Hello and welcome to the second edition of the XG Blogger’s Digest!
It feels like it has been another quiet month on the blog, at least for me personally. Posts have been written but I’ve mostly been trying to find my footing again after our move to Huddersfield slammed the brakes on my usual blog momentum. I’ve also been hard at work on a few things behind the scenes — more on that below — but first things first…
Happy Hallowe’en!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Hallowe’en this year. I’ll no doubt be blogging my exploits imminently (once I get another few rolls of film back from the developers). It was a particularly special one for me as, for many years, I have been toying with the idea of making Hallowe’en my unofficial birthday…
My actual birthday is the 26th December. Anyone who knows anyone with a Christmas birthday probably knows it sucks. You can’t really celebrate it with anyone, as everyone’s embroiled in their own family affairs, and there’s always a weird push-and-pull with the gravity well that is the 25th anyway. For me, I’ve found it either gets forgotten about completely or my family overcompensates for it but that just makes me a bit uncomfortable. I’d be more content with just having a “normal” birthday and just having that one day a year I can do whatever I want guilt-free without the myriad restrictions that the holidays bring.
Many years ago, I remember someone suggesting I should do what the Queen does — apparently she has her actual birthday and also a “summer” birthday. After a quick Google, it turns out she was born in April, so I suppose she’s just being a greedy git, but the idea of moving my birthday to a day that I can actually enjoy has lingered over my head for many years. I’ve often shirked off the idea because I don’t really like my birthday anyway, regardless of when it is (see: post-adoption grief). However, Hallowe’en is a day I have always steamrolled family and friends into enjoying with me and it generally becomes “my day” anyway, so making October 31st my unofficial birthday just makes sense.
This year, that’s what I did and, frankly, it was the best. The day started with pancakes, presents (I got a chair and a rug for my new office), a walk around a graveyard and some witchy woods, before we watched copious horror movies. I think I might write something up about Spiral and Host — two movies exclusive to Shudder that felt incredibly engaged with the present (a rarity with horror films these days) that I was very pleasantly surprised by. We also carved pumpkins and ordered pizza. Honestly, just my ideal day all round. Again, pictures will follow in a week or two.
Anyway, alongside these self-indulgent birthday celebrations, it was also the night of the Repeater Books x Neon Hospice Hallowe’en takeover. I made an audio-essay on the eerie for the occasion. I think an archive of this will be made available by Repeater at some point, possibly behind a paywall, but I’ll be sharing a transcript and tracklist with Patreons here in a few days. (It’s currently scheduled to go live on Wednesday, so look out for that.)
Blog Birthday
Alongside my new unofficial birthday, xenogothic.com also turned 3 this month! My first post went live on 11th October 2017. When I hit “publish” on what was a melodramatic introduction to an anonymised blog space, I did not think that a few years later I’d have my name attached to it, with a couple books under my belt, and that my life would basically revolve around it.
This wouldn’t be the case were it not for having such interesting and engaged readers, so thanks for being here.
As is tradition, I livestreamed some videogames to celebrate. You can head to the blog if you want to relive 3 hours of me starting a new game on Bloodborne.
Class War or Culture War
A lot of time this month was spent thinking more about the “culture wars” — not so much within their own context but at more of a distance. That’s the only way anyone will be able to get a hold on this bastard thing, I think.
One of the book projects I’m working on at the moment considers a fleeting moment immediately prior to now, when accelerationism fell into a seemingly fatal disrepute. I’m sure I don’t need to tell any of my readers that the popular conception of accelerationism today is a mind-numbing miscomprehension but I am increasingly of the opinion that this is the result of some conscious effort on the part of some internet folks. It is very easy to recruit an army of useful idiots to a cause today than it is actually combat something for what it is.
I am, of course, aware of how conspiratorial this sounds but, as times goes on, we see very similar tactics being deployed against other “radical” schools of left-wing thought. This month, it was the turn of “Critical Race Theory”, which has been turned into a reductionist moral panic that somehow made its way to the House of Commons.
The more examples of these attacks on left-wing ideas we see, the clearer the playbook becomes — the “culture war” is nothing other than an attempt to control the conversation by over-defining the battlefield.
This is the background against which I wanted to consider a conversation recently had in the XG Discord. At the start of this month, a post was inspired by our very own Dylan Schenker, who wrote:
Every time the question of who the working class is comes up with certain left-leaning factions it just completely neglects that we live in an information economy now and thus the definition of “productive work” is incongruent with their conception of the working class. It’s never explicitly said, but their analysis never mentions its implications on the status of personal technology ownership. Mark Fisher critiquing Mensch’s invective about leftists owning iPhones is the only example I can think of that really put it’s in clear terms
This led to a really interesting discussion around how, once again, the right controls the battlefield and, with it, the narrative around who is and isn’t working class.
My own brief response to this discussion inspired a bit of blogging about “the precariat” and how developments in how we think about work and class — particularly the coining of new categories for new subsections of the proletariat — do not always work in our favour by clarifying our current predicaments.
This inevitably led to thinking about how a new (if nonetheless superficial) awareness of “class” has been weaponised by the political establishment, as we see the same goading of a “reactionary working class” that we saw in the 1970s. The contradictions that abound go someway towards explaining our present predicament…
— Class War or Culture War: Notes on Social Media and the Precariat
— Class War or Culture War: A Further Note on Consciousness Raising
Later on, this thinking leaked outwards further still into some more general ruminations of how conversations are controlled on Twitter:
— Capitalist Realism & Cancel Culture: How Theory Eats Itself
— TERF Tactics: On Reason and being Reasonable
Coronavirus
I think this blogged pushback against these sorts of controlling narratives is also fed by the recent return to lockdown.
Moving from a relatively free London, where pubbing had returned as a normal part of our social lives, to an isolating lockdown in the North has re-established a sense of isolation and mental fatigue first experienced back in March. It has also revived my thinking about the weirdness of the present.
This has meant I’ve spent a lot of time watching TV. Cue various posts about weird corona feels, as processed through my televisual consumption. Below are posts on Fear the Walking Dead, The Haunting of Bly Manor, the Caretaker’s recent virality on TikTok, and the hauntological implications of a holographic Robert Kardashian.
— Twilight of the Living
— The Haunting of Blah Manor
— Take Care, Zoomers, It’s a Desert Out There
— Keeping Up with Hauntology
Regaining My Footing
Alongside new quarantine measures, I’m still suffering from the “emotional motion sickness” caused by our move north. This has continued to be a major preoccupation for me this month as I try and regain my footing and I have found myself writing a lot more deliberately on the blog in response.
Prior to starting this new blogger’s digest enterprise, I had imagined I could guide you through what I’ve been doing month to month, but what I’ve been doing has been so utterly disrupted by the move as to make this feel a little moot at present. Writing about it has helped, thankfully. At the time of writing, I’m feeling the return of my mojo, but it has taken the entire month to feel better about things.
Nevertheless, here are a few diaristic reflections on moving house and leaving what had begun to feel like home during the coronavirus pandemic — including a post about #carrotgate, which I witnessed on my last afternoon in the Big Smoke.
— The Carrot Drop
— Touching from a Distance: Notes on Lost Footing
Podcasts, etc.
A large part of getting settled has been building a new office for myself. Trawling the freebies section of Gumtree has turned up some amazing surprises and my room in the new house is finally starting to take shape. This has included a new recording set-up, which has thrown me into quite the podcasting mood.
I am late to the party on this, as I’m sure a million podcasts have begun and then burnt out already since lockdown began, but I very much appreciate the sentiment involved in producing this kind of content. Listening to others chat is a godsend right now. It feels like being back down the pub with interesting people.
Anyway, expect more audio content over the coming months, including original stuff from me where I get to do some interviewing instead of being the perpetual interviewee, as has been the case these last few months. I’m going to be co-hosting an as-yet-untitled Deleuze podcast soon and I’m hoping to be organising something weekly / monthly via Repeater Books too.
In the meantime, here’s more of just me…
I have had a few chats with people this month. First, I was invited to chat to the Exeter Socialist Society about the work of Mark Fisher and our present moment. This meeting of the club was recorded — I’m not sure if that was just for internal use or what, but I recorded it for myself too. If they make their recording public, I’ll share it on the blog but, in the meantime, I thought my recording might be of interest to Patreons. You can listen back to the one-hour session here.
I also joined @thejaymo on his deeply wholesome web show, Come Internet With Me. Jay first invited me on last month but the move got in the way. A few episodes in, I ended up pushing him into recording it because I was so excited by the premise: surfing the internet with friends. I find the show to be so relaxing — a bit like mukbang but for very online people. We talked about tornadoes — you can watch that here.
At the time of writing, I’m waiting on two further conversations to make a public appearance. I had an excellent chat with Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou for a Greek radio station about Mark Fisher’s continued relevance to contemporary politics and I also chatted about The Weird and the Eerie with the lovely folks at Acid Horizon as well. More on those when they appear…
Postcapitalist Desire
Last month saw the release of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher as an eBook. This collection, which I edited and wrote an introduction for at the start of lockdown, is also scheduled for a physical release in January 2021. I received by editor’s copies ahead of that release and couldn’t help showing them off online. They’re really beautiful books — Repeater’s foray into hardback editions was something I thought might be a bit weird given the more irreverent nature of their catalogue, but they have really outdone themselves here. The design is lush and it makes this project feel really special.
You can see a few sneak peek photos I took after my initial unboxing here.
Behind the Scenes
Blogging has been slow(er than usual) this month but there have been a number of project I’ve been working on behind the scenes.
First of all, January 2021 is almost upon us and, under normal circumstances, that would mean the fourth annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Visual Cultures department is already working on doing something a little different this year and I have been working with my collaborator Natasha Eves on an alternative iteration of the for k-punk after-parties. It’s early days and we’ll be keeping it under wraps for the time being but we’re both very excited about it and can’t wait to share it with everyone. Previously, we have made every effort to make the parties accessible and welcoming to all but that is, of course, limited to those in our immediate vicinity. We’re excited that, this year, we will be leaving dark clubs behind and connecting with the wider world beyond London.
I’ve also been hard at work on the Mark Fisher reading group previously announced. I am putting together a reader of Mark’s lesser known essays, all of which reflect or expand upon the arguments teased in the “Acid Communism” introduction and the recently published Postcapitalist Desire lectures. As with our main XG reading group, this will be a series of Discord discussions of Mark’s texts, providing an introduction to his thought and how it had developed since his best-selling debut Capitalist Realism. I’m hoping that this reader will have something of a double life, however. Whilst we discuss these texts together, I will also be recording some one-on-one discussions with various interlocutors over the coming months. These will later be broadcast in the new year to coincide with the launch of the physical release of the lectures and also a new multimedia venture by Repeater Books which will be launching around the same time. Again, more on that at a later date!
I was hoping we could have started this by now but it seems like others have had very similar ideas and I’m taking part in a few public reading groups over the coming months — the folks at Bristol Transformed, for instance, are holding one next week (more info here). I’m curious to see how these go first and what I can learn from them to make our own XG edition a bit more special. I’d like to be able to offer something that goes beyond these more public ventures, so we’ll wait and see what that might look like.
In other behind the scenes news, I have also been working on a couple of commissions: for ŠUM Journal on the geology of shopping malls and an introduction to Postcapitalist Desire for Culture Matters.
A Final Note on Housekeeping…
The blog has a new look! The old one, which has seen me well for a couple of years now, was starting to feel a bit busy and overcrowded… Hopefully the new paired-back look is pleasing and easier to navigate, but I may still continue to tweak it over the coming weeks. If there’s anything you’d like to see or which would improve your own experience of the thing, let me know!
Also, Patreon has recently made it possible to change its tiers to your home currency rather than the default of USD$. I have changed the tiers to GBP£ for my own ease — I don’t understand what a $ is. This has technically led to a slight increase of about 30% in the cost of each tier but this will not affect anyone who was already subscribed before this change came into place in October. This will only apply to new subscribers from here on out.
Bye!
Thanks for reading, y’all! See you next month for another one of these.