Has it been quiet around here this month? My posts have slowed a bit lately and activity elsewhere has been limited as well (at least by my standards).
This may continue for a little while. We’ll still be hosting the fortnightly reading group for Discorders but I’m hoping to buckle down and get disciplined with book writing over the coming months.
Repeater recently asked for a deadline for my second book. I am 80,000 words deep into something that is presently working-titled Nowhere Fast: Accelerationism and the Future of the New. I’ve agreed to have a first draft in by September this year for publication sometime in 2022. Although that is a long way off, I’m like a dog with a bone when I’m given a writing deadline. I will assume I’m never going to make it, slave away at it, and then end up finished about two months earlier than I needed to. That was certainly the case with my two academic dissertations… Although the gestation of Egress was a little bit more fraught…
Later this month, I’ll be presenting a lecture on the CTRL Network. Like the last time I was on the CTRL Network, I’m hoping to kill two birds with one stone: I’ll be reading out a prologue I’ve been working on for Nowhere Fast. “A Brief History of the New” will be a whistle-stop tour across the history of philosophy, looking at over two millennia’s worth of philosophical “newness” and “difference” as a way to preface some of the central questions at the heart of accelerationism that are so often overlooked and which I’d like to recentre in this new project.
Anyway, if the blog dries up and starts to feel more like a notice board than my usual public notebook, know its because I’m finally putting a few years’ worth of notes to good use.
In other news, just for you Patreon subs, I’ve been invited to write an introduction to K-punk Vol. 3 — the third and final installment of Caja Negra‘s Spanish translation of the big K-punk brick Repeater put out a few years ago.
Having done the smart thing and split the book into three volumes — click here for vol. 1 and click here for vol. 2 — they feel the final installment could use some further grounding for Spanish readers, in order to better contextualise some of Mark’s most (in)famous essays, including “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, “Good For Nothing” and the unfinished introduction to “Acid Communism”. No easy task, but I’ve spent a lot of this month knocking something together that I’m pretty proud of, which has been written for that particular audience in mind, and tries to not just repeat talking points already gone over in Egress and Postcapitalist Desire. (This is for my own sanity and also because Caja Negra will be putting out the Spanish translation of Egress this year as well, with Postcapitalist Desire following next year maybe.)
If appropriate — I haven’t asked them yet — I’d like to share the English language version of that essay with Patreons only, so watch this space for that.
RIP Grandad
I suppose I should also add that another reason for a slowdown in blogging this month is because my mental health has taken a bit of a hit. The end of March was characterised by pretty horrendous anhedonia for me. There are no doubt various reasons for this, the death of my grandpa from coronavirus was a bit of a shock. It was accompanied by a certain numbness. He was very elderly, and I’ve already watched as numerous friends have lost loved ones over the last year to this damn virus. Regardless of all that, he said in his will that he didn’t want to have a funeral ceremony. So it is all very distant and surreal. I wrote something of my
Kill The Bill
The recent protests in the UK over the death of Sarah Everard and the new crime and policing (aka anti-protest) bill have sent sparks flying nationwide. Spring is here, we’re thawing out, and now fire is catching. A few brief thoughts below. Expect this topic to keep coming back. We’re in for a lively summer.
— What is an Institution?: On the Thoughts of Police
— Kill the Bill: More on the Thoughts of the Police
Happy Birthday, Egress
My book Egress turned one-year-old this month, as did the UK’s coronavirus lockdown… What a fucking weird year it has been. It was also about a year ago that I decided it was time to get to grips with Badiou and, rather than it being a pivot into wholly new territory, it has been nice to affirm how the commitments hashed out in that book continue to resonate as I feel like I’m speeding away from it.
— Badiou’s Platonic Exit: Egress Turns One
Assorted Notes and Continued Conversations
I’ve written a few posts this month that are quite sporadic and are vaguely connected but also not quite… Offcuts from active research… Sometimes a thread that doesn’t fit anywhere ends up culled on the blog.
First up, a few frayed offshoots related to that thread pulled on last month, regarding “anti-hauntology” and the strange difficulty we have both recognising the new and remembering our own recent pasts…
— The End of History 2: Stagnant Boogaloo (Synder Cut)
— The Inertial Endogamy of Covid Capitalism
Related to this hauntological melancholy / cultural amnesia is an essay that grew out of recent research for my Caja Negra essay, following on from last month’s comments about the “post-Capitalist Realism” generation.
— The Post-Vampire Castle Generation: Notes on Neo-Anarchy in the UK
“Meta-terrorism” continues to be a conceptual hand grenade, first lopped by Alex Williams on his blog and recently passed around tentatively by myself and Ed Berger (see last month’s Badiou/Acc conversation).
— Notes on Lenin and Accelerationism Meta-Terrorism
Bring the Noys
A recent lecture by Benjamin Noys started doing the rounds on Twitter that, I must admit, really irked me. It was less the lecture itself than the reaction to it, that was uncritically positive only because — as far as I could tell — Noys was coming out against the accelerationists again. People don’t like accelerationism, we get it — but what Noys was arguing for instead seems so much worse than anything accelerationism offered up back when Noys was most actively engaged with that conversation.
I initially wrote something critiquing Noys’ abstract — not the more surefooted way to critique someone else’s work, but I was confident enough in the argument to run with it anyway. Once Noys’ lecture was made public, which I was expecting to happen any time soon — universities can be sluggish — there were a few concessions to make, but I found my argument actually gave Noys more of the benefit of the doubt than it should have done. He seemed to affirm a mid-00s post-Occupy impotence over any of the gains made by the left in recent years, and it seems like many present just swallowed it up. It beggars belief.
— The Slow Cancellation of… Sorry, What Were We Talking About?
— The Slow Cancellation of… Sorry, What Were We Talking About?: Some Concessions and Further Notes
Podcasts, Etc.
Podcasts and talks and interviews remain a fun way to come together with people during lockdown so here’s this month’s various appearances, including our Patreon reading group on postmodernism and the Situations.
— Extinction, Apocalypse and Desire: XG with Thomas Moynihan on the MIT Press Podcast
— XG Reading Group 2.3: Situationist NFTs and the Intensification of the Commodity Form
— Buddies Without Organs — Episode #05
Photography
The backlog of film scans continues…
— Winter Walks IX
— Winter (Acid) Walks X
— Winter Walks XI
— Winter Walks XII
— First Lambs
Reviews, Etc.
Two further reviews of recent projects emerged this month. A really amazing review of January’s For k-punk event in The Wire and a review of Postcapitalist Desire in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
— “The critical legacy of theorist Mark Fisher is a creative springboard for a new wave of musicians and thinkers”: For k-punk reviewed in The Wire
— “Giving Up the Ghost”: Postcapitalist Desire in the LA Review of Books
Misc.
The recent interview with Adam Curtis for Jacobin has produced an inadvertent but best definition of acid communism:
— The Spectre of Acid Communism
Go check out Time Is Away’s For k-punk commission, which they recently broadcast as the March edition of the NTS residency:
— “Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration”: Time is Away on NTS Radio
That’s All, Folks!
Back next month for the breakdown — same time, same places.