After a wild January, I decided to take February off, so not much to write home about this month…
Sike! I don’t know how to relax.
This month’s productivity can be put down to some very interesting conversations happening on the timeline and elsewhere. In fact, I’m feeling pretty excited about things as of late. We’ve seen reemerging points of contact between different groups and individuals and positions that have seemingly lain dormant for a couple of years now. This hellthread featuring Pete Wolfendale, Amy Ireland, Reza Negarestani and a couple of others was a particular highlight. Just as I feel we’ve been uncovering a few buried or interrupted lines of flight from the blogosphere’s 2000s peak, a bunch of adjacent arguments are starting up with a ferocity we haven’t seen in years. Exciting times ahead, I feel.
Badiou/Acc
On that note, we might as well start with a discussion that had me really excited recently, on Badiou’s influence on accelerationism, which started as an elongated shitpost after I saw someone put “Badiou/Acc” on a weird Twitter “iceberg” meme — thanks to Bob for sharing that in the Discord — and which ended up with Ed Berger, Vincent Garton and myself having a blog dialogue for the first time in years.
I also hope these posts might be clarifying for those taking part on the XG reading group, where we’ve been reading around Badiou, mostly unpacking Brassier’s use of his concepts in the initial discussions around accelerationism.
— A Moment of Renewal: Notes on Badiou/Acc
— Badiou/Acc: A Response to Ed Berger
— Badiou/Acc: Further Responses from Vince Garton and Ed Berger
— Badiou/Acc: Terror and Parody with Ed Berger
Anti-Hauntology
The other conversation to dominate the blogosphere came in the aftermath of SOPHIE’s death, with a discussion around what Matt Bluemink has taken to calling “anti-hauntology”. I think this conversation runs nicely in parallel with the discussion around “Badiou/Acc”.
In memorialising SOPHIE, there was a tendency to downplay her innovations from many more cynical music fans. As I see it, when we discuss what exactly makes something “new” — aesthetically but also politically speaking — the terms by which we judge something to be new are often wholly lacking. The point I hoped to make in this discussion was that we need to define our terms if we want to seriously have this debate. Because it is a worthy question, but it all too often falls back on lazy thinking.
In italics are Matt Bluemink’s original posts over at his website, Blue Labyrinths, with my posts in bold so that you can read the entire back-and-forth as it happened.
— Anti-Hauntology: Mark Fisher, SOPHIE, and the Music of the Future
— Un-Popping the Bubbles of Pop: A Brief History of Anti-Hauntology
— Anti-Hauntology: Arc, AI, and the Future of Innovation
— Anti-Hauntology: Where are the New Forms of New?
— Anti-Hauntology: SOPHIE, Stiegler, and the Ruins of Accelerationism
— Anti-Hauntology: Further Notes on Temporal Specificities
— Anti-Hauntology: Notes on Acid Horizon
Covid Libertarianism
This is becoming a recurring topic on the blog at the moment. Previous entries can be found here:
— Against Covid Libertarianism
— Covid Libertarianism and Molecular Freedom
— Covid Libertarianism and Capitalist Realism
The most recent edition was provoked by my first time reading Althusser, who I’d always kept away from after hearing suspect things about his reputation. (Mostly due to the fact he’s a difficult Marxist rather than the more shocking fact that, in the midst of a mental collapse towards the end of his life, he killed his wife. Must say I felt a bit torn about that after reading a biographical introduction to him.) In truth, I’ve found his thought to be very useful, and I turned once again to the useful idiots du jour to expound on his central thesis on ideology in On the Reproduction of Capital.
— Covid Libertarianism: Notes on Althusser and a Spanner in the Works of Ideological Reproduction
The Geology of Malls
I had a new essay out on Plaza Protocol this month — a new platform built by the folks at ŠUM Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory, who have been long-term supporters of the blogosphere and have put out some amazing editions of their journal in recent years. If you haven’t checked them out before, do so!
Plaza Protocol is a project based around an abandoned and unfinished shopping mall on the outskirts of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Having never been there, I wrote about some shopping malls that I do know and how, in my experience, a new shopping centre is always seen as a quick fix for deeper problems. An abandoned, unfinished shopping mall, by contrast, might leave some plot holes in the capitalist firmament open for further plundering.
I wrote this essay towards the end of 2020, so it’s nice to finally see it out. Whilst researching it, I found this peculiar pamphlet produced by Hull City Council at the end of the Cold War, detailing to residents of my hometown what the likely outcome would be if a nuclear device hit the city centre. (Spoilers: it would not be great.) They make for nice, if errant, companion pieces.
— The Geology of Malls: Architectural Dreamwork as Capitalist Cauterization
— Hull and the Bomb
Misfits
This post was an important one for me. I’ve written a couple of times on the strange reception Capitalist Realism gets in the present, especially when readers see how scathing Mark was about his students. But those who take umbrage at it, in my experience, are either to young to remember 2009 or, like so many people, they suffer from Noughties amnesia.
Noughties amnesia is real, and I’m very interested in it at the moment. I intend to write more on it this month. In fact, I almost wrote too much about it here — so much I had to stop and cut and paste my introduction to this post into a post of its own… More soon!
For now, revisit this starting point:
— The Post-Capitalist Realism Generation: Notes on Students, BreadTube and Digital Psychedelia
Wading thru the Hot Topics
There have been a couple of other topics that it feels like everyone has been talking about this past month — namely, (new) New Labour impotence, Adam Curtis, and non-fungible tokens. I waded into each of them, somewhat brashly, and was surprised to come out the other side unscathed.
I had fun writing these but they don’t really fit in anywhere else, so consider these February’s miscellaneous posts.
— National-Identity Politics: On the Contradictions of New New Labour
— Solidarity and Cryptocurrency: Notes on NFTs
— Framing Adam Curtis
For k-punk
The For k-punk commissions have now left the ICA. We’re already looking to broadcast them somewhere else so people can get a chance to experience them again. It was such an amazing night but the comedown from it was unreal. The start of the month was pretty grey and bleak in its aftermath. Nonetheless, it seems to have had a much bigger impact than we anticipated.
Natasha and I were interviewed together for The Art Newspaper. As is typical, we were cut down to just a few choice quotes for the sake of the article, but I regret not recording our conversation with Kabir Jhala for ourselves. We spoke to him for 90 minutes and it was such a wonderful opportunity to share our love of Mark together, rather than it just being me on my soapbox. Hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to talk about this project together again in a more public setting.
— “A teacher ‘who really gave a shit’”: For k-punk in The Art Newspaper
There are more write-ups on For k-punk due in March as well, or so I’ve heard. The next edition of The Wire magazine, which apparently went to print today, is going to have For k-punk as its lead review in the live events section. I’m not sure what’s said but apparently it’s positive! Watch out for that — I’ll no doubt blog about it when it’s out.
Podcasts and Videos
Fewer media and associated appearances on other channels this month. Probably for the best. Below are a few videos and podcasts that you can listen to nonetheless, including video upped from live events held last week, as well as back in October last year, and also a new episode of Buddies Without Organs.
— Postcapitalist Desire: XG in Conversation with James Butler — Now on YouTube!
— An Introduction to Eerie Aesthetics: Now on Mixcloud!
— Buddies Without Organs #04: The Geology of Morals
Winter Walks
I shot a lot of film in the last few months of 2020. I’ve tried to eek out each set of photographs by limiting photography posts to one a week. The problem with that is that we’re going to be having Winter Walks all the way to summer. Here’s this month’s lot.
— Brontë Country IV
— Winter Walks VI
— Winter Walks VII
— Winter Walks VIII
Patreon Reading Group
If you’re seeing this post, you’re also entitled to listen back to the XG reading group. For those who have subscribed to Discord perks, come and get involved! After our gruelling read through Cyclonopedia, I’m really enjoying our more relaxed approach to some nonetheless interesting questions circling the blogosphere. If you’ve followed the “Badiou/Acc” and “Anti-Hauntology” conversations with any interest, we’re going a few levels deeps in these sessions.
Catch up below and visit the #book-planning channel in the Discord for
— XG Reading Group 2.1: Much Badiou About Nothing
— XG Reading Group 2.2: Brassier’s Critique of Transcendental Materialism
Bye for now!
Not many plans for March right now. We will see where the conversations take us. I have been working on an utterly pointless task behind the scenes, migrating all my previous blogs (going back to 2008!) over to xenogothic dot com. I’m not sure what is to be gained from migrating all this material, going back to my late teens, onto this blog… But I had an epiphany the other day about how there is this continuous line from what I was interested in back then and what I’m interested in now.
In fact, it was reading Althusser and his “aleatory materialism” that made me feel like things had come full circle. Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter is very much related to our discussions around the new. However, applying this to aesthetics, via Jacques Rancière, takes me all the way back to my early blogging days and the DIY internet cultures when creating was itself like a dice throw with whatever materials were to hand.
We’ll see if I get that post gets finished this month. I’ll explain in there why I’ve bothered to undertake this pretty fruitless task, and I’ll probably share a few highlights in next month’s edition of the Blogger’s Digest as well.
Until then!