2020: The Year in Review

It’s been a busy year of boredom, books, blogposts and bust-ups.

Usually, at this time of year, I write some meandering post summarising the last twelve months, reflecting a bit on all that has happened. This year, in 2020, I honestly don’t have the energy.

It has been a year defined, in my mind, by an almost unfathomable inactivity… And yet, at the same time, I published two books, went to my first academic conference (where I was the keynote), travelled abroad to talk about what I do, taught a class at the RCA, taught a course online, appeared on a dozen podcasts, started my own podcast, started a reading group, had blogposts translated into two languages, made friends, lost friends, moved house, gained weight, lost weight, quit smoking (again), met some of my heroes, mourned some of my heroes, walked a lot, read a lot, took a lot of photos.

To summarise all the ups and downs here would just give me trauma flashbacks, so let’s just say 2020 was big.

Some end-of-year stats… The blog has had upwards of 150,000 views — almost double what was clocked up in 2019. 10% of those views were for last year’s U/Acc Primer. People are clearly still hungry for an introduction to accelerationism — thankfully, I’m 60,000 words into a new book on the subject; Patreons can read the preface here.

Otherwise, I posted 290 times over the year, clocking up some 352,000 words. If you’re new to the blog or just want to catch up — lol — here’s everything (worth mentioning) that I posted over the last twelve months, roughly organised into topics. You can catch up on every other year of blogging over in the archive.

See you next year.

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Essays Elsewhere

• Les débordements adolescents du True Norwegian Black Metal [Audimat #13, trans. Fanny Quément]
• Music Has The Right To Children: Reframing Mark Fisher’s Hauntology [The Quietus]
• The Will to Deform: The Promethean Gift of Proletarian Prosthetics [Insufficient Armour, NERO Editions]
• Interview [Music Journalism Insider]
• El Realismo Capitalista de “El Realismo Capitalista ha Llegado a su Fin” [Caja Negra Editoria, trans. Matheus Calderón]
• Unveiling the Collective in Isolation: Thinking the Apocalypse with D.H. Lawrence [Stillpoint Magazine]
• Looking for an Exit: Sonic Coordinates for Egress [Grace’s, Blue Mountain School]

Events, Podcasts, A/V

• For k-punk 2020 [Goldsmiths SU, University of London]
• Insufficient Armour [Book Launch, Spazio Maiocchi]
• On k-punk: Egress and the Fisher-Function [CTM Festival]
• On Desire [Capitalist Realism: 10 Years On, University of Huddersfield]
• Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher [DEATH // SENTENCE]
• Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher [Book Launch, ICA London]
• PlaguePod Live Day 1 [Urbanomic]
• PlaguePod Live Day 9 [Urbanomic]
• Matt Colquhoun [Tank Magazine]
• Egression [The Pseudodoxology Podcast Network]
• PlaguePod Live Day 53 [Urbanomic]
• Mark Fisher and Postcapitalist Desire [Acid Horizon]
• Cold Rationalism & Psychedelic Consciousness: Mark Fisher’s Acid Reflux [K-Punk Quarantined, CTRL Network]
• Simulations Like Us [Turn Us Alias, Saturnalia]
• Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher [Acid Horizon]
• Xenogoth, Capitalist Realism, and Mark Fisher [Exeter Socialist Students]
• Tornadoes [Come Internet With Me]
• Matt Colquhoun on Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie [Repeater Books x The Neon Hospice]
• The Weird and the Eerie Revisited [Acid Horizon]
• Hauntology House [The Nightmare Before Socialism, Bristol Transformed]
• Mark Fisher Revisited [Kirjandusfestival Prima Vista]
• Kit Kat Communism [Mandatory Redistribution Party]
• Mark Fisher and the Lost Futures (Part 1) [The Archipelago, Movement Radio]
• Mark Fisher and the Lost Futures (Part 2) [The Archipelago, Movement Radio]

Mark Fisher (Egress, Postcapitalist Desire, etc.)

• for k-punk 2020 [04/01/2020]
• for k-punk 2020 — Lineup Announced [11/01/2020]
• Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy & Mark Fisher — Forthcoming from Repeater Books [12/01/2020]
• Mark Fisher: Essays Critical and Clinical [13/01/2020]
• Chant Down Babylon: Notes on the 3rd Annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture [19/01/2020]
• Hell is Other People’s Cynicism: On Fans, Trolls, and a Purgatorial Mark Fisher [11/02/2020]
• Notes from the ‘Capitalist Realism’ Conference [18/02/2020]
• Same Virus, New Zombies: Towards a New Hauntology [19/02/2020]
• Vampires and Vampire-Hunting: On the Sharp End of the Blogosphere [22/02/2020]
• Intensive Dissimulation: A Further Note on Vampires and Vampire-Hunting [24/02/2020]
• Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher — Out Now [10/03/2020]
• Heavy Lifting: Egress at the ICA [12/03/2020]
• CTM 2020: On & After k-punk [05/04/2020]
• The Capitalist Realism of “Capitalist Realism is Ending” [07/04/2020]
• “Capitalist Realism is Ending”: An Addendum [07/04/2020]
• Bitter State Failure [07/04/2020]
• Egress and the Vampire Castle: A Letter to the Wire Magazine [12/05/2020]
• Spinoza and Kubrick: From the Exo-k-punk Archive [16/05/2020]
• Surfascism and Surneoliberalism: Notes on Fisher, Bataille and Accelerationism [24/05/2020]
• A Lacanian-Spinozist Theology of the Seething Cosmic Void: Ed Berger on Fisher and Bataille [24/05/2020]
• First Step; Next Step. (I Was Moved.) [03/06/2020]
• Hegemony of the Cliché: Pomophobia Revisited [09/06/2020]
• Egress: Coming Soon from Caja Negra [20/08/2020]
• Nihilism Without Negativity (In 2020) [28/08/2020]
• Rejecting the Hardened Subject [02/09/2020
• Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher — Out Now [08/09/2020]
• Postcapitalist Desire — Sneak Peek [22/10/2020]
• Trust No-One [03/12/2020]
• Postcapitalist Desire: Repeater Books Competition Winners [07/12/2020]

Accelerationism

• Accelerationism and Acid Communism: Notes on Theory and Praxis [21/01/2020]
• Accelerationism and Hubris [06/02/2020]
• Marxism and Accelerationism: Notes on Two Tweets [02/03/2020]
• Anti-Praxis and the Kurtz-Gradient [05/03/2020]
• Hyperstition and Reified Accelerationism [15/03/2020]
• Lucid Accelerationism: Notes on U/Acc and Z/Acc [17/03/2020]
• You Are Not An Accelerationist [19/03/2020]
• What Would Sonic Do? [26/03/2020]
• On Accelerationism, Cathedralism and the Art World [31/03/2020]
• Who’s Driving?: A Fragment on Freud, Ballard and Accelerationism [15/05/2020]
• The “Accelerationist” Subject of Modernity: A Stray Thought [16/05/2020]
• The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism — Course Promo [21/07/2020]
• The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism — Out Now [24/07/2020]
• This Great Society is Going Smash: A Lesson to be Learned from Accelerationism [31/08/2020]
• The Story is We’re Stuck: Notes on Accelerationism and the Climate Emergency [06/09/2020]
• A Further Fragment on Unconditional Accelerationism: What is Anti-Praxis? [14/09/2020]

Politics

• Post-Corbyn Exits: Strength or Weakness? [14/01/2020]
• Fragment on Riotous Subjects and Riotous Objects [28/05/2020]
• “I Can’t Breathe” [31/05/2020]
• Taking the Knee: Black Lives Matter, Subjugation and Sovereignty [18/06/2020]
• Are We The Baddies? [23/06/2020]
• Palestinian Lives Matter [25/06/2020]
• Under Examination [19/08/2020]
• A Matter of Style: Further Notes on Commie Shit [15/09/2020]
• Class War or Culture War: Notes on Social Media and the Precariat [05/10/2020]
• On the Eve of the Election: Notes on Deleuze and the Reterritorialising Voyage of Punk Conservatism [03/11/2020]
• Beckettian Election: Notes on the Afropurgatory of Afropessimism [04/11/2020]
• Politics and Joy [07/11/2020]
• Melancholy and Joy [09/11/2020]
• Tory Maoism [11/11/2020]
• Tory Maoism (Part II) [25/11/2020]
• The Double-Edged Sword of Postmodernity: On the Trussed-Up Ideology of Liz Truss [18/12/2020]
• Against Covid Libertarianism [22/12/2020]

Culture Wars (On TERF Bullshit, the Alt-Right, and Other Idiocy)

• Anti-Essentialism and Cancel Culture: Notes of TERF Science and Anti-TERF Science [03/01/2020]
• Make the Dark Enlightenment Great Again…? [08/01/2020]
• Humiliations [09/01/2020]
• You Are Not A Postmodernist [24/03/2020]
• Prison Politics: Notes on “Cancel Culture” [02/04/2020]
• Postmodern Neomarxism [16/05/2020]
• Postmodern Neomarxism: Round Two — XG on the Jordan Peterson Subreddit [19/05/2020]
• The Crisis of the Negative: The Relativist Right Never Change [09/06/2020]
• Ideology Tumbles like a Statue: Notes on the Far Right, Žižek and Lukács [13/06/2020]
• Cancel Culture and the Betrayal of Truth [08/07/2020]
• Fidelity to the Truth and the Suspension of Politics from Philosophy [09/07/2020]
• A Note on the Abuse of Esotericism [12/07/2020]
• Capitalist Realism & Cancel Culture: How Theory Eats Itself [20/10/2020]
• TERF Tactics: On Reason and Being Reasonable [01/11/2020]
• The Right’s Meme Illiteracy [11/12/2020]

Xenofeminism

• Sexually Identifying as a War Machine: Keeping the Trans* in Transgressive [27/01/2020]
• Xenofeminism and the Problem of the Non-Alienated Region [16/06/2020]
• Cyberfeminist Beginnings, Cyberfeminist Ends [10/08/2020]
• A Postcapitalist Battle of the Sexes [11/08/2020]

Covid-19 and Quarantine

• Coronavirus for President [13/03/2020]
• Front Window #1: Notes from Quarantine [18/03/2020]
• Front Window #2: Notes from the First Few Days of Quarantine [29/03/2020]
• Front Window #3: Notes on Time Dilation and Corona Detox [31/03/2020]
• Front Window #4: Notes on Fear [03/04/2020]
• Front Window #5: Once More, With Feeling… [05/04/2020]
• Front Window #7: Extremely Online Mode [19/04/2020]
• Front Window #8: Wonderlust [22/04/2020]
• Front Window #9: Antigone Beyond the City Walls (XG Beyond the M25) [20/05/2020]
• Front Window #10: Storm Chasing in Surrey [29/05/2020]
• Front Window #11: Obelisk Hunt [12/06/2020]
• Front Window #12: Northern Insomnia (The End?) [25/06/2020]

Hauntology

• Keeping Up With Hauntology [30/10/2020]
• Keeping Up With Hauntology (Part 2) [02/11/2020]
• Keeping Up With Hauntology (Part 3) [26/11/2020]
• Keeping Up With Hauntology (Part 4) [27/11/2020]
• The Magic of Relics [02/12/2020]

Body Horror, Anecdotal Theory and Writing About Writing

• A Body Without Options (Part 1) [15/01/2020]
• A Body Without Options (Part 2) [16/01/2020]
• Mother’s Book [25/01/2020]
• “No Identities, Only Desires”: Thoughts from CTM Festival [04/02/2020]
• An Introduction to Insufficient Armour [07/02/2020]
• Egos and Anti-Egos: Going South of the “I” [08/02/2020]
• Unfolding Folds [27/03/2020]
• Pondering My Navel [04/05/2020]
• Damaged Lives: Notes on Adoption and Subjectivity [21/05/2020]
• First Thought Best Thought [23/05/2020]
• Ignore the Neurosis [03/06/2020]
• Accessed [13/08/2020]
• Thinking about Writing, Writing about Thinking [21/08/2020]
• The Unspeakably Familiar [10/09/2020]
• Touching from a Distance: Notes on a Lost Footing [16/10/2020]

Music

• Bring Back the Music Blogosphere [15/01/2020]
• Albert Ayler’s Free Pop Modernism [10/02/2020]
• RIP Andrew Weatherall [18/02/2020]
• Old Valentine’s Mixtapes [20/02/2020]
• Dreamless Pop [24/02/2020]
• S/he Dropped Her Body [14/03/2020]
• Welly and the Polar Bear, Hull (RIP) [16/07/2020]
• Invisible Strings: Notes on Folkloric Pop in Postmodernity [28/07/2020]
• “Meet Me Behind the Mall”: Notes on the Heavenly Storekeeper and His Stock [05/08/2020]
• Take Care, Zoomers, It’s A Desert Out There [25/10/2020]
• Vague Memories of Oneohtrix Point Never: A Prelude [12/11/2020]
• Less Hauntology, More Salvagepunk [18/11/2020]
• Billie Eilish’s Pop Cartesianism [22/11/2020]
• Putting the “Disco” Back into “Discontent”: Between Róisín Murphy and Dua Lipa [24/11/2020]
• Scared to Live, Scared to Dream: A Concessionary Post on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never [28/11/2020]
• The Christmas No. 1: A Hauntological Frontline? [15/12/2020]
• Winter Songs: Christmas with Lindisfarne [24/12/2020]

Film & TV

• “We’re not coding the hosts; we’re decoding the guests”: Notes on Westworld Season 3 [19/03/2020]
• Metanarratives: Notes on Westworld S03E02 and our Televisual Golden Age [30/03/2020]
• Did We Ever Leave Behind the Bicameral Mind? [04/05/2020]
• We Must Imagine Sisyphus Pathological [16/05/2020]
• Real Simulations: Notes on the Matrix Trilogy [27/07/2020]
• Our Social Dilemma has Plenty of Names: Notes Towards a New Social(ist) Media [14/09/2020]
• The Haunting of Blah Manor [16/10/2020]

Video Games

• Weed Picker [06/04/2020]
• We Have the Unconscious We Deserve: Notes on Resident Evil and the 21st Century’s Machinic Unconscious [17/04/2020]
• The Games Industry: Accelerationism and the Hauntological in Microcosm [07/06/2020]
• The Rotten Western (Part 1) [02/07/2020]
• The Rotten Western (Part 2) [07/07/2020]
• Accelerate the Metaverse: Epic Games and the Networked Individual Mindset [13/08/2020]
• Gaming in a Present Future-Past: Notes on the Polygon Review of Cyberpunk 2077 [08/12/2020]

Literature

• “The Pilgrim Fathers… driven by IT.” [02/08/2020]
• No Nature, Not Ever [10/08/2020]
• Rainbows: From D.H. Lawrence to the NHS [23/12/2020]

Music, Film, TV, Literature and/or Video Games

• After the End of the Myth: On American Interiors and the Rotten Western [30/07/2020]

Buddies Without Organs

• Buddies Without Organs — Episode #01 [20/11/2020]
• Buddies Without Organs — Episode #02 [09/12/2020]

Reza Negarestani and Cyclonopedia

• Cyclonopedia: Hypercodex [18/05/2020]
• More Theology of the Seething Cosmic Void: Notes on Scaling from Spinoza to Negarestani [29/05/2020]

Philosophical Miscellanea

• New Humanism’s Inhuman Forgetting [16/02/2020]
• One or Several Critics [09/03/2020]
• Notes on Dialectical Modernism [24/04/2020]
• Further Notes on an Ethics of the Dialectic [30/04/2020]
• A Realism that is Still Speculative: The Blogosphere After Badiou [05/07/2020]
• A Realism that is Still Speculative: A Comment from Terence Blake [10/07/2020]
• The Moebian Intensity of Mourning and Melancholy [25/08/2020]

Photography

• Happy New Year [01/01/2020]
• Robin and the He-Goat [02/01/2020]
• Gruppo di Nunhead [21/01/2020]
• Nite Flights [28/01/2020]
• Bodiam Castle [09/02/2020]
• Nite Flights II [11/02/2020]
• Windsurfers at Camber Sands [23/02/2020]
• Gothic Marxism [29/02/2020]
• Derbyshire [30/06/2020]
• On the Outskirts of Sheffield [04/07/2020]
• Beachy Head [12/07/2020]
• Birds in Botany Bay [29/07/2020]
• Margate [09/08/2020]
• Botany Bay II [16/08/2020]
• Hasting Road Trip #1 [23/08/2020]
• Hasting Road Trip #2 [30/08/2020]
• Xenogothic to Image API [21/09/2020]
• The Carrot Drop [12/10/2020]
• Hallowe’en [07/11/2020]
• Winter Walks I [14/11/2020]
• Brontë Country I [21/11/2020]
• Winter Walks II [28/11/2020]
• Brontë Country II [05/12/2020]
• Winter Walks III [12/12/2020]
• Winter Walks IV [19/12/2020]
• Brontë Country III [23/12/2020]
• Winter Walks V [29/12/2020]

“To Take a Walk Like…”

• “To Take a Walk Like…”: Radical Art and Philosophy in Three Walks [16/02/2020]
• Walk(ab)out [17/02/2020]
• Dérive Around The Westway [21/02/2020]

General Miscellanea

• Bathroom USB [08/02/2020]
• Paradise Lost: Report from Milton’s Landfill [27/02/2020]
• Dreamless Populism [28/02/2020]
• On Grammar [10/07/2020]
• Freed from Desire [13/07/2020]
• Prime Astrology [17/07/2020]
• Dream Meridian [31/07/2020]
• Dream Meridian (Remastered) [14/08/2020]
• Last Nights [26/08/2020]
• The Thames Path [16/09/2020]
• Moving Day / Mail Art [26/09/2020]
• New Blog Merch: Xenogothic x Crit Drip [19/11/2020]
• Closed-Eye Agoraphobia [23/12/2020]

Patreon Posts

• XG Reading Group 1.0: “Nerium Oleander” [09/05/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.1: “A Good Meal” [23/05/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.2: “A Theology of the Seething Void” [12/06/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.3: “Lovecraft and Philosophy” [19/06/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.4: “Double Articulation and Time” [26/06/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.5: “Chapter One” [15/07/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.6: “Nature Naturing, Desire Desiring” [26/07/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.7: “Oil is Fair in Love and War” aka “I Pity the Fuel” [02/08/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.8: “Traumatic Histories” [09/08/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.9: “The Smooth and the Striated” [23/08/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.10: “The War Machine” [06/09/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.11: “Capitalism and Islamism” [13/09/2020]
• Blogger’s Digest #01 [01/10/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.12: “Polytical Pollution” [04/10/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.13: “Paraslime Shift” [12/10/2020]
• Thinking about the Social with the Exeter Socialist Society [14/10/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.14: “No Dust Jackets for Pulp Philosophy” [18/10/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.15: “All That Is Solid Melts Into Aer” [25/10/2020]
• Blogger’s Digest #02 [01/11/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.16: “Anthropessimism, or Slimulacra and Slimulation” [01/11/2020]
• An Introduction to Eerie Aesthetics [04/11/2020]
• Cultural Prefiguration in 2020 [13/11/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.17: “Between the Thing and Kurtz” [16/11/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.18: “Calvinist Realism” [29/11/2020]
• Blogger’s Digest #03 [01/12/2020]
• XG Reading Group 1.19: “Cursed Be The Cheesemakers” [13/12/2020]
• Preface to a New Project: Accelerationism and the Future of the New [18/12/2020]