Blogger’s Digest #3 (01/12/2020)

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Hello! Welcome to the third XG blogger’s digest, covering the month of November.

It’s been a very busy month this month, and the blog has started to hit its stride again after the disruption of the Big Move. Though it may sound backwards, the more writing that ends up on the blog, the more stuff I have going on behind the scenes. XG is the perfect warm-up space when there’s a lot of things to think through before carving something into stone in another context.

A few IRL events don’t hurt either. For instance, there’s nothing quite like the chaos of a US election to sharpen the mind… That is probably the best place to start for this month’s blogger’s digest.

Political Ups and Downs

Things have settled down (somewhat) at the time of writing but the start of this month was a whirlpool of emotions. The left — broadly speaking — is going into yet another election with a weak candidate and not a lot of hope. The Democrats seemed unlikely to win and, even if they did, they seemed just as unlikely to really change anything. The right — broadly speaking — was drunk on confidence. In fact, their self-assuredness and righteousness provided an opportunity to see what it’s like for them most years. I’d be mad as all hell too, most probably, if the media paraded smug opponents in front of me every election cycle.

Nevertheless, my girlfriend and I were pretty obsessed with it all. (She more than I, actually.) We’ve spent a lot of time lately going out for long walks over Yorkshire’s moors, but she couldn’t help but check the news every 15 minutes for updates on the unending uncertainty. I was torn between her contagious enthusiasm and the internet’s general malaise. It was a fittingly pathetic end to Trump’s presidency but, at a time when I am very conscious of a collective desire that our post-COVID world be nothing like our pre-COVID one, Biden was far from an exciting prospect.

The posts I wrote over the course of those few days probably demonstrate the rollercoaster far better than I could in hindsight. I tried, in various different ways, to emphasise different strands of a present nihilistic euphoria, but I no doubt ended up looking like I was in possession of a split personality. You can follow the journey via these posts below:

Tory Maoism

Tangentially related to all this was a brief post on Tory Maoism (followed by a response from Ed Berger). 

Whereas “the end of history” was once championed by conservative thinkers as a sign of their ultimate success against Marxist progressivism and historical materialism, it is telling that some pundits, in 2020, are explaining Tory (and Republican) incompetence by borrowing from the left’s 2009 understanding of its own failures…

Jeremy Corbyn and Anti-Semitism

… But what lingered most over the left’s prospects this month, highlighting the great distance left to go before the left can have any hope of enacting real change, was the continuous attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from a media that only cares about accusations of racism and discrimination when they can adversely impact the left’s electoral prospects.

Slavoj Žižek was surprisingly lucid and insightful on this terse debate in his recent appearance on the Red Scare podcast. I wrote about that here:

Keeping Up With Hauntology

My post at the end of October on the Robert Kardashian hologram had a decent response from various corners. One such respondent was Padraig, who runs the @k_punk_unlife account on Twitter and used to be very active in the comment boxes of the original blogosphere. His response produced another blogpost on the history of photography, considering how holography fits into this technological lineage.

Padraig later replied to this post in turn and part 3 of this series got down a little deeper into how hauntology is relevant to a load of my current research, drawing on the crisis of the new that the early blogosphere first fought over as well as Enrico Monacelli’s recent article on Oneohtrix Point Never, which has further clarified a bunch of this thinking.

Oneohtrix Point Never

Speaking of 0PN…

Back in July, when he was finishing up his latest album, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, I received a DM on Twitter from Daniel Lopatin saying he very much enjoyed my book Egress and that it had helped keep him sane during lockdown. Having long been a fan of his music, I was embarrassingly starstruck but he suggested we should stay in touch.

Fast forward to earlier this month and the release of Lopatin’s new album has had my mind racing with ideas. It has become a sort of prism through which my recent thinking has been totally crystallised. I’m not entirely sure how he has achieved this but I’m not complaining.

I reached out to Lopatin with an eye towards getting him involved in a future project and we ended up talking briefly about psychedelia, Mark Fisher, Philip K. Dick, the Ccru, anachronism, and how to keep détournement relevant in the 21st century.

This wasn’t a formal chat or anything, but I warned him it was inspiring a chonky blogpost. At his request, I haven’t quoted him directly, but for much of this month I have been tearing my hair out over a mammoth post that attempts to articulate a lot of the concerns of 21st century philosophy — from Badiou and the speculative realisms to Mark Fisher and hauntology — and how these concerns have yet to be resolved, with his latest album as a prime example of the life left in these problematics.

At present, I think this mammoth post was a case of biting off more than I could chew; I soon went from inspired hyper-productivity to cognitive constipation. As a result, I also immediately regretted hyping up something that I would not be able to satisfactorily finish any time soon. That is not to say that all is lost, however. I have an idea of breaking up my huge collection of notes into a bunch of short posts, somewhat disarticulated and sporadic but providing some thoughts that I hope might further illuminate new research and 0PN fanboying.

So far, I have written a little prelude about when I first got into 0PN’s music as a university student, and also responded briefly to Enrico Monacelli’s essay on M0PN, Mark Fisher and hauntology for Nero. (As I understand it, an English language translation is forthcoming on the Urbanomic website.) A final post, cancelling the monstrosity, has nonetheless allowed me to think properly again rather than constipate my thinking. There’ll be more 0PN and 0PN-adjacent posts soon enough. (There’s one scheduled for tomorrow actually, so look out for new stuff on the blog.)

Pop Reflections

As I waited for the 0PN blockage to dissipate, I rediscovered that writing about music is a total joy. It has gotten the creative juices flowing in other areas as well and I’m really enjoying reflecting on culture at the moment.

A further development in the settling of principles that has defined 2020 for me is that I’m realising where I sit in this whole “pUbLiC iNtElLeCtUaL” arena. I have always taken a little bit too much pride in the fact that I never studied philosophy or critical theory formally prior to 2016, when I went back to university at the age of ~26. I think this is partly because, despite having major imposter syndrome as someone who was not as well-versed in the nomenclature as others who had studied philosophy already, I felt I was better at thinking creatively rather than ungracefully deploying abstruse concepts to look clever. There is only so far you can get on learning the right philosophy opinions. If you can’t have fun with them, then what’s the point?

That is why I love Deleuze — for him, philosophy is a creative act. You would not come away with that opinion after speaking to most theory-loving graduates, who see theory as a rebellion against other forms of creative practice. But this is why the Ccru were fans of diagrams. Representing philosophy pictorially is an underrated skill — so too is unearthing philosophical insight from pop culture. 

So, it’s deploying philosophy where it doesn’t belong that gives me the greatest creative thrill, whether that is in orbit of Mr Blobby or Limp Bizkit. I love the heresy of taking my own critically-maligned cultural touchstones far too seriously.

On that note, I have felt a new drive to write about pop culture. This month, the stage was set with a post on Billie Eilish and another on the discontent of disco.

Photography

I have previously mentioned that I’ve fallen back in love with my film camera, sharing a few film scans embedded within some of my more meandering recent posts. This month I’ve been enjoying taking photographs for the sake of it rather than just to illustrate points.

I’ve run out of black and white film now, and I’ve spent far too much money on developing services since we moved up north, but I’ve currently got a new photography post scheduled for every Saturday until the New Year excluding those that fall within the Christmas period).

Media Appearances

Following the digital release of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher, I’ve been doing quite a few media appearances, chatting about Mark’s work and my own. Below are links to various conversations had over the last month, with more on the way.

Buddies Without Organs

Sean Pearce and I have launched a new podcast together! 

I first met Sean when I was interview by him and Lucy for their Wyrd Signal podcast what feels like a lifetime ago. Wyrd Signal is on hiatus at the moment as Lucy has recently gone back to university. Sean, however, in wanting to keep his podcast juices flowing, has struck out on his own and started a new solo endeavour called The Reeves Report, about paranormal happenings around the world. It’s excellent.

Alongside The Reeves Report, Sean asked me if I wanted to start a Deleuze podcast with him. He confessed that he had only ever read Deleuze in passing but thought a podcast might be a good excuse to do some close reading and chat about those readings with a friend who is more familiar with his oeurve. 

Cue me. And with that Buddies Without Organs was born.

The first episode was a joy to record and I think it came out really great. We’ll be recording our next episode tomorrow, in fact, and fortnightly from there on out. More soon!

XG x Crit Drip

Craig, host of the Acid Horizon podcast, has a side-project called Crit Drip. It’s an online clothing store featuring his original theory-inspired designs, and a lot of Craig’s designs are genius. 

I’ve been a fan of Craig’s designs for a while and, after he agreed to send me a Black Metal Guattari jumper in exchange for a signed copy of Postcapitalist Desire, I decided to ask him if he’d like to do a collaboration on some Xenogothic merch designs. The results are perfect. 

At the time of writing, I have a few samples forthcoming in the post, so I’ll be blogging about them again soon, but for now you can check out the initial announcement and all of the designs via the blog below or via the XG Teespring here.

Bye for now!

I still plan to have one of these ready for January 1st… If I don’t manage it, blame a whiskey-doused New Year’s. Then again, who’s going to be reading blog posts on New Year’s Day… Someone no doubt… Apologies to whoever ended up potentially disappointed.

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