My essay on Mark Fisher’s lost futures and the temporalities of mental illness has been published in the first edition of Illness, edited by Sam Kelly of the excellent Red Medicine podcast.
Illness also features essays by Hannah Proctor, Hannah Zeavin and an interview with Jules Gill-Peterson. You can buy it in meatspace from Housmans and the ICA Bookshop in London, and also Good Press in Glasgow.
I will update this post with an online purchase option when one materialises. Watch this space!
I’ve caught wind of two wonderful responses to my recent post on Charli xcx’s new album Brat and the subterranean melancholy that lurks beneath the defiant hedonism of a 2024 brat summer. Here is the first of two reflections on these interjections:
Byrosaurus Rex drags underscores into the fray, as an example of pop brattishness that retains the bite of class ressentiment. They compare each artist’s development, from underscores’ chimeric and nomadic genre-strafing on 2018 Skin Purifying Treatment EP to the (relatively) more straight-forward pop of 2023’s Wallsocket release, alongside Brat and Charli’s more eclectic output prior to Brat‘s singular soundscape.
I am thinking a lot about this process of becoming more recognisably pop (with a nonetheless clear contemporaneity) as a kind of ‘minor’ cute-ification at the moment: a streamlining of genre aberrations into recognisable pop motifs that nonetheless challenges what is so often expressed by pop as a ‘major’ genre. As Deleuze and Guattari write of the minoritarian in Kafka, we might look at these trajectories not as a selling-out to a more heavily codified and capitalist aesthetics and instead as an attempt to ask “how to tear a minor [pop] away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path?” Deterritorialization is at hand; reterritorialization is the enemy.
In the context of contemporary pop, there is a “going overground” here, perhaps more evident with underscores, which further highlights the faults in Charli xcx’s wistful longing for a time pre-fame. But one does not cancel out the other; these two forms of melancholy and resentment meet in the middle of our contemporary pop moment. This makes the paradoxes on display in this in-between all the more intriguing, and these paradoxes do not necessitate one side of the pop divide being pitted against the other. They come together in a growing assemblage of twenty-first-century affects, revealing the terse and unfulfilled desires that linger on in all of us.
I am again reminded of Mark Fisher, writing about The Jam’s 1980 hit “Going Underground”, with its lyrics expressing a sense of contentedness, the pleasures of a ‘minor’ life, and the disparagement of fame and money, all through the medium of a ubiquitous pop song:
You want more money, of course I don’t mind To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes And the public gets what the public wants But I want nothing this society’s got
I’m going underground (going underground) Well, if the brass bands play and feet start to pound Going underground (going underground) Well, let the boys all sing and let the boys all shout for tomorrow
Mark writes of post-punk’s stratospheric rise through mod culture in general, noting the power of the paradox felt in a song about the underground reaching overground ubiquity. But he argues this was the function of The Jam as a whole, their popular-modernist gambit:
The Jam, like The Who before them, drew their power from an auto-destructive paradox: they were fuelled by a frustration, a tension, a blocked energy, a jam. Discharging this tension in catharsis would destroy the very libidinal blockages on which the music depended – and this self-cancelling logic of desire reached its necessary conclusion in The Who’s smashing of their instruments.
The Jam’s modes of expression differ, of course, from those of Charli and underscores, but the sense of blocked energy is familiar, and even more palpable with the latter. Mark continues:
What made this music culture so positive was its capacity to express negativity – a negativity that was thereby de-privatised as well as de-naturalised. In the lack of such outlets, negative affect now is internalised, or else it bleeds into the ostensibly hedonic, generating a suppressed sadness that lurks behind a mandatory enjoyment.
Perhaps, with this in mind, Fisher would have little interest in the mandatory enjoyment of Charli xcx’s brattishness, as its viral marketing campaign — which hardly feels coordinated by her record label, as the album cover spawns a million meme variants, but you can never tell these days — presents the album as a pure slab of hedonic enjoyment devoid of haters. Indeed, the album’s universal acclaim is oddly jarring. The album is great, but the enthusiasm still lacks criticality and crowds out the conflicting affects expressed by the album itself, as discussed last time.
But there is leakage. Whereas the album itself feels like an expression of entrapment in the conflicts of modern celebrity, the virality of its album cover has far exceeded this context. The UK’s Green Party, for instance, riffed on the cover to promote its standing in the forthcoming UK general election…
… and what is this if not a party-hauntology of another sort, a more political-party hauntology through which the Greens channel the dejection of the summer of 2024 into their own offer of an alternative to Tory-Labour stagnancy. Charli xcx herself thus vicariously offers up an opportunity to express feelings of discontent that are seemingly so distant from those on Brat itself. It is heartening to see these opportunities being seized by others. And they are opportunities!
As Mark continues:
Paradox is also opportunity – someone, I don’t recall who, said that paradoxes are emissaries from another world where things work differently. If popular modernism’s attempts to resolve the paradox of political commitment and consumer pleasure now seem hopelessly naive, that’s more a testament to the disavowed depressive conditions of our current moment than a dispassionate assessment of the possibilities. In our world, so it would seem, popular culture’s embrace of consumerism leads ineluctably to the decomposition of class consciousness and the arrival of capitalist realism. In another world – the world that Stuart Hall tried to theorise, and to instigate – consumer desire and class consciousness could not only be reconciled, but would actually require one another. The political significance of working class creativity in popular music was that it gave us vivid glimpses and tastes of this other world, a world that, via these anticipations and rehearsals, at least intersected with ours, or became ours, intermittently yet insistently.
Charli xcx attempts to bring these two things together, but the results may still be (affectively speaking at least) unconvincing. No one would ever deign to call Charli xcx a “working-class hero”, and her melancholy remains the “party hauntology” of the superstar. But the paradox of a rich pop princess still striving for some sort of class consciousness on the other side of consumer desire — even if it is amongst her similarly alienated superstar peers, as with Lorde on the remix of Girl, so confusing — brings to light another world that may be so much further from our own, but is sought after by a whole generation of female pop artists who feel the pressures of objectivization and privatisation otherwise avoided by their more visibly queer and sonically transgressive friends (we can think of SOPHIE here again).
I think Byrosaurus draws this out nicely, exploring how Brat is as “confrontational as Charli xcx described it to be but I think underscores more explicitly exerts a confrontational catharsis of social dynamics implicated by capitalist hierarchy and power.” An artist like underscores more keenly stays with the trouble, and this is useful, as its a trouble that Brat is hardly inoculated against. The two can be pulled together to exacerbate the opportunities that each offers.
I was interviewed by Julia Werthmann for the German edition of Jacobin magazine a few months ago, just before the launch event for the German translation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures.
A wide-ranging two-part conversation with Ahmed Bouzid on the Humanity 8.0 podcast. I talk a bit about my own work, and then we discuss contemporary campus politics in orbit of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, drawing on a number of their concepts (war machine, de/reterritorialization, etc.) as they relate to Israel and Palestine.
I’m quite late in posting this but I’ve only just realised that it is online. Above is the video of the conversation held at the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus in Berlin back in April.
It was lovely to meet everyone there and I want to give a huge thank you to Alexander Brentler for being a part of the conversation and for the diligent translation work and also to Adelaide Ivánova for being such a fantastic moderator.
I dreamt I had flown back from holiday to attend a job interview. The journey was arduous and dull. I returned home dishevelled, gathered up what I thought I might need, and walked to Newcastle’s Civic Centre.
The civic centre is an interesting building caught somewhere between a genuinely interesting piece of modernist architecture and a drab bit of neoliberal utility. I have only been inside it once, to record an interview for a documentary about accelerationism as two separate couples got married down the hall. That just about sums up the vibe.
I’m not sure what the job I had applied for was. It was all very secretive, which made it seem interesting, albeit basic and entry-level enough for me to be a viable candidate. I think it had something to do with telecommunications. It may well have been a job in the post room — the sort of role that involves sorting letters sensitive enough to warrant the signing of the Official Secrets Act.
I was trying to fill out a form on my phone, which required a stupid amount of codes and a bespoke app to access their network. It took me hours and hours and it wasn’t long before I’d been hanging around the offices for the entire day, from dawn until dusk. But people didn’t seem to go home or work a normal 9-to-5. They were all lurking around, waiting to see how the potential new recruits were processed. It felt like living in the 2019 videogame Control, although much more mundane and without superpowers.
I got distracted talking to a man and two women sat under a gold-plated plaque with the word “HAUNTCOMPULOGICAL” embossed across it. (I will forgive my unconscious for settling on such an ugly word and imbuing it with an amount of interest and significance it does not deserve.) They were in charge of the company archive, which included sensitive documentation of the company’s history and development, as well as a collection of artworks commissioned over the years to connect the company to the public, although these were now deemed sensitive as well.
I assumed that my job might be in this department, maybe in dealing with the archive, as I’ve held that sort of job before, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the sign, the ‘hauntcompulogical’. They didn’t seem to know or think about what it meant, as if it had been adopted as the unofficial name for their department long ago and an overfamiliarity meant they no longer questioned it. But it made sense as a name for these bureaucrats in charge of a collective memory bank, who were nonetheless more invested in maintaining a collective amnesia than sharing its contents.
I wondered about the internet today and all of its ghosts, its dead links and redundancies and the enshittification of everything. At a certain point, I realised I’d missed my interview and basically wasted my entire day waiting around in a haunted Kafkaesque labyrinth, which didn’t feel like a total waste (because vibes) but I had other things to be getting on with.
A very exciting night coming up at Newcastle’s Lubber Fiend on 21st June. My friends Kitty McKay and Michael Waugh have been working very hard to pull this off and bring some of the most exciting music-makers in the UK up to the North East. This is really not to be missed. Full information (with links) below.
Friday 21 June, 9pm — 3am The Lubber Fiend, 81 Blandford St, NE1 3PZ £10 adv, £15 otd (tickets on sale now via RA or Lubber’s BigCartel)
“Born of the fire and brimstone of a Wednesday lunch rush in Southport, the collective mind of aya, Jennifer Walton and 96 Back take matters into their own hands. With a scorched earth approach to the sensibilities that have weighed down weaker producers for generations, they vow to reconstruct the wreckage of deconstructions past, reassembling by hand every pane of glass broken. It’s the Vatican II of club music. It’s winning big on red in a casino on a Tuesday. Messy but ultimately needed.”
aya, Jennifer Walton and 96 Back are staples of the DIY club scenes in Manchester and South East London, and are among the most exciting producers in the UK right now. This show in Newcastle sees them performing and DJing together as a trio for the first time for three whole hours.
xin DJs and produces and often takes the form of a meat wad, pile of trash or smallish human. Their 2019 record, MELTS INTO LOVE, was released biodigitally through Subtext Recordings. On it, they sculpt neurofunk, hardcore and dubstep into a caustic, amorphous glob of reese basses and pseudo-breaks. In 2022-23 they used Aaja Radio as a vehicle in which to tunnel wormholes through possible worlds and their musics. Expect all good things wiggy, drippy and weird.
“Amorphous blobular hoonin hoovin shmoovin for the pod people”
ZINZILE (formerly known as FAUCI) is multi’medium + multi’dimensional: wurld’bringr, wurld’traverser + wurld’melder, working in the physical, digital + visionary realms. their practice is anti-specialist + is in continuation of a research project; tha study of SEREMONi. their practice melds internal wurlds as a microcosmic prayers for macrocosmic influence…
ZINZILE will be opening the spase with a warm + complex welcoming… please come with your hearts + minds open, or (at least) with a willingness for them to be…
Charli XCX’s Brat perfectly encapsulates the wet summer of 2024, for better and for worse.
I find myself finally able to look past the lingering cynicism felt toward the private-school pop-princess and am met by a sense of contemporaneity that is immediately clarifying. For the avoidance of any doubt, it’s an album I really like. I have had it on repeat for days. And yet, so much of it remains melancholic — all too recognisably so. I find myself thinking more and more critically about its presentation, and despair as I find my own melancholy mirrored in it. It’s a sweet moment of recognition with a bitter aftertaste.
All the odes to SOPHIE on the album, for example — and the album feels like an ode to her as a whole — strike me as especially bittersweet. It’s a personal mourning I’m touched by and admire, as we all miss SOPHIE, but none of us more than her real-life friends. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel like that grief underserves the work of the person missed. (Is this what some people felt whilst reading Egress?)
It’s okay to cry, Charli reminds the listener, just as SOPHIE did before her, but something is different here. The oscillation between future club classics and jaggedly wistful ballads produces the kind of depressive hedonism Mark Fisher famously called “party hauntology”, and which he identified most clearly on Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreaks and Drake’s Nothing Was the Same. Both of these men have, of course, fallen far from their pedestals over the years since (and Drake very recently at the hands of Kendrick Lamar), but I did not expect Charli XCX to be the one to pick up their mantle…
Take “Rewind”: an inspired straddling of the club euphoria of a pullback and pangs of personal retrospection. We’re a long way from Craig David’s half-brained ode to the dancefloor here. The tension feels novel and I like it. But it remains a song that pines for a youth pre-fame, all the while humble-bragging about international success and fancy restaurants, buffered by acknowledgements of personal anxieties and an inability to assuage insecurities.
Mark Fisher saw this kind of tension as a fascinating critique of capitalism, albeit one without teeth. It is indicative of “the absolute abject misery of on-tap hedonism”; the feeling that, “[e]ven if you’re stupendously wealthy like [Drake] is, there’s still something missing”; a feeling that “captures [the loss of] something really fundamental, which was available even to the poor in the ’90s, which is [the] collective delirium of depersonalisation.”
Alain Ehrenberg has that phrase, the title of his book on depression, The Weariness of the Self. It’s miserable for everyone to be themselves! It’s not just you. It’s miserable for everyone to be themselves […] The rise of reality TV and social media are completely […] coincident […] with the decline of what we’re talking about here. It’s a kind of magical capture that is all done with mirrors. On the ’90s dancefloor… […] We all wanted that enjoyment of the dissolution of identity […] Instead of that, the key kind of social technologies of the twenty-first century, then, are facializing, encouraging us back into this identification with ourselves. What the Willem Defoe character in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ calls “the most pathetic level of reality”. Psychological individualism.
What has Charli XCX succumbed to on Brat if not this?
To the contrary, SOPHIE was a beacon of popular-modernist hope in the mid-2010s because her trans-adjacent dissolution of subjectivity affirmed this delirium with a brand-new, gleeful enthusiasm. She played with the artifice of pop iconography to build a whole new world for herself. Tracks like “Faceshopping” rediscovered the underside of facialising technologies, which can just as well provide you with so many masks. However, although Charli’s love for SOPHIE’s music is expressed throughout the tracks on Brat, the album is nonetheless a collection of paeans to interiority, to the depressive hedonism of modern celebrity. The more I listen to it, the more I wish it wasn’t.
SOPHIE may have declared “your inside is your best side”, but she was addressing the Other. The only hint of this on Charli’s record is “Everything is Romantic”, which functions as an outward-looking centrepiece that interrupts the personal melancholy to find a perverse joy in the pomo blur of semioblitz. The closest we get to hearing about the internal effects of that blitz is on “Girl, So Confusing”, where we are unsure whether Charli is talking to a close friend and personal rival or to herself. But even here, we find a track that is a testament to the weariness of the self above all else, which is not found in the pastel-pink cyberpunk of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, geared towards the future. What we have instead is Charli’s bright-green envy of the past.
Brat is still an album I can’t stop listening to, perhaps because, despite feeling critical of its message, I feel that envy too. Don’t we all? The pugilistic bass and synths that batter through a cultural complacency on Brat may remind me of SOPHIE, but they are not derivative. They are only loving references, which nonetheless encourage me to consider the differences between SOPHIE’s past and Charli’s present, as well as pasts and presents of my own.
The album’s production takes me back like a madeleine cake to blaring SOPHIE’s then-latest single “MSMSMSM” in my Cardiff flat, for example, after returning home from a Jeremy Corbyn rally in 2015. Once upon a time, SOPHIE’s desires for a dissolution of self were coupled inadvertently and serendipitously with Corbyn’s desire to dissolve our political status quo. “Lemonade”‘s approach to pop was so much more onomatopoeic, as was Corbyn’s brand of populism. Less emphasis on being popular — although they both were — more emphasis on burst-your-bubble. But 2024 is not 2015, nor is Charli XCX SOPHIE.
Perhaps Brat, for all its idiosyncrasies, feels like 2024’s quintessential album because its sense of loss and change is suitably doubled by the moment of its release. Despite all of the above sounding so critical, it is not an album I am at all disappointed by; it has simply clarified and crystallised a disappointment I feel all around. This is why Brat is the perfect soundtrack not only to a failed summer but the month-long lead-up to a UK general election. Everything pools together here, and Brat captures a structure of feeling more effectively than it could ever have intended to. Its timing was impeccable. The hopelessness, the striving for change, the mourning and the melancholy — it’s all here, everywhere, already.
Brat works because it strikes the perfect balance between it all; between joy and grief, care and abandon, hope and despair, passion and fury. It’s perfectly poised in the present, looking forward and back, and is thus able to voice its refusal of and its frustration with the present in tandem.
Right now, we’re all considering what we want in the future and what we miss about the past as well. It’s hard not to. But it doesn’t matter either way what we want, because we’re not going to get any of it. Not this year, anyway, with nothing but rainclouds and Keir Starmer to look forward to.
The brat misbehaves because it cannot have the things it wants. Who isn’t feeling like a brat going into the sodden summer of 2024?
I’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones recently. I’m not sure why. I’m reminding myself of the story before checking out the prequel, due to have a second season soon. It’s something to do on an evening, even though it appears to me that there has been much less fanfare about House of the Dragon. Yet more diminishing returns…
Having already wistfully cast my mind back to the 2015 general election, I think about “Abandon hope (summer is coming)”, the rousing k-punk post that followed Labour’s defeat that year. Mark’s insistence that “summer is coming” was an obvious inversion of the Game of Thrones tagline. “Winter is coming“, the Starks tell one another incessantly until their house is all but decimated. The left’s house was ruined too then. “The Lannisters won on Thursday, but their gold has already run out, and summer is coming”, Mark writes. Nevertheless, he notes how there was “a rising tide, an international movement, a movement of history, which has not yet reached an England sandbagged in misery and mediocrity.”
The situation might now feel the same, but in June 2024, as I sit in my flat and watch the rain beat down on the world outside, summer feels much further off. I have dressed myself in winter garb before planning to go and write in the wind to ease my cabin fever. But I won’t sit with my laptop out in the rain. I dress myself, makeup on, only to sit at home, the view outside unchanging. The Northern winter has been long this year and it shows no signs of abating. There was even hail yesterday.
Back in spring, I thought a lot about Groundhog Day. “Six more weeks of winter!” says the prognosticator to his shadow. But those six weeks have dragged on and on this year.
I love that film for its stoicism — not the Silicon Valley variety, but a far more defiant Nietzschean variety. I look not for hope but confidence in my memories of defeats past and the enduring fatalism that underwrites it all. The paradox at the heart of Nietzsche’s eternal return is that, although it appears to suggest there is nothing “new” in experience, our feelings are bound to change in response to a growing awareness of this unending repetition in itself. Like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, though we may come to find these repetitive experiences torturous in their familiarity, this negative feeling acts as a force that leads us to advance and hone our actions anew in each encounter with that which is supposedly the same.
Groundhog Day remains an exemplary exploration of this process in popular culture. (It is not the only one; From Software’s punishing videogames might be a more fitting contemporary example.) In the film, Bill Murray plays the grouchy TV weatherman Phil Connors, who is suddenly and inexplicably fated to live the same day over and over again, seemingly for eternity — a wintery day in the Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney, during which crowds have gathered to witness the annual Groundhog Day tradition, when a groundhog is consulted on the coming of an early spring.
Connors’ character is analogous to the groundhog itself; figuratively speaking, his inability to see his own shadow forestalls the event of his transformation. After first waking up to a day he has already experienced, he is soon disturbed to realise that he has been fated to live this same day over and over again. Over time, he falls into a maniacal despair. But even when he resigns himself (repeatedly) to suicide, on death he awakens in his hotel room to relive his day over once more.
Coming to reluctantly accept his predicament, Connors learns the daily routines of Punxsutawney’s inhabitants, averting (or even exacerbating) a number of catastrophes and accidents that befall them, from the mundane to the more serious. Eventually, he takes up piano lessons and commits himself to mastering various other skills as well, such as ice sculpture; every lesson is always his “first” lesson, as far as his teacher is concerned, but his eventual mastery of these skills is all the more suggestive of how many “first” lessons Connors has had.
Connors pursues all of these skills and acquires this knowledge of his surroundings in pursuit of an overarching goal: the wooing of his television producer and love interest, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell). Though at first a self-serving desire, driven by his own ego, Connors does eventually succeed, but only once his pursuit of Rita is no longer out of self-interest. He has to let go of his lofty and egotistical ideals, dissolving a resentful self and instead becoming immersed in his immediate circumstances, demonstrating not only a capacity for self-improvement amidst a pervasive sameness, but also a new love and appreciation for the people around him, whom he otherwise treats with a cynical distain at the start of the story. Thus, it is only when Connors truly starts to look at his predicament, his world and its other inhabitants differently, in spite of their abject repetitions and fantastical sameness, that he finally wakes up to a new day with Rita by his side.
The film illustrates the paradox of the eternal return well, showing that, as we hone our ideas about human existence through our repetitious and habitual encounters with other subjects and objects, we become all the more capable of making leaps beyond the realms of personal habit and social doxa. It is a metaphysical quandary that leads to broader ethical and epistemological concerns, as we go in search of whatever sense of difference might still be available to us.
For Deleuze, it is this function of the eternal return that makes it not an existential trap but a situation that forces us to enact a “selective principle”, necessitating our choice of which affects and actions to pursue in the midst of life’s repetitions. This transforms thought, even whilst it is “trapped” within routine doxa, into an active and unending process of thinking, and being into an active and unending process of becoming. By giving ourselves over to the paradoxes of the eternal return, as Phil Connors eventually realises he must, we see how this situation “is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation”, wherein “the moment or the eternity of becoming … eliminates all that resists it”.
What is most striking about Connors’ journey is that, in spite of the sameness of his experiences, we watch as the self itself unravels. Connors is at once the same and different as he is shaken by his experience of the eternal return. But beyond the fantastical mode of its presentation, we can sense something recognisable in Connors’ experience: a strange sense of subjective continuity that is complicated by shifting appearances and behavioural adaptations. After all, to draw on a far more quotidian example, who has not felt for themselves, or heard someone else describe, how, on celebrating the passage of another decade, at the ages of 30 or 40 or 50, etc., they still feel 21? What is the nature of this experience, wherein the repetition of an event – a birthday – collides with the contextual differences that emerge when one annually takes stock of who a person is, has been and is becoming
I want to be like Connors. I should probably stop thinking back altogether, concerned that this retrospection is part of the problem. What is the point, at 32, of thinking back to the political landscape of my early 20s? There is no mania here; only a political depression. Still, as I try to find a grasp on the present, considering the ways in which these moments in time differ (or not) feels like a necessary exercise.
I didn’t know anything about the Chartist movement and the fight for universal male suffrage until I moved to Newport, South Wales, as a baby-faced eighteen-year-old back in 2010. Back then, the town centre didn’t have much going for it — and neither did we — but I think we all loved that town for its quirks and community and its bloody-minded refusal to forget. The Westgate Hotel might have been turned into a string of pound and vape shops, but the rebellious friends we made in the local art scene always reminded us that a dozen or so men died there fighting for the right to vote.
In my second year of university, bathing in a mixture of Oneohtrix Point Never’s salvagepunk constructions and the Caretaker’s hauntological traps, we’d make temporary sculptures in search of a psychedelia that kept the grey world outside at bay. Eventually, we would stumble outside, going on walks around town with cameras in hand. We were trainee photographers, after all, but mostly just poor students looking for some way to pass some slow drag of time. There, we found the Chartist mural in a tunnel that led out of John Frost Square. It was an enormous work of art — a true monument to something so momentous. It didn’t glisten like our collection of disco lights and crystals; it smoldered. The clouded stains of time and pollution didn’t make it look sad, however, but battle-worn.
The mural brought pride to everyone I knew, especially those who’d moved to this former polytechnic town to do an art degree and generally weren’t from the sorts of backgrounds where that choice was at all easy or without risk. Art and politics combined there to remind us of what was fought for and how vital it was to continue to represent the memories of movements past and present for all in the future to see.
After university fees were trebled by the coalition government, and my first ballot cast in a general election was met with a sense of dejection and betrayal, we all began to optimistically see ourselves reflected in that mural, as we were bussed to London to march on parliament. We became the penultimate year to pay £3000 a year for our university education, and we were all aware of how that decision, if made a few years earlier, might have changed to come to university in the first place. It’s not like we ever expected to escape the debt of £9000 for 3 years of education, but £27,000 was enough to make us pause. Debt was something I felt so afraid of. I still am. Would it be worth it? Probably not. But how long before that figure was as normalised as the one we were paying? It was free once…
We knew the importance of access and choice. To see that image of working men fighting for representation, rendered in mosaic by Kenneth Budd in 1978, over a century on from the moment it commemorated, and then see the photos we took of ourselves, made history open up for us, and we joined a current that swept from then to now and onwards. The stakes may not have been as high in 2010-11 as they were in 1839, but we were nonetheless fighting for even more choice in how to direct the course of our own lives regardless. Our refusal to be dissuaded by austerity was important. The mural reminded us why.
They knocked it down to build a shopping centre a few years later…
I hate my electoral ambivalence at the moment. The 2024 general election is just over three weeks away and I feel no passion for any party. I think about waking up on the morning of July 5th, fully expecting the first Labour government since 2005, but even after 14 years of Tory rule, I anticipate that I will take no solace in a Labour victory.
I think back to the three general elections since my first — 2015, 2017, 2019 — and remember the waves of dejection felt then. This time things feel worse. For whatever reason, it is still the election in 2015 that stings the most. There was no Jeremy Corbyn then, and Ed Miliband had run a shoddy and easily memeified campaign, but walking into work at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff that year, I remember the disappointment being at its most palpable. To say there was a dark cloud over everyone sounds like a cliché, but it is true. I have been to cheerier funerals. A few months into my first entry-level arts job, I felt the despair of those more settled than I was and felt no hope for my own future, or anyone else’s. What little hope we held onto was dashed. I am quite devoid of hope at the moment.
A few months prior to the 2015 election, we had torn down an installation in the main café area, installed temporarily as part of an exhibition for an international art prize — wall-to-ceiling billboard prints of Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, with added Hitler moustache and the words “i KiLLED THE BRiTiSH WORKiNG CLASS”. A provocative choice, but an apt amalgamation of postmodern cultural references that reflected the chaotic rage of leftist politics. It also later felt like a horrible foreshadowing. We had a decade of twisted and misremembered Thatcher drag to look forward to from there on out.
A miniscule graffito was added to the toilets in the Chapter Art Centre a few months after the 2015 election, channelling post-punk discontent and twisting it into apathetic disintegration. It used to be that anger was an energy. Is our fury a new structure of feeling, a pooling affect to use for the construction to build a wider movement? Or is it the force of our frustrations that breaks everything down? Energy or entropy? What’s the difference?
The further disappointments that entropically followed were somewhat less affecting than the first one in 2015, at least in my memory. It is the initial blow that hit hardest, though what came later was far more disastrous. The left had tacitly hitched its collective wagon to an uninspiring candidate if only to curtail a twenty-first-century Tory party to a single shared term in office. The Lib Dem-Tory alliance was awful, but Tory dominance was worse. Unfortunately, that’s what we got, and the pain of that loss prepared us for the many more losses to follow.
Brexit was devastating too, of course, landing another hard blow shortly after the first, but then our dejection hardened into apathy. Yes, I wished Corbyn had won in 2017 and 2019, but his losses were just two more amongst a litany. We had already steeled ourselves for failures that felt increasingly inevitable, and today we continue to. I take no stubborn pride in the melancholy. It is just tellingly familiar.
2024 is not 2015. Keir Starmer is so much worse than Ed Miliband ever was. Indeed, Starmer is not uninspiring by dint of his general buffoonery, as if he were only insufficiently media-trained. Starmer has lied and misled his way to power through a blatant process of consciousness-deflation. I think this is notable. It is not simply that Starmer is a disappointment who has failed to live up to our expectations; he has actively dismantled those expectations of his own accord, purposefully alienating the left-wing of the Labour Party who had been convinced to rally around him in his bid for party leadership. He has repeatedly informed the left that he does not want to represent them, and now they in turn have declared in droves that they will not vote for him again.
But where does that leave us? I think, some days, that maybe I won’t vote at all. But then I think of the Chartists…
Maybe I will vote Green or for an independent instead — albeit unaware of what these prospective and presently unknown local candidates really stand for. Again, I think of the Chartists…
It is wrong to waste your vote, to squander a right that others fought for — that sentiment has been firmly instilled in me at this point.
But what happened after the Chartists won the vote? First, King William IV died, and parliament was dissolved along with him. The general election of 1837 saw the Whigs win by a narrow margin, and although they continued to be the progressive wing of parliament, they were not radical enough. First, they changed their name to the Liberal Party, then found a terse alliance with the Social Democrat Party, before their tandem stagnation over the next century led to coagulation of what is today the much-parodied Liberal Democrat Party.
All of these developments can generously be viewed as aftershocks of the Chartist movement. Though much was gained, the working class did not passively accept the system they now had access to, and sought radical changes from within. Yes, it was necessary to first win the vote, but then another fight began: the fight for proper representation; the fight for something worth voting for.
The history of the modern Labour movement is the history of this secondary struggle. In light of this, today’s collective apathy is regrettable, but if thousands reject their right to vote on July 4th, it will not be because they have squandered what was once fought for. It is the Labour Party that has squandered all that came next. It has failed to give working people something — preferably a future — to believe in. That is more of a travesty than any individual’s decision to stay home on election day.
Perhaps it is time for the Labour Party to go the way of the Whigs before them. There is a void where the left should be, but no entity yet stable enough to fill it. What would a viable opposition to the parties of capitalist realism look like in the twenty-first century?
