This week we read pages 68-72 of Cyclonopedia — specifically the two short chapters “Excursus II (Memory and ( )hole Complex)” and “Pipeline Odyssey: The Z Monologue”.
Unfortunately, there were more recording issues today… I will have a better and more stable set up once I’ve moved house at the end of this month, when the new Patreon goals of better quality recordings and more varied audio content will be in full swing.
This week I dropped my stupid USB-C headphones and mic into a bowl of oat milk and could not use any alternatives because 3.5mm jacks just aren’t a thing anymore, I guess. Because I could not record with headphones, there is a doubling of channels in the recording. I figured out I was fucking it up about 40 mins in but the solution — fading out my mic when not talking — wasn’t an ideal solution. Sorry about that. I hope it’s not too annoying to listen to.
Introductory notes below as always.
Now we’ve been around the houses and possibly read more of not-Cyclonopedia than we have of the actual book itself, in our own very roundabout way I hope this book feels like it has opened itself up to us a bit more.
Getting back to the text and coming to these short few pages feel right, I think, especially this discussion of memory and the ( )hole complex, which feels quite relevant to how we’ve approached things here. You’d all be forgiven for forgetting where we’ve been and how we’ve arrived at where we are but that’s sort of the name of the game.
If memory holes cause such accessibility problems for the subject, it is because they have been specifically designed for being accessed from the other side. In this sense, memory holes are accessible not for the subject and its integrated self but for that which is exterior to the subject and has no self (no one).
We can feel this in our own reading of the text, in Reza’s own writing of the text, and in the various plot holes that emerge from the text itself without Reza or us.
I like the footnote here too — another hole — which mentions Tell-Ibrahim, an archaeological site in Iraq. I won’t pretend to be any expert on this but even the Wikipedia page is telling. It tells a potted history drawn from many, many sources and fragments and histories and stories and legends. It’s the sort of ancient site that tickles the Western imagination in its elusiveness but I think what Reza hopes to emphasise here is that, although the Western mind might find the mysteriousness of this site and many others like it to be fascinating, through the lens of Orientalism, the mystery is taken as a given without any consideration of the fact that the mystery emerges from Western forgetfulness, and it is through these memory gaps that oil, Islam and the Middle East seap in. As he says, “memory gaps are the instruments of their homecoming.”
In a way, I feel like this is Reza affirming the horror of those classic ghost stories about Egyptian curses and mummies’ tombs. In the next short chapter when he talks about Jihad as a kind of defensiveness, that’s what I imagine — traps, curses and zombies put in place to keep graverobbers at bay. I imagine, at Reza’s hyperstitional and geological scale, these deterrents are eternal. They are as much deterrents for the modern Western man with his sticky fingers as they are for any more local thieves from antiquity.
Is this not also how oil functions? This kind of liquid gold lurking in tombs that makes graverobbers’ eyes glisten and disregard their own safety for the sake of cupful. And it is not a trap left by man but by the earth itself. It is in this sense that it is a war machine. It is the earth’s war machine as a kind of blobjective immanence and, as we are of the earth, all that we are as a species — our cultures, ideals, aggressions and concerns — are swept up in its global flows.
I suppose what might be interesting for us to discuss here and try and pull out of this short chapter — which hopefully makes a bit more sense now that we’ve sort of tackled war machines last week — is how exactly are we to understand this collapse of capitalism and Islamism onto each other in oil? What are the implications of this? How are we to think it in a way that helps us progress through this book but also how does this shift our own sense of East and West? These are questions that we might find, if not answered, at least fleshed out in later chapter, but I’m interested to know what you all think.
Friend of the blog and real person Leah Hennessey has an EP out this week. We’ve been engaged in a fragmentary back-and-forth ever since I lightly declared war on her project Slash back in February, following which we found ourselves torn in two and then stitched together across cyberspace. She’s been an excellent pen pal.
Earlier this week, Leah sent over the press release for her band’s first self-titled EP Hennessey, out September 11th (yesterday!) from Velvet Elk Records. I didn’t need any more of an excuse to write about her more recent activities. The EP’s first two earworms and the band’s accompanying livestreams have frequently soundtracked our flat during lockdown. To see the project fully realised is a joy.
What I remember most from that blogpost shot across the bow of the great ship Slash back in February was my somewhat barbed comment that Leah and her collaborator Emily Allen resembled “‘Nietzsche’s Last Women’ — ‘They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery'”. Leah posted this on her Instagram and added that she and Emily had never felt so seen. However, seven months later, it is clear Leah has fully embraced this gothic position at the end of history — and so she should. Frankly, it is a thrill to have written this as a critique only to now witness Hennessey owning it so magnificently. There is perhaps no better sign of the times.
I have been thinking about this repeatedly whilst listening over and over again to the EP’s truly inspired cover of The Waterboys’ “We Will Not Be Lovers”. A song from 1998 that is already a surreal and anachronistic “post-trad” folk number, Hennessey’s version swaps around eras and sends the song back a decade (whilst at the same time updating its sound?). It is a dizzying whirlpool of cultural reference points that results in a sound that feels weirdly adrift and out of time. And yet, what is revealed underneath is Hennessey’s own rootedness in our time-warped present.
This has arguably long been the function of a cover song — a way to emphasise one’s own standpoint through the words of another. Despite the words not being her own, it is Leah who shines through here absolutely. No transformation necessary.
This is a sentiment Leah gives voice to in the press release and throughout the rest of the EP, including on new single, aptly titled “No Transformation”, which she says
is a kind of hymn to acceptance. I’m starting by saying I’m too this or too that, repeating these criticisms I have of myself like a mantra, but instead of comforting myself by saying those things aren’t true or by trying to become someone else I’m realizing that I can only evolve or even be happy if I start from exactly where I am. I’ve spent so much of my life tearing myself apart in the hopes that I’ll rise from my own ashes and this is me breaking that cycle.
I can relate. In fact, I imagine many of us can after this weird year. We’re told so often that we are stuck and we are a pastiche generation, languishing at the end of history. For Hennessey, however, there is something extra smuggled underneath a song that we might otherwise assume is the epitome of a millennial harking for better times. This isn’t just “New Wave cosplay”, as she sings on “Let’s Pretend (It’s the ’80s)”; this is a moment to “remember what our parents forgot.” In so doing, we might break the present cycle.
The mail order package was sturdy and wrapped in custom parcel tape, with my name and address both writ large in india ink. For god’s sake what’s the shipping you’ve paid on that, my dad asked with a groan of disapproval, noticing the customs form attached and the multitude of stamps. In silent denial, I chose not to answer. It was certainly more than any sixteen-year-old could responsibly account for.
I slipped the package from his hands, still looking at the tape, water activated and alpine-themed. It too was adorned with a distinctive penmanship — more india ink. No more than an inch and a half thick, I was mesmerised by the unmistakable silhouettes of Douglas firs that lined its edges like a kanji forest. I said thanks and thanked the postman in turn, who was peering curiously around the door, waiting for a telling-off that never came. My dad absentmindedly closed the door behind him and in the postman’s face, forgetting his existence, his disgruntled eyes trained only on me. Tucking the package under my arm, I dashed upstairs to my room furtively before any further questions could be asked.
With my back to the door, grasping the new arrival tightly against my chest with one arm, I used the other to turn on my dad’s old hi-fi. I had inherited it — read: rescued it from abandonment in the loft — along with his record collection. It was positioned precariously behind the door — a terrible place for a record player, but there was no other space for it in my tiny room. It also functioned of a useful adolescent barrier — when there was music playing, you did not enter. My dad, respecting the sensitivity of a vinyl record, and all too aware that the records I played were once his own, seldom crossed the threshold.
Unfortunately, this inheritance, rather than sating a childhood desire to constantly listen to the Beatles, had instead inaugurated a bad habit: spending any and all money I had on records of my own. Taking a pair of dulled scissors from a crammed desk-tidy, I opened my new aquisition with glee, already knowing what was inside. If the customs forms were not enough, it was the parcel tape that had given it away. It was No Flashlight, an album by Phil Elverum, released the previous year under his (relatively) new moniker Mount Eerie.
Fifteen songs on a slab of pure white vinyl, the twelve-inch record was housed in a folded sleeve that, when unfurled, measured sixty by forty-two inches. Some said it was the largest album cover ever produced. On one side was a large drawing of Phil himself in the yawn of nature, made with heavy washes and expressive flourishes of yet more india ink. On the other side, a kind of exploded notebook, divided into half a dozen or so columns. Focusing on the notes, I laid the cover out flat on the floor of my bedroom as the needle dropped on “I Know No One”. This “giant explanation poster”, as it was called, covered all of the available floor space and it stayed there for the next six weeks of summer in 2006.
“Knowing no one will understand these songs / I try to sing them clearer”, Elverum sings. “I have tried to repeatedly explain / In complicated songs / But tonight we will find out / I know no one / And no one knows me”. As Elverum’s recordings filled the air over the following weeks, I poured over the lyrics and annotations and photographs and copious other notes that now carpeted the floor of my bedroom, attempting to prove him wrong. And yet, the closer I looked, the more aware I was that I could never know Elverum. In fact, I began to wonder to what extent Elverum could even know himself. The void turned reflexive. I don’t know myself either, I thought, with an adolescent profundity.
It soon became clear that this was not so much an album as a work of philosophy, although it was simultaneously an object that shirked all allusions to such grandeur. At the very least, “No Flashlight”, as an album title and as a mantra, articulated a worldview. It was a worldview that I felt was shared.
“Actually walking in the dark without a flashlight requires more sensitivity than we usually use”, Elverum writes in the liner notes of the song that gives the album its name. It is an album dedicated to the hairs that stand on the back of your neck as heightened animalistic senses take over in the dead of night — walking out into the night, “forgetting” your flashlight, and striding forth regardless, wide-eyed and afraid and thrilled to be there.
I knew what that was like. That was my favourite pastime. Stranded in suburbia, the outskirts of town were nonetheless within walking distance. Within five minutes, I was in fields, stumbling over refuse from the local quarry or skirting the edges of the M62. Within twenty minutes, I was on the banks of the River Humber, looking out at oil refineries and their UFO burn-offs as their chimneys faded into the black of the night. Elverum’s musings provided a lens through which to curate the circumstances of an eerie shuddering and see this otherwise mundane environment differently.
Vixen’s screams and the pitch black of night were abstractions hard to grasp back then. I really believed that something was lurking out there in the post-industrial wilderness, along the old railroads and quarry tracks. There was (something), as Elverum puts it, that “sings above the house”. But this was not simply a romancing of the night; in fact, the lesson Elverum made most clear was that we should get out of the romance. His was a kind of blackened psychedelia, finding the weirdness of real fear — an amygdalic realism — relishing the tricks the mind plays on itself and enjoying them like a magic show put on by the psyche.
No Flashlight, then, is an album about unbelief. It is an album of paradoxical perspectives. It is, as Elverum sings, about knowing the night from the perspective of the day; knowing the mountains from the perspective of the town; knowing a map of the land and the land in itself; seeing the moon reflected in a puddle of water and seeing the actual moon. It is speaking to that experience that fades away as soon as it is uttered or illuminated and being enchanted precisely with the impermanence of permeability and the enjoyment of unreason from a rational perspective. It is about the impossibility of no abstraction, of things in themselves, of nature and no nature. It is an album that straddles the strange relations and momentums and desires that entangle the world and the singer, and give form to the song of the world and the world in song. It is an album that revels in these contradictions and the confusion that follows them. It is a nest. It is one musician’s attempt to gather together enough references and sensations and coordinates to create a world inside this one. When passed through, this world changes how we might inhabit its nested neighbours.
That resonanted with me deeply. I, too, wanted to find another world inside this one.
Summer, 2020
I thought I might start my new life up north by writing a poem every day. I’d never done that before — write a poem — at least not seriously. In fact, previously, I might have told you, quite definitively, that I hate poetry. Not all poetry but certainly what passes for poetry these days – the sort of comment made by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about but is at least somewhat aware of the fact that they don’t like how the kids are doing it.
That’s how I felt as a teenager, most certainly. An old girlfriend took me to a poetry night once, and then a few years spent around universities meant that I heard plenty more student offerings. I hated (and still do hate) the over-affected drawl of your average “slam” poem. The spoken word feels like it has been reduced to a cheap rollercoaster and I find myself struck more by a poem’s rhythm than its meaning. That’s all well and good if you’re listening to R&B but, as the same rhythm unfolds again and again in the mouth of poet after poet, I can think of nothing more irritating than that pretentious vocal tic, whereby the emphasising of irregular syllables into the perpetual echo of the same syncopated utterance constructs a rickety scaffolding suggestive of meaning where there often isn’t much of anything. Just a half-witty coinage and a mode of reading that wouldn’t be amiss on a night with your local amateur dramatics society.
I have evidently thought long and hard about why I don’t like poetry…
But then, one day in lockdown, newly intrigued by the modernists of the early twentieth century, I read some T.S. Eliot aloud to myself on a whim, having thought I might give this poetry thing another go. I was transported. I had previously heard it said that poetry is written to be read aloud but I thought that was a general rule, not one to be taken on so personally. Hearing that beautiful composition reverberate through my own bones in the solitude of a coronavirus quarantine was a revelation. I decided I liked poetry then and I wanted to read more of it.
Writing poetry is, of course, another matter.
If I have any sort of reputation as a writer, it is for quantity over quality. Writing (or rather, blogging), for me, is a method of organising thoughts as they fall out of my head. It is a compulsion. It is far from some considered exercise in self-control. This is to say that it is not a matter of great contemplation and reflection – that’s called “editing”. Writing (and blogging most of all) is, instead, a torrent you later sift for gold. Who said “write drunk, edit sober”? I have been guilty of following that adage a little too closely in the past. Two pints deep is a sweet spot for productivity but when you write as much and as often as I do, that rule starts to impact your waistline before you know it.
Poetry, then — what for? Brevity is an interesting notion at present; condensation and economy – the careful management of resources. It would be an interesting challenge to be careful with my words for once; to try and say more with less. My problem, if I have one, is that I am often neurotically chasing long-winded truths. Writing comes easy because so does extrapolation, joining the dots, unfolding an argument, rambling, ranting, following the twists and turns of a thought and building a labyrinth of independent and borrowed knowledges, then providing the Ariadnean thread out of my own maze. I’ve long been aware that this is an unpopular way of working in fields adjacent to Continental philosophy and, particularly, the Ccru — where philosophy and poetry are often silent bedfellows — but this confession is not necessarily an admission of didacticism either. It is a habit picked up from Elverum, who would make the world’s biggest album cover to avoid the travesty of miscomprehension. In this way, it was Elverum who taught me that clarity can dazzle and confound just like opacity can, if done well.
Elverum has reneged on this tendency to over-explain, however. No amount of writing has allowed him to shrug off the suggestion made constantly in the music press that he sings about nature (rather than “no nature”). Embracing the futility of explanation, he has come into his own as a poet as much as he is a songwriter.
I don’t think that’s me though… To attempt poetry, and to try and become disciplined within its constraints, is an unnatural thought. It would, however, be a healthy exercise in letting go of this compulsion — to over-share and over-write. Or perhaps it would be a healthy way of diverting the aphoristic energy usually expended on Twitter.
It is surely no secret at this point that I’m struggling at the moment with the internet. Complaining a little too often about the succession of creeps I have encountered on social media in recent weeks, my friend Natasha recommended Juliet Jacques’ Trans: A Memoir. True enough, I found the way her relationship with social media develops over the course of the book to be so relatable. At first, she writes about how “social media keeps me sane, providing contact with friends, family and well-wishers at any time, saving dozens of energy-sapping conversations.” She reflects on the initial joys of Twitter too: “finding new books, films, art and writers, doing years’ worth of ‘networking’ in six months, making friends in London and feeling part of so many conversations, even sensing that old power structures were being challenged by those traditionally excluded.”
Later, however, she reflects on the fallout of the “trans wars” and the Guardian‘s now well-established propensity to suck when it comes to trans rights and representation. With the column that served as the basis for her book having been published there, the feeling of having to pick a side as an old friend and colleague outs themselves as a bigot is perhaps more of a conundrum than it would have been otherwise. She is almost too exhausted to take much of a stand. Instead, she just left Twitter.
“I’d thought my exhaustion and exasperation with Twitter would fade, and that I’d regain enthusiasm for the connections it offered”, she writes. “I didn’t: having confessed so much … I had nothing more to give.” Eventually, finding herself looking at her phone and “disdainfully going through the cavalcade of people’s actions and opinions, it suddenly felt like a radical gesture to just watch the films I’d rented and not broadcast about them.” In the end, she concludes: “Withdrawing from social media, especially Twitter with its bitter arguments, has helped. I think it’s terrible for writing.”
Reading this was just what I needed. It was reassuring, as I really do feel much the same way. I have a lot left to say and plenty to share but I think I am done with sharing myself, at least in the ways that Twitter — and, indeed, London — demands. Maybe poetry could be the right kind of hobby after all. An exercise in doing something for myself. (If I do start experimenting with poems, I don’t intend to share any. Can you imagine the horror?)
Whatever I end up doing, I know I want to do something different; that makes me act differently. The idea of some new project like a notebook of personal poems excites me because, in my mind, the first of October — when we will hopefully be settled in Brontë country — designates a line in the sand that I am preparing myself to leap far over. I’m not really sure what new life awaits on the other side but I’d like it to be different to whatever this London life has been. I’ve lived here for four years at this point and my life is completely unrecognisable to what it was before I got here. In 2016, I had no direction and no future and no prospects. I wasn’t even writing. I’d barely read any philosophy, at least not with any seriousness. I have been transformed, but into what? And by what? The hours and hours spent tapping away now feel like hours and hours spent holding onto the debris from some wreckage. I’d like to let go of it. I’d like leaving this city to be the beginning of some new relation. Less wreckage, more driftwood.
I think part of the renewed interest in poetry and lifestyle shifts may come from my persistent thinking about Phil Elverum’s latest project — his return to the Microphones in 2020 and his long reflection on what it means to release an album under that name again now. It has dragged me back to my own teenage years and the strange but shared realisation that, despite everything being so very particular and different now, I’m still interested in the same things I was when I first heard Mount Eerie. This is perhaps the knock-on effect of musical nostalgia — Elverum’s consideration of his trajectory as a band has made me consider my own trajectory as a listener, and the experiences that he has often soundtracked at various intervals.
I do distinctly remember a time when I went off his music entirely — I wasn’t much of a fan of Wind’s Poem or Ocean Roar but considered Clear Moon to be the best thing he’d done. Still, I cooled on him a lot for some unknown reason. It was a time when I found myself reacting against all my old ’00s idols. Regretfully, I sold a few of my rarer records by him, only to reconnect with his music again a few years later when Sauna heralded a really magnificent return to form. Everything that followed Sauna felt like music from a different (and no less brilliant) entity. It is interesting to see that “other” Elverum, pre-greif, is now returning tentatively to the fore.
Considering all these twists and turns of his life, his career, the time of the Microphones is another country. It is strange to think, in retrospect, that his most notable studio albums under that moniker cover only four years of output — from 1999 to 2003. I’m sure, like most, whilst the mythology of Elverum’s music from that time casts a long shadow, I never knew him before he was Mount Eerie. And so, in listening to The Microphones in 2020, I find myself thinking about that moment of transition. Because that is, after all, what The Microphones in 2020 seems to point to. It is not just an album about the Microphones but why Elverum is now Mount Eerie and if he still should be. In this sense, it is a nostalgic project that also begs the question of what comes next. It is clear that something has got to give. With the Mount Eerie project becoming so subsumed in a grief that he’s already discussed a gradual slide out of, what is it for the “Mount Eerie” project to now be so closely associated in the critical imagination with that moment of personal trauma? What is in a name anyway? Does his art warrant another name change now that so much seems different? Is The Microphones in 2020 not a kind of self-reassurance that, no matter what changes, the line of flight remains the same? From the vantage point of this strange templexity, does the work he’s produced since 2017 really constitute that much of a shift from what came before, despite how life-changing that year was circumstantially?
I’ve been thinking about this kind of transition a lot as we prepare to exit London. I’m left wanting to completely reorient my relationship to the world in response. Over the last few months, every day that goes by seems to be defined by the further entrenchment of a path inaugurated only as an attempt to leave it.
I wrote Egress as an exploration of and as a product of grief; I called it Egress because I hoped writing it and publishing it — and therefore relinquishing ownership of it — might allow me to let it all go. (This has happened but not without an unanticipated amount of difficulty.) That I began writing the book the same year Elverum released A Crow Looked At Me is a coincidence but one which I cherished after first hearing that release. Getting Postcapitalist Desire out into the world this month is a step into different and perhaps more positive territory, where I can emphasise a more impersonal relationship to the work rather than to the man. A further project I’ve been working on in lockdown remains related to Fisher only tangentially, moving out even further to consider more of the blogosphere as a whole. It feels like the beginning of my own Powers of Ten, produced bookwise. A slow process just begun but, on a personal level, perhaps a sensible one. There’s no rush, I tell myself. I mustn’t rush. After Egress came out, I felt like I might get the bends.
Watching and listening to how Elverum has undertaken his own shift in this regard has been an inspiring lead to follow — not only in coming to terms with the uncomfortable realisation that a horrible event can crystallise a thought you have long been preoccupied by, but also that there is a way back to a previously impersonal perspective, no longer behold to the details of a particular life or death.
Isn’t that the meaning of the Mount Eerie name, after all? An impersonal vector through which Phil Elverum the man can feel his size?
Although Elverum claims no one has asked what “Mount Eerie” means, the frequent deference he pays to Gary Synder in the liner notes to that first album suggests he has been trying to tell people for some time. Synder remains an interesting vantage point from which to view Elverum’s project in 2020 also.
Gary Synder’s first book on poems, for instance, featured a number of tributes to and translations of Han-shan, the Chinese poet from the T’ang dynasty known in English as “Cold Mountain”. As Synder explains, when Han-shan “talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind.”
Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease — No more tangled, hung-up mind. I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff, Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.
It’s a beautiful sentiment and one I’m left wanting to emphasise for myself, although I’m not sure I could get away with rebranding as “River Humber”. Still, the return back north feels like a chance to reconnect to old lives and loves lost over the last few years. The basic change in circumstance of having less of a stark divide between the woods and the city feels profound enough, but not as a way to “get back to nature”. In normalising its presence in our lives once again, I’m looking forward to getting out of its romance.
Elverum remains a guide, in this regard. More recently, he has begun referencing Joanne Kyger in his songs and on his record covers — a hugely accomplished poet in her own right who was, nonetheless, for a brief time in the 1960s, Gary Synder’s wife. (She passed away in 2017 also.) Returning to the sentiment of his old track “Log in the Waves”, on his 2018 album Lost Wisdom Pt. 2, Elverum sings again of “Enduring the Waves”, capturing an honest and uncomfortable sentiment that has haunted this goth blogger for much of the last decade. He sings, accompanied by Julie Doiron:
When I was younger and didn’t know I used to walk around basically begging the sky For some calamity to challenge my foundation When I was young So imagine what it was like to watch up close a loved one die And then look into the pit I lived on the edge of it And had to stay there Joanne Kyger said:
We fight incredibly through a hideous mish mash of inheritance Forgiving for deeper stamina That we go on The world always goes on Breaking us with its changes Until our form, exhausted, runs true
We might read in this the birth of a new self for Elverum, taking all that has happened to him and finally running true, but is this not the same sentiment that was always behind the “Mount Eerie” name? Is this not Elverum returning to his own “Cold Mountain”? A mountain he has never left? Walking back in the front door to find himself all together, in one big empty house?
The coronavirus pandemic casts a long shadow over these vague suggestions of an egress from grief, and the fact that we are moving into a very high risk area (after London has somehow bizarrely avoided a second wave), complicates things further still.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the collective grief of our present moment — a grief that can barely be dealt with. The sentiment behind Egress lingers even though the specifics of that moment feel like a lifetime ago. I keep wondering if there are echoes of the interwar period here — as if those from a previous generation might recognise that big black cloud that hovers over us now, after a loss of life so large we cannot process it and so we shuffled on, sometimes breaking habits and often looking for new scenery, contrary to a nationalist sentiment from the government that insists somewhat pathetically on a return to business as usual.
In the 1920s, it is worth noting that the trauma of the war didn’t lead to a mass return to the countryside, as is being reported as happening now. The interwar years were instead defined by many people moving to the cities. This is perhaps because, prior to the Blitz, England’s cities were not yet sites of trauma. It was the countryside, instead, that was tainted. It’s peace had been disturbed, mutated by memories of battlefields and the bodies upon them, as if every English plain now contained the ghosts of the Somme. In his book The Lark Ascending, Richard King comments on the literary impact of this shift in the national consciousness. He quotes from Siegfried Sassoon’s anonymously written novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, for instance, writing how:
George Sherston, the narrator and titular fox-hunter, recalls riding before the war when ‘The air was Elysian with early summer and the shadows of steep white clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers … For it was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something which I have never quite been able to discover.’ The ‘something’, which George was unable to discover, lay buried within the landscape of his memory. Sassoon’s use of the word ‘discover’, rather than recover or rediscover is notable; it suggests a source of impenetrable emotional energy made all the more overwhelming by his inability to locate it, an inability he is carrying as if it were a wound from the battlefield.
As we, along with many other friends, choose to vacate the city, I wonder if the inverse is taking place. Now it is the city that feels tainted but this needn’t be a reactionary about face. The same line of flight might apply…
I’ve been thinking about this line of flight whilst reading D.H. Lawrence’s 1922 novel Aaron’s Rod, but I’ll save those musings for another post…
Edited with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — outlining a project that his death left so bittersweetly unfinished.
Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — “Do we really want what we say we want?” — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.
For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think…
This collection of five lectures and associated course materials, along with an introduction by me, is out today as an eBook. There will also be a limited edition hardback out in early 2021. We’ll be organising a few online events between now and then maybe… More info on those soon.
For those who have read Egress, I mention pretty early on that one of the first things I set about doing after Mark’s death, as a way to ground myself in the process of memorialisation as I spent time away from my mourning London friends in Manchester, was to transcribe the first lecture of FIsher’s postgraduate seminar from the academic year of 2016/17. That experience, conducted in isolation over a bleak two-week escape, is what led me to start that Egress in the first place.
Over the years since I’ve kept coming back to those lectures time and again. I never bothered finishing the transcriptions though. For a long time, the thought of listening to ten hours’ worth of recordings of Mark’s voice was too much to bear. But I was also aware that the material collected there was really important.
The first session alone is a really great introduction to Mark’s thought, and the course as a whole really dives beneath the surface of his interests. He gives lectures on Herbert Marcuse and his Freud / Marx synthesis, the frustration of Seventies feminism over the failure of the counterculture, György Lukács’ psychedelic Marxism, the neoliberal invention of a reactionary working class that continues to be a problem within the political imagination to this day, and Jean-François Lyotard’s libidinal Marxism.
Despite the heaviness of the topics at hand, Mark tackles them in a way that is accessible and conversational. He successfully opens up a whole new world to the uninitiated. But, of course, it’s all still unfinished — only five of the projected fifteen lectures went ahead. We miss Mark’s analysis of cybernetic socialism, xenofeminism, accelerationist aesthetics, and various other avenues within his thought that he wanted to thread together over those few semesters. Nevertheless, these five recordings constitute a document unfinished in a way that feels productive rather than bittersweet. After all, the entire course is set up as an experiment and a dialogue. There is clearly more here — as with all of Mark’s works — than meets the eye.
Nothing else has ever been done with those recordings, as far as I’m aware. Almost four years on from when they were made and shared online by Nace Zavrl, they have languished in obscurity. The onset of coronavirus lockdowns around the world felt like as good a time as any to return to them and finally unearth Mark’s hopeful project, re-affirming its persistent relevance and fleshing out his “Acid Communism”, which has become so popular despite being based on very little.
And so, alongside transcribing these lectures, I’ve written a lengthy introduction that connects the lectures and their assigned readings to essays of Mark’s already out in the world (mostly online). In 2017, Kodwo Eshun repeatedly made the point that Acid Communism was a project to be reconstructed. Whilst plenty of people have taken up this mantle, I think Kodwo meant this quite literally. Many of the lectures Mark gave (or intended to give) at Goldsmiths that year arguably already existed in essay form on various websites and in various magazines. Connecting the dots between these articles, written between 2012 and 2016, gives a far more lucid outline to this unfinished project and its concerns than many others have bothered to look for and share.
Personally, I think this collection of lectures should be the starting point for anyone interested in what Mark was working on at the time of his death and what he’d been working on ever since Capitalist Realism. After all, Ghosts of my Life and The Weird and the Eerie, as great as they are, can be traced back to that prior period of blogging productivity from the 2000s. They were more like streamlined statements regarding past projects rather than new directions in his thinking. The essays he later wrote (but which never quite found his posthumous audience) developed a thread that persisted in his thought until the very end. Unfortunately, we never quite saw the pay off, where Mark’s hauntological thinking would, via The Weird and the Eerie, give way to a full-blown accelerationist politics that sought to ask the most difficult questions facing us at present, concerning our tandem desires for capitalism and capitalism’s demise. This was, quite explicitly, Mark’s next big project, the sequel to Capitalist Realism proper, and he had spent almost a decade mapping it out. A very useful portion of that map can be found here.
If that’s not reason enough for you to check this out, I don’t know what else to tell you.
Postcapitalist Desire is only available as an ebook for now from the Repeater Books website but a limited edition hardback copy is being printed and will be released early next year. Keep an eye out for that.
To the pirates: all proceeds go to Mark’s family, so please support it if you can.
This week we read (or at least skim-read) the “Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine” chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus — a final peruse of that unwieldy book to try and help us tackle that other unwieldy book, which we’ll be turning back to properly from here on out: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.
We spoke about the concept of the war machine quite explicitly, then moved onto parkour and free running (again), rave culture, “the militarization of peace”, class struggle and etiquette.
Below is a short point made by Max in the Discord about the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the machine and Manuel DeLanda’s. I’ve included this here for context as we discussed these points off the bat.
Below that are my obligatory notes constituting something of an introduction to the chapter and the oddly promiscuous concept of the “war machine”.
Max writes:
An interesting point for me would be to understand more explicitly the machine. At the moment my reading of Deleuze is still influenced by DeLanda. DeLanda’s explanation of the machine is again via the modelling technique of state spaces. In a state space you look for dimensions with degrees of freedom (e.g. you can describe a pendulum as a two dimensional state space: one dimension for its place that can change and one dimension for its momentum). Another example is a simple model of growth (of a population). This can be modelled with the logistic function. This function has some interesting properties (you can play around with this function here).
You have r as grow rate and x0 as initial condition (the size of the population in regard to the annihilation factor — the size where the population dies out. Therefore x represents a fraction and has always a number between 0 and 1). The interesting point is, that depending on r the function has different properties. If r is smaller than 1 (r < 1), than the population dies out after some time; independent of the initial condition. Between 1 and 3 there is a point attractor. For example if r = 2, the point attractor is 0.5; independent of the initial conditions. Around r = 3 the equation reaches a critical value and a bifurcation occurs. The attractor is no longer a point attractor, but a period-2 one (try it with r = 3.2). The ratio in which these bifurcations occur can be measured by the so called Feigenbaum constant. The growth function is big abstraction, but there are other examples with the same ratio of bifurcations: convection rolls; the dripping of a faucet (r; the control parameter is the pressure of the pipe); and so on. This phenomenon is called universality. A mathematical structure shich occurs in many different mechanisms. The “classic” causality is the physical mechanism behind the concrete individual process.
But for DeLanda the distribution of attractors and bifurcations is also a causality or in his words a quasi-causality. According to DeLanda the term machine in Deleuze describes exactly this quasi-causality. (read the pages about abstract machines at the end of thousand plateaus and it makes a lot of sense with this context. Singularity is another word for attractor. In this sense it starts to make sense that machines are singular, but abstract; that they are more than the simple mechanism and so on). DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory goes so far that social entities can be described as state spaces. You have to find the parameters (or dimensions) with their degrees of freedom (he actually shows this with the war machine example in his Assemblage Theory book; the newer one with exactly this title not the A New Philosophy of Society one). But in the virtual (for DeLanda the structure of state spaces that determines the distribution of singularities/attractors) there are structures.
Sorry for the long text, but I think it helps to pose my questions. First: Is this the only way to think about machines? Is Deleuze using the word machine only in this mathematical / physical sense or are there more connotations of the word that can be applied to his texts and still make that much sense as the mathematical one? Second: Let’s stay within DeLanda’s explanation. If the virtual is the structure that is not actualized but has effects on the actualization of possibilities, what exactly is the virtual of a war machine? Are there different virtuals? Can they be thought as the same, that changes depending on a parameter and critical values?
Another interesting point is the application of war machines in Reza’s contribution to collapse 1. In this text he uses the concept of affordability (a concept i understand only faintly). It would be very helpful for me to get a grasp on affordability. Especially what this concept can explain that terms like tendencies and capacities can’t.
I hope that wasn’t too much text. I wanted to present a few thoughts, because I can only be part of the chat for a short time today.
First of all, apologies that I changed tack on this a little late in the day for anyone to realistically devour a 90-fucking-page chapter. But, as is common with Deleuze and Guattari, we’re not aiming for full comprehension here. However, at least an awareness of what Deleuze and Guattari call “the war machine” is probably necessary before we jump back into Cyclonopedia. On a cursory glance through the chapters ahead, it is a huge focal point for Reza. I think it might be worth us dwelling on for a session before we get back to the task at hand and, perhaps, finish it!
So, what is the war machine? Geopolitically, it is perhaps quite easy to understand. It is a military or para-military force that exists on the border of, or wholly outside of, state apparatus. With particular relevance to Cyclonopedia, we can perhaps consider the relation of America’s international military presence to the confines of America the state. What is the function of America’s presence in the Middle East if not to perpetuate what Deleuze and Guattari call this “war without battle lines”. And furthermore, can we really limit the movement of the American military-industrial complex to the preservation of American state interests? As Reza demonstrates throughout Cyclonopedia, America isn’t just serving itself; it is serving capital. It is, in a way, a kind of militia employed to service the real war machine — oil.
A war machine, in this sense, becomes more of an abstract concept for that kind of entity that traverses and is simultaneously entangled with smooth space and striated space, which we discussed last time. As such, it is not just an entity that moves through “space” as such. Striated space, for instance, is not only determined by infrastructure but also by ideology. I mentioned this in the last session but I think it remains a compelling analogy — think about the difference between “parkour” and “free running”. Although these two sports are increasingly entangled and inseparable, parkour is a name for a kind of militarised Situationist movement — getting from A to B quickly and efficient, through a kind of movement that wholly undermines a suggested or instructed usage.
Free running is less practical, in that regard, and we might also say less explicitly “political”. It is all about flamboyance and flair — it is more about the aesthetic qualities of the movements made rather than their efficiency, but the interrelation of these two sports is very telling I think and brings us to what I’d quite like to discuss today.
If this chapter is overlong and difficult, it is for much the same reason as the rest of the book and, indeed, Cyclonopedia itself — it is constantly doing what it is trying to describe. Wassim’s discussions around “epistemic trespass” remain super interesting here to me. Epistemic trespass, as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, might be described as a kind of epistemic parkour or free running. Their logics are disciplined but inventive, rigorous but irreverent. This makes A Thousand Plateaus something of a war machine in itself.
But is that equivocation dangerous? What are the implications of this kind of trespass or parkour, in which the political slides into the aesthetic? Plenty will decry this manoeuvre as being a red flag for fascism. As Walter Benjamin famously noted, “fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics”, but can’t neoliberalism similarly be defined by the de-politicisation of the cultural? Of the regimenting of the aesthetic to the point that it becomes a archetype? Instead, we might ask, what is an aesthetics of the multitude or the commons? In this sense, the American military-industrial complex has learnt lessons from its opponents. At the time of writing, Deleuze and Guattari are arguably nodding to the guerrilla warfare epitomised by South Vietnamese militias rather than the hard-headed arrogance of American interventionism, or even to the nomadology of the counterculture that would later reach its peak in the form of rave culture and the free parties of the ’80s and ’90s when unrestricted public space was exploited to pursue desires.
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s tendencies have almost suffered an inversion. And this was, arguably, always planned. For instance, in the UK, everyone is no doubt familiar with the concept of “anti-social behaviour” — meaning behaviour that is contrary to social norms or accepted social standards. It was a term coined specifically to counter rave culture, when the relaxing of laws that prohibited basic access to open land for working people faced the ultimate backlash. The Young Communist League’s trespassing on Kinder Scout in the 1930s paved the way for rave culture and the New Age Travellers that would become a moral panic fifty years later. The argument often made here, of course, is that rave and the hedonism of collective congregation and celebration are long-standing social behaviours. However, they have been gutted by the hatred of intimacy that is defined by class war.
This is something I learned the other day. Did you know that the concept of “etiquette”, as a code of good behaviour, actually predates human understanding of germs and the transmission of diseases? Today, because etiquette already comes pre-packaged with a squeamishness around bodily function, it persists as a good way to ward off germs. But, originally, it was nothing more than an over-regulated statue of good behaviour that’s sole purpose was to signal your immersion in the upper class and its tastes. Here we find an instance where class politics and aesthetics are fundamentally entwined, and it is entanglement that allows the suppression of alternative social behaviours and desires to continue. And yet, these practices persists, precisely because they exist on the outside of striated spaces. They cannot be contained and, therefore, they cannot be defeated. There are sleeper cells everywhere for the good life. But these governing and authoritarian structures have nonetheless appropriated the war machine from the nomads, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, and it is perhaps this that has led us to the moment of stasis from which we seem incapable of escaping.
A few weeks / months ago — what is time? — the Contemporary Theory Reading Group at the University of Birmingham organised an amazing series of lectures and workshops during quarantine around the work of Mark Fisher. The sessions brought together some wonderfully like-minded people and I was honoured to be asked to present some of my research as part of the series.
The Contemporary Theory Reading Group has now changed shape and they have re-launched themselves as a proper online entity called Ctrl Network. They’ve started a blog and written a little something here explaining their shape-shift and their plans for the future. Embracing the way that quarantine exploded their existence, they hope to function as a node for wider discussion in a network that exceeds their institution. I’m sure anyone who took part in their K-Punk Quarantined series will vouch for this as a really exciting endeavour for anyone theoretically inclined looking for a way to share ideas and chat with people.
You can check out their website here for more information, and make sure to follow them on Twitter. If you want a taste of what the group have done, the entire series of workshops and lectures around Fisher’s work is now up online here and my guest lecture is embedded below.
A contradictory tension that has defined the last couple of decades of life on earth is one between the accelerative nature of technological progress and the encroaching stagnation that defines life for the rest of us. Something has got to give. How can we catch up and get a piece of the progress? Because speed isn’t just for the owners of the means of production — it’s clear they can’t handle it on their own.
The rest of us have surely proved, by now, that we can keep up. We have adapted better and more quickly to new ways of life in 2020 than many ever thought possible. But the capitalists can’t. They don’t like change and so they scramble to get things back to “normality” for the sake of their own interests.
This is what fat cats do best. They fortify their own interests, even at the expense of life itself, gorging on accumulated wealth until there is none left for anyone else.
Fat cats are fat, lest we forget. The chub of accumulated capital deprives them of their otherwise spritely nature. It’s about time they were put out of their (nonetheless contented) misery.
When we say accelerate the process, what do we mean? Accelerate what? What process?
The process. There is, arguably, only one. Nature itself is a speed freak. It is always moving but we’re choking it. Nature and capitalism, in this regard, share much in common. We are both separate from and a part of them. We affect them but can’t control them; just as they affect but cannot control us. Our relationships to both seem fundamental but fraught; always-already entangled but unruly and disagreeable. Things only get more complicated the further down we dig.
When we find ourselves beholden to things at the level of desire, where does nature and the natural end and begin? “No nature”, Gary Snyder says. It’s all one big house.
Extinction Rebellion recently blockaded roads around print works for all the major right-wing newspaper in the country — specifically those owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
The blockage itself is not the story, they insisted. The blockage they represent is pervasive. We ourselves are blocked — by Murdoch and those like him. Those who have accumulated wealth and power and used it to constipate society.
THE STORY IS WE'RE STUCK. Some of us with superglue. No, all of us, we’re not moving at the speed needed to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. The right wing media is a barrier to the truth, failing to reflect the scale of the crisis and hold government to account.
It is interesting to see XR take the battle to the pockets of the rich and powerful in this way. After muddled tactics pre-lockdown showed protesters disrupting the lives of commuters and, in one widely publicised incident, London’s working classes just trying to put food on the table, it seemed to many that the movement — whilst undoubtedly well-meaning — remained bogged down in the sort of middle-class ineptitude that had come to define (in my mind at least) the UK’s Green Party.
That kind of action did not shine a light through the cracks in the firmament, but this one might.
However, it is one thing for the proletariat, who we know can be freed from the mire of immediacy, to answer the call of the climate crisis, it is another thing entirely for the bourgeoisie to grasp the need for speed and action, (s)trapped as they are in a capitalist-realist death drive of their own devising. Nevertheless, disrupting the world of the latter might make new worlds visible to the former.
Either way, we find a unicorn in our midst here: XR messaging that is on point.
The story certainly is that we’re stuck, and in more ways than one. The climate emergency is the most pressing example but our apparent impotence before a black wall of capitalists mirrors our impotence at large. If XR can break the deadlock, there’s hope for us yet. Accelerationism, in this sense, does not need a green variant. It is instead — and has always been — the observation that the more things stagnate, the worse they’re gonna get. (Not speeding things up for the same result.)
Accelerationism is stopping the slow cancellation of the future by giving it a jolt. A jolt in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch might not solve anything, but it’s a shock that might ripple into unexpected places.
It is sad that, for many, Mark Fisher’s career is defined by his essay, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. It remains controversial — although, personally, I think he has been largely vindicated — but the essay was all for nought if we remain blinkered to its place within the wider context and trajectory of his thinking.
Unfortunately, we’re far from that mode of thinking today. What is so often missed by our perpetual focus on the essay’s fallout is all that Fisher did after it.
Was Fisher “cancelled”? Hardly. He didn’t let himself be. His essay was the subject of fierce discussion and some despicable things were said about him by his critics, but he refused to engage with it. After all, he’d already made his decision to leave Twitter. He didn’t need to stick around for it. From what I’ve heard from others, the fallout was certainly more sizeable than he was expecting and I think that that sort of vitriol would bruise anyone, but he nonetheless managed to put it behind him and move onto brighter things. Unlike those who find themselves in similar positions today, he didn’t proceed to obsess over his being hard-done-by and wear his attempted cancellation like a badge to define himself. He had no interest in affirming his position as a somehow “dangerous thinker”; as a pantomime villain in the then-still-nascent “culture wars”.
If only the same could be said for others today, who define themselves through perpetual victimisation, often by persisting in stirring the pot with the most asinine of takes. In essence, the cancelled turn themselves into the sort of reactionary pundit that defines the right-wing media in the UK and the US — the likes of Piers Morgan or even Donald Trump, contributing enormously to the very thing they say they are supposedly critiquing.
Fisher, on the contrary, chose to built up a positive project instead. His critique of the Vampire’s Castle certainly resonated with some; it really didn’t with others. No matter — those are the breaks. And so, he retained the critique but dropped the polemic, instead striving for that kind of “nihilism without negativity” that he had long been trying to articulate — a nihilism informed by a positive political practice of consciousness raising.
This isn’t a story often told about Fisher, however. Instead, we see him recruited as some member of the new “dirtbag left” or as a forebearer for some Community of the Cancelled. (This was precisely what happened on Twitter yesterday — see tweet below.) The inconvenient truth is that he had no truck with the new tendency to self-pity and shadowbox with those he’d labelled as vampires. According to many who discussed this with him personally, he’d likely be as embarrassed by the ways things have gone as the rest of us.
I think that’s obvious when we look at what he wrote next.
In an essay for Plan C called “No Romance Without Finance” — presented two years after he’d written “Exiting the Vampire Castle, as part of a workshop in 2015 — Fisher opens with a familiar analysis of an alienated and culturally-maligned working-class subject, browbeaten by “the corrosive effects of the neoliberal environment on intimacy.” Referencing Jennifer M Silva’s book Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, he writes:
Over and over again, Silva finds her young subjects exhibiting a ‘hardened’ self — a form of subjectivity that prides itself on its independence from others. For Silva, this hardened subject is the consequence of this generation being abandoned, institutionally and existentially. In an environment dominated by unrelenting competition and insecurity, it is neither possible to trust others nor to project any sort of long-term future. Naturally, these two problems feed into one another, in one of the many vicious spirals which neoliberal culture has specialised in innovating. The inability to imagine a secure future makes it very difficult to engage in any sort of long-term commitment. Rather than seeing a partner as someone who might share the stresses imposed by a harshly competitive social field, many of the working class individuals to whom Silva spoke instead saw relationships as an additional source of stress. In particular, many of the heterosexual women she interviewed regarded relationships with men as too risky a proposition. In conditions where they could not depend on much outside themselves, the independence they were forced to develop was both a culturally-validated achievement and a hard-won survival strategy which they were reluctant to relinquish.
I think this essay is very telling. Understood as a kind of post-“Vampire’s Castle” foray into practices of group consciousness raising, it reads to me now like a retort to those who now define themselves by their stunted careers as members of the commentariat. Whilst he clearly sympathises with the feelings of abandonment and betrayal explored by Silva, hard-baked into a cold and unforgiving neoliberal culture, he does not identify with them. (I imagine he identifies even less with the middle-class constitution of most cancelled subjects.)
It is as if Fisher roots cancel culture and our reactions to it within the class struggle so often disarticulated from discussions of its affects — although, of course, many who are cancelled will comment on the impact it has on the livelihoods, but being denied a seat at the commentariat table is hardly comparable to working class precarity more generally. It is an inspired move, in many respects — reorienting his critique away from the dynamics of Twitter discourse and cementing it within the initial subject that concerned him most.
Most notably, in distancing the critique made in “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle” from that essay’s notoriety and reformatting it into his new Acid Communist project, he successfully skewers both sides of the divide that now defines the so-called “culture wars”: the vampiric moralisers and the self-pitying reactionaries who bleat about the former’s attacks upon them. He rejects the surgical focus on individuality that the moralisers exercise with abandon and he rejects the “woe is me!” attitude of those on the receiving end of it, instead emphasising the need for a new kind of relation on both fronts. He writes:
Where consciousness-raising pointed to impersonal and collective structures — structures that capitalist and patriarchal ideology obscures — neoliberalism sees only individuals, choices and personal responsibility.
This is to say that both cancellers and the cancelled complete the feedback loop of neoliberal hysteria. It is consciousness raising that we require to unplug ourselves from the outrage machine. “Personal shame becomes dissolved as its structural causes are collectively identified”, Fisher continues. Collectively organising around your shame and holding onto it is hardly a successful outcome of that process. That is a recipe for ressentiment and nothing more.
(This is particularly true when so many of those cancelled around issues related to transphobia insist on entertaining “philosophical” positions that are implicitly deployed to block the establishment of a broader feminist group consciousness that intersects with others’ experiences. It is hypocritical to speak of cancel culture, in this sense, when what has gotten you in hot water in the first place is a pearl-clutching attitude towards reactionary categories of subjectivity.)
What we require, instead, is a vigilance.
Vigilance has been a bit of a buzzword on the blog as of late. It’s particularly relevant, I think, to the impotence that has befallen accelerationism — the irony being that, following the 2008 financial crash, accelerationism was itself a critique of impotence. When we go on about “cancel culture” on the left, we fall into much the same trap, giving fuel to or even embodying some of the left’s most reactionary tendencies, even as we attempt to call them into question.
This is, in part, to say that defining yourself in opposition to that which has wronged you — especially if you feel so wronged by the left as to slide right — is a sorry tale as old as capitalism itself. More specifically, however, we can acknowledge that it is also a process of ideological confusion and cognitive dissonance that defines neoliberalism in the present, stretching back to its suppression of psychedelia and its creation of a reactionary working class.
The strange difficulty of separating your critique from the tendencies that you are critiquing is something Fisher untangles well when he analyses Gwen Guthrie’s 1986 single “Ain’t Nothing Goin’ On But The Rent”.
Whilst the song’s insistence on fiscal responsibility might be seen a “reactionary concession to capitalist realism”, we can also understand it “as a rejection of the ideological sentimentality that separates out social reproduction from paid work.” It is a song that echoes so much of modern hip hop. I’m reminded, for instance, of Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” — a song somewhat superficially interpreted by many at the time of its release as being about capitalistic principles of debt collection, but we might just as readily interpret as a far more politically-charged demand for reparations — an interpretation made far more explicit by the song’s video:
Fisher suggests something similar when he concludes that “‘Ain’t Nothing Goin’ On But the Rent’ is the sound of the loneliness that happens when consciousness is deflated, and the conditions for raising it are absent.” It’s a familiar sound. We hear it in the bleating of cancelled writers writing about being cancelled, and the hysteria of those who wish to cancel anything that moves. But this sound does not just the drone of the culture wars; it is, as Fisher makes clear, the sound of “corroding the conditions for intimacy.”
More than ever before, so many of our lives are defined by a radical uncertainty and precarity but many of those who find themselves cancelled are just as guilty of corroding intimacy and shared consciousness as those who are cancelling them. (An argument I’ve made in another context in my old post on the left’s “prison politics”.) Too many of the supposedly cancelled make reactionary concessions to capitalist realism but few go so far as to reject the conditions that make it all possible. Instead, each one, in their own way, is a new shade of the hardened subject Fisher initially pities. The only way to combat this death spiral is to reject both variations of this hardened subject — defensive and offensive — and re-establish the conditions for consciousness raising.
It was this sentiment, above all others, that Fisher wanted to resurrect from the counterculture — from funk and soul and the other musics of that time — using it to attack the Vampire’s Castle he so despised. It was a cultural sentiment that didn’t just impotently make positive affirmations or take reactive swipes against those who dare critique you but rather warned of reactionary forces within our midst; the back stabbers whose “smilin’ faces sometimes tell lies”. Fisher was, in effect — cunningly and implicitly — warning of snakes in the grass amongst both his apparent enemies and supporters.
Those snakes still lurk. In fact, they’re more emboldened now that Fisher isn’t here to keep them at bay for himself.
