Stop the attempted cooption of Mr Blobby. Cease and desist. We cannot allow his narrative to be rewritten by the powers that be.
A sacrilegious article over at Joe.co.uk has suggested that Blobby will be entitled to some sort of state funeral when he dies, as well as suggesting that he is the product of the normalised Oedipal structures of a nuclear family, that he is pervious to common illnesses, that he will be emblazoned on the national currency following his demise.
Ciara Knight asks the question: “So what happens when international icon Mr. Blobby dies?” and informs us:
Rest assured, there is a plan in place. A meticulous set of instructions that must be adhered to. These directions are locked away, with only two people in the world aware of their whereabouts.
The constitution clearly states that the United Kingdom will not be without a fully-functioning Mr. Blobby for a period longer than twenty-four (24) hours or one (1) rotation of the Earth around the Sun.
Blobby was hatched from an egg. We all know this. An egg from where? From the earth itself. He is the product of immaculate conception via palpable social tension. And you think he can simply be removed from this world by some sort of biochemical warfare? In the year of the Skripals, any sudden death of a public figure by curable disease must be treated with the utmost suspicion. It is common knowledge that Blobby will only transcend this mortal plane once the class war is over and full communism has been implemented after the demise of the late capitalist structures that birthed him as irrepressible libidinal ejecta.
So, come on then, Ciara Knight, if that’s your real name, what is this utter fucking bullshit? Who are they trying to kid!? This hyperstitional rehearsal of the death of Blobby would be seen as incredibly distasteful for even a D-list celebrity, never mind someone of Blobby’s stature, synonymous with the much-repressed national spirit in itself.
Blobby is not in the constitution. He is not akin to some former Prime Minister or the Queen Mum. Do not mistake his disruptive nature as being alike to that of Prince Phillip — removed from public life so as not to embarrass the establishment anymore from within. Blobby embarrasses the establishment from without. That is his power.
The only state funeral Blobby will attend is the funeral of the state itself.
As a case in point, I have been enthused to learn, via @oktokuiten, that Mr Blobby was once, at one time, literally possessed by a “hardcore, rave-loving S&M lesbian”, being embodied by the spirit of the age as much as he embodied it — Blobby: the revolutionary and reciprocal subject.
This is very important information and adds a whole new dimension to recent Blobby posting, giving further credence to the suggestion that Blobby was the mutant afterbirth of a repressed rave-era class war machine brought to life through the psychedelic colourgasm of a pink blob with yellow spots. This state-sanctioned image of Blobby is not mere poetic license — it is the reterritorialisation of a figure for the sake of pathetic clickbait. Whoever would do such a thing on a blog or website will be amongst the first against the wall. This is the cold, hard fact of Blobby.
The cooptive attempts do not stop, however. Many questions remain as to what Blobby will be for us. The war over his image and philosophy has been ignited at a moment that could not have been any less expected but also at a most convenient time, with so much of the country in chaos, that I have no doubt many are hoping this rewriting of his history will slip by unnoticed, like the small-print apologia in the tabloid press.
It is very explicit that Blobby is — must be — a positive figure, an anarchic figure, an emblem of desiring-disruption. But what are the stakes of his being coopted in this instance? What exactly are we fighting for? To understand the truth of Blobby is not to render him a costumed rave-loving lesbian as a caricature of another mode of living. We cannot allow him to be rendered grotesque and violent by a newly inaugurated neoliberal media elite.
I had begun to think more about this after I recently revisited a dual set of K-Punk posts, in which Mark Fisher explores the two sides of a contemporary psychedelia.
For Mark, psychedelia was not a general 1960s tie-dye aesthetic but rather the evocation of various potential approaches towards libidinal engineering in the era of Big Pharma and the violent repression of our global dissensus. This is an approach that could be used in various ways, both for consciousness raising and consciousness razing, and this is the same line in the sand that Blobby is being fought over.
Mark would first write about a “psychedelic reason” as a sort of natural egress from the confines of a subjugated inner experience. Whilst Mark advocated for a “getting out of our faces again“, this was not intended as a euphemism for hedonistic mindlessness. Mark would write, in fact, that drugs can be dangerous (ontopolitically speaking) because all they do is reveal to you, often messily, how fragile the subjugated self you hide behind really is. Rip off the mask at your peril. Better to do it carefully, with cunning; under the guiding hand of Baruch Spinoza…
Mark writes that what makes drugs, religious mania, mental illness, et al. dangerous is “not the state of ego-loss itself but the imprecision of the art of maintaining it, the fact that the organism might resume its rights at any moment, crashing you into psychic mini-deaths and melancholic catatonia.” Of course, the joy of Blobby is that there is no such recapitulation in sight; no fix on the horizon. He is on a pure line of flight that is all his own.
Fisher continues:
The problem with drugs is that they only put the Alien Parasite Entity (= His Majesty the Ego = the thing that calls itself you) to sleep. Their dissolution of the APE is temporary, all-too temporary. And after a while, the neuronal battleground — what you are fighting over AND what you are fighting with, i.e. the only resources you have — is itself damaged. APE has its way as you are dragged/drugged into permanent low-to-deep level depression.
[…] Drugs are like an escape kit without an instruction manual. Taking MDMA is like improving MS Windows: no matter how much tinkering $ Bill does, MS Windows will always be shit because it is built on top of the rickety structure of DOS. In the same way, using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end because Human OS has not been taken out and dismantled.
Blobby, on the other hand, is Linux-as-malware, ripping through the human security system that had tried to eject him. He is rogue code; the APE unbound from its oppressive architecture.
Later, Mark writes about the other side of this psychedelia: “psychedelic fascism”. He begins by quoting Stanley Kubrick, responding to criticism of his film A Clockwork Orange in a letter to The New York Times in 1972. Initially, the critic Fred Hechinger writes the following about Kubrick’s ultraviolent adaptation of the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess:
“Liberals,” said Malcolm McDowell, star of A Clockwork Orange, “hate that film.” The implication is that there is something shameful in the liberals’ reaction — that at the very least they don’t know the score. Quite the opposite is true. Any liberal with brains should hate Clockwork, not as a matter of artistic criticism but for the trend this film represents. An alert liberal should recognize the voice of fascism.
Kubrick rightly responds:
Hechinger is probably quite sincere in what he feels. But what the witness feels, as the judge said, is not evidence — the more so when the charge is one of purveying “the essence of fascism.”
“Is this an uncharitable reading of … the film’s thesis?” Mr. Hechinger asks himself with unwonted if momentary doubt. I would reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism — the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings — which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.
A Clockwork Orange is perhaps the perfect example to draw upon here, in orbit of Blobby. The violence and reckless abandon of both so often steal the limelight whilst it is in fact the language deployed in the midst of their actions that frames the debacles in front of you. From protagonist Alex’s “post-Joycean mash-up of Slavic, Cockney rhyming, Gypsy and Polari” to Blobby’s explosively expressive intonations of blobby blobby blob blob.
Where does fascism enter here? Through the violence of the individual or the smothering violence of the State that seeks to squash the libidinal individual? Mark writes, concurring with Kubrick:
Psychedelic Fascism legitimates and propagates a radically unSpinozist notion of being free: i.e. give free reign to your Inner Child = yr Inner Fascist.
Spinoza rightly says that children are in a state of abjection because, unable to repress their passively-generated and self-damaging impulses, they confuse being free with ‘doing as you please’.
Ask yrself this: who or what is it that cannot or will not explain what it is doing or why it is doing it?
It’s the Inner Child, the Alien Parasite Entity, the Foreign Installation….
‘Don’t mess with my mojo man….’ ‘Hey man, don’t lay that rationality tip on me, it’s, like, the forces of the cosmos being creative, y’know…’
Where is Blobby in all of this? Is he not our Inner Child? No. He has no self-awareness of such a role in the mind of the Repressed Adult. He has no internal justification for his rebelliousness. He is always already abjectly outside the established order. He is an Outer Child at worst, but this is not what he thinks he is. He has no conception of the architecture in which he has been inserted or the anarchitecture that he represents. He is a nomad. He is an outsider absolutely.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the man who, as a child himself, brought Blobby radically into his life not as Inner Child but as Father Figure:
Blobby is an anarchist. A pre-internet meme-making, Andy Kaufman-inspired troll, whose sole purpose was to humiliate the questionable craft of Z-list celebrities. A creature whose rebellious anti-establishment blues – well, anti-BBC, too – made working class children smile from Portsmouth to Glasgow at a time when Britain was still recovering from Thatcherism. I like to think my dad would have been sort of proud that a toddler was emotionally-fathered by such a renegade.
This is not the fascism of an Inner Child. This is a hobgoblin, a friend to children and a horror to adults. He is the renegade we don’t yet know.
Today, as the Brexit process falters at another low hurdle, we might also do well to remember here that the first translation of The Communist Manifesto did not translate the “Gespenst” of the book’s opening line as “spectre” but, rather, as hobgoblin.
How fitting!
If there is a frightful hobgoblin stalking Europe today, it is surely Blobby, emerging from the shadow of a doomed-to-fail Brexit. The process has been dismissed by many as anarchy. Blobby is here to show them what real anarchy looks like.
Do not let the state coopt him as they themselves go out of their minds. He is the people’s unconscious. Not theirs.
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