Welcome
Hi all. First of all, thank you for signing up to the Patreon. I hope everyone who is new to the “Reader & Listener” tier is enjoying catching up on the ramshackle recordings of our reading groups. There’s a fair amount of material to get through there already but things are going to be changing gear around here very soon.
For those who haven’t seen the new Patreon page on the blog, I’m planning a few new things starting in October. First of all, better audio posts — better quality, better content, and more varied content too, which will include new lecture courses. Once we’ve wrapped up Cyclonopedia, we’ll be moving onto Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and, alongside this, I’d like to run a secondary reading group of essays by Mark Fisher that I think can be assumed to constitute his Acid Communist thinking — something of a companion to the Postcapitalist Desire lectures, out now from Repeater Books.
The third thing is this right here — a blogger’s digest. It’s a ‘behind the scenes’ newsletter of sorts that goes into a bit more detail around what I’m working on and threads together all of my disparate posting into short, monthly reading lists, organised around the themes that are obvious to me but which may not be clear to the casual reader. (I am very aware I write too much for most people to keep up with.)
There’s not much to write home about right now as I’ve just moved house and I need to get back into the swing of blogging away once we’re properly unpacked and settled, but that feels like a good opportunity to make this the first blogger’s digest — to say hello, let you know where I’m at, and what people can hopefully expect here on Patreon and on the blog in the near future.
Moving Day
At the time of writing, I’m on the verge of moving from London to Huddersfield — I’m writing this on the Monday before and I’m not yet sure when it’ll get posted. Unfortunately, this is putting a momentary stop to our reading group for a couple of weeks whilst I get settled. The next session will be held and recorded on October 4th. It will be up on the Patreon later that day.
Moving feels like a pretty big deal. A lot has happened in London over the last four years and it is no doubt obvious I’ve been riding some productive grief wave since early 2017, so leaving the city is an unexpected trauma but thinking about this has been productive in itself.
In the back of my mind, 2020 was meant to be a year of closure. First I thought that would come with the publication of Egress — it didn’t — and then I thought the Postcapitalist Desire lectures might be a healthier project that looks at 2017 with a bit more distance — still nothing, but it helped — but leaving the orbit of Goldsmiths, where it all went down, seems to have done the trick and I’m a little bit broken about the whole thing.
Earlier this month I wrote “The Unspeakably Familiar”, a post about reconnecting with nature and poetry and Yorkshire and how I was feeling before the emotional meltdown. Whilst it’s a rambling post, it’s one I was really proud of and there will be a part two coming sometime in October once I’ve had time to finish off some other drafts — something on the same themes but seen from the other side of the emotional border between being here and being there.
Postcapitalist Desire
Of course, the main thing to happen this month, besides moving, is the release of Mark Fisher’s final lectures, which I started putting together back in April and finished just a few weeks ago. The response so far has been fantastic. Mark’s lecturing style obviously speaks for itself and I hope this is something of a turning point for the reception of his legacy.
Enrico Monacelli wrote a review of it for The Quietus that you can read here, and I also appeared on the Acid Horizon podcast to chat more about it. The Acid Horizon chat was particularly illuminating for me. One of the responses from one of the hosts was that, between Egress and Postcapitalist Desire, there is a real sense emerging of what Mark was working on at the time of his death — not just theoretically but physically, in terms of a new tenderness in political philosophy that he was cultivating, which was very much parallel to but subtly undermining the dominant narrative of social media identity politics. Hearing that that project is becoming ever clearer to people is a vindication that this unruly project is finally coming to fruition and connecting with people how I’d originally hoped.
In truth, it has also made a lot of things clearer for me too. I’ve heard it said that some readers feel the blog has settled into some new phase of clarity recently and I think that’s true. Putting together Mark’s final lectures has been a powerful exercise in remembering why I wanted to write Egress in the first place, excavating a context that was very nearly lost in the following fallout of grief and paranoia. It’s taken three years, but it is life-affirming to feel that project is once again within our collective grasp.
So, what’s next?
Negotiating the Vampire Castle
A post written earlier this month that I think is related to this and worthy of note is “Rejecting the Hardened Subject”. This is something of a strange post that straddles a line between woeful personal drama and important political considerations (at least in my mind).
There has been a growing rift emerging in and around the old and current blogosphere which sees many former interlocutors worry and whine about “cancel culture”, often recruiting Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” essay for their cause. It is a sorry state of affairs and one that does nothing for his legacy, conveniently ignoring all that he did after publishing that infamous riposte to the Twitter hoards. What is ignored is that Fisher hoped to lead by example, after the fact, rather than sling mud from some self-enacted exile on the side lines.
I have regrets, these days, around giving many of these people the time of day and even publicly supporting some of those who loudly complained about being criticised online. But rather than feed the hate machine, I feel like the best course of action in 2020 is to rescue Fisher’s project from the reactionaries and emphasise the things they conveniently leave out. “Rejecting the Hardened Subject” is one attempt to do just that.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a series of posts that cover the background and the growing animosity between TERFs and the left:
— Anti-Essentialism and Cancel Culture: Notes on TERF Science and Anti-TERF Science
— Prison Politics: A Note on “Cancel Culture”
— Cops
“Cops” is something of a odd post in hindsight. It exists in a catch-22, where the experience of harsh public critique is entangled with an awareness of its impact on a person, but it is clear to me now that no amount of abuse received excuses any amount of abuse given out. Whilst the catch-22 may still exist — what is solved by lashing out at someone who is lashing out at being lashed out at for lashing out — there remain some deeper questions here that are too often buried underneath the circle jerk. It is these questions that I recently hoped to dig below the drama to get to. These were addressed in the following posts:
— Cancel Culture and the Betrayal of Truth
— Fidelity to Truth and the Suspension of Politics from Philosophy
— A Note on the Abuse of Esotericism
These posts may provide further context but I hope that “Rejecting the Hardened Subject” serves as a capstone to this affair and signals a new era of better political engagement with the issues that are dear to my heart but which have often been derailed and undermined by my propensity to get involved in online drama. In truth, online drama is an utter waste of time. I want to get out of the house more, and not just to commune with nature and find an offline outlet for my reactionary sensibilities (like some have done) but rather organise politically and try and contribute to something bigger than this blogosphere.
However, that doesn’t mean that I am turning my back on many of the questions that the accelerationist blogosphere (in particular) is interested in…
Anti-Praxis
Speaking of organising, I’m left somewhat torn as to what that looks like at present. I’m interested in doing more things in my local area, once lockdown has subsided, but there remain a number of questions regarding what we can do more broadly about this big ol’ mess we’ve made.
Enter that other major talking point on the blog this month: “anti-praxis” — a strange and provocative concept that emerged from the Unconditional Accelerationism blogosphere of 2016-18. There is little agreement about what it means — it’s a talking point related to accelerationism so of course there isn’t — but it’s interesting for me because it is tying up some loose ends of my next book project which came together very quickly during lockdown.
When Meta-Nomad invited me to join him in putting together a course on accelerationism (he covered the philosophy and I the politics), I saw this as a very good opportunity to complicate an increasingly dominant view of accelerationism that separates theory from praxis. “Accelerationism is a philosophy of time and nothing else” was Amy Ireland’s famous adage, and there is surely little we can do to change time, despite how it tyrannically structures the working day under capitalism. And yet, to assume this jettisons the human subject to be nothing more than a log in the waves is a mistake, I think. From a nihilistic perspective (in the Brassierian sense), that is absolutely what we are, but this does not mean we should do nothing — it should free us, instead, to focus on what matters.
There is a tension here that I don’t think anyone has managed to really articulate sufficiently as yet — myself included — a tension between the impotence of collective political intervention in the 21st century and its absolute necessity. These posts are an attempt to view this problem from numerous scales simultaneously, from the local to the global to the cosmic.
What sounds counterintuitive is instead a call for cunning, and it requires we completely rethink how we move around in the world and how we comport ourselves to our libidinal attachments.
The posts I’ve written this month that address this point in various ways can be found here:
— The Story is We’re Stuck: Notes on Accelerationism and the Climate Emergency
— A Further Fragment on Unconditional Accelerationism: What is Anti-Praxis?
— Our Social Dilemma has Plenty of Names: Notes Towards a New Social(ist) Media
— A Matter of Style: Further Notes on ‘Commie Shit’
— Passing Paradoxes: A Quick Response to Some Quibbles with Anti-Praxis
There is still much to be said on this topic but these posts have served me well in hashing out a conclusion to the current book project — The Crisis in Negation: Accelerationism and the Blogosphere — which considers how accelerationism sought to address that perennial question of “what is to be done?” throughout the emergence of a new period of political impotence. That accelerationism fell on its own sword and became a part of that impotent fabric is easy to make fun of but I think a better understanding of how and why this happened is necessary.
I’m hoping to have a second draft of this book — much more developed versions of the lectures that made up my course with Meta-Nomad — ready by the end of the year. It will hopefully come out on Repeater Books some time in 2021.
Over the next few months, beyond the activities ongoing here, that will be my primary focus.
Feedback & Other Media
This first issue of the Xenogothic Blogger’s Digest is something of a trial run. I hope it won’t be limited to this sort of chat in the future. If this sort of contextualisation is useful, however, that’d be great to know and if there is anything readers would like in addition, I’d be happy to tailor this thing, whatever it is, to reader’s desires. I get away with more than enough of my own whims on the blog. Feel free to chime in here with your own stuff.
See you next month for another update.
Matt xg