics, they found something else to stamp on as an act of displaced atonement.

An Anon on CuriousCat asked me late last year: “LD50. Fascist gallery or accelerationist hub wrongfully targeted?”

I think the response still stands:

Is this really a question that still interests people? It all took place on my doorstep but I can’t profess to having any real understanding of a protest I didn’t go to over an exhibition I didn’t see. From what I have seen: Edgy twitter archaeology doesn’t seem very accelerationist to me. As for fascist — according to whom? Reactionary, boujee artists who were horrified by a sudden flash of self-awareness illuminating their complicity? Or anon Tumblrs with ulterior motives? The Shutdown LD50 campaign began by asking earnest and necessary questions but I have no interest in defending either side’s contribution to a shitshow that has used up more than enough oxygen in 2017.

However, following yesterday’s post about Westworld and Trump, I can’t stop thinking about what the 2018 versions of 2017’s fights will look like. Short-term victories seem to have done nothing for long-term goals. As the new world order becomes familiar, people sink back into complacency.

What is to be done?

I was at a party recently, having to defend openly reading Nick Land. You know, the usual…

It wasn’t the first time this has happened but this person was perhaps the most belligerent I’ve had to answer to. It was an encounter that stuck with me more than others and finally made me wary of talking about what I write on this blog in public.

It has stuck with me because the argument dropped at my feet was that the crux of Land’s philosophy, as far as this person was concerned, was a rejection of justice. And how could anyone give him the time of day when that is his untenable position?! It’s just so right-wing!

My response was to point to @cyborg_nomade‘s recent tweet about the various political positions on Acceleration and talk about my interest in community/ies but, in a state of utter mental exhaustion after a very long working week, I didn’t actually do a whole lot of talking. I just took all the character judgements on the chin and waited for it to be over.

Much like the aftermath to any other kind of argument, I spent days thinking of all the things I wish I’d said but didn’t think of in the moment. And so here I am, left wanting to articulate something where before there was just an overtired silence.

“What the fuck is ‘justice’?!” I found myself muttering bitterly to myself as I wandered around the house and to the shops and to the office for the next few days…

Justice, it seems to me, is a spectre. It is a social promise but when is it ever meaningfully achieved? The word itself seems to jettison half its agency to the Outside. Too often when invoked does it resemble a theological concept.

In a conversation at a reading group a few days after this encounter, much time was given instead to the word “responsibility”, as invoked by Helen Hester at a recent conference in London — a conference I didn’t attend and so I can’t comment on her sense of the word in any detail but it has nonetheless echoed around my head as I try to come to terms with my own formulation of it. It is a formulation that is important to the first part of this new series (along with its tangent and the in-progress Part 2).

Land’s horrorist approach to the end of the “World”, as laid out on his blog, clearly rejects justice, but it does seem to express a sense of responsibility (responsibility to nothing is a responsibility nonetheless):

It is thus that the approximate contours of the horrorist task emerge into focus. Rather than resisting the desperation of the progressive ideal by terrorizing its enemies, it directs itself to the culmination of progressive despair in the abandonment of reality compensation. It de-mobilizes, de-massifies, and de-democratizes, through subtle, singular, catalytic interventions, oriented to the realization of fate. The Cathedral has to be horrified into paralysis. The horrorist message (to its enemies): Nothing that you are doing can possibly work.

“What is to be done?” is not a neutral question. The agent it invokes already strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist response: Nothing. Do nothing. Your progressive ‘praxis’ will come to nought in any case. Despair. Subside into horror. You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but reality is your true — and fatal — enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently, in your ear: “despair”. (The horror.)

I think it is this responsibility to nothing that irks the left the most. The privilege of being able to do nothing transforms it into doing something. The leftist horror, it seems to me, is that they are already closet horrorists. They overcompensate the volume of their doing to make sure that it seems they are doing something of value. (A phenomenon the Right have latched onto in their obsession with “virtue signalling“.)

LD50 offered an opportunity to meaningfully reckon with this. A moment that past with an intense amount of confusion, panic and international news coverage but little meaningful change other than a shuttered and graffitied gallery space.

Following the consideration of counter-intuitive praxes in The Walking Dead and The OA in my post ‘Mental Health Asteroid‘ I was interested to see Adam Kotsko mention the latter show in the aftermath of this week’s school shooting in Florida, which has occasioned the all-too-familiar ineffective public outcry and, notably, accusations that Trump himself has ‘done nothing‘.

Kotsko invokes the concept of ‘liturgy’, related to his study and great work translating Agamben, which I need to read more of as it continues to orbit questions of community that are central to the interests of this blog. (I’d recommend this post by Kotsko for further reading and some of these themes were considered here, again in brief, in ‘Monastic Vampirism‘).

Kotsko writes:

[The OA] does not presume, I think, to offer a solution to school shootings — certainly it does not indulge in the fantasy that such a problem can be solved without cost. But it does suggest that a counter-liturgy, born out of deep trauma, may be able to disrupt the liturgy of the school shooting in which we all find ourselves.

School shootings are the most spectacular and horrifying example of similar events that provoke near-scripted responses. The religiosity of these responses is endemic and increasingly lacking subtly the further down the path of leftist eschatology we travel.

If that is the politics the left are choosing to stick with, they need counter-liturgies for a lot more than mass shootings…

After the Trump Glitch

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I didn’t know Mark had written on Westworld and so now here I am reading over his thoughts, published in the New Humanist.

For those unfamiliar, Westworld is a generally unpopular 1973 film written and directed by Michael Crichton (best known for writing the novels that would become The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park) which was remade for TV to critical acclaim in 2016. It’s due to return for a second season in April this year.

I’d thought about Westworld a lot when it first came out, writing on it for an essay that I later shelved and forgot about.

What I’d wanted to consider in that essay from 2016 is now outdated in an interesting way and so I thought it might be interesting to explore this train of thought again before the series comes back.

Considering the cultural and sociopolitical context in which the first series came out and the effect this context had on the discussion around it, I’m left wondering where the series will go next and, particularly, how it will be received by commentators.

Continue reading “After the Trump Glitch”

The Sensation of Looking

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Spending a few days exploring the 2014 Brighton Photo Biennial with friends, a recurring joke passed between us that went something like, “I saw plenty of things I liked during the Biennial, but none of them were photographs”.

The highlight of one particularly chilly October morning was Camper Obscura. As the name suggests, it is a touring camper van turned into a camera obscura. We found it down by Brighton Pier advertising itself on a sandwich board offering “free visual experiences”. Finding such a promise irresistible, I boarded the van with a friend.

Sat opposite each other, we were given a large piece of cardboard which we held between us under something resembling a periscope. Sat in darkness with the camper’s curtains drawn and the door closed, we adjusted the position of our cardboard to bring the light streaming down from above into focus. A disorientating image appeared before us.

Continuously readjusting the cardboard as the periscope turned and our arms grew tired, our host explained the science behind what we saw before us — the physics of light and the way the camera obscura attempts to copy the biological function of the eye. These explanations only went so far, unable to fully account for the uncanny image we saw before us.

Turning the periscope towards the sea, it seemed to lose its more familiar ebb. Mediated through a camper van and onto a piece of cardboard we struggled to keep level, waves looks like writhing maggots at a lower visual fidelity. To look at it for too long was migraine-inducing.

These and other experiences over the weekend seemed to summarise my frustrated relationship with photography. I rarely look at the medium in books or exhibitions and find myself feeling anything that comes close to my initial experiences of looking at the world around me.

My sustained interest in photography despite this seems to be occasioned by a familiar feedback loop. As Hubert Damisch reminds us in his Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image, it was this sensation that first inspired the invention of the modern camera.

Each and every one of those innumerable inventors who made photography what it is today were not actually concerned with the creation of a new type of image or a novel mode of representation, they simply wished to fix the images which “spontaneously” formed on the ground of the camera obscura.

The adventure of photography begins with our first attempts to retain that image he had long known how to make. The failure of photography begins when we realise that it is never quite the same. The practice of photography finds its feet in the affirmation of a representative impossibility.

Although the camera obscura is now inseparable from an established technological lineage, it is worth remembering that it existed with this purpose all of its own; a purpose that runs deeper than its now technological redundancy as a precursor to the modern camera.

This seems central for Damisch, for whom photography has been co-opted into filling a specific role and, importantly, one that is profoundly different from that of the camera obscura that came before it. He seems to lament the discussion on the sensation of looking that was inherent in the camera obscura that has since been lost to photographic theory’s obsession with the technical implications of the modern photographic process or the prevalence of “documentary photography”.

The retention of the image, its development and multiplication form an ordered succession of steps which now compose the photographic act, always taken in its reductive whole. History has determined that this act would find its purpose in reproduction, much the way the purpose of film as spectacle was (perhaps inadvertently) established from the start.

With a focus on photography’s scientific and commercial potentials at first winning out over more explicitly artistic pursuits, is it any wonder that the desire to capture the sensation of the camera obscura has been forgotten as one of the medium’s defining characteristics?

Nicéphore Niépce is the only pioneer Damisch mentions by name in his Five Notes, no doubt because of the lasting power of his impressionistic window view (pictured below) which, whilst less “technically” accomplished than the efforts of his competitors, captures the sensation of looking through a camera obscura perfectly and with an almost painterly quality, resembling a black-and-white Monet or Cézanne.

Instead, despite these beginnings, photography has been defined in opposition to and in competition with painting. Photography claims to have won the war of representation but it is painting alone that has benefited from this conflict, having been freed — according to Andre Bazin — “once and for all, from its obsession with realism and [allowing] it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.”

This aesthetic autonomy can be seen throughout modern art following the invention of the camera and it is with Paul Cézanne in particular, born a little over a decade after Niépce made this first photograph, that the discussion on the sensation of looking in the visual arts has continued.

Although similar in style to the Impressionists, it is the artistic process that differs most. Cézanne would work analytically, considering all angles and characteristics of his subject to produce a painting that bore all the sensations of his intense and often repeated looking — documents of his experiences of not just light and colour, but form and line and everything else as they appeared to him. As Gilles Deleuze wrote on Cézanne’s works, this sensation is only experienced in the viewer “by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed.” The process of looking feeds back into the the expression of the sensation of looking. This now seems to be an obvious point to make about this period in art history but it is worth noting as a function that photography is capable of but has long since forgotten.

 

Darkness Itself III: Whitstable Flesh

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There is something keeping the south afloat — financially speaking; unnaturally speaking. I am sure of it.

Recent trips to the coastal settlements that dot the seaward edges of Kent and East Sussex have given me a glimpse into an alternate timeline where the all-too-familiar hardships of the north have been kept at bay.

Nowhere is the North more grim than at its edges and if the Justified Ancients sought to encapsulate all of it with their parochial roll call, the oceanic currents of their jagged trance nevertheless suggest a land that is coastal even at its centre.

Nothing disintegrates quite like the coast.

Nevertheless, here in the south, there are far fewer boats left to rot. Greasy spoons are replaced with novelty eateries. London expats bake pies and make the most of easy-access eels, charging double for authentic East London recipes that have been both displaced and returned to their source. Ramshackled fishing huts are yours for £150 a night on Air B&B.

Even the rain is somehow pleasant here. It doesn’t chill the soul in the same way.

Whereas fairgrounds take up beach-side car parks in the north, locked up as travellers and carnies alike wait for the end of the endless out-of-season season, here there are no rides to be seen anywhere. It is as if the heart of a coastal culture of the mildest hedonisms has been removed to stop the gangrenous spread of class strife.

Penny slots remain, of course – there is no accounting for that plague – but they seem to ensnare far fewer drunks and minors.

There are no tanning salons. Even though the south still shares the British weather, they seem to have lost the need to make up for the sun’s abandonment of these isles. Fortunes continue to proliferate here, bringing smiles and strength to the local economy.

The north, in short, is mournful. It struggles.

The south sells itself as the prosperous vision the north forgot.

As I continue to wander and explore, I grow suspicious. There is surely something else at play here – some deal with the devil.

In Whitstable, recently, I could have sworn I felt it.

Continue reading “Darkness Itself III: Whitstable Flesh”

A Forest

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Come closer and see
See into the dark
Just follow your eyes

Into the trees

Suddenly I stop
But I know it’s too late

I used to work with a burly Welshman called Marc.

Marc liked music and we would talk a lot about our favourite records.

Most of the time we worked together it was to install exhibitions and so this was often the perfect time to listen to albums and talk about them. Other times, we’d just listen to the radio.

This morning, whilst on the bus into work, The Cure’s A Forest came on and I was reminded of the last time I had heard that song. It had come on the radio whilst I working with Marc around three years ago.

Marc began to laugh to himself when he heard it and told me a story about seeing The Cure at Glastonbury in 1986. I’ve never been to Glastonbury but one part of its reputation that precedes it is the size of the festival site itself. Marc said this can be irritating but it has its uses.

He told me that, whilst standing around all day, eating and drinking and listening to music, he had felt the need to relieve himself. He walked around for a while but felt that this was an “evacuation” that warranted more privacy, shelter and a wider berth than your usual duck behind a tree…

Marc decided to walk for some distance, away from the festival site, away from camp sites, away from any potential passersby.

He found himself walking through a forest, through patches of bluebells and wild flowers, and soon he was in a suitable clearing, alone.

Marc dropped his trousers to his ankles, placed a selection of large leaves in a pile in front of him and attempted to squat next to a tree.

Before he had had a chance to exert any pressure on himself, he heard a low rumbling sound. The clearing around him gradually came alive with activity, like a storm had brewed out of nowhere, and then continued to excite itself beyond the possible influence of any natural source.

Before Marc’s very eyes, too shocked and too unstable to move, buffeted by the violent currents of air now billowing around him, his pre-selected leaves lost to the wind, a helicopter descended into the clearing.

As it touched down, a succession of bodies, their heads bowed towards the ground out of reach of the rotor blades, exited the helicopter and made their way to the edge of the clearing, towards the festival site, some carrying bits of equipment and lighter instruments.

The final person to disembark the helicopter, their hair a black bramble mess, caught Marc’s eye as they looked up towards their destination and, were it not for the force of air at their back, may have otherwise stopped in horror at the sight of Marc’s Somerset greeting.

It was Robert Smith.

Mental Health Asteroid

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Originally part of yesterday’s post, After the End of the World (Part 1), this post feels more at home on its own. Nonetheless, there’s a cross-pollination of references.

Social trauma, in the process of making-sense, often requires analogies to be formed — regularly channelling apocalyptic imagery to exacerbate a radical destruction of the sociopolitical “world-for-us” that violence of many kinds affectively instantiates.

Such analogies have been endemic in the aftermath of the neverending disruptions to the sociopolitical landscape that have occurred over the last few years. In late 2016, writing in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in the US, Laurie Penny diagnosed the extremity of psychological affects being experienced by many in that moment as precisely the destruction of “our world”.

The rise to power and election of Donald J. Trump is the sick recrimination of a society shriveled by anger and anxiety, and the response from deep within the psyche of the same society has been various degrees of panic, depression, and grief. Illinois suicide hotlines have been overwhelmed since the election, with calls up 200 percent, according to Chicago public health officials. A mental health asteroid has smashed into the carapace of a culture already calcified with anxiety and ambient dread. Major newsrooms are rumored to have hired in therapists so their journalists can continue to work. Everyone is wondering what this crisis will mean for their future, for their families, trying to work out how they’ll cope. Some coping strategies, however, are more dangerous than others.

I repeatedly referred to this passage within the community that formed in the aftermath of Mark Fisher’s death in 2017 as we tried to make sense of and inhabit the rupture that it opened up within and around us.

“A mental health asteroid has smashed into the carapace of a culture already calcified with anxiety and ambient dread”.

Whilst the affective catastrophe this phrase described resonated with the “structures of feeling” that arose in late 2016 and early 2017, as time progressed that resonance dwindled as our “community” repeatedly changed shape. (A lot more on that here).

Despite its eventual redundancy in the face of flux, the image conjured by Penny is nonetheless powerful in its paradoxical nature. The disaster she describes is an asteroid without a crater; a shockwave felt but not seen; a horrific planetary event without the disaster-movie spectacle and mass extinction it seems to promise. It is a disaster that leaves everything standing.

Continue reading “Mental Health Asteroid”

After the End of the World (Part 1)

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January 2015: Darryl Pinckney reports from the front line in Ferguson, Missouri, for the New York Review of Books. He is present for the announcement that the police officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted for killing Michael Brown.

Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, a Boston pastor and well-known civil rights activist, is also present and welcomes Pinckney into his group whilst they look for shelter following the announcement and the subsequent civil unrest. Riotous scenes of social self-harm travel around the world.

Sekou, despite being a staunch advocate for nonviolent protest and resolution, does not blame Ferguson’s residents and their supporters for attacking the police and the town itself:

[Reverend Sekou] feels that the system hasn’t worked and now needs to be born again. The young demonstrating in Ferguson had faced tear gas and assault rifles. “There isn’t any political terrain for them to engage in other than putting their bodies on the line.”

Thanks to Tobias Ewe for sharing the following post of Jehu’s on social media recently: Land, Wilderson and the Nine Billion Names of God. I hadn’t read it previously.

(As ever, I miss Jehu’s Twitter.)

What Jehu’s post does is articulate a position that I’ve been thinking about for some time now but he does so more astutely and more succinctly than I ever could — and it is the sort of treacherous position that it is better not to articulate at all if you can’t articulate it well.

Reading Jehu’s post has made me want to pull further at the frayed threads of the Left’s inability to write off humanity as Nick Land supposedly dares them to do.

Jehu writes:

For the longest time, I thought — mistakenly — that people just didn’t get Land — and in large part because they just didn’t get Marx. There is no way, I thought, you could lay Land and Marx side by side and not see they were talking about the same thing.

I have to admit now that I was wrong. The Left will never get Land because Land only offers them death. The idea that death is the culmination of history is a concept that can never be embraced by the Left.

This is a position I’ve tried to explored (tentatively) on this blog a few times over the past few months, or at least I feel I have orbited this point. It was also the central drive behind a paper written in late 2016 which was to be my first foray into notions of community and exit — Monastic Vampirism:

Let us take a shuffling step away from Left melancholia towards of a new Gothic politic – from Old Left to New Left to Dead Left.

There is a sense, in this (now old) articulation, that the invocation of death is facetious but I have always taken it seriously.

The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has been a primary inspiration that I have always been dissuaded from considering head-on (a fair suggestion).

BLM is a humanist political movement that has been built upon chants in which protesters self-identified with the deceased. Desiring to build on this sentiment is not to invoke All Lives Matter but rather to try to learn something from the communality of death that All Lives Matter fails to account for; to learn from the specificity of BLM in the aid of other specificities, all of which orbit each other in their intensive affectivities.

As such, these issues of race and black radicalism have lurked constantly in the background of my readings and writings over the past year but they have always ended up as footnotes and offcuts, primarily because it doesn’t feel like my place to articulate a cultural perspective that is not my own.

I also have a number of friends who are much better informed about these issues than I am.

Despite this, as I find myself reading various elucidations of the horror of whiteness and its disintegration in so much SF, to avoid an adjacent recognition of the horror of blackness (whether in its xenophobic or xenophilic mode) feels increasingly short-sighted.

If we are to learn anything about how to proceed from moments of collective trauma, ontological questions of blackness are essential.

Continue reading “After the End of the World (Part 1)”