Did You Miss Me?

Hello. I missed you. This interruption in blogging activity (around six months!!) has been surprisingly painful; the longest I have gone without posting anything since the xenogothic blog was birthed six or seven years ago, perhaps even since I started blogging in general some 18 years ago… But rest assured, the writing has not stopped; my PhD thesis is still percolating in the background, and I have roughly 12 months left to finish it. It is quickly taking shape, and I am hoping to have a full draft ready by the summer (although I am sure god is already chuckling at my best laid plans…). Plenty else has been going on too, and so we have much to catch up on.

First things first, I have a few extra publications to share with you, the most recent being a new introduction to the Russian translation of Mark Fisher’s K-Punk. At the invitation of Victoria Peretitskaya, who has also written an afterword to the new edition, it’s a text I am particularly proud of. Just when I think I truly have nothing left to say about Mark, each new invitation to write something new results in a re-engagement with his work that brings about new resonances. It is always a pleasure, and I may share the English-language version of the text here in due course.

I’ve also been doing a few interviews, as Narcissus in Bloom has continued to come to the attention of new people, and I am grateful that people are still interested in talking about it with me.

I was interviewed by Beki Cowey for Art, Etc. magazine here, in which she reflects on her own selfie-taking practice before we chat about the contents of my book.

More recently, I was also interviewed by Arianna Caserta for Link magazine, on the occasion of Narcissus‘s translation into Italian, which has been published by long-time friends of the blog, Nero Editions.

Turning the tables momentarily, I conducted an interview with Gordon Chapman-Fox (aka The Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan) late last year, at the invitation of the Walker Art Reader, for whom I wrote about Mark Fisher and ChatGPT a while back. You can read the interview here.

Keeping my interview hat on, I was also down in London speaking to Adam Jones at the launch of his new book The New Flesh at Housmans in November 2024. Thanks to everyone who attended. Adam has had a busy year, and we’ll be in conversation again in April to talk about Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs, which is finally getting an official print edition via Zer0 Books and for which Adam has written a fantastic foreword. This event is likely to sell out quick, so check here for tickets.

Returning to 2024, also in November, I travelled to Budapest at the invitation of the Eidolon Centre of Everyday Photography. Endre Cserna interviewed me for their website back in 2023, and it was nice to meet Endre, Róza and the rest of the Eidolon team in person for an event on Narcissus.

The morning after the talk, I sat down with Nagy Gergely in the hotel breakfast bar to chat photography, the place of narcissism in our contemporary political landscape, and the argument the book puts forward about how we should think about it less moralistically. If you speak Hungarian (or want to Google translate it), you can read that here.

Here are a couple of photos from the trip, with one featuring my lovely friend Ged, who came along as my travel twink:

Before heading to Budapest, I was in Cardiff in October 2024, returning to my old university – sort of; the University of Wales, Newport, where I studied for a Bachelor’s degree in Photographic Art, has since been absorbed into the conglomerate University of South Wales. It was one of the best talks I’ve done in a while, if I do say so myself, and I may share the text in due course. Above all, it served as an affirming reminder of what it is I love to do and why I set about doing a PhD (which I may have admittedly forgotten somewhere along the line)…

I have always wanted to teach. As soon as I finished my undergraduate degree – an experience I truly loved – I knew I wanted to have a role in enabling others to have a similar kind of experience of arts education. But I knew I wasn’t yet qualified (literally and more generally), so after a couple of years working in arts administration, I went to Goldsmiths to do an MA in Contemporary Art Theory, believing (perhaps falsely) that I hadn’t been that successful as a budding artist because I simply wasn’t very good at communicating my ideas.

What happened whilst I was there has, of course, been very well-documented… And although I never fully left art and photography behind, I am more reticent these days to identify myself as an artist or photographer. Goldsmiths was an event that completely changed the trajectory of my life. Now I’m a writer, and I guess that’s fine… But despite having spent a number of years distracted by theory and the history of ideas, and now no longer resembling much of an ‘artist’ in any quasi-professional sense, I would still like to think that I am primarily interested in what certain forms of cultural production can do. Writing is one such form, and a form not that different from the book-form that I have always treasured. Ten years ago, I hoped to end up making art books and photo books; I have written more traditional readerly books instead. Narcissus in Bloom was nonetheless a book about philosophy and art history, and it was a conscious attempt to write a fairly straight-forward book of art theory. But now I feel the itch to get back into making things, to experiment more with the book form, and once again take a more ‘artistic’ (rather than strictly writerly) approach to what books can do.

(Whether any of this will culminate in an expansive, perhaps even pedagogical practice, remains to be seen… The current state of the university sector does not inspire much hope that this is on the cards for me… We’ll see…)

To that end, a very nice opportunity arrived at the end of last year to write a short, poetic text for Dexter Barker-Glenn’s recent exhibition at Espace Maurice in Montreal. Titled “In the Garden of Saint Anthony”, it is a text that tries to draw out some of the themes of Barker-Glenn’s project, inspired by Mark Fisher’s “Acid Communism”, which considers Saint Anthony’s Fire as a kind of pharmakon.

In other tentative news, I also have a text forthcoming in a new edition of Edinburgh University Press’s Deleuze and Guattari Studies reader (more on which at a later date). It has been such an integral text for me, which I wrote as a short draft of the conclusion to by PhD thesis, and in writing it over Christmas 2024, it has given me so much energy to finally finish this bastard academic project, allowing me to finally see the end point I am aiming to reach and expand upon by the end of 2025. In fact, it’s given me a new working title for the thesis as a whole: The Bastard Path: Post-structuralism as Orphaned Philosophy. Keep your eyes peeled for a less academic and more approachable version of its argument in book form in a couple of years (I hope).

There are so many other things I wish I’d written for the blog during this time of offline convalescence, which I may still get round to. One thing that I suspect will rear its head again — in fact, it did on the day I started writing this post — was the return of Daniel Tutt’s attacks on Acid Horizon and the general gathering of authors associated with Repeater Books. Ironically, he (and others) seem to think I am Acid Horizon, or generally overstate my involvement in various enterprises, despite my professional links being freelance and tenuous. (I am always speaking in a personal capacity, so more fool them for having no idea who they’re talking to or about…)

Similar to the disgruntlement Tutt expressed when his (planned) platforming of transphobe Nina Power was called into question back in 2023 (which hardly went well for him), Tutt took responses to his general idiocy to be censorious and seemed prepared to mount a crusade against Repeater, Acid Horizon, and anyone else he views to be a part of the ‘Nietzschean-Deleuzian left’.

The main irritant was a laughable email Tutt sent to Repeater, demanding the deletion of all tweets posted in disagreement with him, simultaneously threatening the publication of a report into Repeater’s censorious practices – including my own censoriousness in my capacity as a freelance proofreader (lol). A statement – that would have appeared here if the space was active – was posted on Twitter, highlighting how ridiculous it all was, which seemed to pour cold water on Tutt’s spurious claims. You can read that here.

But it wasn’t put to bed for long. Today, Tutt (sort of) actualised his threat and — along with “shamanic TERF gigakaren” (as someone hilariously referred to him) Rhyd Wildermuth — made claims that Repeater’s recent behind-the-scenes woes have been due to a cashflow problem. This seems to be an argument that Tutt has parroted from Etan Ilfield, head of Watkins Media and Repeater’s de facto owner; an Israeli venture capitalist who took a disliking to the fact that Repeater Books, as a collective entity, signed an open letter circulated by Verso in late 2023 under the heading “Publishers for Palestine” — an anonymous report on which I shared before this blog went dark back in September 2024.

Tutt and Wildermuth claims there is no truth to this. They are wrong. And it is very telling they will take the word of a duplicitous Zionist over that of the precarious workers at Repeater and Zer0 who are undoubtedly exhausted by the effective shutting-down of the former imprint and the various headaches produced by its inexplicable platforming of Compact / Sp!ked mag reactionaries, who we all assumed had been expelled from its operations when Watkins bought Zer0 Books back in 2021 (which I wrote about at length at the time). I unfortunately expect we’ll be hearing more from them, and that I’ll be writing about it here no doubt, over the next few months.

On a more positive note, I have been loving Ethel Cain’s new album, Perverts, and would like to write something on it as a counterpoint to last year’s most widely shared blogpost on Brat Summer… I recently signed a contract for this essay, which will appear in a TBA essay collection at some point in the future. I have a rough draft in the works, and it has also been a nice vehicle for processing my grief over David Lynch’s death, which hit me – as it did for so many – particularly hard. A few weeks ago, in fact, I was struck down by a horrible flu doing the rounds at the moment (probably just one rung below COVID in my estimation), and spent two weeks in bed watching almost all of Lynch’s output. It was wonderful, and an experience that I’m sad has come to its inevitable end.

Lynch has been in the background of everything I do, and most of my life up till this point. I’ve been reflecting a great deal on childhood viewings of The Elephant Man; a teenage Twin Peaks obsession (and the cringe Peaks tattoo I got when I was 19/20); Lynch’s undeniable influence on Phil Elverum of the Microphones / Mount Eerie (and the latest Mount Eerie album, Night Palace, has been on heavy rotation since the end of last year); the night I bought the DVD of Inland Empire, on the day it came out in 2006/07 from a shop in Hull, and the desire to watch it immediately, sticking it in the tiny combi TV in my bedroom with my headphones plugged in, bathing in its impeccable sound design late into the night, which is an experience I have never recovered from and may well have been one of the most significant cultural encounters of my adolescence; Mark Fisher’s writing on Lynch’s egresses and curtains in The Weird and the Eerie; Lynch’s industrial photography and its influence on my own photographic eye; the Inland Empire sample that opens Burial’s Untrue… I could go on…

Suffice it to say, I am deeply saddened to now be living in a world without him in it, and I’d like to quote a short Instagram caption written by Shumon Basar that I found particularly moving in the days immediately following his death, on the time Basar met Lynch in LA:

He was every bit as he seems: Mel Brooks once described him as ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars.’ I thought of him as a suburban boy-scout who taught himself how to make Jungian fire. Fire was always present in his imagined worlds: The Air is on Fire, Fire Walk With Me, viscous smoke, Song to the Siren set in a burning stack, the Elephant Man’s head is the shape of the mushroom cloud violently birthed from Oppenheimer’s atom bomb.

It is, therefore, not insignificant that David’s fatal ailment – emphysema – was a product of his lifelong love of smoking, a sickness which necessitated he couldn’t leave his Lloyd Wright designed house starting five months ago. Was it a coincidence that he passed away as the most powerful wildfires in Los Angeles – his home for more than half a century – destroy so much of the city he attributed as the reason he became a filmmaker? (The morning light one summer in 1973).

An era comes to a close, its smoke plume signalling the fire has gone out, its carbonic particles dissipating into everything. But we live on. And so what comes next…?

When I returned from Budapest, I went back and read parts of Egress. In two weeks’ time, the book will be five years old. It is always strange to read yourself back in such a formal way, and this blog has often (perhaps too often) been a space where I’ve reflected back on my more formal printed output. It has been necessary for me though, precisely because the experience is usually quite torturous. I have long felt uncomfortable about what Egress ended up being, having internalised some of its more uncharitable critiques.

Many people loved it nonetheless – particularly a Spanish readership, whom I adore. It’s always nice to hear from those people who particularly enjoyed it, but I accept that it was not the book many other people were expecting. I think I have since returned to it through their eyes and been more acutely aware of its flaws. It was a not-very-Fisherian book about Mark Fisher, that’s for sure. But I also didn’t want it to be a kind of cloying imitation. I wanted it to be an experimental project that, on the one hand, recounted personal experiences in a quite linear and diaristic way, but which also scrambled that linearity with tangents into other spaces and temporalities. I wanted it to feel like a journey through so many portals, reading my own experiences back through the egresses of other texts that I was reading at the time.

These were not texts that anyone associated with Mark Fisher himself – my reading of Bataille especially, who Fisher was not a fan of (and whom he also read inadequately) – but they are texts that were nonetheless put before me in the context of Mark’s Postcapitalist Desire course and Kodwo Eshun’s Geopoetics seminar. Given the interrupted nature of Mark’s final lectures, the book perhaps bears the mark of Kodwo’s teaching more explicitly than Mark’s in this regard. This is what is jarring about it, perhaps, and unexpected for those coming to it from outside of that immediate context.

Suffice it to say, the pendulum of self-reflection has swung back towards a generosity towards my younger and less experienced self, and whatever comes next from me, I would like write something that re-affirms this more experimental approach. This desire has, however, been complicating the process of writing my PhD. I have been attempting something quite ambitious, perhaps too ambitious, and the last two years have certainly constituted an unorthodox approach to a PhD thesis. But I am having to remind myself (through a persistent disgruntlement) that a PhD is not a book; it serves a quite particular institutional purpose, which is the acquisition of a kind of ‘researcher’s license’, like a driving life, to borrow an analogy I once heard from Pete Wolfendale (and similarly argued by Lacan in one of his seminars). As the end of the PhD looms on the horizon, I am making peace with the fact that I don’t want to make life any more difficult for myself than it need to be. I can write something more straight-forward and academic, but this can be the basis for something far more daring once I’m out the other side.

What comes next for me is, then, on my mind a lot at the moment. Will I stay in Newcastle? Will I try and get a teaching job, despite how awful a place academia is to be at present? One thing I am sure of: I don’t want to teach philosophy.

Even though I am now pursuing a PhD in Philosophy – something that has offered me some (institutional) teaching experience, as I lead undergraduate seminars every now and then, as well as over three years of research funding that has allowed me to get my life back on track after a (very public) mental breakdown in 2022 – after delivering my talk in Cardiff in October 2024, I had some time to kill before my train home, and decided to sit in on some third-year ‘crits’, looking at the work being produced by final-year students ahead of their degree show. I’m glad I did. It was an experience of university pedagogy so different to what I’ve gotten used to over the last ten years or so, during which time I’ve sporadically been a ‘postgraduate’ student, and it made me miss the excitement and free-flowing ideas of arts education specifically. I want to get back there, and I want to return to an approach to writing that is more creative and fulfilling than the stringent formality (and, if I’m honest, unimaginativeness) of contemporary academic philosophy.

A considerable influence on this change of heart or path has been another central experience of the last six months or so: I fell in love. Without a blog to witter away on, I have found someone to witter away with. It is, for the time being, a long-distance relationship, but this unfortunate circumstance has given rise to a truly writerly romance, which blossomed at the end of summer 2024, as I found myself wooed by someone with the confidence to write me poetry as I drudged away behind the bar at the Cumberland Arms in Newcastle’s Ouseburn valley.

Blogposts for an anonymous mass have been replaced, momentarily, by love letters for a particular individual. It has punctured the lingering claustrophobia of a postgraduate khâgne with a wholly new and distinctly other adventure in writing. We write for each other and we write together. I have never felt so inspired and so free to write so affectively and affectionately. Indeed, straddling a peculiar contradiction, as I write my PhD on the politics of family abolition and its implications for adoptees and the orphans of post-structuralism, I have found myself immersed in a new poetics of relation, an orphan (un)consciousness that has been coupled with a new opportunity to unorphan myself. It is terrifying and exciting and I have never felt more excited about what the future may hold.

Anyway, it’s nice to see you again. My thanks to Gray Leonard for helping me migrate my old site to a new host and for giving me a new platform for a new era. There’s still some tinkering to be done with the backend (ooo-err), so apologies for any ghosts in the machine. As ephemeral as blogs can seem, this place is truly a life-work to me. It is the most significant thing I have to hold onto, an online archive of stray thoughts and missives that can nonetheless be framed as the source of all else I’ve produced. Everything starts from here. Everything starts from now. Without it, I have felt without a limb. It’s good to be back.