Month: December 2023

It feels weird that the year is over. It also feels weird that I don’t think I have much to say about it. For me, it revolved around a wonderful early summer — six weeks across May and June — when I found my own place to live, helped raise a load of money for my friend’s top surgery, and then went to Bang Face. (All chronicled on Instagram.)

The months before that are a stressful blur; the months after are a blur of hospitality work, re-learning the guitar, and wrestling with my sleeping pattern. There was a lot of joy there, and a lot of poor mental health as well. But I made it. After spending most of 2022 flirting with death post-lockdown and post-long-term-relationship, it is nice to think of 2023 as my attempt at “having a normal one”. I hope in 2024 I continue to find more of a rhythm and reconnect with the wider world a bit too.

What I am very conscious of at the moment is how local my life feels. I can’t claim to have logged off, but far more of my life than ever before revolves around a small group of people in a small part of a city that I rarely leave. My time in London was perhaps similar, but that felt necessary in the belly of a big city. This has felt like recovery time. In lots of ways, I feel more anonymous here than has felt possible for a few years. I’ve rebuilt myself in the peace and quiet, and I don’t think of myself as a broken person anymore. I also feel like myself for the first time in a very long time. It’s nice.

All that being said, the year has hardly been quiet. Below are a few highlights from the past twelve months, with links to relevant posts, taken from the now-updated “Archive” page.

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I started the year by doing a load of MDMA in January and it did more to improve my mental health than the previous four months on sertraline put together, so that’s highlight number one. (Sorry, Mum.)

In February, I was invited to Dublin by Kasia Boyle and spoke to undergraduates at the National College of Art and Design. I read an abandoned preface to the then-forthcoming Narcissus in Bloom and had wonderful conversations about the scene in Dublin and peoples’ hopes for the future — postcapitalist and otherwise. I’m not sure what it was about that flying 24-hour visit — my first time in Ireland — but I think it was my favourite speaking engagement since I started talking abroad. Kasia has since become a firm friend as well. I was exhausted the day we met, but I felt briefly taken in by a community reminiscent of the one we had at Goldsmiths in 2017. I will never forget it.

I finally finished Narcissus in Bloom over the weeks that followed. I say finally — I’m surprised it only took me two years, but they were two years of utter chaos and personal turmoil and felt a lot longer. And I was technically homeless for about six weeks after I handed it in, so it’s not like everything stopped being shit either. But it felt like a real achievement, and I remain immensely proud of it as a book that appears to be a radical (even regrettable) turn away from my first book, Egress, but which I think is a natural successor to its concerns and I hope it finds its audience.?

I went to see Edward George perform at Newcastle’s Lit & Phil, writing up my thoughts shortly after, which Edward himself read and seemed to really enjoy and appreciate.

I had a bit of a manic moment and wanted to start a million other shelved projects after Narcissus was done. I wrote the introduction to the Greek translation of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie in that time, and pitched another book idea (shot down as a kindness), which turned into an essay for the Walker Art Center on the Ccru and ChatGPT.

I started DJing more and really loved making shows for Slack’s this year. Between going to Bang Face and Kitty’s top surgery fundraiser, I put together two sets (in June and in July) that I spent a lot of time listening back to over the sunny days that followed.

I attended the premiere of Jake Chapman’s accelerationism documentary, Accelerate or Die, which I was interviewed for.

Narcissus in Bloom came out in August and I loved talking about it with Michael Waugh — a beautiful and fast friend who has been a highlight of this year in his own right — in London and Newcastle.

In September, I was invited to write about Mark Fisher’s relationship with Russell Brand in the New Statesman. Rather than posthumously lump Fisher in with Brand, following the allegations against the latter, it felt necessary to reiterate Fisher’s more emboldened feminism toward the end of his life, and further demonstrate the ways that Fisher did not become one of the “resentocrats” he so obviously hated. It was an essay that terrified me, assuming many would think a defense of Fisher was inappropriate in that particular context, but I was relieved that all those who read it — friends and otherwise — saw it as useful and necessary.

In October, I wrote about Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, and I’m very grateful to Dan for reading and sharing it. There is no experience more affirming and humbling than having someone admire enjoy what you write about their work.

The last few months of this year have been defined by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which seems likely to spread to the West Bank with a similar ferocity in 2024. I got sick as it all unfolded and have spent most of the last few months in my flat thinking about it all whilst storms batter my windows. I wrote two posts on this — here and here — and later made another Slack’s show that captures this strange experience of global chaos and local quietude.

We’ll see what the new year brings. I’ll be in Spain in May to talk about the work of Mark Fisher, but aside from that, my only plans are to get my PhD done.

See you on the other side.

Accelerationist discourse has returned to the Internet recently, following a flurry of activity amongst the e/acc set. In response, a number of articles and video essays on “effective accelerationism” have attempted to give an account of e/acc specifically and accelerationism in general, most amusingly in Forbes.

E/acc is rubbish, of course. It is nothing more than a rebranding of neoliberalist market optimism in the age of “artificial intelligence”. The other day, Adam and Craig (from the Acid Horizon podcast) and myself decided to spend ninety minutes on this regardless, discussing Marc Andreesson’s recently published “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. You can listen to our conversation below.

A Note on Accelerationism’s Revolutionary Sentiments

I will say one thing in addition to this. Whereas Adam and Craig do not align themselves with any form of accelerationism, I personally remain an accelerationist even now, for whatever that is worth (or not worth). As someone whose thought was largely shaped by Mark Fisher, the Ccru, Hyperdub, Urbanomic, the blogosphere (2003-2019) — and yes, undoubtedly the residual influence of Nick Land’s early work — it is not something I can imagine ever renouncing entirely, even as I despair at the ways this complex body of thought has been and continues to be used and abused. But despite all of this, one obscured truth remains. For me, accelerationism is just one name for a recent flavour of revolutionary sentiment, and no matter what others come to say about it, that sentiment and the context it was shaped in is something I still hold very dear.

What is embarrassing about e/acc is that it has removed this revolutionary sentiment from its “thinking” entirely. This is clear when you look at the comments made by those who are spearheading e/acc online, particularly their disgruntled responses when they are lumped in with the vulgar accelerationisms of old. For example, I was scrolling through the replies to YouTuber Joe Scott’s recent video essay on accelerationism last night. The video does a surprisingly good job of tracing the origins of accelerationism (albeit ending with the politique du pire summary, after going in a few directions entirely new to me). But rather than incur the ire of the old acc crowd, now largely dispersed, it was CEObro Garry Tan who voiced his disagreement with the following tweet:

Your characterization [of accelerationism] is disconnected from reality. Technological optimism is at the core of e/acc.

I am a moderate Democrat and centrist and e/acc is nonpartisan. We care deeply for creating as much human abundance as possible.

This was a very entertaining tweet to read. When e/acc first started being discussed online, many of us saw it for what it was immediately: a centrist accelerationism. It was funny to see that acknowledged outright.

Of course, the likes of Tan are by no means embarrassed by this characterisation — although they should be. As Adam, Craig and I discussed, this is in large part the problem with e/acc. We “original” accelerationists, whether of the first or second wave of blogospheric discourse, might have also rejected the claim that all we wanted was societal collapse, but if our dissenting retorts never quite broke through the popular reductionism, it is because we did not reject notions of creative destruction absolutely. Why? Because that is precisely the revolutionary sentiment at accelerationism’s heart. It is mischaracterised by many, but so are all revolutions.

I was reminded of this whilst proofreading Jon Greenaway’s forthcoming Capitalism: A Horror Story. In a chapter on the monstrous, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in particular, Jon writes:

The poor, the non-white, the exploited, and the enslaved are an amalgamation of bodies forced into exploited labour, and despite the ambiguities of the novel’s politics — and the politics of its author — the creature becomes a powerful symbol for the revolutionary potential of the monster. And this is not, as the Burkean conservative would insist, a revolution that would destroy the social order in an orgy of violence and death; that is already the bedrock of the social order, after all. It is the bourgeois revolutionary Victor who meets out violence on the defenceless. Rather, the revolution promised and glimpsed by Frankenstein’s creature is a fulfilment and dialectical sublation of the social order: the construction of a world wherein all are included within the universal fraternity of which the Enlightenment liberal spoke, but which they would not extend to all.

Accelerationists have often identified with capitalist monstrosities, but it is telling that the disparagement the movement has received from all quarters — left, right and otherwise — is always an unthinking parroting of this “Burkean conservative” position. Accelerationism certainly wants to destroy some stuff — namely, the unjust structures of capitalism that keep us forever indentured to those whose interests are not our own. And it certainly likes speed, but mostly through an acknowledgement of its inaccessibility. The William Gibson line that “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed” was apt for the accelerationists; accelerationism was the blogosphere’s militant wing in the Time War, pushing forward as the hauntologists brought up the rear. If they identified with the machines, with the perverse enjoyment of our libidinal economy, that was their prerogative, but they also wanted to understand these things so that they could seed dissent from capitalism’s most suffocating tendencies.

As Mark Fisher argued, accelerationism “does not mean accelerating any or everything in capitalism willy-nilly, in the hope that capitalism will thereby collapse. Rather, it means accelerating the processes of destratification that capitalism cannot but obstruct” — that is, accelerating the proliferation of desires that capitalism cannot itself fulfil; accelerating the need for something other and proliferating those subjectivities that capitalism hopes to obstruct but cannot stop producing.

There is, then, in the accelerationist position, a sort of immanent critique at work: we hate capitalism and wish to move beyond its bounds, but this subjective position is nonetheless the product of capitalism itself. This was Lyotard’s position, and there are echoes of it in Deleuze and Guattari. Nick Land differed from this in that he didn’t hate capitalism and instead expressed an unabashed admiration for its shredding of subjectivities. Indeed, he affirmed capitalism’s claim that it had a monopoly on desire, and that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible. The accelerationists of the 2008 blogosphere took Land’s writings seriously, finding his analyses of contemporary capitalism to be appropriate and accurate in their feverishness, but they fundamentally disagreed with his conclusions and wanted to empower the left to prove Land wrong. In a later essay on Land’s legacy and influence, Fisher frames two of Land’s disparagement as productive questions for the left as follows:

Instead of the anti-capitalist ‘no logo’ call for a retreat from semiotic productivity, why not an embrace of all the mechanisms of semiotic-libidinal production in the name of a post-capitalist counter-branding?

Where is the left that can speak as confidently in the name of an alien future, that can openly celebrate, rather than mourn, the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities?

These are the questions that accelerationism and its blogosphere were most consistently interested in. (If I stand by this blog’s “patchwork” writings at all, it was as a full-hearted — if naive — attempt to respond to the second question.) But harking back to Jon’s forthcoming book, in answering these questions, there is often (or should be) a subject at the heart of it. For the early accelerationists, no such subject seemed to exist, and therefore had to be constructed. Later attempts to introduce one, however — such as my own writings on unconditional accelerationism that sought to introduce a kind of Stoic subject into the heart of things — were more often than not rejected as a humanism that wasn’t posthumanist enough.

Simon O’Sullivan is particularly insightful on this. This question of subjectivity is where accelerationism runs into problems. “As with utopian modernism and its attempt to separate Geist from Reason, today’s accelerationists have run into the old problem of differentiating their version of progress from that of capitalist development itself”, Simon argued almost a decade ago. And it is with this in mind that we might find something useful in e/acc.

E/acc backs the logics of neoliberal capital absolutely. There is no intention of differentiating their version of progress from capitalist development itself. As Adam quipped, it is a version of /acc that almost makes him sympathise with Nick Land, but perhaps that is because e/acc’s pointlessness casts the nuances of prior accelerationisms in greater relief. As a movement of woeful reterritorialisation, it better illuminates the strategies of deterritorialisation that accelerationism, at the point of origin in 2008, was first trying to utilise. In attempting to construct a “positive” accelerationism, e/acc only makes the negativity of prior accelerationisms all the more attractive.

New Tenderness w. Xenogothic – December 2023 by Slack's

One hour of drone, noise, disgusting feedback and haunted textures. This felt like something of a protest mix, put together with a simmering fury, because who has much to say right now.

Free Palestine.

Tracklist

1. Kali Malone, “Prelude”
2. Jute Gyte, “Another Pioneer”
3. The Gerogerigegege, “Moonlight & His Loser Knife”
4. Kassel Jaeger, “Onden ??”
5. Rashad Becker, “Dances II”
6. Aphex Twin, “Gwarek2”
7. Masayoshi Fujita and Jan Jelinek, “Undercurrent”
8. Kazumoto Endo, “Evergreen”

Humbled thanks to Steve Bamlett for writing a review of my latest book, Narcissus in Bloom. It is a book that deals with the joys and terrors of seeing and being seen, after all, and this is one wonderful example of feeling seen by a reader. This is exactly how I hoped it would be read.

I especially want to share the concluding paragraph here, as ending books is hard and ending on an ambiguity is always a gamble as well, and Bamlett has a takeaway that I did not expect, but which makes me feel like the choice was the right one:

Of course I am left with questions mainly about self-reference. Critical commentary and the tone of the book itself makes me believe it is a wonderful contribution to queer theory and yet self-reference in it hardly covers this potential in ways usual to writing. There is, as it were an occluded part of the ‘selfie’ this book constitutes. But why should this not be the case. The invocation of male queer lives, especially Jarman and his role in the beginning of Colquhoun’s own subjective instabilities feels like a story deliberately not told fully, particularly since we are told that the only relationship specified was with a girlfriend. There are so many ways to read this. Has Matt just begun an identity as queer, a queer ally or is their lost story one of transition to non-binary status or a trans male with non-binary preference or is none of this relevant at all. There is always a suspicion of prurience in oneself when asking such questions. The topic of this book makes the alternative of non-relevance unlikely and given that the book continually analyses how identity is distributed across works including and especially ‘selfie’s’ it feels as if one might ask. But in the end, no answer should be given for as the book says ‘the blooming and wilting’ of selves alike is part of the process of narcissism properly understood – a letting happen. And for another to ask for certainties here is a kind of appropriation of the process and its re-insertion into unnecessary conventions.

You can read the whole review here.