Hello! Another month gone. Time is really disappearing since we hit one year of lockdown.
I’m still in book writing mode at the moment, so blog activity is slowing down a bit. An agreed September deadline sort of put the fear in me. The accelerationism book I’ve been working on over the past year is nowhere near finished, and it is already quite lengthy, so I’ve sidestepped to another project to give myself a bit of breathing room.
I’ve had a book about selfies in the back of my mind for a few years now. My undergraduate dissertation was about photography and nihilism, and I’ve been keen to scratch that itch again. I got close in writing two further essays in recent years, “Points of View” and “The Will to Deform”, so there’s already a backbone in place for it. I think finishing it by September is very doable.
Anyway, I’m telling you this because, in case you missed it, I shared a draft chapter from the book for Patreons earlier this month. Hopefully there’ll be more sneak peeks in the coming months.
For now, here’s what else got posted over the last few weeks.
Narcissus in Bloom
That’s the working title of the new book. Subtitle: “Nihilism and the Selfie”. I’ve already broken this introduction up and rewritten it extensively, but since it was relevant to the XG reading group at the time, here’s a few take on the psychoanalytic understanding of narcissism and how it’s not necessarily a sign of our own impotence — quite the opposite.
— Narcissus in Bloom: A Work-in-Progress
An Introduction to the Late K-Punk
I was recently commissioned to write an introduction to K-Punk, Vol. 3, the final installment in Caja Negra’s three-part Spanish translation of Mark Fisher’s K-Punk anthology. It will be published simultaneously in Spanish (on the Caja Negra blog) and in English (right here) in June, as well as appearing in the book itself.
Ahead of time, I thought it’d be nice to share it with you Patreons early. This one is available only over on Patreon and not here on the blog since it will end up here eventually anyway. Enjoy!
— Introduction to the late K-Punk
Prince Philip
The old racist died and England lost its collective marbles. I wrote an essay about his environmental politics and how they’re weirdly relevant to the royal family’s own continued existence. A follow-up post considered how, even though the man is dead, his tactics for manufacturing consent were clearly on display at the funeral, as an imagine of a lonely queen supposedly defined our pandemic. I think not… I hope not…
— Ecologies of Class: Prince Philip’s Conservationist Politics
— Regarding the Pain of Royals
Bad Queer
A big, long overshare that generated a really wonderful response. I sought of exhausted everything I had to say in that post, and I’ve found it difficult to talk about since. Maybe there’ll be more on this in future.
Photography
The backlog of “Winter Walks” posts was finished, and then I went and bought a new camera. With a book on photography in tow, I think there’s a lot more photo posting on the horizon. There are a few essays on photography thrown in here too, for good measure.
— Winter Walks XIII
— Burning Heather
— Winter Walks XIV
— Encounters with Photography and Community: Alumni Talk at the University of South Wales
— Untitled #23 (With Notes on a Migrated Archive)
Reading Group
We’ve been reading Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory in the XG reading group these past few weeks. There’s two extra posts thrown in here — one related, one divergent — both inspired by our reading. (I’ve really enjoyed this book, despite it calling into question everything I hold dear?!)
— XG Reading Group 2.4: A Grift in Space-Time
— Knowing the Unknown Knower
— Communities of Loss: A Brief Reflection
— XG Reading Group 2.5: Narcissist Realism
— XG Reading Group 2.6: Capitalism’s Transcendental Mirror Factory
A Brief History of the New
I gave a guest lecture as part of the CTRL Network’s Postcapitalist Desire reading group earlier this month. It was a chance to share some of my research for the forthcoming accelerationism book… Just as I put it on hold… If you missed it, the video will be going live soon, I think. For now, a preliminary note on it that I posted ahead of time.
Forthcoming
The last public talk I’ll probably do for the foreseeable, as I retreat into book mode: I’m speaking at the rA/Upture_2 conference, part of the OFF-Biennálé in Budapest on 8th May.
— Third Actors: XG at the rA/Upture_2 conference, OFF-Biennálé Budapest
See you next month!