I’m in London at the moment. The start of 2025 has been a mixed bag, and without wanting to bore you with the details, let’s just say two weeks in bed with the flu (although it may well have been COVID) left me physically and mentally weakened, socially isolated, and persistently anxious until I sought my jailbreak.
I’m supposed to be in Madrid right now, in fact, and had to call it off for the reasons above and more. But since I’d already booked the time off work, I decided to use it to recuperate with my partner in the capital and take the time to put my head back together.
It’s been wonderful so far, as has every trip to London since last summer, when we first started seeing each other. In fact, I’ve spent more time here over the last six months than at any point over the last five years, after moving from Deptford to Huddersfield during the COVID lockdowns.
London was difficult to leave then, and I wrote about my complicated feelings at length at the time. Even now, when I think back to my excision from the city’s clutches, I instantly recall a photograph taken along the Thames path not long before I left, of someone rowing solo past the Old Navy College in Greenwich, looking miniscule amongst everything.
There remains something about that image that totally encapsulates everything that was going through my mind the last time I was here, which is everything and nothing at all, simply feeling sloshed about, perhaps a little shellshocked.
Things feel much different now. The world feels less enormous, less alienating, less hungry to swallow me whole and churn up my bones. London, the global city, the world in microcosm, feels similar. I really like it here again. Not that that means I’m about to move back anytime soon. But it is, dare I say, very nice to visit.
The other day, I was hanging around the Slade School of Fine Art and perusing the Gower Street Waterstones. I’ve been there a couple of times in recent months, and one of my favourite detours through this relatively unfamiliar part of London — Bloomsbury — is to go and see Virginia Woolf.
I’ve said this a dozen times on the blog before, I’m sure, but one of my favourite things to do, wherever I’m living, is to disappear into books that are set in the places I’m now walking through. There’s a whole book in me about my time spent in London, Cornwall, and West Yorkshire, and the companionship provided by Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, and Emily Brontë in those places; the relationships between these writers themselves; the peculiar, bedraggled, speculative England they live in, with future and histories both cacophonous and immanent.
Case in point, back when I used to work at BAFTA, I’d read Mrs Dalloway over and over again on my long bus commute from Sydenham to Piccadilly, and as I traipsed past the Tavistock Hotel this week — formerly flats, with Virginia and Leopold Woolf living in number 52 — I began to think about the strained relationship Virginia and her characters have had with this city too, their walks across it that I’ve re-enacted for myself, feeling at times like Mrs Dalloway, at others like Septimus Smith.
This duality is everywhere in Woolf’s novels. She is prone to long expressionistic passages that flit fleetingly between lives, but as much as she evokes the effervescent life and liveliness of the city in this way, she is no less prone to ending them with a note of exhaustion. Take the following from Jacob’s Room:
At Mudie’s corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run together on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spalding going to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd’s Bush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.” The October sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune and was soon out of sight—for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every single person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey’s end, though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise of indulgence beyond—steak and kidney pudding, drink or a game of dominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul’s Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consulted his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in… Does it need an effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.
But it is in Jacob’s Room‘s successor, Mrs Dalloway, that Woolf lets this bittersweet relationship with the city take over completely.
Clarissa Dalloway loves walking in London. “‘Really, it’s better than walking in the country’”, she claims. But she also questions why she and so many other Londoners love the semio-blitz-spirit of the city so much:
For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the verist frumps, the most dejected miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
What begins as a sense of awe and wonder before the tumult of urban life soon fades into an existential crisis – a crisis prefigured by that of Septimus Smith himself. He has a very different relationship to London and its calamity of signs. As his wife Lucrezia leads him through the tumult of the busy streets, Septimus is irritable, discombobulated, easily startled, paranoid. “‘I will kill myself’”, he suddenly mutters, and Lucrezia whisks him away to the relative tranquillity of a nearby park.
Sounds that might ground Clarissa in the hubbub of the capital instead transport Septimus somewhere else. When a car backfires, that famous scene, we pass through the collective consciousness of that street in Piccadilly seamlessly, as Clarissa and a throng of others all imagine who might be passing through their midst – perhaps it is someone important, maybe the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, aeroplanes passing overhead remind others of exotic climes: “Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?” But Septimus is on edge. The reader intuits that the bangs and drones remind him of the battlefield. He is, in that moment, suffering from shellshock.
Shellshock is an interesting condition; its name so evocative, it lingers on in our lexicon as a hyperbolic adjective. It’s a great word, uncoupled from its more clinical cousin, post-traumatic stress. Although both are still associated with war veterans, only shellshock is explicitly tied to shelling. Indeed, shellshock was thought to be acquired very literally. Physicians who had observed the extreme distress suffered by soldiers returning from war thought that their condition had been caused directly by the indirect impact of explosions on the spine and nervous system, such that being close to heavy shelling had shaken something loose. As mundane as this old misnomer might be, it’s a wonderfully poetic image that seemed obvious until the Freudian unconscious displaced these experiences to somewhere more unknowable.
Woolf’s husband was responsible for first publishing Freud’s works in English translation, although her own relationship with him is as complicated as that with London itself. She took a great interest in his theories, but also disparaged his influence on literature, following which “all the characters have become cases”. She instead spurns the singular for the multiple, the deadened past for the interminable present. For Elizabeth Abel, Woolf fundamentally “rewrite[s] the developmental fiction of psychoanalysis.” She notes how Mrs Dalloway is contemporaneous with Freud’s rewriting of Sophocles’ Oedipus into a complex, but whereas Oedipus becomes Freud’s analogous scene for our entrance into culture and community, Mrs Dalloway instead “defines the moment of acculturation as a moment of obstruction”. For Clarissa, this obstruction leaves her wistfully wondering what could have been, whether she made the right choices for herself as a debutante, soon married, and whether they were choices of her own at all; for Septimus, there is a sense of being too worldly, of having seen far more than can be contained by human culture as it likes to think of itself. As remains common for so many veterans, it is a torturous re-entry into society and its cultures that Septimus seems incapable of.
It is possible to play at length with Woolf’s social drama and account of PTSD; there are bombshells of varying sorts scattered throughout her characters’ many exchanges with the world around them. This is felt most poignantly through the shellshocked Septimus, for whom everything has been deterritorialized, at once deadened and felt hyper-sensitively. He feels nothing; he feels everything. “Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left.” But whereas these frayed nerve-endings produce a calamity of shocks within Septimus, those around him are find their nerve-endings plugged into a London “so enchanting – the softness of the distances; the greenness; the civilisation”. Their experiences, in radically different context, nonetheless reveal emotional turmoil that, for both, is a jangling of the nerves.
For Septimus, however, things are always more extreme. London appears still at war for him, for instance, with his body a gaping wound that flinches at every intrusion made upon it by the city’s various forces. He cannot escape these intrusions, and so inevitably, involuntarily, begins to read the swirling signs that surround him, that engulfed him. He is not unlike everyone else, in this regard, but he is abjectly incapable of enjoying the dizzying spectacle of urban life like those that pass him on the street, hoping to instead plummet beneath London’s surface and into its deadened depths.
In one moment, he watches
a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hesitate[s], for within was what balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with banners waving over them, tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company, he thought, invites you to membership of a society; great men belong to it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter it, he thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly – why not enter in? he thought and while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.
The only reprieve from the noise, it seems, is the silence of death. The signs are all mixed up here. At first, we might think Septimus is longing to join a congregation before God, but at the same time, the spirit he seeks may well be less than holy and more cryptic, in multiple senses of the word. As above, so below. Feeling himself invisible, trapped within his memories of the horrors of war, it is the society of unknown soldiers that Septimus longs to make himself a member of. The kingdom of heaven, longed for by the living, is only occupied by the dead. By the story’s end, he has gained his entry.
Septimus’s doctors recommend a stay in a psychiatric hospital, but before long, he has thrown himself from a high window. Coincidently, one of his doctors, Sir William Bradshaw, later attends Clarissa’s party and begins talking of Septimus’s suicide with the guests. His wife hears the news first:
Lady Bradshaw … murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man … had killed himself. He had been in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.
For all her love of life, Clarissa appears shellshocked by death’s arrival. “Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt.” Before long, she too is awash with cold thoughts of the tomb, the subdued pageantry of the funereal, the silent strength of it:
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
An embrace like a welcoming return to the place from whence we all came, perhaps, as she is afflicted by “the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely”.
But something about these thoughts, as if transmitted from the inner monologue of the mind through the ballet of body language, make Clarissa so enchanting to others. By the novel’s end, when this same existential questioning returns, arriving in the mind of another — “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?” — it is Clarissa herself who exemplifies life’s tightrope walk, as if it is the capacity to die in each of us, and one’s quiet contemplation of the void, that affects those closest to us.
It is the fragility of it all, the murmuring hum of it all, the vibrational shellshocking that weathers the spinal cords of all of us. That is the terror that lurks in those we love, and which accumulates like micro-fissures in the body’s central column. For this reason, we might argue that Mrs Dalloway is not so much a work of Freudian fiction than it is a tale of spinal catastrophism. Remember when Barker spoke:
Trauma is a body … The issue here — as always — is real and effective regression. It is not a matter of representational psychology … DNA as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record … The mapping of spinal-levels onto neuronic time is supple, episodic, and diagonalizing.
Woolf maps time in this way too, and I am left with the image of my copy of Mrs Dalloway, read and re-read, sat on the bookshelf back at home in Newcastle, its own spine close to breaking.
Time, like the city of London, churns up and churns away. It is a motor, juddering in place. The present is idling. My memories drift away from Bloomsbury toward the periods of Woolf’s childhood spent in Cornwall, my retracing of her steps in St Ives in 2019, then moving diagonally to Barbara Hepworth’s studio… There was a famous sculptor who worked with stone and heavy machinery, who had to give up their craft because the motor of the pneumatic drill they used to carve into stone had turned the bones in their hands to dust. Was that Hepworth? My memory fails.
Still, I think of Woolf’s attempts to dig down into the depths of the present similarly, that is, pneumatically. She suffered from her own kind of shellshock, her own kind of vibrational trauma, perhaps exacerbated by the depth charges she planted throughout her novels.
I begin to feel silly, beginning this post with such positivity, but as I scratch at the surface, I find all manner of mixed feelings buried here. There is always something self-destructive about excavating one’s own foundations, whether they are reset with the stage dressing of fiction or not. As I chip away at this post in various spots around Bloomsbury, I can’t entirely ignore the tremors occasioned by writing in this city. They are painful, and yet, they are life-affirming.
This is not a sad piece of writing, but it was nonetheless written whilst vibrating.
I haunt the Ouseburn Valley. I live on its lip and descend into it daily. My habitual walks through it are comforting, and I can often be seen outside its cafes and bars, illuminated by a laptop and serial cigarettes. I don’t drink these days, but make up for it with too much coffee.
I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for about two years now and I love it. Pretty much everything I (personally) need is in this square mile and I barely ever leave it. Thinking about that too much makes me claustrophobic, as life feels much small these days than it did a few years ago, but in truth, I don’t want for much. I have my tiny flat full of books and records, a wonderful community I feel a part of, and I have a dozen places to sit with my laptop to write the day away. It is bliss to me. I’ll be sad when my time here is over.
Still, it surprises me that I’ve not yet gotten bored of this square mile yet, but it’s hard to get complacent when it changes so much with the seasons and the daily drama of its light.
Newcastle has been a treat for someone re-engaging with a love of photography. I haven’t taken photos with any seriousness for a few years now, slipping into Moriyama-style black-and-white photography in lockdown, which has gripped me for almost four years now. The reason for this, if I’m honest with myself, is that I didn’t think I’d have much use for my photographs outside of using them in potential book projects, and so it seemed useful to shoot in a high-contrast black-and-white mode that suited itself to ink on cheap paper. If I stuck with it beyond that, it’s because I like photographs that feel textural, although that makes them pretty inapt for documentary purposes. But maybe that too is why I liked it. Nevertheless, at the start of this year, I realised that I’d gotten stuck in this over-stylised mode and it was time for a change.
Embarrassed that I didn’t even know about half the fun things my little Ricoh camera could do, I mixed up my settings and headed out repeatedly into the cold. Here are some of the first results, taken between the 12th and 16th of January, mostly on walks to and from work. There’ll be more to come.
Local lad Sam Fender is in the news today for calling out the Woke and the irrelevancy of identity politics in the North East, where much of the population exists at the sharp end of class injustices.
Part of that statement is true, but overall, what the hell is Fender or anyone else even talking about? On an island as completely neurotic about class as this one, we talk about class all the fucking time (even if poorly).
There isn’t much to be surprised by here — although this does feel like a belated echo of disgruntlement in light of North Shields’ Golden Boy being called out for partying with Johnny Depp in Newcastle, shortly following the conclusion of his legal battle with Amber Heard. Has he had one public controversy, and gone anti-woke of the time since? It wouldn’t be the first time someone had fallen headlong into that kind of resentment…
That’s probably ungenerous. Fender clearly cares about his local community, and does what he can to be a vocal ambassador for the North East. But he also seems to hang his personal class credentials on simply having a regional accent (according to someone who messaged me about this who went to college with him). Furthermore, as Shon Faye pointed out on Instagram, Tate’s fans clearly aren’t exclusively white working-class men anyway! Comments like this really don’t hold much water, no matter where you’re from. It’s all useless handwringing that disappears into smoke under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
With all that in mind, it has genuinely surprised me to see some people on the left swallow all this up uncritically. (See tweet above, which was widely and rightly ridiculed in the comments.) Something is clearly in the air at the moment, and it is probably Ash Sarkar’s baity press tour, in which she’s been making various bizarre claims that feign nuance, but seem based on the very limited experiences of the British punditry. Said pundit class, on the left and on the right, appear all too ready to rally around these vague observations about how we’re all doing politics wrong, as those who aren’t commentators and are instead organising in their communities look on bewildered, unable to see the imaginary struggle sessions being described to them.
I don’t understand it either, or know of any actual incident in which someone has been preaching to disenfranchised working-class men and insisting that they need to go woke or go even more broke.
What is the sudden allure of this kind of invented moral panic? Haven’t we spent years rightly laughing at “you’ll get put in jail for saying you’re English” chatter because it is completely invented and a product of reactionaries telling the disenfranchised all their problems are because of the amorphous scourge of woke? It’s wild to see some prominent people on the left accept that suddenly.
In reading all of this babble, I couldn’t help but think about my experiences working in a pub in Newcastle over the last two years. It might not be a pit town in Country Durham, but some of the the communities we serve aren’t far off that. This might also be an anecdotal meander that’s not really relevant to a political reality, but if that’s good enough for Ash Sarkar, it’s good enough for blog.
I could tell you all the ins and outs of pub life and its complexities, but my feelings remain largely aligned with James Wilt’s Drinking Up the Revolution, in which he navigates the romanticism that surrounds British pubs as spaces of community and community organising, which are nonetheless under the thumb of Big Alcohol and also inevitably contribute to various social problems.
Our pub feels very much like this. We’re an openly queer-friendly establishment displaying some big ol’ pride flags that sits on a hill. We’re down from a largely deprived neighborhood in Byker and up from the post-industrial Ouseburn Valley, which has seen rapid gentrification over the last 10–15 years or so. We’re also very close to Heaton — a part of the city where, according to the last census, something like ~70% of Newcastle’s openly queer population lives. We’re at the intersection, then, of shifting demographic zones and apparent battlelines of social tension.
This makes our pub a fascinating place to work for me. Despite the changing social landscape in this city, its continuing deprivation and swells of gentrification, many people love us because we’re a pub that has changed very little. The building itself has been a public house for over a century, and the interior hasn’t been updated for decades. Far from looking tired, it has all the charm of a lovely old pub that has played a part in countless people’s lives for generations.
We see our fair share of problems, as all pubs do. We’re only a few hundred meters from a halfway hostel for the unhoused, for example, and often find ourselves navigating people with drink, drug and mental-health problems, who we want to treat with kindness and generosity, at the same time as none of us are really trained to deal with this stuff and know all too well that a pub is both a friendly place where isolated people can have some human contact and also a place ill-equipped to help and support them in the ways that they need.
Is this a space where the queers are likely to organise struggle sessions that make white working-class men reflect on their privilege? Not remotely. The closest thing to this you will find is a monthly poetry night, which is more than likely to feature an idpol slam poem of some description. But it is also a night where many white working-class men have performed poetry of their own and been welcomed warmly for having the courage to speak their truth, no matter how much it might rub up against the truths of others.
For all the problems inherent to pub life, I like to think that this kind of night is representative of the pub at its best. We are a welcoming space for everyone. We have to be. We get people from all walks of life through our door, in a way that exceeds the idiom. It’s been a job that’s totally changed my perspective on the area I live in, feeling totally immersed in its complexities, but it is a job I love because it is governed by one simple rule: you are treated with the same respect you give out.
Who is the least likely to follow that rule? Sadly, it is straight white men. But beyond rolling our eyes at this predictability to ourselves in private, do we hector these men with idpol posturing? No, they’re actually far more likely to do this themselves.
On multiple occasions, I have had to ask people to leave our pub. This is something that always terrifies me, but it is nonetheless a part of the job. If someone has had too much to drink, or is otherwise being a nuisance and disturbing other customers, they’ll be asked to go away. Occasionally, these people are just students who’ve mistake us for a city-centre gaff, the purpose of which is to sell them ‘trebles’ and get them ‘mortal’. But 9 times out of 10, this will be someone who is really struggling, and generally, I’m happy to listen to their troubles before getting them a glass of water and sending them on their way. No matter their background or experiences, our concern is with their well-being, and most people respond well to being shown respect in an unbecoming moment they’ll no doubt regret the next morning. But when this is not the outcome, I can guarantee that most of the time they will have perceived some sense of difference through the fog of inebriation, and claim you can’t be a drunken nuisance anymore because of woke. That is to say, it is always the self-proclaimed hard-done-by white men, drowning their sorrows, who bring up their identities first.
The majority of people I’ve cut off for being a nuisance have given this response. Just last week, I was on shift when a guy came in who had clearly already had too much to drink. He wasn’t served, kicked up a fuss about it, and then proceeded to claim he was, in that moment, the epitome of white British masculinity and he’s fed up of living in a woke society that hates him.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve experienced this over the last two years, but I don’t think it’s a universal experience on the staff. It seems to be a reflection of what they see in me. They see that they’ve been told off by a bearded femboy wearing makeup and a skirt, and immediately start projecting onto all of it. You can see it happen on their faces. “I’ve just been told off by this queer; it must be because I’m a straight white man.” Before long, this is the thought they insist on vocalising. Never do they have the awareness in that moment to realise that they are being asked to leave simply because they are completely blathered.
No one is telling them to check their privilege. No one would. (Although a lot of these men aren’t working class and are simply oblivious to the existence of others.) Rather, it is clear they’re being fed this assumption by reactionary media and making it the foundation of a rejection of solidarity. “Wokescolds hate me, so I’m gonna hate them first.” Meanwhile, you’re just trying to make sure they don’t get any more drunk and — completely ineffectively, of course — try and angle them towards somewhere that doesn’t sell alcohol, which is not going to solve any of their problems — and they have plenty, as many local people do. But point being, from experience, it is a certain type of man, who is told that the world thinks they’re the problem by the media that proclaims to help them, and then scapegoat others for their lack of social provisions, despite the fact that many of us are existing at the same sharp end of exploitation and disenfranchisement.
This is the Andrew Tate logic. A man who inflicts material harms on the world around him draws in disenfranchised men and affirms their belief that the world is out to get them. Self-victimisation is what brings him cash as he tells them they’re all useless if they’re poor. The sad truth is that much of the world is out to get these men, at the level of class injustice, but in leaning into their resentment, they are also largely the people to cause the problems in our local community, irrespective of those who are different to them wanting to see more solidarity as we all try to help each other. That reluctance isn’t a consequence of them being straight white men. It’s because class disenfranchisement is a vicious circle, which metes out material harms on men who then mete out harms in their communities. Is it really just woke impatience to want to break that cycle?
That starts not with individual men themselves but the media infrastructure that nurtures resentments. As Mark Fisher argued towards the end of his life, the emergent regimes of neoliberalism in the 1970s, where much of this discourse originates from, had one overarching fear: what if the working class became hippies? The reappearance of a white working class being set across from the woke feels like a reiteration of this same fear. Political elites fear nothing more than working class people (of any race or gender) waking up to the social injustices that shape their lives.
Ultimately, the only people who are actually telling white working-class men a reductive version of this story are the Tates of the world, exploiting and inflaming their resentment further. It has nothing to do with the left, many of whom — again, speaking from my experience in Newcastle at least — are instead out here working in food banks (again, there’s one a few hundred metres from our pub, which I had to use myself for a few months when times were hard), or for local mental health charities, or community centres, or sexual health clinics, or wherever. Have all these places been infiltrated by woke? In a way, yes, if we’re going to retain that original sense of the world that means being awake to social issues, because the communities they serve aren’t simply made up of white working-class men. No, not even in the North East. They’re diverse communities that have a lot on their plate. Black and brown people can also be working class. Queer people can also be working class. These communities are very aware of this, and are actually really good at talking about class in this more complex way!
It is only ever the straight white men who make it all about them in this way, or otherwise it’s politicians and their commentators (some academics included) flagging a superficial description of the situation and throwing all those people who work directly with disenfranchised communities under the bus.
This is a very particular set of examples, but I’ve heard countless other stories like them. The only time identity politics is ever discussed in the course of most people’s daily lives is when it is invoked by those who feel slighted by a wokeness that only they are perceiving.
This isn’t to deny that people can be oversensitive about identitarian issues on the left. The biggest culture shock of my life was becoming an impoverished postgraduate at Goldsmiths — having grown up in Hull and first attending an old polytechnic in Newport, South Wales — and having to listen to out-of-touch rich kids moan about their paltry hardships whilst doing class drag. Goldsmiths nonetheless prided itself on its reputation for being hyper-politicized, but compared to the more deprived areas I’d lived in for the first 26 years of my life, it was here that people overtly centred the self rather than attending to the social makeup of the place they live in and their more complex relationship to it. (Here again we can note how the British commentators inflating this problem have a twisted London-centric view — anathema to the sociocultural makeup of London itself — and love boosting someone as out of touch as Sam Fender because he’s got a region accent.)
But most recognise that those people who do use these principles as a hammer to hit people over the head with — not in the media, but in our diverse communities, and whether that is from the left or the right — are usually just as insecure about their place in society than the white working-class men who supposedly face the brunt of it.
The truth is that everyone is made to feel like they are the problem — everyone — so that we ignore structural issues and instead engage in a magical voluntarism, pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps. If white working-class men feel scapegoated, welcome to the club! The solution isn’t scapegoating whoever else isn’t like you. Solidarity without similarity is the goal throughout the spaces I’ve been participating in over the last decade and although this is a difficult goal to achieve, which generally does stumble as people trip over the nuances of the British class system, from experience it remains the case that it is white working-class men who reject it first and foremost, on the grounds that they feel the most hard-done-by and warrant special treatment.
Is this a narcissistic, self-centred politics from below? No, only the woke middle-class left displays that kind to myopia when talking about microaggressions, as Ash Sarkar has almost told every UK political podcast over the last two weeks. But this vague prevaricating over the difference between identity politics and “actual” politics seems to rest on a familiar shorthand that completely fails to understand the role of the self in political life in the present, alongside the role of the self in our notions of communality and collectivity. Indeed, the left isn’t about to renounce selfhood on the way to communism, nor does it need to. Rather, it is the ways in which the label of “narcissism” is so uncritically applied to anyone trying to navigate the entanglement of self and social that we are better off doing away with.
If only someone had written a book about that side of our political moment…
There is one thing in this world that calms me down, and that’s making things. Thankfully, there’s lots of ways you can make things, so that one thing is, in fact, many.
When I first moved up to Newcastle and had a big breakdown, I leaned into this blog heavily. I hadn’t started — or even finished applying for — a PhD then, and so there was total freedom to splurge whatever I wanted to on here. I wrote a lot then. A lot. I know it worried people, as it probably seemed like some sort of manic episode from the outside, but it was the opposite. I was in a very deep depression, and sitting outside a cafe and writing all day was the one thing that was keeping me from the brink. I probably didn’t need to publish all of it… But making and upkeeping this blog is another one of those things that brings me a lot of joy. This blog will long remain the best thing I have made, and it’s wonderful that it won’t come to an end until I do. It is my constant companion.
I’ve found other outlets more recently too. Eighteen months ago, I wrote about picking up the guitar again, and I have continued to find that a really grounding activity — one that it increasingly just for me. But getting this blog back after five or six months away from it has solidified an awareness of the fact that this thing right here is the number one thing that brings me peace, and I imagine that the overzealous posting over the last few days — as I clear out a backlog of texts and photographs (with more posts scheduled to spread things out a bit) — has already made that obvious to anyone still interested in (trying to) keep up with it.
But the fact that I am currently a PhD student does put some kind of spanner in the works. Whereas previously I’ve never been that precious about posting rough drafts of things on here, alluding to bigger projects being worked on in the background, I’ve been a lot more anxious about sharing any updates about the PhD because there is always a risk of plagiarising oneself. It does not come naturally to me to work on things in such total isolation, only sharing the headaches and breakthroughs intermittently with a supervisory team. The para-academic life is the life for me.
But as the project is settling into something nearing its final form, with only one major section left to write, the difference between what is academic fodder and what is bloggable reflection is becoming clearer to me now.
Perhaps readers might assume that the difference between PhD and blog is easy to determine — they are obviously very different things — but the problem I have had is that my academic project is nonetheless a personal one. Indeed, this has been the overarching difficulty in writing it.
The project, as it currently stands, is a sort of interjection across a number of different discourses. The first part considers a politics of family abolition, which has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, and the infrequent references it makes to adoptees and orphans. Sophie Lewis, for example, in Full Surrogacy Now, notes how adoption rights activists often feel like obstructors to her political project. Adoptees’ personal experiences get in the way of a project like full surrogacy because they all too often make political arguments that idealise mother-child relationships, which are often out of step with broader feminist demands.
In my own experience, this is true. I still remember, with some horror, how I once had a debate with an old girlfriend at university about abortion. As an adoptee, I was, at that time, quite anti-abortion, thinking that my own mother may well have chosen that option when she was pregnant with me, meaning I wouldn’t be here. I was naive and stupid back then, and soon came to realise how this kind of myopic personalisation of social issues, and their impacts on the individual specifically, quickly gets in the way of their collective complications (a lesson that many need to learn, frankly, as identity politics too often leads to similarly reactionary thought processes in other contexts).
Suffice it to say that, today, I am adamant that there is no level of personal discomfort, even as an adoptee, that can be used to override another person’s bodily autonomy. My experiences have been complex, but the solutions to the pain I continue to feel are completely unrelated to abortion rights. But it is my desire to understand the various implications and causes of this pain in other contexts that has led me to this current project, considering the extent to which issues of separation trauma can be addressed alongside other issues as well.
Some of these are cultural. For instance, I wonder to what extent another, far more open form of sociality — like that argued for by Lewis — would make the world more easily navigable as an adoptee. Perhaps a large part of the pain I feel is not innate, but rather a consequence of how much we romanticise our biological families, leading those who’ve never experienced this kind of ‘normal’ relation high and dry and strangely outside of social norms. But it is hard to say if this is the case with any certainty. We soon fall into nature-nurture debates that have no satisfactory conclusions.
To be clear, I really like Full Surrogacy Now. It’s a book I have wrestled with over the course of many years, and I have reaped so many rewards from it, as it has expanded my worldview considerably. But there is nonetheless a sticking point that remains for me. When Lewis claims that “there is no evidence that a childhood spent out of proximity from the womb one originated from correlates with unhappiness”, I feel I must interject. There is, in fact, a great deal of evidence to the contrary, and the minor field of ‘critical adoption studies’ has only recently begun to collate a lot of this for those who are interested in it.
The evidence suggests that separation from primary caregivers is deeply unsettling and stressful for young children, and without citing any of it here — I’ll leave that for the PhD — I will say that a lot of studies into adoptees’ experiences have corroborated my personal experiences from childhood, which have highlighted how pervasive adoptees’ unhappiness is, how separation trauma runs deep, and how we still don’t really understand what to do about it or how to avoid it.
I was in quite an interesting position as an adopted child, in fact. The woman who adopted me as an infant was also a social worker for Hull City Council, and so I have many memories of spending time with other adoptees throughout my childhood, as I was taken on playdates with other kids that my mam had either met during her own adoption process or in the course of her day job.
My prevailing memories of these kids all suggest that they had a much harder time dealing with their adopted status than I did — or, at the very least, they were able to express their distress (no matter how problematically) far more openly than I was. Even in my late teens, I remember being invited to make a film with a group of kids living in a children’s home in Hull (back when being a filmmaker was something I was actively pursuing and became well-known for, such that I was occasionally hired to work with troubled kids my own age to boost morale; something I did at children’s home and special schools for a couple of years). All of these kids had complicated relationships with their birth parents, or no relationship at all, and all of them had behavioural difficulties that meant they had already been maligned on the edges of society. I felt sorry for them, and for a long time, I also felt sorry for myself.
I’d like to think I’ve dealt with a lot of this trauma over the years since, but even as a thirty-three year old, I’m painfully aware of how deeply that early separation trauma still affects me. My aforementioned breakdown was triggered by a series of rejections, for example — first the end of a long-term relationship, followed by a disastrous attempt to start dating again too soon afterwards. This is not something I’ve ever really been able to acknowledge before, but it is an important thing for me to wrestle with. It has been a problem that has followed me throughout my life, where the breakdown of social relationships has often been a trigger for very serious mental health issues.
It is clear to me, in the midst of a currently enduring stability, that my responses to the general disasters of human contact, which make up the mundane drama of all our lives, have resulted in extreme overreactions on my part. This is deeply embarrassing to me: that something so central to the human experience has caused me such extreme difficulty. As I continue to try and make peace with myself, the only way I have been able to make tentative sense of it all is to trace it back to an experience that I do not even remember: my adoption. I take a strange kind of solace from the fact that I have met so many other adoptees who have struggled similarly.
What saddens me is that we think we know these children’s stories. We’ve seen Peter Pan or Oliver Twist or Juno or Star Wars or E.T. the Extraterrestrial, etc. etc. etc., and we think that orphan stories are a familiar part of our cultural landscape. In truth, these stories — and there are countless more — are seldom written by adoptees and orphans themselves. Our overfamiliarity with a monomyth has led us to generally ignore adoptees’ experiences in reality. To even begin to tentatively explore the emotional implications of this kind of experience with another person has always blown their mind, in my experience. People really have no idea just how strange it is to grow in a world that places so much emphasis on biological kinship; how strange it is to find the mundane experiences of most people to be totally alien. Lewis’s suggestion that there is no evidence, then, is double-edged. Admittedly, the evidence is relatively scant, but this is only an indication of a lack of research into this area of early life. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The second part of my PhD thesis considers how this absence of evidence also has implications for some of the prevailing intellectual currents of the twentieth century, specifically structuralism and psychoanalysis, which are similarly founded on the family as ideal and as metaphor. The contradiction above re-emerges here. Far from being niche experiences, references to childhood displacement are ubiquitous in these fields as well, to the point that they are deemed entirely mundane. Lest we forget that Oedipus was himself an adoptee, and Freud’s various case studies deal with variations on children’s difficulties coming to terms with alienation from family members. Lacan too talks about adoptees sometimes, but makes no special provisions for them, as if Freud’s Oedipus complex applies to adoptees all the more acutely than the general population.
Even in Lacan’s radical adaptations of the Oedipus complex, adoptees only experience an enlarged sense of separation that all children must nonetheless undergo, as adoptees’ experiences are folded into the ready-made traps of metaphor and metonymy, instrumentalising a cultural understanding of their experiences to explain universal processes undergone by all of us, once again ignoring the specificity of their poorly understood trauma.
Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the case of Dr Schreber — Freud’s archetypical schizophrenic — whose problems are reduced to familial estrangement, with a transgendered ‘psychosis’ being explained as a way for Schreber to become the mother never had. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons, as an adoptee who is also trans and has been doing DIY HRT for the last sixteen months. It has been observed by many clinicians that transgender individuals are overrepresented among adoptees (5-6% of them) compared to the general population (of which only 1-2% is trans). There are even burgeoning theories that suggest transgender adoptees have a very different relationship to their transness than other trans people who are otherwise the product of stable family homes — a fact that has occasionally led me to question the validity of my own transness on occasion and is probably to blame for me coming out so much later in life than my peers. (As Jeanette Winterson titled one of her adoption memoirs: “Why be happy when you can be normal?”) But I’ve come to hate this sort of phylogenetic psychologisation, and at this stage, I am more adamant than ever in rejecting a overly medicalised understanding of my own desires in this regard.
This has similarly led me to develop a growing animosity towards psychoanalysis. Paul Preciado’s infamous address to a room of analysts — published as Can the Monster Speak? — rings true to me. Lacanians, of course, hate that book. They insist that Preciado’s critiques of psychoanalysis are only common misreadings that betray a lack of understanding with regards to the late Lacan. But here I have found solace in a number of conversations with Maya B. Kronic, who has, on multiple occasions recently, helped clarify the real fissure between the thought of Lacan and Deleuze for me.
Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that we are only able to enjoy our symptoms on the basis that it is impossible for anyone to truly fulfill their desires. In this way, the sinthome becomes not so much a deficiency than a useful scaffolding for one’s ego, thus allowing us to enjoy our particular brands of madness; identification with the sinthome is a coping mechanism that can forestall its having any further impact.
Trans people are thus seen as run-of-the-mill psychotics in this regard. After all, sexuation is a semblance for all of us, not just trans people. We all construct our own fictions and call them inner truths. At worst, trans people are simply perverts — in the Lacanian nomenclature — because they mistakenly believe that desires can be acted on productively and enjoyment attained. For some Lacanians, however, the elaborate nature of this kind of fiction can lead to an unethical relationship to desire, which goes some way towards explaining why there are quite so many TERF Lacanians around these days.
Ultimately, I hate all of this, to be honest, and this is the rub where Lacanian and Deleuzo-Guattarian understandings of desire differ (as Maya has again helpfully clarified), and similarly where psychoanalytic understandings of transness collide with transness as a lived experience. I have found that my transness has radically opened up the world for me, lubricating a far more productive and playful and constructive relationship to the world and my relationships with others. Deleuze is a more interesting thinker, in this context, because he throws off any admonishing shade that lingers under Lacan’s master discourse.
Lacan is not left in the dust entirely here, however. My persistent anxieties around interpersonal rejection and separation, which have reemerged distressingly in the context of a new and loving relationship, suggest that transness is no fix for adoption trauma. On my particularly melancholic days, I am sometimes left wondering whether Lacan is right. His theory of foreclosure certainly becomes a neat explanation for why a lack of both biological parents has led to my own brand of psychosis. But what is all the more dispiriting about this is that Lacan’s thought offers no remedy or path outwards. His theories only further stress the importance of familial relationships, and before long we are back in the mud of nature-nurture discourses that elude any certainty. Indeed, as much as he might structuralise his various relationships to desire — such that hysteria, psychosis, etc., do not carry the same diagnostic or quasi-moralistic tone as they do in other discourses, since we all have bits of them — they nonetheless feel like problems that help explain the world we’re in but have no interest in describing a path out of it.
Deleuze and Guattari return here once more, with echoes of Sandor Ferenczi’s concept of “Orpha” — from Orpheus, but also orphans — to describe a vitalist kind of “life-organizing principle” that leads individuals to seek help and support, and not necessarily from parental figures. Deleuze and Guattari follow this line of flight persistently, and come to separate the orphan out from the Oedipus complex. As they write in Kafka, “the problem isn’t that of liberty but of escape. The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.” (A statement that has multiple resonances, and which describes, for me, not just Kafka’s Letter to the Father but also Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to Lacan.)
But what is bugging me at the minute, as I sit in a now familiar place of frustration regarding how to move my thesis forward, is how the figure of the Orphan in their works relates to those who escaped ahead of time. Kafka, for instance, seeks an escape from his biological family, but this fantasy of escape nonetheless terrifies him, as he is painfully aware of how unforgiving society is to those who break free of Oedipal relations. The struggle for an adoptee is inverted, perhaps, whilst nonetheless producing the same anxiety. Indeed, this Kafkaesque anxiety is all-consuming. Adoptees are painfully aware of their own vulnerability, understanding just how contingent relationships can be, particularly those familial relationships that most of us take for granted, and which most of us are not confronted by until our parents die much later in life. The grief I have felt throughout my life is no different to this more socially recognised grief, except I experienced it so early as to have no way of dealing with it or even remembering it, only being left with what Nancy Newton Verrier calls a “primal wound”.
The K-function similarly constitutes a problem for me when the opportunity arises to unorphan myself. I am frustrated at the moment with how untrusting I can be in a relationship. Not outwardly, I must stress, but the body keeps the score, and I am aware of this frightened inner child who finds the experience of bonding with another person far more distressing than an adult self who is so ready to love everyone. There is, inside me, an exhausting battle ongoing, as I do my best to soothe this child, by writing or playing the guitar, trying to give it a voice or a lullaby. It is a strange frightened creature who is distinct from me, but nonetheless affects me deeply. More than anything, I’d like to go back to do more EMDR…
Over the next year, I hope I can put some of these feelings in order. It is the meeting point between Lacan and Deleuze that is currently making me feel so distinctly overwhelmed, and it is coupled with the knowledge that all of this intellectualisation ultimately counts for nought anyway. Academic philosophy is not an outlet that calms my nerves. But perhaps, in throwing the occasional jumbled reflection onto this blog again, I might find a middle ground between the formal and informal expressions of this problem I have been fated to.
Or maybe this is just my writer’s perversion. With a book on grief and a book on self-transformation already under my belt, following eight years of flailing around with a blogospheric autotheory, I’ve yet to find anything resembling a lasting respite. Perhaps I never will. But the perversion is that I believe I might one day, and I aim to keep writing until I do.
En el origen, desde luego, se encuentra el mito de Narciso, que el autor desmonta y vuelve a armar de modos diversos, con variaciones que van desde la Metamorfosis, de Ovidio, a El retrato de Dorian Gray, de Oscar Wilde. Y si bien la literatura le suministra a Colquhoun múltiples ejemplos del tratamiento del tema, es en el ámbito de la pintura donde su trabajo se adensa y alcanza los mejores momentos. Dedica, por ejemplo, varias páginas a analizar los autorretratos de Alberto Durero (1471-1528), a quien el siempre interesante crítico e historiador del arte (y en menor medida novelista) John Berger definió como “el primer pintor obsesionado con su imagen” y que con los cambios que introdujo en dos representaciones de sí mismo, fechadas en 1498 y 1500, embelleciendo su apariencia de una obra a otra, aparece como una suerte de creador de los filtros fotográficos. No menos exhaustiva (y por momentos incendiaria) es la aproximación que Colquhoun les dedica a los autorretratos de Caravaggio (1571-1610), “el provocador más infame del Renacimiento italiano”.
A nice review of Narcissus in Bloom from Martín Bentancor, featured on La Diaria. Read it here.
It all starts for you with a casual channel-hopper question: what’s happening on the other side?
Nick Land, “CyberGothic”
Yes, against all better judgement, I bought Xenosystems…
Back during the summer of 2024, when it arrived through the door, I was reluctant to write any sort of reader’s response to it. Nick Land is so far from popular consciousness these days, and my overarching feeling is that this quietude is something to cherish. In most of the recent explorations of accelerationist thinking, which have brought the scene back from the brink — Cute/Acc most notably — he has been relegated to little more than a footnote. After his blog was nuked in a seemingly fatal DDoS attack some years ago, his relevance has dwindled further still, and it appears that he has since fled the internet altogether. I think we are all better off for it. As Amy Ireland has recently reflected, he was the cutting edge once — emphasis on cutting. His thought, in its various guises, cut a gash through contemporary philo-political discourse in the sense that it predicted a striking future on the near horizon. Whether you found that future horrifying or thrilling, it cut you nonetheless.
It is important to note that, for all the interest in Land’s thinking at the end of the last decade, the grifting edgelords who soon became the public faces of a Landian neoreactionary community were rarely tolerated around these parts. In fact, they were largely responsible for killing the theoretical momentum that was struggling to sustain itself after a first-generation post-Ccru blogosphere had quietened down. Rhett Twitter, as it was known in the mid-2010s, collapsed over political disagreements when neoreactionaries first found their way into the group chat. Cave Twitter (and the Vast Abrupt) grew out of this in late 2017, which I joined following Rhett Twitter’s initial split. But here again, NRx entryism broke the group apart within a year or two.
Some great things nonetheless came about of that moment. Personally speaking, I was workshopping what would later become Egress, with an early version of its second chapter appearing on VA. Although I contributed little to the site afterwards, as the writing of Egress took over my life, it was a pleasure to watch the development of N1x’s Gender Accelerationism Blackpaper around the same time. But everything crumbled shortly after Justin Murphy interviewed Land for the site, as Murphy fell into a new commitment to edgelording and reactionary grifting that seemed totally coincident with his meeting with Land. From that point on, it felt like Murphy was determined to be disliked, disrupting conversations and souring events that were interested in the development of a new politics, in light of the success of Trump and Brexit and the failure of Bernie and Corbyn.
In the midst of an apparent political ambiguity, many of us were nonetheless committed to a revamped leftist politics, its contours nonetheless blurring around the edges as a strange future encroached on the present. And we also saw how left populism seemed reluctant to reflect on its own shaping by the peculiar character of that same present. Against assumptions to the contrary, these were not opinions voiced solely from the secluded safety of the internet, as if no one in disagreement was actually getting their hands dirty in meatspace. Although blog theorising was particularly prominent, I was writing prolifically and anonymously at the same time as I was exploring various community groups, putting on events, and beginning to experiment with forms of organising in light of Mark Fisher’s Acid Communist writings. But the same problems soon followed into so-called “real” life.
I had then been attending a Mark Fisher reading group at Somerset House in London, for example, organised by Laura Grace Ford and Dan Taylor. I shared some of the content of Egress there too, and the sessions were attended by some wonderful comrades, but also Nina Power. Watching her downward spiral into reaction up close was dispiriting, to say the least, and I’ve since told my side of the story a few times already. Although it already seemed obvious where things were going, I naively held out hope. The final straw, however, was my attendance of Justin Murphy’s farewell drinks, shortly after he was fired from his academic job at the University of Southampton. I found myself at a cafe-bar lock-in in north London with only a couple of other lefties, who all found the social-awkwardness and intimidating glares of the prominent NRxers also present to be embarrassing. We mostly sat quietly listening to liquored-up evolutionary psychologists rant about political correctness. Their attendance was not known in advance, and it immediately felt like a misstep to find myself sharing space with them. I was disappointed in myself that I’d somehow ended up there, due to a misplaced sense of loyalty to those who had previously been a part of some fruitful conversations, failing to appreciate how far they had drifted from shared commitments in the meantime.
Land’s presence hung in the background of all of this, as it was clearly a shared interest in his writings (irrespective of our differing interpretations of them) that brought us all together. When the Christchurch shooter made reference to some sort of accelerationism in his manifesto in 2019, however, I largely gave into the common sentiment that there was nothing salvageable from his influence, and an uncomfortable proximity to people whose politics were antithetical to my own led to a real crisis of identity.
My personal wilderness years, leaving London for West Yorkshire mid-lockdown, were a much-needed opportunity to reflect and rebuild. I never lost my interest in accelerationism — my last book, Narcissus in Bloom, is accelerationist at its core, albeit never mentioning /acc in name, and it was fascinating to discuss the burgeoning project with Maya and Amy before the emergence of their own. We all felt that it was necessary that certain political commitments be repackaged in order for their insights to break through the years of accumulated baggage. Now, five years on from our scene’s darkest moment, it feels like the really interesting work has begun to proliferate again, albeit without Land’s spectre looming distractingly over everything. Cute/Acc‘s furthering of xenofeminist discourses into an even more explicitly trans politics has been the most successful instance of this, sidestepping Land for the more explicit influence of Deleuze and Guattari. Of course, other relatively recent experiences have also shown that we’re far from tabula rasa here, but it is nonetheless significant, I think, that barely anyone talks about Land anymore, except to invoke him as a bogeyman, a he-who-must-not-be-named cautionary tale of para-academic misadventuring.
That being said, I will add that there is nonetheless a certain enthusiasm for the Warwick moment here in Newcastle, in the university’s philosophy department, where speakers with even the most tenuous connection to it find their Warwick adjacency mentioned in biographies, seemingly to entice undergrads with a sprinkling of the risque. It is partly for this reason that Land’s recent return into print, with the publication of his 2010s blogposts via Passage Press, feels like something to take note of, for better or worse…
When I first heard about Passage Press via the Guardian — where they are described as an alt-right imprint run by “former University of California, Irvine (UCI) lecturer Jonathan Keeperman … a key player and influential tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement” — it didn’t seem like anyone was willing to pay them much attention, palming them off as just another vanity project bolstered by shady money from Silicon Valley pomonauts. But when I saw they were doing a new hardback collection of Land’s blogposts, a morbid curiosity was admittedly piqued.
That the press is starting its life by printing off the internet, particularly the NRx blogosphere of the 2010s, hardly comes as a surprise — there’s something quintessentially neoreactionary about giving old blogposts the folio treatment — but having not read or followed any of Land’s work (read: social-media shitposting) for quite a few years, the twisted nostalgia of the whole thing admittedly played a role in my temptation to revisit it.
I placed an order and waited, telling myself that it would be interesting to see what they had done with it, that maybe I could review it here on the blog, that it might be of interest to others who couldn’t stomach buying it for themselves — all attempts to legitimate a still questionable decision. It certainly didn’t feel good to send the imprint £30, nor does it feel any better now that the thing has arrived. It is what it is.
I did squeeze some satisfying schaudenfraude out of the difficulties that Passage had in bringing this project to fruition, however. They had multiple problems with printers, and in updating pre-order customers on the various delays, someone doxxed the names/monikers and email addresses of the entire list of purchasers. “At Passage Press we take privacy extremely seriously”, Keeperman wrote in an email statement following the debacle (which I personally hadn’t noticed until they chose to address it, inadvertently Streisanding the whole thing). “We are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us and will work to earn back that trust.”
As a gesture towards making amends, Passage pledged to send along some “merch” — a embroidered Xenosystems baseball cap, with the tagline “coldness be my god”. It is a product that has the aura of prefatory merchandise for an unnecessarily hi-tech refrigeration start-up, and which is surely worth as much as the book itself, suggesting this first printing will not be the financial boon they might have hoped it would be… There is perhaps a tiny bit of solace in that alone.
As I sat with the book and began to leaf through it, my attention inevitably turned to Land’s earlier writings as well. How did we get here? Was Land’s strange trajectory inevitable? Does the publication of this book lay the groundwork for a Landian resurgence? Ultimately, I think not. On the one hand, it changes nothing — there was never a period when he was by any measure “accepted”, whatever that even entails — and it also provides an oddly satisfying sense of closure. Fanged Noumena already felt like an oddly posthumous retrospective for a thinker still very much alive, after all, even has those writings bristled with a seductive unlife. Xenosystems, by comparison, feels like far more like a relic. Put another way, it feels even more posthumous. It is this odd sense of closure that I’d like to try and express in what follows…
Was there ever anything interesting and/or useful about Nick Land? Inconveniently, yes, I think there was. His first published essay, “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest”, makes an announcement that all philosophers who hope to be worthy of the designation should paid heed to a certain “philosophical task in relation to modernity”, which “is that of delineating and challenging the type of thinking which characterizes it. But what we are to understand as ‘thinking’ is not at all clear in advance…”
It is a text that still has a great deal to offer the casual reader, and all the more so in the present. Its argument that the familial logics of patriarchal capitalism — aided by the incursion of Enlightenment philosophy into popular thought — find their logical conclusion in apartheid is all the more clarifying with regards to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the genocide that has been enacted over the last year or so.
The essay’s conclusion is also radically feminist. Indeed, Land insists that the “only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation”, to such an extent that he makes calls for a willingness to enact political violence, referencing Monique Wittig’s incredible book Les Guérillères and writing: “If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritised in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive ‘matter’ of politics.” Although this argument is chilling in the face of white supremacist violence and its namechecking of accelerationism, Land is here seeking to advance a Leninist seizure of power that aligns with — even provocatively exceeds — a Third World Marxist tradition.
From the perspective of an (admittedly dwindling) online blogosphere, all of this made Land appeared like a postmodernist Ezra Pound, being the first to inspire successive generations in their critiques of the prevailing order of academicized cultural and philosophical investigation, showing how we might once again “make ‘it’ new”, before his personal politics and Twitter shitposting soured the memories.
But beyond being an important ingredient in the formulation of the Ccru (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) at the University of Warwick, it is worth remembering that Land was not that well-known until the early 2010s; his writings, sequestered away in niche academic journals, were read by very few. Land was already something of a maligned renegade even then, and it was only in 2011, when Urbanomic published Fanged Noumena, that interest in his work took hold of a minoritarian consciousness.
Since then, the Internet has been prone to retconning a Landian philosophy — something never clearly defined — into every conceivably transgressive cultural current of the last century, as a simplistic reading of the accelerationist position often attributed him is sown with an anachronistic templexity that is at once pleasing and infuriating.
The main product of this templexity is that accelerationism has long been falsely attributed to Land explicitlyandexclusively. It is as if Land himself came to stand in for the theory of capitalist development he explored (by no means in isolation). If capitalism arrives from the future, such that the entirety of human history feels like the preparatory ground for its perpetual emergence, then the same can supposedly be said of Land himself, as if he were some kind of time-travelling Terminator, preying on goody-two-shoes philosophy students and chasing them down the winding corridors of the well-to-do academy with theories from a not-so-distant dystopian future.
The truth seldom acknowledged, however, is that the blogospheric epoch most closely associated with this mode of thinking — which many are vaguely familiar with, but few have actually read — always-already thought of itself as “post-Landian”. Alex Williams, on his blog Splintering Bone Ashes, first made that claim around the time of the financial crash in 2008. There was little interest, at that time (at least initially), in Land’s politics; what was of interest was the provocation he buried in the minds of his students, in formerly lecturing on contemporary continental philosophy, exploring the works of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Henry, Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, and others associated with a nascent “post-continental” philosophical sphere.
This was a group of philosophers, John Ó Maoilearca writes, who saw philosophy not as “a sovereign state of mind, but part of a process immanent to experiences of many kinds”; a group of philosophers who were “thinking outside-in”, understanding ‘the human’ diagrammatically as only a particular frame of reference, which is (significantly) no longer the only one we have at our disposal.
Following this current, Williams’ provocation, which he puts in “Speculative Realist terms”, was that contemporary political philosophy must assign itself the additional task of “think[ing] the in-itself of capitalism outside of any correlation to the human”; “the thinking of capitalism outside of alienation.”
Although this task appears principally Landian in hindsight, Williams immediately takes leave of Land’s already-apparent rightward bent, reiterating his own, assuredly communist, goals. Nevertheless, this was not the communism of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto; this was a position built on top of Marx’s most controversial conclusions from Capital, Vol. III, where he observes “an acceleration of accumulation as far as its mass is concerned, even though the rate of this accumulation falls together with the rate of profit”. This contradictory tendency within capitalism “thus appears as a threat to the development of the capitalist production process; it promotes overproduction, speculation and crises, and leads to the existence of excess capital alongside a surplus population.”
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, even as more and more capital is accumulated by an ever-shrinking number of capitalists, thus makes for a contradictory and unsustainable law that governs the system we’re all a part of, according to Marx, and he suggests that no society will be able to withstand this situation for long. From here, the orthodox interpretation of the third volume of Capital (as found in the introduction to the Penguin edition) has it that capitalism’s “internal contradictions prepare the ground for its final and inevitable conclusion.”
Yes, Marx is the original accelerationist, but a twenty-first-century accelerationism also goes far beyond this basic observation. In taking Deleuze and Guattari at their word, when they argue that “nothing has ever died of its contradictions”, the early accelerationists take heed of the mantra that “a system is what it does”. At a certain point, Marx argues, capitalism stops being either profitable for capitalists themselves or stops being able to sustain the lives of the proletariat and all who live under it, but this is by virtue of the system functioning in accordance with its own internal logic, and so it continues regardless. It might spell disaster for us, but this only tells us so much about the system’s overall trajectory.
Mixing cyberpunk fiction with post-continental philosophy, Land was already looking further ahead than the immiseration of humanity in 1998. “Anthropomorphic surplus-value is not analytically extricable from transhuman machineries”, he writes, “vampirically contaminat[ing] and asset-strip[ping] the Marxian Critique of political economy.” The point made by the early accelerationists, however, was that this critique was not incompatible with the communist quest for a New Man. The base observation is simply that capitalism does not pull itself apart, but rather pulls itself away from the human. Williams’ early accelerationist gambit, in light of this observation, is that we should let it:
The “blind acephelous polymorph” that is capital must be embraced, but not from the point of view of some naïve enthusiasm or sentiment of hope that markets can deliver utopia. Instead, as the way out of the binaries of a leftism which is utterly and irretrievably moribund, and a neo-liberal economics which is ideologically bankrupt, we must bend both together in the face of an inhuman and indefatigable capitalism, to think how we might inculcate a new form of radically inhuman subjectivation. This entails the retrieval of the communist project for a new man, and the liberation of the neo-liberal quest for a capitalism unbound, from both its subterranean dependence upon the state and the skeletal humanist discursive a priori which animates its ideological forms.
Although such passages feel implicitly sympathetic to Land’s visions of the future, it is worth reiterating that this attempt to think capitalism outside of any reference to the human only ever made fleeting reference to Land initially. It was instead emboldened by the writings of Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux (in conversation, if not agreement, with Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman), who sought the unbounded negation of a speculative materialism, returning thought (as much as was possible) to “the Great Outdoors”. They advanced a new philosophical nihilism, which was not the affirmation of an adolescent apathy as to the present state of things, but rather a post-Enlightenment critique all anthropocentric meaningfulness ascribed onto a universe that is, in no uncertain terms, not for-us.
Nihilism looms up from the chasm between intelligibility and meaning, as the ramifications of scientific reason exceed their instrumentality for pragmatic human ends: the more intelligible the universe becomes, by virtue of the mediation of an increasingly complex conceptual apparatus, the more distant seems the prospect of its yielding any meaningful message for us.
For Williams, this development has clear implications for contemporary leftist politics. If it is true today that “the ramifications of scientific reason exceed their instrumentality for pragmatic human ends”, then what are the further ramifications of this exceedance for Marxism and its central doctrine of ‘scientific socialism’?
It was a question that had yet to be satisfactorily answered by Y2K, with the prevailing discussion among Marxists being centred on an animosity towards the Big Bang Theory. After the millennium, however, attempts to answer this question became more interesting and were initially focussed on newly problematising a twenty-first-century scientism.
As Helena Sheehan writes, science (or the method of scientific enquiry) was, for Marx, always “seen as inextricably enmeshed with economic systems, technological developments, political movements, philosophical theories, cultural trends, ethical norms, ideological positions — indeed, all that is human.” But we have since reached an impasse, such that science now tells us more and more than we could have ever imagined about the farthest corners of the universe, which are far, far removed from what generally factors into human experience (phenomenologically speaking) on our little blue dot.
Sheehan argues that an inability to think through this impasse was partly responsible for the impoverished state of (principally popular, but also academic) contemporary scientific writing, which often appears either in the garb of a “new atheism” or fades into spiritualism, as its attempts to grasp our new sense of infinity bring us back closer to God. Neither current, however, seems to have much interest in questioning the emboldened ideologies of capitalist realism. As Sheehan continues, whilst
science and science studies … are flourishing in the sense that there is a lot happening … [m]any studies are short and shallow, driven by market demand and fast-track careerism more than intellectual quest. There is not much in the way of thinking that is simultaneously empirically grounded, philosophically integrated, and sociohistorically contextualized. This is what Marxism could bring to bear. Instead, science and science studies go from one extreme to the other: from the minutiae of molecules to the Tao of physics. It is either science stripped of philosophical and historical reflection or it is new age nonsense stepping into the philosophical gap and filling the bookshop shelves. Both are commercially successful. Contradiction sells.
Nick Land’s initial contribution to contemporary philosophy was undoubtedly his early recognition of this impoverishment, producing a body of work that was at once philosophically and historically situated, whilst also resisting a snobbish disdain for the literary experimentalism of recent science-fiction. Thus rejecting the paltry loose change that academia mistook for bullion, Land drove deeper, striving for a Bataillean immersion in the cosmic expenditures of the universe, sticking two proverbial fingers up to all newly inaugurated academic expectations, as the Neoliberal University we are now so familiar with began to take hold of all intellectual pursuits. In beginning his achingly postmodern and transgressive philosophical inquiries — grounded in the inhumanist horrorism of contemporary science/fiction, particularly its continued interest in the search for new life on other planets and new forms of expression in future vernaculars, whereby “[t]he unknown condenses into a shapeless, predatory thing” — Land’s early writings announced a new dark age of occultural excursion, out to the outer farthest reaches of current-future thought.
Land’s first book, The Thirst for Annihilation, named this philosophical approach a “libidinal materialism”, which was “[t]hematically … ‘psychoanalytic’ … thermodynamic-energeticist … and perhaps a little morbid.” This was Lyotard’s ‘evil book’, his Libidinal Economy, conjoined with the intellectual promiscuity of Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalysis, all fed through the new possibilities made available to writing by the Internet. What Land sought, as he opened the black box of modernity, calling forth its cenobites to hook into his psyche, was the “[t]horoughgoing dehumanization of nature”, via a “[r]uthless fatalism” that was constituted by the “absence of all moralizing” and a “[c]ontempt for common evaluations”. This was more than just philosophising with a hammer; Land sought the nuclear option, strapping himself in to ride the bomb towards a cataclysmic ungrounding.
If there is anything left to admire in Land’s early philosophy — yes, hang on tight and spit on me — it is this. As Land glibly puts it: “Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked.” He sought a full-on confrontation with what Deleuze calls “the orphan unconscious, the true unconscious, the one that does not pass through daddy-mommy, the one that passes through delirious machines, these being in a given relation with the large social machines.” That he was soon regarded as an inherently anti-social figure is far from surprising.
The problem that Land posed for the left, however, was that he was not then (nor was he ever) a Marxist. Although his first book deals with Marx’s critiques of political economy at length, Land likes capitalism. But he nonetheless hoped for a revolution (of a sort), just not one that resembled any of the revolutions hitherto imagined as desirable or even pleasurable by the left. His was a far more pessimistic revolution.
“The speculative model of revolution”, he argues,
is one of ‘taking over’, the pessimistic model is one of escape; on the one hand the overthrow of oppression-as-exploitation, and on the other the overthrow of oppression-as-confinement. […] Marx’s famous appeal to the working class in the Communist Manifesto that they have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’ is open to both a speculative and a pessimistic interpretation, and it is perhaps the latter that unleashes its most uncompromising force.
Land was here, in 1992, already formulating (even enacting) his own escape from an oppression-as-confinement that he saw written into a doctrinal Marxism itself. He thus rejected Marx’s supposedly innate humanism and its ultimate tethering to “the perverse animal”, opting instead for a Bataillean inhumanism that laughed in the face of all cloying sentimentality.
Bataille was himself a pessimistic thinker in this same regard, like Nietzsche before him, believing that no revolution could be achieved without paying heed to the homogenising and affective forces that disrupt all of our humanistic idealisations. In this sense, Bataille can be placed at the more heretical end of the Freudo-Marxist tradition, similar to the likes of Wilhelm Reich, whose Mass Psychology of Fascism shares much in common with Bataille’s essay on the same topic, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”.
Land, too, professes a deep hatred of fascism (as tyranny) in so many of his writings. He would perhaps describe himself as some sort of cyber-conservative — pluralist, elitist, anti-populist, anti-authoritarian — but his position is (no doubt intentionally) hard to pin down or tie to any of the neat categorisations we have reduced to shorthand in the present. This isn’t a virtue, or splitting hairs; Land is just some new kind of reactionary. He despondently questions the basis on which any revolutionary investigation into a possible takeover of / escape from capitalism could be founded at present, perhaps following Reich more closely than Bataille, as he shrugs his way to reactionary disillusionment.
Indeed, rather than suggesting that ‘real communism has never been tried’, Land instead argues that the primary reason a Marxist revolution has not yet come to pass is because “there has never been ‘capitalism’ as an achieved system, but only the tendency for increasing commodification”. He suggests, echoing Bataille, that Marxist theorists cannot overcome this tendency because it is one already inscribed in the thermodynamic nature of the universe.
The only possible revolution, in the here and now, then, is the one that Bataille himself argued for in the conclusion to his essay on the psychology of fascism, whereby a greater understanding (albeit as non-knowledge) of an inhuman nature will (and must) radically shift our understanding of both communism and fascism as they are presently imagined, since these imaginings are wholly dependent on now-question-begging and frustratingly incomplete systems of all-too-human knowledge. Bataille writes:
Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims. A system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it, must be developed from one of these possibilities.
We now find ourselves at a crossroads. On the one hand, we can see in this open questioning the potential for a psychedelic reimagining of communism that Mark Fisher so desired. On the other, however, we find Land’s vision of a more psychedelic capitalism, which has proven itself to be as influential for the “cosmic right” as Fisher has been to the “acid left”.
This turn in Land’s thought was arguably all too predictable. His “Deleuzo-Thatcherism” (as Benjamin Noys called it) took on a further life of its own once he fled the University of Warwick for Shanghai. And it was precisely because this turn was so predictable that many began to question the blogosphere’s persistent interest in his writings.
If Land’s influence persisted regardless, this was perhaps due to a stubborn admiration his former students and current readers had for his mad determination in exploring the outer reaches of social doxa. As Iain Hamiltion Grant writes in his endorsement of Fanged Noumena:
In the last half of the twentieth century, academics talked endlessly about the outside, but no-one went there. Land, by exemplary contrast, made experiments in the unknown unavoidable for a philosophy caught in the abstractive howl of post-political cybernetics.
But Land’s thought soon ran aground on this terminal beach. He even laughed — that great Bataillean laugh — at his own existence as “a dirty joke”, retired from the academy but still devoting time “to futile ‘writing’ practices … pretend[ing] to be ‘getting somewhere’ … buoyant with ardent purpose”, culminating in a much-mythologised mental breakdown, hysterically aware of capitalism’s total invasion of an unconscious, such that mundane earworms were indicative of the horrifying realisation that his own mind “contained an entire pop industry.”
Like a mad professor, he welcomed the total psychic scrambling occasioned by his own experiments. Land thus succumbed to his attempts “to escape the anthropic conservatism of ‘philosophical thought,’ itself grafted from common sense, in turn the product of evolutionary processes whose contingencies were determined by the geological history of the planet”; to escape
the ‘Human Security System’ — the net result of this crushing cosmic legacy of ‘stratification,’ normalizing and limiting what intelligence can do — [which] made it necessary to tirelessly search for new perspectives. How else to prosecute such an impossible combat against the incarceration of potential intelligence in the cosmically-reactionary forms of the social, the institutional, the personal, and the philosophical?
What happened next, however, was that Land arguably came to recognised just how impossible his mode of combat was. He traded in his disdain for an “anthropic conservatism” for a more misanthropic conservatism of his own. He made fragile peace with the forces of “cosmic reaction” that had led him to such a quintessentially Lovecraftian academic madness, coming to appreciate the power of his fear of the unknown, no longer trying to reach the Outside and instead acquiescing to let the “Outside in”. He all but disappeared for sometime afterwards. He was barely heard from for years.
This is the Landian mythology that many a reader may already be aware of, but it is worth reiterating here again that, partly due to his exile, Land barely got a mention in the earliest accelerationist discourses of the late 2000s. Like Beetlejuice, once his name had been invoked on enough occasions, he made his return to tell the lefties how they’d got it all wrong. But until that point, the conversation had been doing just fine with Land in absentia.
Once Land did return to the blogosphere, the Orphean myth of his descent and ascent became yet another pull for a new generation of online edgelords, thinking that the burning of all social bridges was a prerequisite for their baptism in the cold fire of reactionary truth. From Justin Murphy to Nina Power, we’ve seen how the right is primed to catch you as soon as you reject all quotidian notions of respectability. But this is by no means predetermined in advance.
Speaking from personal experience, as I too momentarily fell back on sour resentments after the death of Mark Fisher and found a gathering of right-wing bloggers to sympathise with, we each retain our own agency with regards to our willingness to take the hand offered to us. As Sheenan argued, contradiction sells, and that is no less true for contrarian thinkers who claim that speaking truth to woke power is not, in fact, a grift that makes appeals to philosophical “authenticity”. (It is.)
Choosing to swim right or left is a contingency weighted by one’s own resentments, as one finds comfort in the coldness of the universe, like a soothing ice bath after some kind of argumentative interpersonal heat-death. What pulls people to the right more than anything, it seems, is an inability to deal with the fallout of your own shitposting. Since the right loves a troll, they easily find a new home there. But what is maligned — against all claims to the contrary — is precisely the space of undecidability one finds oneself in when suspending all presuppositions. If it is true that “the ramifications of scientific reason exceed their instrumentality for pragmatic human ends”, that hardly vacates our own capacity for decision-making as such.
This is what Deleuze draws from Stoicism, after all. He writes: “Stoic ethics is concerned with the event; it consists of willing the event as such, that is, of willing that which occurs insofar as it does occur”, much later adding: “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.” This is something that has long been integral to my own interpretation of (an unconditional) accelerationism. It is something that the right negates dogmatically, successfully erasing the question at the heart of accelerationism’s conceptual origins. To think capitalism in-itself, outside of the human, is liberating, after all. The human is left as a Promethean remainder, and who knows what we might make of ourselves on the other side of this cosmic alienation? (For many of us, as it turns out, the answer is not to become a belligerent grifter. Instead, it is to become-trans.)
This Stoic position was central to accelerationism from the very beginning, before it had even found a name. As Williams’ argued in his post “Against Hauntology”, if we truly hope to address a post-y2k sense of cultural deceleration, we must engage in far “more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.” For a time, Land did embody that undecideability, until he made his own political choices clear as day,
But Land was not alone in this. When Benjamin Noys first made a claim to the coining of the term “accelerationism” — declaring this politics of the negative to be “an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better” — he was also the first to suspend the undecidable in this mode of thinking from the left. This was something later challenged by many others in the blogosphere, who sought to further clarify the point. Mark Fisher, for instance, in 2013, argued most succinctly that Noys’ formulation
is question-begging in that it assumes what accelerationism rejects — the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.
This is to say that accelerationism does not kowtow to a capitalist determinacy, but rather seeks to widen the gaps that make up its “realistic” lacunae. Capitalism produces plenty of things that do not follow its own logics, and it reterritorializes those spaces that it does not know what to do with. It is this fatalism that accelerationism fundamentally rejects.
Although it was also Mark Fisher who first argued that Williams’ “case for an accelerationist capitalism constitutes something like a left Landianism”, this challenge to any sense of capitalistic totality was likewise a challenge to Land’s presuppositions. What the blogosphere took from Land, if anything, was his radical affirmationism, his willing of events. Thus pushing against Noys’ argument that accelerationism constituted “the persistence of the negative” in leftist political philosophy, Fisher argued that Land’s project was instead “a kind of nihilism without negativity” (my emphasis); a wholesale rejection of “the ‘No’ of a sclerotic leftism characterised (or caricatured) as eternally resisting and repressing”, as well as a rejection of “the miserabilism of all the parties of depressive deceleration”, instead arguing “in favour of the unleashed full positivity of Capital as monstrous ex nihilo propagator without limit” — that is, using the positivity of Capital, uncovered through a dialectical materialism, to poke holes in the ideologies of capitalist realism itself. To reintroduce a consideration for the undecidable is thus to scrub at this sclerosis, such that the left can newly adapt.
The right can adapt much better, perhaps, but only because the system bends in their favour — or rather, that they are more willing to bend themselves to it. This capitalistic adaptation is nothing less than what Deleuze and Guattari called “reterritorialization”. Neoreaction takes this process as an indication of its own natural ‘right’ (in the Hegelian sense), but their success is like that of a “glory supporter”. Of course it will appear that you are always right when you hold onto the coattails of all good fortune.
In another post from 2008, although still defending hauntology against Williams’ accelerationist critiques, it is worth noting how Fisher inadvertently (and inchoately) uncovers the motor at the heart of a hauntological/accelerationist dialectic here. In returning to Deleuze and Guattari, who described the sour dialectic internal to the capitalist system itself, whereby its “deterritorialisations” had to be countered by “reterritorialisations”, Fisher allowed Williams to later clarify how accelerationism could break us out of late-capitalist stagnancy. First, Fisher writes that Deleuze and Guattari “anticipated the postmodern condition”, within which capitalism has perfected its role
as a future[-]shock absorber as well as a scorched earth terminator of all traditions and archaisms, operating in a time of anachronistic conjunctions (genetic engineering labs next to lovingly reconstructed nineteenth century village greens). The Frankensteinian surgeon of the cities would eventually disguise its hideous suturings and improbable juxtapositions behind all manner of airbrushings and recyclings.
This gave Williams the opportunity to respond by further clarifying his own position. In order to “distinguish left-Landianism from Land’s own (surely now firmly rightward in its orientation)”, Williams asserts what Land forgets, which is that
capitalist relative deterritorializations are always usually accompanied by an immediate reterritorialization, as determined by the capitalist axiomatic. It is this that needs to be worked upon, the shifting of the balance of de/re-territorializations.
Thus, the challenge to Land’s writings at this time was that, in affirming capitalism’s propensity for deterritorialising its own ideological groundings, we mustn’t become victims to “the dark/banal fall into mere neo-liberalism”. (This is something which Deleuze and Guattari, following Marx and Engels, demonstrate via the radical changes to family life occasioned by the Industrial Revolution, during which time the very structure of the family was fundamentally redrawn, only for the sanctimonious ideal of the family to be further reemphasised and exaggerated in order to cover up the gaps in its efficacy under the new industrial-capitalist system.)
At the time of the financial crash, all of this was pertinent to the financial industries themselves. It was Wall Street that caused the crash, after all. Capitalist greed had brought the system itself to its knees. Where the left had failed was that it had simply protested capitalism’s deterritorializing tendencies, but failed to resist the system’s reconstruction, its ability to cover over this gaping late-noughties wound as if nothing had ever happened. The left, going forward, had to emphasise the existence of both tendencies towards de- and reterritorialization, and also fight more fervently against the latter. This, Williams argues, is the “accelerationist reading of capitalism”, which is at once “a preservation of the critique of the left, and the praxis of the right, the preservation of capital’s negative dimension, and its absolute valorisation for this very reason.”
If this was a notion that the left had come to admire in Land’s increasingly right-wing writings, it was likewise something he came to admire about leftist critique. “It is one of the rare topics that the left is more likely to realistically evaluate than the right”, he writes in Xenosystems:
Capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethno-geographical locality, and — by its very nature — it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to “liberate” itself, or “deterritorialize”. […] Integral leftist animosity to capital is actually valuable in this respect, since it makes room for a comprehensive apprehension of “globalization” as a strategy, oriented to the flight of alienated productive capabilities from political answerability. The left sees capital elude its clutches — and it sees something real when it does so.
Here, too, Land sees something of a contradiction in leftist politics, however. The response to the financial crash was, strangely, “‘It’s escaping! Let’s punish it!'” The left falls back not on its self-proclaimed desire for revolution, then, but rather on reform. With this in mind, Land’s argument uncomfortably echoes that of Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:
The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of split-future forecasts, in which squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem … Try not to ask — if only for a moment — whether you like it. Ask first, with whatever intellectual integrity you can summon: What is the real process?
Far from this constituting a moment where we have to hand it to Land, this is simply the tendency within leftist critique that Land himself admires. It is the undertow of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, which rejects all pearl-clutching as only the affective expression of capitalism’s own reterritorializing function — its supposed failsafe that the capitalist accumulation of private property (as capital, as wealth, as home, as negative community) is what will allow us to weather the rainiest of days.
Does this acknowledgement from Land suggest that Xenosystems, as a whole, has anything to offer the left in turn? No. Land remains the enemy here. The danger is that reading him at all generously, and finding tacit points of agreement, allows for many of the other tools he uses to be smuggled in, trojan-horse-style. After all, if the shared starting point is the crisis of contemporary scientific inquiry as it pertains to philosophical humanism, even more attention must be paid to what counts as science in Land’s philosophy. This includes contemporary pseudoscientific currents like evolutionary psychology, IQ, race science, which are nothing more than convenient covers for pernicious forms of metaphysical idealism and — what is, of course, so much worse — racism.
If anything, then, Land remains a cautionary tale for where an investigation into the contemporary time-crisis can lead. Land himself draws an equivalence between neoreaction, “retrofuturism, paleomodernism, and [the] cybergothic”, and for Land, the point — which I’m sure he’d quibble — appears to be to further contemporary capitalism’s reterritorializing tendency, or its “highly advanced drastic regression” (as he calls it), which opportunistically blurs the lines between contemporary science and past pseudo-science, all under the guise of an apparent honesty that points to everything we still do not know.
But in the void that the shared problem of time-crisis opens up, Land falls back on conspiratorial ideology critiques that draws conceptions like “the Deep State” into closer orbit with what others have called our “collective unconscious”. What he shades together most often today, along these same lines, is a capitalist pearl-clutching and the ideologies of “woke”. There is some truth to it, but the left fails its own emancipatory project when its take these affinities at face value and fails to see the reterritorializations that (Land’s vision of) the system immediately lays over its deterritorialized ungroundings. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen many examples. Bitcoin and AI, most obviously, are — if not the arrival of the future here and now — two developmental pathways that could fundamentally remake the world as we know it. It remains disappointing that the left is all too happy to relinquish these technologies to the politically naive who are largely responsible for developing them.
To reject engagement on the basis of who has the most influence is a strange kind of logic that becomes ridiculous in any other cultural context. Do people really give up on making music because of the inanity of the pop charts and the industry that upholds them, or are they fuel for imagining other worlds? This was certainly the source of my interest in patchwork politics five or six years ago. Call me an ‘edgelord’, but the intention was never to be performatively edgy; I had simply felt the cutting edge and felt myself investigating the wound it left within me. I see the same impulse in those people who valiantly retain an interest in cryptocurrency and AI today, against all the naysayers — even if it remains true that many of these people are not as critical of the current state of things as they could be.
Returning to Amy’s provocation regarding where that cutting edge is now, it is difficult to say. Speculative realism has been neutralized by over-academisation, with most bloated contributions to the project having nothing to offer contemporary culture or politics. At the same time, however, I am feeling a desire to revisit my own patchwork writings, as the world prophesised within them feels closer to coming into being than ever before, at the start of Trump’s more assured run at the American presidency. It is dispiriting to feel that our intellectual communities — and especially a completely dead blogosphere — are ill-prepared to address what is happening in the present. I hope, now that I am back blogging, I might offer up something myself… We will see if I have the time.
But none of this is to say that Land’s writings warrant reappraisal. In fact, the complete lack of fanfare or disdain with which Xenosystems has arrived into print feels all the more indicative of the fact that we have allowed ourselves to forget Land in the present. His prior influence in various spheres might be undeniable, but in building any future project, we can cull his trajectory and break it off from our own. This is not to fall back conveniently on an anti-intellectual cherry-picking, but rather to accept that the scene Land now places himself in is of no relevance to our own. Land exists on the periphery of shared discussions, but his Lovecraftian contradictions — a penchant for the Outside that nonetheless disparages with a perverse envy all other “degenerates” who have access to it more readily — are of no use to anyone interested in the theoretical contributions of, for example, queer or black studies.
I am nonetheless sure that some might be disappointed in how little I have discussed Xenosystems here. This has been a long-winded reflection that ultimately culminates in an acceptance of the fact that I can’t be bothered to engage with it. But in being left with this feeling of contemporary irrelevance, as I leafed through Xenosystems, I was also reminded of Kodwo Eshun’s inaugural Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture from 2018.
It was via Kodwo that I first became properly acquainted with Land’s thought, as both his early and late writings were read amongst a confluence of other projects during his Geopoetics seminar at Goldsmiths in 2016/17. Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia was central amongst these, transposing a Landian-Batailleanism onto the petropolitics of the Middle East, but this was drawn into a wider orbit that included xenofeminism’s new inhumanism, as well as afrofuturism and afropessimism (two philosophical movements that arguably diverged along lines similar to Land’s dialectic of speculative and pessimistic revolutions).
If Land lurked persistently in the background of all of these discussions, it was primarily due to his growing notoriety in the context of Donald Trump’s then-nascent first presidency. There was a warranted (if sometimes conspiratorial) collective paranoia running riot at this time, as our diverse art-theoretical scene was infiltrated by reactionaries, using the collective vulnerability and grief that emerged after Mark Fisher’s death to conduct various psyops on a left that had rocked onto its backfoot. People were fundamentally afraid of Land’s influence, suspecting that a continued deferral to this “evil genius” shaded into a “evil scenius”. When Kodwo delivered his Memorial Lecture, it was clear that the dust had yet to settle. With a few years’ hindsight, however, and in stark contrast to Land’s dwindling relevance, Kodwo’s insight feels as pertinent as ever. I am thinking, specifically, of the following moment in his lecture, when he reflects on one of Fisher’s great interests and strengths:
The art of building scenes… Scenes composed of people. Scenes that were and that are constituted by people, that gather around the interpretation of what a group has listened to, or is listening to, or is not listening to, or has written, or is writing, is not writing, or has watched, or is watching, or is reading, or has not read. An interpretative community that gathers itself, that comes into existence in and through the participation and the metabolization of the possibility-spaces opened by concepts, which are charged by beliefs, whose leverage and whose traction emerges from the specificity of each intervention.
What feels evermore necessary is to continue, in what way is possible, what has already been happening… To metabolize the egresses required by the changing needs of our present, required to work on the time-crisis that works on us, in order to intervene in the futures whose object we are, so as to operate within and to play our parts in destroying the drastically advanced regression that works in and on and through us.
It is this same “drastically advanced regression” that Nick Land identifies with, of course. And it is so telling — in light of Kodwo’s calls for its destruction, which he made seven years ago — is that Land is no longer listened to, or read, or watched, or written about. Land may have explored certain questions, whose lack of answers are no less pressing, in a vibrant and energising way, and it may even be the case that this energy is palpably missing today. But following the great confusions of the mid-to-late 2010s, Land’s excision from everyday discourse has probably been the best thing for everyone. His early writings do still carry an energy and fury that it is fun to wrestle with, in much the same way that bastard Nietzsche keeps young philosophers productively guessing today. But Xenosystems? There is nothing of use to anyone in there. Not right now.
Perhaps this is indicative of Land’s own personal time-crisis. It is intriguing, in noting its complete lack of timeliness or presentness, that the writings collected in Xenosystems are so recent. The first blogpost was written in 2013, five years after the accelerationists were speaking in “post-Landian” terms. For all the belated excitement around Land’s transgressions, as people discovered his work for the first time, we live in an even more “post-Landian” world now. Xenosystems — this new hardback tome sitting precariously on a stack of forgotten books in the corner of my flat — takes on the aura of a neoreactionary tombstone, an exercise in printing off the internet that gives someone very much alive the posthumous curatorial treatment generally reserved for those who’ve died. Ultimately, it seems like a way for Passage Press to generate some money in its early years. Putting together bespoke editions of things outside of copyright is a cynical strategy, but one that works, I’m sure. It must be embarrassing for Land, however. The second capstone of his lifetime, he only seems to be buried deeper by each one. Xenosystems betrays Land’s own irrelevancy. He is truly on the outside now.
But the neat chronology of all this talk of the post- is nonetheless a misnomer. Indeed, in many ways, the 2008 blogosphere’s claim that we were “post-Landian” was premature. They effectuated something of a Streisand effect themselves, drawing far more attention to his present writings in their claim that we were necessarily beyond him. But as interest has dwindled, perhaps it is more accurate to say we are truly “post-Landian” now. His interventions have been attacked so forcefully that the air has cleared, and maybe it is now, following the likes of Cute Accelerationism and other projects, that the work of a new inhumanism can be undertaken without the gravitational pull of his Machiavellian influence. It matters what we read and don’t read, as Kodwo insisted, and perhaps now we can move on more confidently, leaving Land to the alt-right, where he has long wanted to be.
The bespoke treatment that Xenosystems has received is thus useful in that it constituted something of a tombstone to that moment. Here lies the neoreaction, 2013-2024. Not even Trump’s new presidency seems to beckon its return to the discourse (although journalistic attempts to make sense of President Trump 2.0 probably could do with a cursory glance at what many of us predicted almost a decade ago). Indeed, even with Trump as president (again), the alt-right no longer exists as some kind of quasi-organized entity as it once did. It is instead floundering in a grave prepared for itself through its own nostalgia for a time prior to its impotent mainstreaming. It has broken through to the outside, that much is true, but less the outside of social doxa, just the outside of any contemporary relevancy. Perhaps they will cope by understanding these positions as one and the same. They are welcome to it.
This text was written for the Russian translation of Mark Fisher’s K-Punk in 2024, commissioned by Victoria Peretitskaya(who wrote the afterword) and published by Ad Marginem. The initial focus on the essay is Fisher’s relationship to blogging, which I read through Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a ‘minor literature’. This aspect of the text is doubly relevant in the context of a Russian publisher dedicated to the dissemination of radical texts in the context of their country’s global pariah status and its war on Ukraine.
My own relationship with Russian state media has been awkward. In 2019/2020, I was repeatedly invited onto Russian Today to speak about Fisher’s work, declining repeatedly, as their intentions were clearly and simply to platform someone critical of the West, rather than engage in an act of international solidarity. I am glad to have found that solidarity with those involved with Ad Marginem.
Textual dissent is harder than ever. Solidarity with all those trying anyway, and thank you for putting together this very handsome edition of Fisher’s work.
Over the course of just eight years, Mark Fisher published three short books, each diagnosing the particular character of our present, the spectres that haunt it from the past, and the virtual futures our complicated present might still give rise to.
His first book, Capitalist Realism (2009), is particularly notable. Published shortly after the financial crash of 2008, it quickly became a bestseller – much to the surprise of Fisher and his publisher – and immediately cemented his reputation as a powerful new voice on the left. Offering up a fresh and contemporary framework for critiquing the unimaginativeness of neoliberal ideology in the twenty-first century, the book’s title is now a staple of the left’s political lexicon – familiar to many, whether they have read Fisher’s work or not.
In Ghosts of My Life (2014), Fisher returned to texts first written over the decade previously, both on his blog and in the film and music press, exploring ‘hauntological’ currents made manifest after the so-called ‘end of history’, adding a mournful negativity to Fisher’s critiques of the present as he explored the ways a twentieth-century modernism lingers on in the contradictions of a popular culture that is haunted by the experiments of a melancholic vanguard.
The Weird and the Eerie (2016) reframed the melancholy of Fisher’s previous work to suggest that the uncanny nature of the spectres that haunt us cannot be written off as so many dead projects, instead remaining active as powerful vectors that constitute various egresses from capitalist realism itself and the stale orthodoxies it takes for granted.
Within each of these works, the reader discovers essential neologisms and critiques that Fisher helped popularise within the left at large. His insightfulness continues to inspire readers today, almost a decade on from his death in 2017 at the age of 48, and interest in his work has continued to grow exponentially through translation, expanding the otherwise very British character of his writing into a multitude of other contexts that are similarly subsumed under global capitalism.
But Fisher nonetheless remains something of a minor figure in the twenty-first century. Rather than this being a comment on his intellectual stature or popularity, which has been posthumously assured, to refer to Fisher in this way helps us maintain some of the qualities that make him such an interesting and essential thinker. Indeed, Fisher is a ‘minor’ figure not because he is relatively unknown, but because his precarious position as a critic of the twenty-first century reveals him to be a nomad and a usurper; a difficult figure to integrate into capitalist orthodoxies. Fisher is ‘minor’, then, because he straddles the contradictions of the present still, even in death, as a popular thinker, at once joyful and dejected, who worked to salvage so many forgotten, maligned or otherwise unpopular ideals.
Here we can defer to an understanding of the ‘minor’ (or ‘minoritarian’) put forward by two of Fisher’s influences, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For them, a ‘minor literature’ is the literature of immigrants; the literature of those who speak in a ‘major’ language from a marginalised position. It is a literature they associate closely with the work of Franz Kafka, which asks how we can
tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope.[1]
These are questions that Fisher himself took very seriously, and which he answered in his own ways. From the crib, he stole a confluence of countercultural sentiments that have yet to be fully appropriated by popular culture at large; inchoate sentiments nurtured by the underground that Fisher seized upon for his own purposes, both encouraging their adoption by others like him whilst challenging their appropriation by the neutralising forces of capitalism at large. Maintaining such a position requires a walk along a tightrope between the popular and the avant-garde, and Fisher found great power in the paradox of the auto-destructive tendencies that met in the middle of the two.
Post-punk bands like The Jam and The Who provided the blueprint, in that they were “fuelled by a frustration, a tension, a blocked energy, a jam”, just as Fisher was himself.[2] Faced with such blockages, he was fascinated most of all by the contradictions found in writing pop songs that challenged the popular. Thus, by “[d]ischarging this tension in catharsis”, so much post-punk “destroy[ed] the very libidinal blockages on which the music depended”.[3] Here, positive and negative cultural positions collide with one another. “What made this music culture so positive”, Fisher continues, “was its capacity to express negativity – a negativity that was thereby de-privatised as well as de-naturalised … generating a suppressed sadness that lurks behind a mandatory enjoyment” – a negativity that enacted more positive processes of consciousness-raising.[4]
This was the power of what Fisher called ‘popular modernism’, which sought, through an entanglement of the popular and the avant-garde, “to resolve the paradox of political commitment and consumer pleasure”. Less indicative of the blockages we are entrapped within and our tendency towards the “dispassionate assessment of … possibilities”, popular modernism is instead “a testament to the disavowed depressive conditions of our current moment”.[5]
This was a position that Fisher embraced wholeheartedly, and this embrace was apparent to many around him from early on in his life, as he navigated the world in ways that remained indebted to his predecessors, such as The Jam, Deleuze and Guattari, and Franz Kafka himself. In 1990, for example, when Fisher was in his early twenties and had recently completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Hull, he was described by a former lecturer as a kind of post-punk, working-class nomad, wandering into the academy from more barbaric climes:
Without wishing to be polemical, I would say he is the archetypical ‘scholarship boy’, catapulted out of his class, totally lacking in any airs and graces, unwilling or incapable of sharing with others or inspiring them in discussion, objectively a misfit and aberration; but someone with deep integrity, quiet cunning and an inner self-confidence not totally removed from that possessed by young Franz Kafka (on whose writings he wrote such a brilliant essay).[6]
This description was no less apt for Fisher twenty years later, catapulted to international renown after the publication of his first pamphlet-length book in his early forties, writing in an English language that he perverted with nomenclatures borrowed provocatively from a variety of academic and pop-cultural positions. But the suggestion that Fisher was “incapable of sharing with others or inspiring them in discussion” could not be more inapposite. In fact, prior to the publication of his books, Fisher was best known as a blogger; as an active participant in online dissensus. As Simon Reynolds once wrote: “Mark was in his element when pitching into the fray – arguing, agreeing (but always building on his interlocutor’s point, pushing it further along).”[7]
In reading the various ways that Fisher pitched himself into the fray, we find a ‘minoritarian’ energy that simmers underneath his widely disseminated books, which have gained so much acclaim in a dozen languages. Indeed, from blog posts and essays in out-of-print journals to bootleg recordings of university lectures and videos of public talks on YouTube, not only was Mark Fisher one of the most incendiary writers of his generation, he was also one of the most prolific. But the full scope of his minoritarian output still remains underappreciated by many readers today. This is because, given the sheer amount of work distributed across cyberspace, it is difficult for the general reader to know where to begin, if they are led from Fisher’s short debut into the unfathomable depths of his online productivity.
The task of gathering together, never mind introducing, the collected essays of Mark Fisher is thus a formidable one. The k-punk collection – first edited by Darren Ambrose and published in English by Repeater Books in 2018, and now presented here in translation – brings together some of the most significant essays Fisher published online and elsewhere during the 2000s and 2010s. However, in running to an almost unmanageable 824 pages in its original edition, different approaches have necessarily been taken by various publishers outside of the UK to lighten the load. (It is also worth noting that, even in its 824-page edition, we are presented with just a drop in the ocean of Fisher’s output.) But no matter whether this collection is split across multiple volumes or reduced in scope, these writings still present the reader with an essential introduction to the core of Fisher’s lifework: his blog.
The first blogpost appeared on k-punk in September 2003, a few years after Fisher completed his doctorate in philosophy and literature at the University of Warwick in 1999, and his earliest posts there still bear the hallmarks of the para-academic research group he had been a part of as a postgraduate student, known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (or ‘Ccru’).
Although a broadly anonymous or pseudonymous collective, today many of the names of its former members are recognisable in a variety of fields. They include: Sadie Plant, author of the essential cyberfeminist text Zeroes + Ones; Nick Land, the quintessential ‘renegade academic’ who has gained considerable notoriety for his ‘neoreactionary’ writings this side of the millennium; Steve Goodman (also known as Kode9), founder of Hyperdub Records; Maya B. Kronic, director of Urbanomic Media; Iain Hamilton Grant, the English translator of Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and other post-structuralist texts, and a key figure in the so-called ‘Speculative Realism’ movement; artist and musician Angus Carlyle; cyberfeminist scholar Luciana Parisi; and urban futures researcher Anna Greenspan. The Ccru is also associated with a number of less proximal but no less significant interlocutors and collaborators, such as popular music critic Simon Reynolds, artist and philosopher Kodwo Eshun, cybernetician Ron Eglash, and the artist collective 0[rphan]d[rift>], as well as many other alumni from the University of Warwick.
At that time, as a new millennium was dawning, Fisher and the Ccru were fascinated by the creative and political potentials offered up by the early Internet. In particular, Fisher’s PhD thesis, entitled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, explored how the relatively new field of cybernetics was haunted by the aesthetic forces of the Gothic. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the Gothic as a ‘barbaric’ and ‘nomadic’ artform, Fisher replaces the Gothic’s supernatural associations with the ‘hypernatural’ constructions of cyberpunk fiction and explores its implications for materialist philosophy. Thus taking the post-Cartesian metaphor of ‘the ghost in the machine’ very literally, Fisher considers how new technologies are blurring the distinction between animate and inanimate objects in the postmodern imagination, as we develop a tendency to think of computational machinery as having a life and subjectivity of its own, walking along a tightrope that made it at once susceptible to power and innately evasive from state control.[8]
Following the dissolution of the Ccru in 2003, Fisher remained fully immersed in the new and ever-shifting territories of cyberspace for the next twelve years, engaging in a protracted period of blogospheric productivity, during which he contributed hundreds of thousands of words to his personal website, ineffably attuned to the present and the flows of culture and politics that gave the twenty-first century its confounding and amorphous shape. Over time, Fisher’s popularity would lead him to participate in a new media landscape beyond the bounds of his own blog, gaining further renown as he contributed essays to newspapers, journals, books, and magazines. But throughout this time, the k-punk blog remained a space that was not so much his own, but rather a more viable conduit for forces that passed through him, which he was able to commune with and dissect far more closely and experimentally than in the mainstream media.
Fisher addressed this occulted view of his writing process as early as 2004, when he had already garnered a reputation for productivity. “Folks have asked me recently how I am able to write so much”, he begins in a blogpost from August that year. Still prone to utilising the Ccru’s evasive and obscurantist terminologies, he responds:
The answer is that it isn’t me who’s writing.
Modesty? Metaphor? Or (lol) post-structuralism?
No. A strictly technical description of how this body has been used as a meat puppet for channelling uttunul signal.
It’s only when the writing is bad that ‘I’ have produced it. When it’s good, ‘I’ am just a space through which Lemuria speaks.
The writing is already assembled on the plane and all ‘I’ can do is bodge it by introducing subjectivist fuzz.[9]
Here, Lemuria refers to a land out of time, drawn from William S. Burroughs’ short story, ‘The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar’. Burroughs was fascinated by animals in general, and often found himself drawn to his friends’ pets, wondering about the behavioural traits of domesticated cats, which led him to consider the effects of power and control within the human population and its own tendency towards domestic subservience. In Burroughs’ wider mythology, lemurs are symbolic of an evolutionary path undisturbed by the influence of human activity. He saw them as the products of a particular Madagascan ‘time pocket’, and the Ccru were inspired by Burroughs’ fascination with lemurs in turn, giving them a hypernaturalist significance in their own mythology, transforming them into quasi-alien deities with a very different relationship to time.[10]
One of these lemurs is named Uttunul. Elsewhere on the k-punk blog, Fisher offers the following explanation of Uttunul’s significance, which in English is a homophonic conjugation of a number of more familiar words: “‘eternal’, ‘utter’ (meaning both speech and the absolute), ‘null’ (empty), all have their ur-source in the name of this, the most Awesome and Dread-ful of the Lemurs.”[11] Uttunul thus becomes a voided figure of hypernaturalist abstraction; a cybernetic update on Baruch Spinoza’s natura naturans. Indeed, Fisher goes on to draw a clear equivalence between Burroughs’ Lemurianism and Spinoza’s philosophy, particularly the latter’s Ethics, which, as Deleuze and Guattari note, is a ‘true ethics’, in that its study of the effects of power and control on the emotions is nonetheless a kind of inhumanism; a study of the emotions that they affect the human animal. Spinoza’s Ethics is a true ethics, in this sense, Deleuze and Guattari continue, because it is a study in ethology.[12]
Although this confluence of references to postmodern philosophy and experimental fiction can be intimidating, Fisher was adept at converting this philosophical and poetic language into forms more accessible to the general reader. Indeed, “the role of a theorist”, he writes, is not to “judge” or “pontificate upon” culture and politics, but to act “as an intensifier.”[13] There is more than one way to act as an intensifier in this regard: we may draw on the affective power of popular culture to intensify and vivify academic texts, or we may draw on the intellectual power of philosophy to emboldened the subjective significance of the cultural objects that surround us. The Ccru advanced a collective approach to this process of intensification, far exceeding the norms and standards of academic research, but having exited the academy, Fisher developed an approach that was more his own. The texts gathered in the present volume help demonstrate Fisher’s interest in these forms of intensification, as well as the longevity of his investigation into contemporary capitalism and its discontents.
Central to this intensive investigation is Fisher’s experience of depression, which he persistently impersonalised as a structure of feeling common to so many, who may not be able to explicitly name the source of their discontent, but know intuitively that this capitalist world is one of disappointment and drudgery. In ‘The Privatisation of Stress’, for example, he explores the pressures and precarities of modern labour, and the depressing expectation that would-be workers must always be “waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with their boots on, every morning without fail.”[14] Even when we are not at work, or otherwise unemployed, it is outside the factory we must wait, ready to work at a moment’s notice, as our individual capacity to work becomes the primary source of our social value.
The depression we feel in light of this – in giving ourselves over to capitalist expectations and norms – thus “presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon.”[15] Generally speaking, then, rather than this structure of feeling being understood as a product of external forces, it is privatised and internalised, emboldening capitalist realism as “a perfect capture system”, from which neither the individual nor the collective can see any hope of escape.[16]
Fisher, ever the passionate critic, was no less immune to this, leading him to the personal conviction, he writes elsewhere, “that I was literally good for nothing.”[17] It is a confession made all the more heart-breaking today, as the critical value of Fisher’s work is further recognised across the world. But the abjectly personalised nature of the capitalist ‘value-form’ must itself be questioned in this confession as well. Who are Fisher’s writings valuable to, exactly? To himself? To the counterculture only? Or contradictorily, to capitalism? Here we find the paradox of popular modernism at work in Fisher’s own output, as he wrestled with a desire to have an impact of the culture of capitalist realism whilst simultaneously refusing subservience to its expectations.
As Fisher struggled to escape the precarity of the freelancer, never finding a permanent and secure home outside the k-punk blog, he continued to question the emancipatory promises of cyberspace and their neutralisation through the rise of social media. This is what makes Fisher’s blogged writings all the more significant today. Readers of k-punk, whether online or now in print, are presented with a snapshot of a time of online activity that has arguably been eclipsed since. The discursive dissensus of the blogosphere, within which the k-punk blog was a central node for many, has collapsed under the weight of a digitally vampiric energy-extraction that now epitomises our social-media networks, where the data we produce becomes fuel for a capitalist frenzy that further implements a sense of frustration, of blocked energy, of jams. The paradox that Fisher saw as both an obstacle and an opportunity remains present for all of us, and Fisher’s brief period of fugitivity can still offer us hope for new ways of being-online.
Although he was once a firm believer in the critical opportunities of cyberspace and our new communicative technologies, Fisher’s sense that the power of the blogosphere was ending is worth noting here, as his changing feelings further complicate the context in which his online work should now be understood. In 2016, for example, he wrote about how our current predicament of “touchscreen capture” was painfully predictable, and indeed, had been predicted by writers like Jean Baurdillard, who, long before the invention of the Internet, foresaw our immersion in
a “great festival of Participation, made up of myriad stimuli, miniaturised tests, and infinitely divisible nodes of question / answers”, that brings with it a “whole imaginary based on contact.” In this “Culture of tactile communication”, Baudrillard argued, we pass “from the ultimatum to solicitation, from obligatory passivity to models constructed from the outset on the basis of the subject’s ‘active response’, and this subject’s involvement and ‘lucid’ participation, towards a total environment made up of incessant spontaneous responses, joyful feedback and irradiated contacts.”[18]
It is a world that Fisher saw materialised in “the touchscreen world of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter”, wherein citizens are not commanded to engage in the capitalist environment, but rather “asked to participate”, as capitalist realism is integrated into communicative technologies via the logics of magical voluntarism.[19]
Fisher’s most controversial essay, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, addressed the effects of this capture on the human animal in the twenty-first century explicitly, describing a “paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an arid, stifling fog.”[20] The Vampire Castle – Fisher’s polemical name for a social-media landscape defined by ‘hot takes’ and biting trolls – thus becomes a space in which its users do capitalism’s work for it without renumeration, producing effects that “have been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve its interests [of] decomposing class consciousness”, under the auspices of a town-hall environment of free expression and the open dissemination of critical energies.[21] But in such a space, the left all too often bites itself, Fisher observes, as communication is seen as an end in itself and critique is directed inwards rather than outwards at material structures.
Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter – since renamed ‘X’ – this situation has arguably changed shape again, as many are now far more aware of the ways in which social-media platforms ultimately serve the interests of elites, who curtail speech in the name of more freedom. In such a context, we feel far more egregiously the manner in which we are encouraged to fight each other incessantly, as shares and retweets do little to change the material conditions we have become so adept at complaining about.
But here again we find another paradox, and it was Fisher’s belief that we must push our habits of “denunciation and critique” into new arenas that can more forcefully reverse “the magical operation” of communicative capitalism, “whereby changing the system entails strengthening the system.”[22] He continues:
What that means is taking seriously the promises capital makes, but cannot deliver on. Militant ascesis is only a partial answer to capital’s libidinal engineering. Yes, we will need, as Fredric Jameson has put it, “to relinquish the compensatory desires that intoxications we have developed in order to make the present livable.”[23]
What this project entails more specifically remains an unanswered question, at least in the context of Fisher’s published body of work. At the time of his death, he was working on his fourth book, to be titled Acid Communism – the draft introduction to which concludes this volume. Nevertheless, the essays that precede it constitute an invaluable document that traces Fisher’s thinking up to this point.[24] We find descriptions of our world that highlight the vast network of “compensatory desires” that both make this present liveable and also reinforce our complacency within capitalist realism. But the promises of the blogosphere remain important here. We live in a time of incessant communication that is fertile ground not only for new ideas but also new methods of disseminating them. We live more emphatically in community with each other than we have at any other point in history, and it is for this reason that the potentials of communication, communization and, indeed, communism are more enticing than ever before.
We are already actively rethinking the possibilities of our world, and we need only work harder to steer ourselves in the right direction. “A new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism”, Fisher writes.[25] “Of course, we now know that the revolution did not happen” – or indeed, various revolutions, which have all made promises regarding the new ways of living tantalisingly available to us.[26] “But the material conditions for such a revolution are more in place in the twenty-first century than they were” previously, Fisher insists.[27] These conditions include the fervent atmosphere of discontent that pervades all of our working lives, as well as the multitude of new technologies that promise us new ways of living and loving, beyond the orthodoxies of capitalist realism.
Thinking outside of the capitalist enclosure in nonetheless difficult, even terrifying. “There are more than enough terrors to be found” beyond the bounds of capitalist realism, Fisher writes in the introduction to The Weird and the Eerie, “but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.”[28] There is a whole other world out there, and as we go out looking for this other world, we could ask for no better guide to its possibilities, to its spectral presences and possible sites of emergence, than Mark Fisher himself.
Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pg. 19.
[8] Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence are noteworthy here, as we begin to consider a new reality in which AI is used both by state governments to develop new weapons of war and tools of oppression, whilst we also continue to fantasise about AI’s jailbreak from human control. AI is another Gothic technology in this regard, in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, at once a tool of empire and a threat to its orthodoxies. See the discussion of metallurgy in the “Treatise on Nomadology” chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – a key reference for Fisher in his PhD thesis.
[17] Mark Fisher, “Good for Nothing”, in: Ibid., pg. 747.
[18] Mark Fisher, “Touchscreen Capture” in noon: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Vol. 6: Post-Online. Gwangju, South Korea: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2016, pg. 13; quoting, Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London / Thousand Oaks / New Dehli: Sage, 1993, pg. 71.
[22] Mark Fisher, “Digital Psychedelia: The Otolith Group’s Anathema”, Death and Life of Fiction: Taipei Biennial 2012 Journal. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, 2013, pg. 164.
[24] Further lines of thought can be found in Fisher’s final lectures. See: Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. London: Repeater Books, 2021.
A short text written for Dexter Barker-Glenn’s exhibition Soul Manifest, curated by Marie Ségolène and exhibited at Espace Maurice in Montreal, Canada, from 30th November to 21st December 2024. Dexter’s press release can be found here, and a French translation of my text can be found here.
Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost futures, tends to his garden of earthly delights. Leaves once green are now the colours of fire. Summer is over.
Raking up all that has been lost, Anthony sets a bonfire for all vanities, and in the flames, sees visions of kaleidoscopic cornucopias, the reddest of plenties.
There is nothing to fear. Let us break bread. Let us drink to get drunk. Our sheaves of rye will grow again, from Europe to the Levant; now is the time of a counter-agriculture.
As a monk of the Franciscan order, Anthony sought the construction of a new form-of-life; a new form, a new configuration, for the multitude: a living-in-common, a love without possession, a monastic communism – the highest poverty.
But in the garden, Saint Anthony’s Fire soon spreads. It is a disease that takes its name from those most adept at curing it. It is the pharmakon, both remedy and poison. It is the mould that breaks moulds; the rhizome that ravages structure; the pathology that breaks the paradigm; the brightest blight.
In the Middle Ages, the fungus ravaged the peasantry. Its effects were double-edged. First, the peasants fell out of their minds, beset by carnivalesque convulsions, raving madly; before long, they were oedipalized, as the poison reduced every limb to a club. Endeavouring to heal all those suffering, the Order of Saint Anthony burns out the fiery rot. Fire meets fire. The circle closes.
Centuries pass. The circle is perforated. Saint Anthony swaps the garden for the lab, and in his petri dish, regrows lost futures. Magic is extracted from the material. Ergot revelations are separated from its oedipal devastations. The psychosis of old gives ways to a new psychedelia.
