Month: July 2021

The Tomorrow War

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The Tomorrow War is an intriguing film. [Major spoilers below.] It is something of an amalgamation of World War Z and Edge of Tomorrow, but it is also a fun and dynamic alien invasion movie in its own right. It has also crystallised something for me that I’ve felt for years but never quite known how to articulate…

When I was growing up, my grandpa loved old war movies. Mostly “prisoner of war” stuff, like Colditz and The Great Escape. I liked them too. They were often great family viewing. (At least in Britain, but let’s not go there…)

As I grew older, I remember being quite surprised about his love of such films. He fought in World War II, after all, and served as a navigator for the RAF. But he never talked about it. I don’t think he was under any illusion that war was something to enjoy or remember fondly. And yet, there was something about seeing this kind of romantic vision of wartime that was cathartic or calming for him, I think. It allowed him to relive what must have been one of the most affecting times of his life, but with a certain amount of distance and through a certain kind of soft-focus filter. He was just one man in a nation of men who, after the war, needed to tell themselves a certain kind of story.

In more recent years, it is interesting to see how that kind of film has developed with a new kind of veteran in mind. Ever since American Sniper came out in 2014, after a generation of veterans were starting to settle back into civilian life post-9/11 and the war on terror, there have been periodic film releases that insert a Chris Pratt or a Bradley Cooper into the mix — basically any young white contemporary American everyman — in order to tell a story (whether explicitly or implicitly) about duty and responsibility and, perhaps most importantly, the emotional toil of coming home. These films aren’t dramatizing what happened over there — this isn’t Jarhead or Black Hawk Down or a film from that generation of war movie — but what happens when it’s (supposed to be) all over. They are essentially PTSD films, told largely through flashbacks.

I have no problem with that kind of narrative. I find American militarism pretty nauseating, truth be told, but I do have a soft spot for films that explore its complexities. (I’ve seen American Sniper more times than I’d care to admit, actually — the result of a hangover from a childhood obsession with Clint Eastwood and his particular brand of reactionary anti-hero, I think.) As films, they can actually be quite charming, even if they are clearly made with a certain kind of ideological standpoint in mind. But what is telling, in consuming this sort of movie, is watching how that standpoint changes over time.

The Tomorrow War is fascinating in this regard, mainly because, through its time-travel drama, it facilitates a major subplot that explores the impact of intergenerational PTSD quite specifically.

Chris Pratt is a veteran of the Iraq War trying to kickstart a new life and make something of himself after the military. But it’s not going very well for him and he’s getting very sad and angry about it. When we meet him, he’s just walked into a house party he’s supposedly hosting, but he doesn’t interact with anyone there. He’s like a ghost, almost, with no time for anyone but his wife and daughter and, most significantly, some people on the end of a phoneline who might be offering him his dream job. But he doesn’t get it. And he takes the rejection surprisingly badly. The world fades out around him, as if this setback in his career is nonetheless taking him back somewhere much darker. There’s a dark sadness within him that is rising.

Alongside Pratt’s clearly undiagnosed PTSD, we learn about how he’s also deeply resentful of his father, played by JK Simmons. When he arrives home, he’s given an unopened Christmas card from the man, which he throws in the bin. (Though the narrative suggests Pratt goes dark over his failed job interview, this minor detail looms ever larger as the story progresses, as if the Christmas card is the real trigger for him.) Simmons, we later learn, came back from ‘Nam a broken man and wasn’t really present when Pratt needed him most. They’re estranged and not really on speaking terms, largely because Pratt refuses to engage with him.

Then the aliens arrive. Pratt goes into the future to fight a war, and whilst he’s there he meets his daughter, fully grown and now a Colonel fighting off the invaders — and she resents him. She keeps him at a distance and later tells him some home truths (albeit related to a life he hasn’t lived yet). She tells a story about how, when she got older, he and her mother separated and he was a bit of a mess. In the end, just seven years later, she watched him die following a car crash, after they’d been estranged for years. It is a case of “like father like son”, as it turns out. Whatever was eating Pratt when we first met him, devoured him whole a few years later. This disturbs Pratt greatly.

But something also clicks for him. Suddenly, you see this intergenerational picture being painted. Post-‘Nam dad is followed by post-Iraq son, and tomorrow war daughter isn’t really having any of it. Later, when Pratt is unceremoniously sent back to the past, having watched his future daughter die, he sets out on a redemption mission to destroy the aliens — frozen in ice on the Russian tundra, as it turns out — in order to make sure the war never happens and his daughter never has to die. But in the process, he ropes in his Dad, and together they’re two shaken veterans — one of them maybe an alcoholic — doing what they unfortunately do best and trying to save the world.

The psychological picture painted here is fascinating. None of this really takes precedence. It is all back story; little details that paint a big picture, which is nonetheless a familial backdrop to a big spectacular alien invasion movie. But these little details change the film in quite a profound way, I think.

Despite how it might sound, this isn’t quite the gung-ho American militarism we’ve come to expect. It doesn’t have much ideological pomp about American exceptionalism, filling its role as the world’s police force. Pratt is sent on a suicide mission into a war that America (but also the world) is definitely losing. It’s Vietnam, yeah, but it’s also the Middle East. But then, the aliens are not the Viet Cong or the Taliban. This isn’t a fantasy do-over, winning the war that was previously lost. This is a film about a band of troubled veterans who truly want to redeem themselves, haunted by the things they’ve done or the world they might have created through their actions. This is a band of veterans turning the tables. A Vietnam war vet and an Iraq war vet fighting off an invading species. This isn’t Predator, with a tank-like Schwarzenegger fighting off the single alien guerrilla, getting his own back on the enemy and securing the cathartic victory otherwise denied him (although the aliens in The Tomorrow World do look like the monstrous lovechildren of a xenomorph and a Predator). This is a film about vets redeeming themselves by fighting off a hoard of (notably white) invaders, rather than being one of them. It’s a film about war vets getting the sharp and sour taste of their own medicine, and wanting to use the time they have left to fight off an invading force. It’s a film about war vets stopping a war from ever taking place.

The Tomorrow World feels like a film for anti-war war vets, in this regard, dressed up as an overblown alien invasion movie. This feels like burnt-out American militarism creating a narrative where it gets to save the world from itself.

Learning and Trauma:
The Sharp Object of Ideology

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In a rare moment of insecurity, I deleted this post from last week in order to revise it. It felt undercooked and needed to simmer a bit more. Here it is again.

I had an email recently from someone asking about Fisher’s various uses of the concept of “ideology” throughout his works.

In Capitalist Realism, we have this understanding of ideology that is ostensibly Lacanian / Žižekian — after the end of history, once capitalism no longer has any real ideological opponents, ideology itself seems to disappear. With nothing to compare capitalism to, our critical faculties go blunt as we fail to properly interrogate our current system’s shortcomings. Soon enough, capitalist realism isn’t an ideological position but rather the absence of ideology itself. Fisher writes: “The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.” We’re post-ideological, Žižek argues, illustrating that now familiar fallacy, as if the fall of the Soviet Union was to ideology as the Obama administration was to race consciousness.

But then, in the Postcapitalist Desire lectures, Fisher talks about Lukács and reification. This isn’t ideology disappearing but ideology making its presence known as a kind of solidified position. It’s similar — ideology becomes “common sense” or a “general rule”. It makes the case for itself as common sense. It still doesn’t announce itself as ideology, of course. But it will assert itself through concepts like freedom, or through a kind of moral encouragement, sending you towards all your hopes and dreams. It is assigned to general principles parasitically in order to establish itself as a kind of symbiote. But why is that relevant to us now? Why does Fisher go back to Lukács? Post-ideological capitalism doesn’t have to announce that “there is no alternative”. There literally isn’t any.

The emailed question, then, was how are we supposed to reconcile the two conceptions of ideology when thinking about Fisher’s overall trajectory? I sat on this question for about a week, but on reflection, I don’t think it’s too hard. To borrow from Fisher’s own terminology, at least in The Weird the Eerie, perhaps we can say that Lukács sees ideology as a failure of absence whilst Žižek sees ideology as a failure of presence.

This movement from Žižek to Lukács mirrors our own trajectory over the last decade or so. 2009 Fisher uses the Žižekian critique of post-ideology because that is what’s required. Obama has just ushered in a post-race society and the financial crash has shown that we don’t actually have any political imagination left to generate alternatives through ideological friction. But in 2016, when Fisher is giving his final lectures, we have far greater ideological tension, with an ascendant far-right and an emboldened far-left.

Things are only more explicit five years on. Ideology shows its bare face, and so we see not the absence of ideology but its undeniable presence. We witness, in real time, that eerie transition from one to the other. We have ridden the wave of that phase shift over the last decade — maybe without realising it, in some ways. We’ve gone from a popular abstention from politics to the popularisation of standpoints more broadly. Though often a depressing time to be alive, we have seen increased solidarity with marginal communities. We’ve gone from Jeremy Corbyn being denounced as a terrorist for simply not slotting into the status quo to the normalisation of criticism of Israel and neoliberalism all around the world. We’ve clawed ideology back from the void, in a way, and moved from post-ideology to a new kind of explicitly ideological landscape. Lukács is more appropriate to this world than the Žižek of 2009. But that’s not to say that Lukács and Žižek are incompatible…

Whilst thinking about all this, I came across this somewhat recent essay from Benjamin Noys, which I found really interesting and resonant with this discussion. First of all, he talks about how Capitalist Realism is, at heart, a book for students — and Mark, in general, was a writer for students. Not just post-16 HE teenagers, as an explicit demographic, but all of us as students. Mark was an educator, which, for him, is the same as a consciousness-raiser, which is the same as a sort of ideological diagnostician.

Noys then talks about Fisher’s view of capitalist ideology more explicitly, relating it to his personal writings on depression and our collective mental health crises. Crises precipitate change because crises denaturalise systems in revolt, he argues, and this is true at the level of the individual and society more generally.

Noys writes:

In terms of mental health, the breakdown of capitalist realism is not only a social breakdown, but also a psychic breakdown that condenses the forms and processes of the continual series of breakdowns and crises that compose capitalism. While “Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect)”, the effect of crisis is to further estrange and de-naturalize capitalism, mental health, and, of course, the weather. Overlapping forms of breakdown strike at the very heart of the usual ideological mechanism, central to the analysis of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, of treating what is cultural as natural. Now, with the widespread recognition and reality of climate catastrophe, even nature is no longer natural.

Consider, for example, how people who suffer from PTSD often experience feelings of “specialness” — not arrogance but an alienating uniqueness, as if they are not like other people, they’re outcasts, no one understands them, and it can get to the point where sufferers feel like they have a nonhuman subjectivity. Depersonalisation is precisely a breakdown where you no longer feel “natural”. Have we not experienced a kind of political PTSD in recent years, where traumas of all kinds — from pandemics and financial breakdowns to cultural crises and bizarre elections — have led to the very denaturalisation of the system at large? That seems to be Noys’ argument.

This kind of experience can make people feel really hopeless and listless, but there are ways that we can learn to channel our experiences into positive change. We can get better. But it can be a really daunting and even re-traumatising process. That’s something I wanted to explore in Egress — how to continue down the path of “education”, both academic and political, when that education is ruptured by a trauma. The response isn’t to divert off into a kind of mandated social therapy. This is what education is itself for — education, consciousness raising, libidinal engineering. The best kind of education is often the very rupturing of education itself and the biggest challenge is persisting with this kind of process, even when it gets really tough.

This is the same argument I’ve been trying to make for years, against “acid communism” as this kind of reheated hippie positivity. The breakdown of capitalist realism isn’t going to be a pleasurable experience by default. It can feel good to have the wool pulled off your eyes, and watch reality warp as a result, but the fetishisation of psychedelic experience ignores the fact it is not for everyone. It undermines the real movement, ultimately, by reducing it to a singular sort of aesthetic experience rather than a psychedelic unveiling to be experienced by all.

It’s the problem of Plato’s cave, in many ways. Some people are attracted to the bright colours and flashing lights, but others are more comfortable in the dark. That is the problem of our present moment and of political education more generally. In a polarised society, we see ideology like a colour phasing in and out of space. It’s a spectre, struggling to materialise — beautiful to some, terrifying to others. Because convincing people to deconstruct their ideologies, those “naturalised” perspectives on a familiar reality is a very difficult task to sustain. Indeed, it can be a traumatic experience. If we don’t retain an awareness of that, we might as well say goodbye to long-term goals.

K. Daniel Cho has a really fascinating book on this called Psychopedagogy. One of the central obstacles in learning and educating oneself about history, capitalism and our place within both, is that the reality revealed can be really unpleasant. We’ve seen what happens when that process gets to work. We see bizarre attacks made by the misinformed against so-called “critical race theory”, arguing it’s nothing but a guilt machine for white people, and guilt gets us nowhere. But where does that guilt come from? If you feel guilty, you might find your education to be traumatic. That not only puts “students” off learning, it also makes the burden of being an educator a little too much to bear. These are common talking points today, particularly on subjects like race. But Cho’s response to this is entirely in line, I think, with Fisher’s weird and eerie approach to education, which is not afraid to disparage or critique or disturb on its Platonic quest towards truth on the outside of an ideologically-instantiated “common sense” . Cho writes:

If critical pedagogy wants students to become more aware of the problems of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression, then it must allow for the repetition of those relations within the controlled space of the classroom. As these forms of oppression are rooted in authoritarian relations, repeating them in the classroom will inevitably involve transferring authoritarian positions — the Patriarch, the Bourgeoisie, the Colonizer, the Bigot — onto the person of the teacher insofar as the teacher occupies the position of the “subject supposed to know.” Acting as the recipient of the patient’s various transferences is not a comfortable task, which is why Freud describes the transference as the most arduous of all the analyst’s responsibilities. But it is the best way to learn the traumatic knowledge of the unconscious. In this way, taking on this transference can be seen as an ethical decision, as Lacan says the “status of the unconscious . . . is ethical”. One must make an ethical decision to become the subject of the transference in order to achieve the ends of social justice. Critical pedagogy must follow Freud in saying: “Whatever it is, I must go there”.

Fisher’s intuitive understanding of this is what made him such an excellent teacher. I always found him to be intimidatingly approachable in this regard, because as much as he was, in many of our minds, a guru and a deeply intelligent man, he was open about his own insecurities and the gaps in his knowledge. He was always, in the best way, a kind of student-teacher, shifting from the “subject supposed to know” to someone just as affected by the world as the rest of us, and it is the minor position of the student that allows one to be constantly open to outsides and new perspectives. Cho again:

Confronted with contradictions, the social investigator should make no attempt to rationalize them away and should instead conceive of them as integral features of the system itself. The negative space left by the refusal to assimilate one’s self to the system (i.e., identify with it) opens up the possibility for one to become the subject of traumatic knowledge. We might call this void the psychoanalytic or Lacanian subject or the proletariat subject with equal accuracy. But, perhaps, most apropos would be to call it simply this: the student.

When reactionaries grow concerned about the tendency of university students to radically change their political positions, or simply gain a political consciousness, this isn’t because they’re all overrun with communists looking to corrupt the youth. It’s because education — a proper education — always illuminates ideology. To become active within the world, aware of its structures and its ideological construction, is always to be a student. (This is surely part of the reason why neoliberalism tries to separate and create antagonism between students and workers, despite the economic and philosophical overlap between the two.)

Noys makes a similar point. He interrogates the friction in Fisher’s writing, which is at once the product of an educator’s desire to educate and a student’s desire to educate themselves. (I think this is true of all blogged writings, personally — the best ones, at least. Blogging is both an attempt to teach oneself how to say what one thinks, as well as articulate what you think in order to inform others around you — it is both personal and social.) For Fisher, the role of his books, blogs and lectures alike is to initiate “a process of the education of desire to both free us from capitalist realism and to develop a non-capitalist life.” Noys writes: “I am reminded of Fredric Jameson’s contention that our problem ‘lies in trying to figure out what we really want in the first place.'” (Fisher’s version of that same question is: “Do we want what we say he want?”) Noys continues:

Utopias are negative lessons, finally, that teach us the limits of our imagination in the face of the addictive culture of capitalism. It is only, Jameson insists, once the utopia has impoverished us, undertaken an act of “world reduction,” that we can undertake a “desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called Utopia in the first place.”

This is the kind of ideological process we have undergone over the last decade or so. We have transition from a post-ideological society, where capitalism has won, becoming near-utopian in all the things it provides and the freedoms it facilitates. But towards the end of the 2000s, it felt — for my generation at least — like this utopia we were told about all the time had truly impoverished us and made us lacking. It was then, with perfect timing, that Fisher helped a lot of us see the light, and a new process of education began. But again, for me at least, having followed the k-punk blog, read Fisher’s books, and then applied to Goldsmiths, it was eventually clear that he was not some messiah but a student-teacher who led humbly by example.

Noys writes:

It is also important to consider Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, which suggests “it is essential to educate the educator,” and that: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” If Fisher is writing largely outside of this context, as are we all, then we still have to consider this problem of education and self-education. The various attempts made at educational forms “outside” neo-liberal capitalist forms are often equivocal, even reproducing those forms in the dream of the “private”. Perhaps the closest we have to such experiments arise in the “teach-ins” or “outs” that have arisen in various struggles against privatizing education. These, however, remain temporary and are limited in addressing questions of self-reproduction in the context outside the wage. There is no simple solution to the problem and the difficulty of even sketching such forms speaks to our moment.

It is this project of education that remains before us and is left implied as the true substance of which “capitalist realism” is the truncated and mutilated form. To make good on this project we would need to articulate the weird “outside” with the eerie spaces of “absence,” of the fractures and dialectical tensions of capitalism with its empty appearance. This is the difficult bridge to be forged that is marked in the joining and divide of The Weird and the Eerie. Whether the acid or psychedelic would have been the sufficient mediator remains a question, and one which any continuation of Fisher’s project would have to suggest. I would argue, however, that any such project of education needs to abandon the conceptualization of inside and outside for a more dialectical grasping of the “interior” limits of capitalism and the articulation of those “limits” and their possibilities with that “interior.” This is where Fisher’s project requires urgent re-thinking.

I’d like to think his Postcapitalist Desire lectures clarify this last point, at least in part.

Blogging as Infinite Conversation:
Lately I’ve Been Feeling Like Arthur Rimbaud

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? Preamble

Mark Fisher opens his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life with a line from Drake’s “Tuscan Leather”, the opening track from his 2013 album Nothing Was the Same.

“Lately I’ve been feelin’ like Guy Pearce in Memento.”

The track itself is an atemporal collage, as Drake heads back to the future. Heavily treated vocals gather together in reverse, as the beat staggers forwards for six minutes. That’s an eternity as far as rap albums go. This is no introductory skit or three-minute tone-setter but a six minute song that doesn’t bolt out of the gate but slithers, side-winding into earshot.

Much of what is mentioned in the song’s lyrics reappears over the course of the rest of the album. Track titles are spoken as lines of verse. But there are also nods to drama from Drake’s personal life, and references to past album sales and industry records. It even acknowledges itself as an intro. But it doesn’t feel like one. It feels like a closer; like a return. It’s a “previously on” introduction to a brand new season, just in case you missed what happened last time. As a result, that sample-reversing beat starts to feel like a mutant coda, not an opening salvo. All the while, the track builds and builds, with the beat gathering momentum, or at least taking up more space. After each verse, it seems more fleshed out, becoming thicker and more present, but still, the backwards main ingredient swerves around the drum pattern, which is propulsive and undeniably forward-facing. The two temporal directions box each other, ducking and diving, mirroring each other. There’s this strange sense that, although this is the intro, it is one half of a rhyming palindrome.

“How much time is this nigga spendin’ on the intro?
Lately I’ve been feelin’ like Guy Pearce in Memento.”

Does this sounds familiar? Maybe not yet. It is as if Drake knows the importance of an intro, of a first line. Forget the singles and the hooks. It’s those first few seconds of the album that are going to stick in your brain, no matter how amorphous they are. He knows it’s that first reversed sample that will act like a Proustian trigger for now and from now on. This is a future classic, Drake seems to say, and you’re gonna long for that moment when you first heard this, so let’s savour it for a while. Six minutes, to be exact.

“How much time is this nigga spendin’ on the intro?”

How much time is it gonna take for you to never forget this moment? The song takes its name from a perfume by Tom Ford. Smell is the scent that binds itself most firmly to memory, of course, and this is one decadent bottle of future nostalgia. If the coding of longevity into new content is now a music industry staple, Drake pioneered it for the streaming era. Like turning up to a job interview in your best threads when there are so many candidates to choose from, it’s less about a good first impression and more about ensuring you’re remembered. Drake knows that. He’s maybe even a little insecure about it. He seems to mourn the false construction of an event. So many of his songs are hedonistic laments. Yeah, this party might be “unforgettable”, but I’m barely present enough to enjoy it and commit it to memory. “Party hauntology”, Fisher called it. So many of music’s name-checked substances help us to forget. This is an album that wants to remember and be remembered.

But perhaps “Tuscan Leather” is also a comment on the process of writing itself? In what way does Drake feel like Guy Pearce, exactly? Does he suffer from short-term memory loss, or is it more that he recognises how the very process of writing an album / a book / a life is about inscribing fragments, clues, waypoints for yourself, as if there’s a future self trying to be born, leaving breadcrumbs for you, secret messages that you have to put together, just as Drake is doing for the listener over the course of his six-minute preamble. We might argue that’s how so many of the biggest names in music make albums these days. Look at Kanye, seizing every moment, picking up tracks and samples and people, all of whom he brings together like raw materials. Every encounter — sonic or otherwise — becomes a potential piece of the puzzle. Things aren’t planned from the start — this is a process, unfolding in real time, and you’re about to hear the outcome. Maybe that’s why “Tuscan Leather” feels like an outro in reverse. Though introducing the project to the listener, it was probably the last thing recorded, just as the introduction of a book is so often the last thing written. It’s a survey, letting the newcomer know what to expect, as you sign off and let it go.

Jean-Francois Lyotard once wrote that producing “a book means only one thing: that you’re fed up with this approach, this horizon, this tone, these readings.” (Fisher certainly seemed done with hauntology after the publication of Ghosts.) A book is a culmination of fragmentary thoughts, undertaken in search of some unknown thing. “There was a horizon sketched, uncertain.” Sometimes, those fragments see the light of day — they are inchoate attempts to prefigure something that has not yet fully emerged. “Nevertheless, you collect all of those attempts and you publish them as a book.” You write a book, you make an album, you direct a film — “you do it to get it over with.”

Then what?

The final section of Maurice Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation is titled “The Absence of the Book”. It is an investigation into “the neutral, the fragmentary”. He begins with an end — Arthur Rimbaud’s “final” work.

Having scandalised much of the literary world as an anarchistic poet who broke all the rules, and much more besides, Rimbaud famously had an affair with Paul Verlaine. Verlaine was a drunk and an abuser, but a poet that Rimbaud admired, and they travelled to London together to immerse themselves in culture, in each other, and in their shared compulsion to write. But the two writers were seemingly only attached to each other because their spirals of destruction exerted a similar gravitational pull. Like two black holes caught in each other’s orbit, the affair ended with Verlaine taking pot shots at Rimbaud with his revolver. Following Verlaine’s arrest, they went their separate ways forever and, to the shock of the literary world, Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible, never wrote another thing.

Daniel Mendelsohn, writing in The New Yorker, argues that

This sordid emotional cataclysm surely goes some way toward explaining Rimbaud’s desire for a new life: it’s hard not to feel that, perhaps for the first time, he realized that deranging his and other people’s senses could have serious and irreversible consequences.

But for Blanchot, this is not a retreat but an owning up to the life one has lived, or perhaps a way to at least forget that his has ended — “for one who wishes to bury his memory and his gifts, it is still literature that offers itself as ground and as forgetting.” Writers write their own stories and can rewrite their own histories. Inscriptions, poems, scars — they’re not memories but signifiers preloaded. How does an injury and a trauma become a battle scar? You renarrate it. Guy Pearce is trapped in the templexity that results. He awakes each day, remembering nothing, covered in inscriptions, which he sets about deciphering. He feels like he is at the beginning, but the end is already a foregone conclusion. He’s already written the book. Now he’s simply rereading what he’s written.

Though we like to think that Rimbaud never wrote another thing. He was more like Guy Pearce in Memento than we might like to think. Verlaine was his Joe Pantoliano. Perhaps he saw, in Verlaine, an archetype — the great Symbolist was a trigger-happy poet, a manipulator, an opportunist. Though he implored his fellow writers to “Keep away from the murderous Sharp Saying, Cruel Wit, and Impure Laugh”, he loaded his gun with worse things than that. Rimbaud, in response, turned Verlaine’s bullet-poetry on himself. (Camus described his abstention from poetry as a kind of “spiritual suicide”.)

But he did not die, he simply stopped becoming. That is not to say his work was forsaken or he set about renouncing his past life. He simply never wrote anything new. As Blanchot notes, even when Rimbaud was not writing, he took an interest in what he had written; “going back over the paths he has traced, he keeps them open as a possibility of communication with his friends.” After the publication of A Season in Hell, his “final” work, Rimbaud sought to publish his Illuminations — a compilation of sorts, written prior to his fallout with Verlaine, but reconsidered and reworked for years afterwards. These were his inscriptions, written in the midst of a trauma and later deciphered to find the essence of a life lived within. Some critics dismiss them as a failure, but in his own work he found the shadows of a mystery he wanted most to solve. He tried to excavate this errant and anarchic self, a mature voice trying to distill the fire of adolescence without snuffing it out. Did he succeed? Even after the Illuminations were posthumously published, they were seen as incomplete. Soon, the mythic temporality of the poems themselves were called into question. How can we say they were written “before” A Season in Hell if the work was not done on them until long afterwards (and, even then, was arguably never finished)? Blanchot argues that,

Even if written afterward, the prose poems belong to a time that is “anterior,” the time particular to art that the one who writes would have done with: “No more words” — a prophetic being, seeking by every means a future and seeking it on the basis of the end already come.

Though he stopped writing, Rimbaud was newly immersed in the art of literature. Not the writing of experience and poetry as a gesture on the cusp of the present itself, but the organisation of the past as a future yet to come. This was the shape of poetry after the end; beyond the fin de siècle.

Blogs are not written with books in mind. If books were in mind, we would not blog. But there comes a time when the material collated, accumulated, stored, suggests to oneself that there are threads to be entangled and rope to be made. The question is, when do you stop blogging? When do you say no more words and set about the thankless and withering task of drawing a line under the past in order to produce a future already written? When does one announce that one is no longer speaking and thinking and instead becoming the true master of words already said?

For Blanchot, “the affirmation of the end is anticipatory and prematurely announces a new hour”. The book is just such an announcement, but never on time. It is too much in time to ever be on it. It is the “speech of the turning where, in a vertiginous manner, time turns”. By comparison to the finality of the book, poetry is quantum, dead and alive, zombified, reified but not inert, the corpse of speech lying in wait for a mouth that might reanimate it, beckon it forwards. A poetry reading is a séance. “I was creating … the ghosts of future nocturnal luxury”, Rimbaud writes. Was he a genius? Only in stopping. That way the spirit, the genie, was not exorcised.

But books, too, are never over. That is why no one should ever write too many of them. “One book overlays another, one life another — a palimpsest where what is below and what is above change according to the measure taken, each in turn constituting what is still the unique original.” All books revolve around a centre, for Blanchot — “the needle, the point of secret pain that … harries with haste without pause.” Books are interruptions in writings; the recorded minutes of an infinite conversation. Poetry is writing interrupted before it can ever truly begin. Poetry is an intro, always arrested, before the laborious process of literature takes over. It is pure essence, bottled; a fine perfume, condensing on glass.

What are blogs? Nothing so romantic and ethereal, but they still capture that thrust, that life force from which writing emerges and which is hard to stop. Maybe if poetry is perfume, a blog is a sneeze.

What was it Burroughs said about the word-virus?

Blogger’s Digest #10 (01/07/2021)

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Hello! We’re back for another month of blog digesting.

I’m still mostly working behind the scenes at the moment, but a few things broke free of various embargoes and became blog content. I actually had a meeting with Repeater this month about book details — I had been scheduled to deliver a new manuscript by September. In all honesty, the deadline made me shit myself, and I jumped around and felt very insecure about what I have been producing and whether it will be good enough. (Not a blog perfectionist in the slightest, but if it’s gonna go into print, neuroticism takes over.)

Thankfully, things are back on track. I’ve put yet another project on hold and returned to my book on accelerationism, which I think is in a lot better shape than I thought it was when I hit my last wall with it. A first draft may even be ready for the now-defunct September deadline. Fingers crossed!

I’ll keep you Patreons updated on that. In the meantime, here’s everything that went down this month.

K-Punk, Vol. 3

The third installment of the Spanish translation of K-Punk is out now, completing the set. I was invited to write a new introduction for it at the start of this year. Patreons have had access to it for a while, but now it’s available for everyone to read now that the book is out.

You can read the English language version on the blog via the link below, and you’ll also find a link to the Spanish translation there too, which is both in the book and on Caja Negra’s blog.

— Introduction to K-Punk, Vol. 3: English Language Version

That Grimes TikTok…

I wrote about the Grimes TikTok about communism in the context of Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence & Spirit, which gained way more traction that anticipated and ruined my mentions for at least a day. There was some good discussion that went on around it though, including a long comment from Hypnosifl, which I shared in a separate post.

— AI is Good Actually: Notes on Commie Grimes and Intelligence & Spirit
— AI is Good Actually: A Further Note from Hypnosifl

The Memeing of Everything

After the cover of Mike Watson’s forthcoming book for Zero launched a thousand subtweets, I wanted to try and write something that wasn’t entirely cunty but at least addressed one of the prevailing problems with how a new generation of content makers is engaging with Fisher’s legacy and the legacy of the Ccru and its affiliates more generally.

— Memeing History
— Memeing Politics

Cultural Critique

I wrote a lot about TV this month? It’s been ages. I feel like I haven’t really watched anything in months. So much of lockdown is spent sitting around, I tend not to like doing it by choice. It’s also hard to concentrate.

Despite all that, three posts about films or TV shows that feel zeitgeisty? I thought Mare of Easttown was good, precisely because it showed how counter-productive most policing is, and I thought Cruella was a weird anachronistic mess, and I thought Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock and the entire Conservative government starts to make total sense when you consider them in the context of “zany” TV characters from I Love Lucy, Parks & Rec, Veep and The Thick of It.

— Mare of Easttown: 2021’s One True Cop Show
— Cruella
— Our Zany Ministers: On Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, the Personal and the Political

That last one was basically half of a chapter that I wrote for the forthcoming book on narcissism, but I’m not sure I liked it for that context any longer. Still, a decent sneak peek if you want to know where I’m heading at the moment.

Poetry and Poetics

Speaking of “where I’m heading at the moment”, I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry recently. I’m reading a lot and still formulating thoughts, but these two posts contain a load of inchoate takes on stuff.

— Stronger Than Death: A Note on Poetry and Grief
— Blogging as Infinite Conversation: Preamble

Hull

This post was basically an excuse to share an article written for MAP Magazine about the experiences of Chilean refugees in Hull in the 1970s, who fled the violent rise of neoliberalism under Pinochet only to find a seemingly more innocuous version taking root in England. The fact this all took place in my hometown of Hull was also fascinating to me. It’s a short piece with some excellent photos and it stayed with me for weeks afterwards.

— Hull and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Photography

Just one photography post this month, but I took a lot of photos in the meantime. There are currently fortnightly photoblogs scheduled all the way up until September, so look out for those.

— Untitled #26

Podcasts and Appearances

There were quite a few events happening this month. Alongside the last two installment of our reading group, before we move onto Benjamin Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real, there was Repeater Radio’s mammoth K-Punk marathon, which I’m hoping will go online soon. I also spoke to our friend Bec for her Liminal Worlds website and roleplayed as spermatozoa for two episodes of After the Maestro.

— Repeater Radio presents: K-Punk Marathon
— XG Reading Group 2.8: Interlude
— XG Reading Group 2.9: The Social
— Literary Ley Lines: XG in the Liminal Lounge
— After the Maestro

That’s all for now. See you again next month!

Memeing Politics

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Yesterday’s post was written, somewhat tangentially, with the cover for Mike Watson’s The Memeing of Mark Fisher in mind. I’d already been thinking about Deleuze’s approach to history and its relationship to present appraisals of Mark Fisher and the Ccru the day before the Zer0 tweet went live. The book cover and its literal dramatisation of a weird Oedipus complex, with a kid whose Dad is Adorno looking at Mark Fisher memes, dovetailed with the sentiment I was already exploring. Beyond that, it wasn’t really a direct comment on it. But there was some debate about it on Twitter afterwards…

Tweeted out by the Zer0 Books Twitter account yesterday, the cover seemed to be everywhere by the evening, and for many people it crossed a line. I was particularly surprised that many people affiliated with Repeater Books, who would usually keep their criticisms private (in my experience), suddenly began tweeting about it disparagingly. Always the gobshite, I didn’t really think twice about adding my own two cents on Twitter…

Everyone talking about it negatively apparently had egg on their face, however, because the cover is ironic and didn’t your mum ever tell you not to judge a book by its cover? But the problem is perhaps that the cover is indicative of Zer0’s general output of phoned-in culture war provocations, filtered through their Frankfurt daddies. It unfortunately epitomised everything that a lot of people really hate about the present version of Zer0 Books.

Later that evening, someone shared the book online. I had a quick read-through and, thankfully, it is far from as provocative as the cover itself. It is tempered and thoughtful and engages with different meme trends, wondering how they express certain structures of feeling and relate to different philosophical concepts and movements. Though I still think the previous post is applicable to how it anachronistically treats its historical antecedents, the book hardly seems like the disaster the cover suggests it is.

So why choose that cover? Why pick something that is going to be such an obstacle for many people to get past? Isn’t that Fisher’s problem with aestheticised politics in the first place? Zer0 obviously runs on the belief that all press is good press these days, and so some of their fans saw the cover as doing its job, but that’s hardly applicable to Fisher’s own interest in online culture and parody. Why embody the absolute worst of what you’re intending to talk about in order to entice people into your argument? Have we learned nothing from accelerationism?

The go-to example for memetic politics I always think of is the bootleg Jeremy Corbyn Nike tick t-shirt from the 2017 UK general election. That tongue-in-cheek combination of designer clothing and socialist politics was exactly what Fisher meant by “designer communism”. It hijacked an already existing symbol, synonymous with desire and a certain kind of streetwear luxury, and somehow made a old socialist like Corbyn sexy by association. The lesson learned was a simple one — if you can’t sell a t-shirt, you’re not going to be able to sell the revolution. That’s the counter-intuitive provocation of Fisher’s postcapitalist desire.

Zer0’s various attempts to go viral in a similar way falter. Their intentions are suspect. Instead of grassroots organising and political consciousness, it’s all culture war bullshit and debate bro strategies. And because it doesn’t really have a material basis or a popular culture to attach itself to (beyond the one it attempts to create for itself), it always looks self-serving.

That sums up my problem with Zer0 Books and its various attempts to sell books to a market of memers more generally. Watson distances himself from this (unconvincingly), but that’s alright. For the sake of not judging the book by its cover, perhaps it is better to consider the publisher-wide problem people seem to think the book cover is somehow indicative of.

For all the attention Zer0’s various authors give to internet culture, memes and the political potential of the right aesthetic messaging, imploring the left to learn to meme and engage with contemporary culture… The reality is that most don’t need a lesson. They’re way better at it and smarter about it than Zer0 themselves are. They don’t need meme culture to be translated into Frankfurter talking points. Many are already making their own culture that is tapped into now. Maybe there’s a way of using that to make older works of political philosophy more accessible? But most attempts to turn Frankfurters into memes come across as anachronistic and weird. They’re ugly and didactic, having very little aesthetic merit whatsoever — not even ironically. It feels like meme politics as folk politics.

When I think about Mark Fisher memes — or at least memes he’d appreciate — nothing like a stock image with some fat text on it ever comes to mind, and ironic misunderstandings of his own concepts don’t seem to achieve anything, other than sending new readers down useless labyrinths of poor thinking. If there was a meme he’d like today, I reckon it’d be the one doing the rounds right now during the Euros, combining politics and football, as he liked to do. Every good performance is currently blamed on the England team’s embrace of Marxism. It’s a meme I’ve even seen right-wing pundits make. It’s hyperstitous, recognising the popular interest in football and a general desire the nation has (more or less) for its team to do well, and it ties that to criticism the team has got for taking the knee and infecting politics with “Marxism”. But as a prematch ritual, it looks like the Marxist gesture is working!

As a meme, it’s organic, it plants a humorously fitting seed regarding Marxist determinism for those in the know, but it’s utterly grounded in the present, and helps further normalise the message the team are hoping to send themselves. It might not have a pictorial format with text over image, but it is a joke, part of the fun of which is the way it is being widely shared and popularised. It’s a meme by any measure that uses something like Twitter to respond to an event (both literally and philosophically speaking), spreading a message about material conditions and politics in football.

(If you want a more dynamic and sustained masterclass in memeing yourself into the national conversation, without sacrificing on substance, you can also consider the UK’s Northern Independence Party.)

But whatever this video is above, and whatever that book cover represents, is something else entirely…

(The quote chosen in this video feels deeply ironic too, it must be said: “The less the culture industry has to promise, the less it can offer a meaningful explanation of life, and the emptier is the ideology it disseminates.” Welcome to meme world.)

Not being a fan of terrible meme cultures may make me elitist to some — I’m used to that accusation from members of the deeply cursed Mark Fisher Memes for Hauntological Teens group on Facebook — but the point is surely that aesthetics and cultural production really matter. The memes and the culture war videos and the book cover are misjudged, in much the same way a lot of Extinction Rebellion happenings are misjudged, for example — they irritate their target audience and the people they’re out to convince of their cause. The fact it’s much lower hanging fruit than XR only makes it worse. It stinks of a kind of detached hippiedom, which tunes out to the point it doesn’t realise how out of touch it is.

That was precisely the problem with psychedelic culture that Fisher first denounced. It prided itself on its detachment from the zeitgeist, in a lot of ways. It ignored material conditions and saw tuning out as a virtue. In some respects, it is, but meme tutorials feel like an instance of tuning so far out you can’t convince anyone but the already converted of what you’re talking about. It’s representative of leftist problems rather than a solution. It’s a problem of practice that preaches contemporaneity from within but already feels outdated from without. And that’s a shame, because there’s nothing really wrong with the theories being discussed and applied in themselves. But those theories are being turned into practices that rarely function as intended. So the practices undermine the application of the theory. To have something undermined entirely by its presentation, when presentation is also so much of the wider focus — it’s bewildering.

As @snowdriftmoon argued in a video response: if you make your literal book cover into a joke, don’t be surprised when people assume your work is a joke also.

But there’s also more to it than that. It’s symptomatic of a strange lag that they don’t seem to be aware of. This isn’t cutting edge cyber-praxis reaching out to zoomers on their own turf; this is meme warfare stuck in the left’s Twitter paroxysm of five years ago. Rhett made this point first and I think it’s a really pertinent one: Zer0 Books “are stuck in 2016’s trenches and they are just refusing to get out. I’m starting to believe that they are the first, real rear-garde of Trump nostalgia.” (Prat made a similar point as well.) It is a cultural approach that feels like it was built in response to an emergent alt right that had just broken into the mainstream by appropriating Pepe. But even if we were still living in that moment, clunky quotes on a stock image backdrop aren’t going to compete with that. It’s aesthetically minded but, ultimately, it’s aesthetically impotent. As such, it’s not memetic in any functional sense. These “memes” don’t spread in any positive sense. They’re always a backdrop to something else — book covers, YouTube videos… They’re captured within the publishing industrial-complex and are rarely seen outside their own context.

The Memeing of Mark Fisher likely doesn’t deserve the disdain and cynicism it has received over the last day or so, but the sheer amount of vitriol its central Mark Fisher meme has received from interested parties surely says something about how those responsible for it are able to navigate the very issues they are concerned about. And what it says isn’t good.