Month: November 2019

St. Ives

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13/11/2019

The day before, stopping off in Truro and running around the shops in the minutes before they closed, I decided to buy a rain coat.

I hadn’t owned one for years. I’m not sure why. It’s a Northern thing, maybe? I don’t really mind the cold. My winter coat is an old thing that has gone from fine fabric to a felt-like thing over the years that I’ve owned it.

On arriving in Cornwall, I felt an uncharacteristic urge to wrap up. The wind was fierce and the threat of rain serious. Something worthy of mountaineering felt necessary if we were to do all the coastal walks we intended to, despite the weather, and still survive.

I quickly felt like I’d made a very good decision.

On our second full day in Cornwall, it rained nonstop. We first decided to go to Land’s End but were scared off by the sheer force of the wind. Instead, we headed for St. Ives and walked its streets.

With the tourist season over, the entire town had decided to get all of its repairs out of the way. The high street was like a warzone.

We walked up the hill to St Nicholas Chapel, pictured above. This was the only photograph to come out from the day. Everything else was ruined by rain on lens and persistent fogging. Nevertheless, we saw seals from the hill to the west, overlooking the harbour, and we saw a lot of very brave surfers out at sea to the east.

I’d wanted to go and see Talland House — the one-time home of Virginia Woolf and where the bar was set for her happiness. When she would later write of a “room of one’s own”, it seems to be her room at Talland House that she remembers most fondly. However, on reading a Google review that suggested the house was down a private road, inaccessible, and with no signage identifying it and its history, I changed my mind about going to see it. Something I know regret.

I’d never realised her connection to St. Ives before this trip — our third or fourth in two years. Her time there influenced many of her novels, To The Lighthouse and The Waves most famously, but also Jacob’s Room. I started (once again) to read Hermione Lee’s biography which I’d decided to bring along for the trip and enjoyed reading her connecting of the dots between Woolf’s various descriptions of her room at Talland House, weaved into many of her books under different guises, and also the experiences of the town described by her extended family.

St. Ives is renowned for its connection to various artists and artistic movements these days but they seem to bring out a cynicism in a lot of people. For what it’s worth, Barbara Hepworth’s former studio is a nice if overpriced place to visit. However, Tate St. Ives itself is not. Leach Pottery aside, the rest of the town seems to be dedicated to the usual bland seaside tat. (“I’m a local artist… I put shells on things!”)

I was amused to read that, long before the arrival of Hepworth and co., the healthy cynicism directed towards St. Ives’ artists goes back over 100 years, with Woolf’s parents writing theirs down repeatedly.

First she quotes Woolf herself in To The Lighthouse:

But now, she said, artists had come here. There indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yellow boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by ten little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face, gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbued the tip of his brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr Paunceforte had been there, three years before, all the pictures were like that she said, green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing boats, and pink women on the beach.

It’s a passage which seems only obviously mocking in the context of Woolf’s own circle of avant-garde modernists who would no doubt look on the seriousness with which such tat is painted and scoff.

The most scathing tale comes from Julia Stephen, however — Virginia’s mother — who writes in “The Wandering Pigs”, a short story penned for her children, about three little pigs who wander around the bay and get up to mischeif. One of their encounters is also with a monkey, painting on the pier, whose response to Curly’s somewhat patronising exclamation is telling:

Curly, who was never shy, went up to see what was going on. He was quite surprised to see, on the bit of board before the monkey, the boats and their brown sails and blue sea running into the little harbour. ‘Dear me, you are very clever,’ said Curly.

‘You are very polite,’ said the monkey, looking round for a minute. ‘Are you an art critic?’

There is much more to be said about Woolf and St. Ives but, as luck would have it, it’s all recently been said, in blog form no less, over on Blogging Woolf, who visited St. Ives the weekend after we did.

A New Jerusalem: Laura Grace Ford on William Blake

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It seems that Laura Grace Ford will always find an opportunity for a dérive, even when she’s standing still.

Last night, on 28th November 2019 — William Blake’s 262nd birthday — Laura discussed the poet and painter’s work in an explorative and wonderfully meandering talk to coincide with Tate Britain’s current exhibition and a conference focusing on Blake’s artistic legacy and body of work.

Laura described Blake as “spectral force”, exceedingly relevant to the city of London today. She focused, at first, on his poem written about the city, noting how, in its original graphic form, it takes on a “sociogeographic” sensibility — not psychogeographic, all too concerned with the affects of a landscape on the individual, but sociogeographic in the sense that Blake’s poems fold and unfold the city’s “psychic infrastructure”, in much the same way that Laura hopes to do with her own walking practice.

The influence of Mark Fisher on Laura’s thinking last night was palpable and beautifully put to use in a way that did not simply reference his writings but put his ideas to use and take them on a walk elsewhere. I was struck by her descriptions of a weird London, where “the edge of the city is folded in” constituting a “liminal centre”.

For Laura, Blake foreshadows many of the diagnoses that Fisher made his name articulating. He foresaw “our contemporary psychic binding” so effectively that to read his poetry is to feel like he is still writing for a “people-to-come” — not us but a people still beyond on a postcapitalist horizon.

In light of this, Laura noted how Blake’s most famous poem, Jerusalem, the anthem for a million Women’s Institute meetings around the country, is not some ode to the Christian daydreams of suburban mundanity but a call for the sacred. Jerusalem, in Blake’s poem, is a city-to-come, a city to be built among “dark Satanic mills”. His Jerusalem is an emptied Christian signifier for a newly collective city experience, a city of the sacred.

The sacred here is undoubtedly the Bataillean kind — his term for that ecstatic experience that explodes outwards from the everyday. The sacred, however, is not an individualised experience. It always occurs, for Bataille, through the collective. This understanding transforms Jerusalem, as Laura explained, “into a commons.” She described how Blake “was violently against the Enlightenment concept of the individual” and so Jerusalem becomes Blake’s term for “an England of collective joy”, accessible through the deployment of his “early capitalist counter-sorcery”.

Laura went on to invoke Mark Fisher’s essay “Baroque Sunbursts”, and particularly its endlessly evocative conclusion:

‘From time to time’, writes Fredric Jameson in Valences of the Dialectic, ‘like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays of from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are still possible.’ This psychedelic imagery seems especially apposite for the ‘energy flash’ of rave, which now seems like a memory bleeding through from a mind that is not ours. In fact, the memories come from ourselves as we once were: a group consciousness that waits in the virtual future not only in the actual past. So it is perhaps better to see the other possibilities that these baroque sunbursts illuminate not as some distant Utopia, but as a carnival that is achingly proximate, a spectre haunting even — especially — the most miserably de-socialised spaces.

For Laura, in line with this, rave is Jerusalem, as are the impositions of Extinction Rebellion that pry open the psychocapitalist infrastructure of this city and others like it.

I was intrigued by these references and the renewed importance of collectivity to Laura’s practice in this context and wondered how these elements could come together anew.

Describing walking through London “as an experience of sensory derangement”, she emphasised the importance of walking to her own creative practices and the practices of others — most psychedelically noting De Quincy’s London as an opioid labyrinth. But drugs are not an escape from the binds of the city. (Mark knew that well.) It is having the right to roam that is most central to an expansion of collective consciousness. She described how walking, for Blake in particular, seemed to be “a prerequisite for visions”. Mind and body must be able to share in that exercise of exploration.

I started to think about the Kinder mass trespass and the mass trespasses of rave across the Home Counties, propelled by the gravitational slingshot newly provided by the M25 Orbital. Extinction Rebellion’s more recent trespasses have, instead, repeatedly provoked controversy. Trespassing is for hopping country fences and occupying sites of natural beauty to make them accessible for all. Extinction Rebellion are fighting for the same thing but to walk through the city to fight for it has ruffled many feathers.

I tried to ask a question about this during the Q&A but garbled it. Laura was gracious enough to try and respond to my half-baked musing anyway. I suppose I was left wondering: To what extent are communal walking practices — collective aphertopic dérives — still possible? Is a mass dérive still a mass dérive if it has to be sanctioned by permit? Is trespassing still a viable political act? The die-ins and sit-ins of recent decades have certainly helped raise awareness of issues but I wonder if the necessity of staying still, even feigning death, is a sign of the times.

The squats have gone. Westminster protests seem ineffective. Laura’s call for the collective — itself chiming with a chorus of other voices who have recently placed the possibility of the communal above all else — is all the more necessary now because the movements through which we are able to enact it have been been stultified without us knowing. We must make room again for Blake’s people-to-come, referred to by Laura via Deleuze and Guattari. Perhaps we also need a new kind of unlawful “assemblage”, again in a Deleuzian sense — not a non-sanctioned gathering but an ontological grounding of fluidity, exchangeability and multiplicity — the very sort of collective becoming that the infrastructure of the city itself has been constructed to arrest.

‘For K-Punk’ Fundraiser — 6th December 2019

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This January, it will be three years since we lost Mark Fisher.

As in 2018 and 2019, there will be various events going on around Goldsmiths to celebrate his memory. There will be the third annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture — speaker currently unannounced — but it’s gonna be big — and, as ever, our for k-punk party which has been organised by a small group of current and former Goldsmiths students on very little time and for very little money.

The last two years have been incredible occasions and anyone who came to last year’s night at Ormside Projects will know that this celebration has become serious business. It’s a super important night to a lot of us and a necessary accompaniment to the lecture-hall celebrations of Mark’s legacy.

Unfortunately, they still cost money. As much as these events run on the charity of others, it is also really important to us that they are done right. That means suitable venue hire, fees for artists and all that stuff.

So, what better way to raise money for a big party than throwing a smaller party?!

Info below taken from the Facebook event page:

FOR K-PUNK FUNDRAISER

FRIDAY 6th DECEMBER
10pm – 4am
£5 otd

TASTY BAKERY / JAMAICA FLAVOUR
207 Rye Lane, Peckham
London SE15 4TP

LINE UP:

xin
https://xxxiiinnn.bandcamp.com/

simkin
https://www.mixcloud.com/jamiesimkin/

xenogothic
https://www.mixcloud.com/xenogothic/

bruno verner & eliete mejorado (tetine)
https://www.mixcloud.com/TETINE/

serf

****

For k-punk are nights and events celebrating and thinking with music theorist Mark Fisher (1968-2017). www.4kpunk.tumblr.com

A limited number of “Mark Fisher would have loved Cardi B” scarves will be available to buy on the night. All proceeds going towards the Mark Fisher Memorial events in January 2020.

See you soon! ✨

A Gothic Line, Broken: Fragment on Worringer, Deleuze, Fisher

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Here’s an off-cut from an unpublished essay trying to tie accelerationism to an explicitly Gothic sensibility. It may not make much sense out of context but isn’t a Gothic line a line that interrupts itself?

I’m thinking a lot at the moment about how both the Gothic — or Goth more specifically — shares with accelerationism a consideration of the ungrounding of the subject of modernity. There is a line here — a Gothic (flat)line — that connects Wilhelm Worringer to Gilles Deleuze to Mark Fisher, who together diagram an intensity that has struggled to survive a politically nefarious reductivism.

Accelerationism is Gothic but it likewise suffers from a Dr. Frankenstein problem — far too often is the diagnostician mistaken for the monster running amok.

Is it any surprise that, in our own contemporary moment, that the Gothic — or that which is, at the very least, recognisable as such – is aesthetically maligned, confused and impotent? Today — and online most explicitly — cyberspace is the natural pasture for our newly xenogothic considerations after all — the Gothic finds its unhome in the constellation of thoughts known as accelerationism.

Nick Srnicek, speaking at an event held at the Artworkers’ Guild in London in 2013, would describe “two ideas of accelerationism” which broadly hold true today — although many more particular subsets of this grouping of theories have since proliferated. He speaks to an “epistemic acceleration, which involves broadening knowledge and synthesising all the different fields” — that is, fields of understanding — “and political accelerationism, which essentially is the use of certain technologies and social capabilities.” For both formulations of this widely misunderstood theoretical umbrella, Worringer’s understanding of the Gothic’s “will to form” remains prescient. We may even extend Worringer’s conception of the Gothic in our present moment to include a will to deform.

In 2019, another and increasingly more dominant understanding of accelerationism emerged within the popular imagination — an extremist and (alt)right-wing accelerationism that looks upon the “truth” of a supposedly maligned white Western subjectivity and attempts to exacerbate chaos in order to strengthen anew the consolidatory tendencies of a patriarchal and white supremacist late capitalism. This accelerationism represents a fight for the preservation of a dwindling subjectivity instead of an embrace of difference and change; of post-historical becoming. The present malignance of accelerationism is commensurate with a maligning of the Gothic — a Gothic that struggles to retain its speculative nature under the weight of both the future and the past: a past that is, for all intents and purposes, seen as complete and closed and a future that we increasingly fear will not involve our species.

And yet, as Mark Fisher writes, in indirect response to Srnicek’s paper, it is this moment of historical and speculative dissensus that warrants a new Gothic explicitly. For Fisher, death and the end of experience, “not just individual death but hyper-death, and not just the unexperienceable but the evaporation of the very possibility of experience, via extinction or whatever … has consequences for this question of aesthetics.” This question is precisely that already explored by Worringer in his study of the Gothic. Just as the architects of Worringer’s immediate past were concerned with their own experiences of a world emerging from a complex past into an unknown future, we too today require a newly speculative aesthetics. This is to say, quoting Worringer, that “if we dismantle to its very foundations the marvelously delicate fabric of the unbroken chain of transmitted characters, we are left with a creature who confronts the outer world as helplessly and incoherently as a dumbfounded animal, a creature who only receives shifting and unreliable perceptual images of the phenomenal world, and who will only by slow stages of progressive and consolidated experience remodel such perceptions into conceptual images, using these as guides for finding his way, step by step as it were, in the chaos of the phenomenal world.”

Roseland

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18/11/19

Our first full day on the Cornish peninsula and the week’s last day of sunshine. We went to Roseland and walked along the coastal path before descending into a very witchy forest and reading on the beach.

I had with me a collection of short stories by Daphne du Maurier (which later felt prescient). My girlfriend had with her The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun (no relation). We saw seals far off in the distance and watched them through binoculars.

That evening we watched the sun go down over Pendennis Castle.

Mall Goth: A Chemically Castrated Romance

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I’m putting the finishing touches on an essay this week that, surreally, I won’t be publishing in English.

Last month I received a really exciting commission to write an essay to be translated directly into Italian and I’m excited about it because it has given me an opportunity to have a dry run at an introduction to my second book which I’m already thinking about and working on.

I’m thinking it’s going to be some short tract on accelerationism, the Gothic and modernist literature but I’m not entirely convinced that all the different strands I have mapped out will hang together as well as I hope they will…

Anyway, it’s opportunities like this that allow me to go deep into topics in a way that makes for good book chapter trials down the line, so I’m hugely grateful.

I won’t give too much away in terms of what this new essay is about — more information on that in the New Year most likely — but, for the most part, I’m dedicating it to the current state of the Gothic and, more importantly, I’m expanding on what I think the “xenogothic” is.

I already have a short explanation on my ‘About’ page but it has so far felt really good to expand on that definition with some receipts and references.

The “xenogothic”, for me, is an involuted term for the Gothic’s own internally propulsive outsideness. It is what Deleuze called “a witch’s flight” and what Wilhelm Worringer called the Gothic’s “will to form”. It’s that unique momentum that has allowed the Gothic to subvert all the forms that have previously defined it whilst still retaining a sense of aesthetic continuation. It is that drive that has allowed the Gothic to survive for almost a millennium whilst all other artistic movements and trends have found themselves tied up and closed, reified into recognisable types.

This is not to say that the Gothic isn’t under threat from capitalist co-option, of course, and we’ve already seen this happen over the last thirty or so years. So, in the essay, I explore how the Gothic has been reduced to a commodity form whereas previously it has represented a proletarian fugitivity from capitalist control whilst excavating a subterranean xenogothic that still — albeit slowly — moves the Gothic forwards.

I pay particular attention to how, on the surface, Goth, as a music genre, seems to have been the Gothic’s last hurrah. The translation of a Gothic sensibility into the sonic opened the door for its commodification and, unfortunately, it seems like the 2000s “mall goth” moment was its final form and death knell.

Thankfully, despite this, there are still plenty of examples of a resilient xenogothic tendency to be found in our contemporary subcultures that treats the capitalist subject with a fresh contempt — Gazelle Twin’s “Belly of the Beast” is probably my favourite — but I’m nonetheless spending a lot of time at the moment trying to figure out what went wrong and this is partly what I’m using this new essay as a vehicle for.

This morning, I found myself embroiled in writing a ridiculously long footnote after having something of an epiphany but it feels like too much of a tangent even for footnote status. Instead of binning it, I thought I’d chop it up and distill it here instead for future reference. This might even turn into a short series of posts where I share my cut-offs from this essay for posterity.

Danny Baker has this Twitter bugbear that I really enjoy where he decries the resurgent popularity of Freddie Mercury and Queen as a musical entity that, for him, acted as lighter fluid for punk’s explosive emergence on the UK’s cultural stage.

He has posted a lot of tweets about this over the years:

It seems to be an opinion that has been getting him in hot water for almost a decade online — Queen are a national treasure apparently — but I don’t see how anyone can disagree with him. The band’s post-prog embrace of decisively uncool monarchist and bourgeois sensibilities is something I have always felt a violent revulsion towards and, the fervent reappraisal of Mercury’s own identitarian Venn diagram aside, I have never understood their elevation to pop darlings — something which has only gotten worse over the years with the beatification of Mercury’s legacy in film and on stage.

What’s more, I have always associated them with Goth’s more recent death rattle.

When I was growing up, as I’m sure was the case for most people my age, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was somehow still this giant classic rock anthem, thirty years after its initial release, cryogenically frozen in a cloud of embarrassingly pop-American decontextualisation, where everyone loved to recreate that scene from Wayne’s World for some reason, treating it as a genuine headbanger instead of some bloated slab of embarrassing bourgeois pomp. (More on America’s tone-deafness regarding class and cultural production tomorrow.)

In the mid-2000s, this revulsion came to a very surprising head for me when the corpse of Freddie Mercury was reanimated by Gerard Way and his emo megaband My Chemical Romance. Their 2006 “concept album” The Black Parade was this weird self-aggrandisement of emo that sought to elevate the genre’s stature by tying it to some woeful prior standard of sonic experimentation and high culture — specifically, late prog, glam and the “rock opera”.

The influence of Queen was particularly explicit, with the biggest nod towards their idols being their echoing of Mercury’s sexy camp marching band schtick.

Maybe this says more about the state of the cultural landscape in 2006 more than anything else but somehow the record found itself receiving considerable critical acclaim as some sort of post-hardcore innovation. At school, the hype around it pissed me off more than anything. As far as goth was concerned, it was the year of Liars’ Drum’s Not Dead and Scott Walker’s The Drift, but fat chance that was going to compete with the mid-2000s frenetic cultural stasis. (I was very bitter about it — for some reason, all these years later, I still sort of am…)

In hindsight, I think I have an better idea as to way. My Chemical Romance and The Black Parade have long been a bugbear of my own, akin to Baker’s Queen obsession.

It was precisely Gerard Way’s blatant aping of Queen’s stage aristocracy and faux-military pomp that made me despair at the emo kids in my midst as a teenager. Most of them were my friends but I didn’t understand where they were coming from. This wasn’t innovative. It was mind-numbingly nostalgic for a moment in musical history that I thought Goth was supposed to be against. Their cross-pollination of Goth decadence with their love of Freddie Mercury and Queen felt like a monstrous betrayal of all that Goth originally stood for and against.

It still does.

Their importance to the “mall goth” moment of the 2000s is surely, in hindsight, unsurprising. I only wish they’d stayed dead. We certainly don’t need them right now.

Here We Go Again

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I spent today on the beach in Cornwall with a book of short stories by Daphne Du Maurier. The first one in the collection was a story about an island of peaceful inbreds off the Cornish coast who batten down the hatches to avoid a deadly easterly wind. When they wake the next day, they find the wind has blown a ship full of exotic men into their harbour and, with them, a thalassic libido that infects the island’s inhabitants — with horrific results.

It’s a story that feels almost proto-Landian. Desire, cigarettes and brandy blown in on horny noumena, interrupting an incestuous status quo.

The wind was blowing pretty strongly whilst I was reading this story and, later, as we tucked ourselves into our Cornish cabin with the fire on, out from the east, another familiar wind blew in…

Zack Beauchamp has written a long article for Vox about what Accelerationism is and how it’s fuelling violence across America. It’s been about six months since the last so we were due another one.

There’s nothing new here. It suffers from the same irony of all the other mainstream media guides to Accelerationism in 2019. It is the journalistic misreading of philosophical Accelerationism that people have been trying to correct for six years but which has perpetuate nonetheless in a journalistic echo chamber that has done far more to inspire the alt-right than Deleuze and Guattari. They’re certainly not getting these readings from us. A lot of these edgelords are looking for Cliff Notes and finding articles just like this one instead.

Credit where due, Vox has done something a little bit different here. They’ve interviewed Land himself to get some clarification… But then not understood what he’s said and joined up all the same dots as the tabloids:

The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a celebration of the status quo.

The mainstream ethos of the 1990s was thoroughly capitalist, the collapse of the Soviet Union creating a sense that the spread of the American economic and political model was inevitable and irresistible. This coincided with a technological revolution — the rise of widespread internet access and the birth of mass internet culture, a sense of a world defined by and connected through technology in previously incomprehensible ways.

At the University of Warwick, a relatively new but well-regarded English university, a young philosophy professor named Nick Land argued that the triumph of capitalism and the rise of technoculture were inextricably intertwined. Drawing on the work of famously dense continental theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Land argued that capitalist technological advancement was transforming not just our societies, but our very selves. The self, he believed, was being dissolved by the increasing speed and pace of modern life — the individual was becoming less important than the techno-capitalist system it found itself in.

“Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor,” Land wrote in an email to Vox, in characteristically cryptic style. “Our question was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it provokes.”

There’s something weird going on here. This section is completely glossed over but all the answers are here?

This talk about a self that is “being dissolved by the increasing speed and pace of modern life” remains the central interest of Accelerationism. When U/ACC balks at the violence of these alt-right nut jobs, that’s why! How many times have others said that these individuals are precisely the subjects that Accelerationism hopes to critique? These violent acts are responses to the sensation Accelerationism predicted!

@qdnoktsqfr has this comment locked down once again:

To reiterate something I tweeted at the time of the NZ shootings—ultra-violent contemporary white supremacist ‘accelerationism’ is a macho-humanist *reaction* to what Ccru presciently referred to as accelerationism in the 1990s. [1]

Historically speaking, the first thing accelerationism critiques—in a hard way (i.e. procedurally not semiotically)—is this subject position. [2]

As Deleuze and Guattari say, we haven’t seen anything yet. [3]

She continues in a separate thread:

Accelerationism is a transcendental philosophy. Horrific monkey-plane reactions to the reality of a material process that determines the conditions of possibility for monkeys is not accelerationism. [1]

Apprehending the relationship of the monkey-plane to the material process is all accelerationism as a philosophy does. [2]

I don’t intend to just repeat myself here and get all blue in the face. Robin has articulated the general feeling well on Twitter:

‘And it’s important to realise that there are many accelerationisms’.

Really really hard I know. but try [1]

Have no interest in playing at moral exoneration, still less denying that words have their own destiny.. just, if you’re gonna insist on doing it, then make a minimal effort [2]

Robin is quoting himself here, from an old interview about acceleration he did back in 2014. He’s right now as he was then.

There are many Accelerationisms.

To say this new alt-right Accelerationism isn’t Accelerationism at all is wrong. It’s not ours, but that in itself isn’t an argument against theirs. It’s as “valid” an offshoot as any other that the philosophical accelerationists around these parts continue to perpetuate for themselves. It might be the dumbest of them all but that doesn’t invalidate its usage of the term. I’m not sure anything can do that at this point.

The main thing I’m left thinking tonight is that Accelerationism is taking a similar (albeit suitably digital and accelerated) route into the ideological swamp as communism.

Who today can call themselves a communist without having to answer the “What about the murderous totalitarianism of Stalin?” question at some point? I know I’ve done it.

(Try wearing an Acid Communism badge in a city like London and explain what it’s all about after a few beers to someone from a post-Soviet country at a house party. It’s hard to do without looking like an edgelord cunt but I’d still say I’m a communist.)

The trouble is that you can’t deny that Stalinism is a kind of Communism. People can go on about “Actually Existing Communism” but at the end of the day it also comes down to a shitty instantiation of some nice ideas. And that’s a hard thing to argue unless you know about the consistency and virulence of those ideas for yourself.

You can try but drawing on footnotes to Capital isn’t all that convincing. The best argument you can make is that communism lost its way when it progressed as an ideology that decided to cling onto that which it was originally designed to critique — the (capitalist) state.

Accelerationism is the same. It has lost its way by clinging onto that which it was initially meant to critique — the subject — but, unfortunately, that doesn’t make the alt-right’s upset not Accelerationism.

It does, however, still make shitty journalists shitty journalists. Maybe one day these sorts of articles will be as ridiculous as the current equations being made between Jeremy Corbyn and Stalin in the press. That acknowledgement won’t make them go away though. Best to get used to it and carry on anyway.

The main thing to remember is this: no matter what Accelerationism gets called or denounced as, the sensation it describes will still haunt modernity.

Back Soon

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Off to Cornwall for a week, staying in some hut without Wi-Fi or an indoor toilet. The weather is meant to be shit all week but, to be honest, I think Cornwall is even more beautiful when it’s grim. (Photo above from last year of Robin in the rain walking towards Lanyon Quoit.) Back to our usual programming soon.