If any defiant expression of queer joy were needed over Easter, in light of a recent TERF-led UK Supreme Court case, it was found in the wonderfully surreal appearance of Mykki Blanco at Newcastle’s Old Coal Yard last Saturday. It was a beautiful night.
Over the last few days, like so many trans people, I have been trying to process my feelings about the UK Supreme Court’s strange and contradictory ruling on an interpretation of the Equality Act in Scottish parliamentary proceedings. Despite the fact that, yes, this case is that niche, it has been taken as an important precedent and a first step towards laying to rest one of the British press’s favourite ‘gotcha’ interview questions: “what is a woman?” Unfortunately, the precedent set is not one in the favour of trans people.
The answer given by the presiding judge is what defines a woman is “biology”. But unfortunately for everyone celebrating this decree, they still fail to demonstrate an understanding of biology that aligns itself with science — that is, which isn’t simply a cherry-picking essentialism of hidden characteristics like chromosomes or genital appearance. “Biology” is here, then, only an overzealous and normative claim over what is “natural”, but far from this getting at some reliable version of the truth, as we all should know — cue Zizek voice — most claims of naturality only indicate our full immersion in the realm of ideology.
What makes the Supreme Court ruling contradictory in this regard is that, in asserting a “biological” basis for the category of woman, the judge has nonetheless cowed to a selective understanding of the biological. Because, despite what TERFs claim, you can change your biology… In fact, for many people, that’s sort of the whole point of being trans… As one Twitter user succinctly put it:
it is because sex is biologically real that sex can be changed btw. the things that make up sex are meaningfully real and that is why when those things are changed, sex then changes. loads of things are real and also mutable, obviously
— michael wave (@michael__wave) April 17, 2025
TERF ideology shades into a kind of (capitalist) realism here: when it comes to the supposedly divine rights of gender, there is no alternative. The indefatigable problem that remains, of course, is that there are alternatives that the law cannot eclipse.
It never ceases to amaze me how the UK’s institutional transphobia wrests on a wilful ignorance about endocrinology and its development. Instead, the ability to change (or even “maintain”) one’s sex, via biotechnologies that have been available for almost a century, is being increasingly gatekept by cis regimes of normativity through purely extractive and vindictive means.
What we are living through are the consequences of a primitive accumulation of sexual technology. From puberty blockers to testosterone-suppressing treatments for prostate cancer, from the contraceptive pill to hormone replacement therapy to alleviate the symptoms of menopause — these are all medical treatments offered readily to cis people, which would likely not exist were it not for biomedical science’s interest in developing forms of care for trans people.
The truth never acknowledged by aging TERFs, then, who have likely benefitted from these treatments themselves, is that the science of changing sex predates a lot of the treatments now offered to maintain their own sexual identities.
This history will be familiar to many already: the first sex change operation took place in Germany in 1930 or 1931, after which much of the research into trans healthcare was lost due to Nazi book-burnings. Was this event a factor — one amongst many others, no doubt — that led to the thirty-year delay before the emergence of the contraceptive pill (which uses synthetic forms of estrogen and progesterone to prevent pregnancy) in the 1960s?
We can also note how hormone replacement therapies for cis and trans people were introduced and medically sanctioned in tandem during in the 1990s and 2000s, with research into their long-term effects still ongoing. But even prior to HRT’s medical normalisation for cis people, there are of course many recorded instances of trans women using HRT that precede this. Trans people have always existed — that much is true, and that truth is often repeated — but what is left out of this acknowledgement is the additional fact that trans people have long been the endocrinological guinea pigs for treatments that many cis people now take for granted.
Of course, no one would dream of denying cis people access to the sorts of care that help remedy the things we judge to be cruel acts of “nature” — although many TERF allies, like anti-abortion campaigners and the far right more generally, would like to do this as well. But the same principle is not extended to trans people’s access to medications or their general exercise of bodily autonomy. This is on the basis of such care being “unnatural”, despite the fact that advances in trans care have only further highlighted the mutability of cis bodies as well.
It baffles me that the irony of this is not more readily apparent at the moment, but it is the sort of paradox that will soon come to bear on trans and cis healthcare in the years ahead. No one is “natural”; everyone is valid. But still we defer to “biology” without considering the mutability explored by this domain of science in itself.
The most harrowing thing about this ruling has been watching its psychological impact on trans people up and down the country. But it must be said that, on its own, the ruling counts for very little. Yes, it has sent the tabloids into a frenzy as they hypothesise gleefully about how power might further malign a social minority, but we must always remember that these attempts to clamp down on trans life are quintessentially reactionary; they have arisen in response to growing awareness and acceptance of trans people amongst the general public at large, following the so-called “transgender tipping point” of the early 2010s, when Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time.
Still, trans friends everywhere are afraid of what will happen next. Those who are some way into their transitions fear losing ground and access to medications, and I imagine there are those yet to come out to anyone who may now think they are better off continuing to suffer in silence. But I would like to offer some sort of interjection here, if not to the dolls then to the eggs. It is Easter Sunday after all.
When friends have asked how I am personally feeling in light of the Supreme Court ruling, my honest answer has been one of defiance. Perhaps I am also in denial. But this ruling has not frightened me in the same way it has others, because I do not feel like I am due to lose anything in light of this judgement. On the one hand, this could be framed as some sort of privilege; on the other, it could be framed as not having gained certain privileges that I might later lose. To explain why, perhaps it is worth me providing on update on my journey so far.
I came out relatively late in life; three years ago, at the age of 30. Having written an achingly egg-laden post on this blog in 2021, at what was (in hindsight) the tail end of a long-term relationship that I’d been hiding behind for a decade, I moved to Newcastle and changed my pronouns in mid-2022. In late 2023 — having recovered from a severe mental breakdown that followed the relinquishment of all of life’s habits and comforts, and which was triggered more acutely by the end of a brief flirtation, on the grounds of my not “being a woman” (which I’d last experienced the pain of in my late teens) — I took my time building up my strength and resolve and finally decided to start taking hormones. I began buying estrogel online via a Bulgarian pharmaceutical company in October 2023 and immediately felt a sense of relief, but it was only in late 2024 that I feel I got my dosage right, finally feeling the more pronounced effects of HRT when I added a testosterone blocker to my daily regime of medications last September.
The cost of these medications is roughly £120 a month. This is a disconcerting expense to feel committed to for the rest of my life — along with an anxiety regarding the various unforeseeable contingencies that may disrupt this — and it later led me, at the encouragement of my friends, I filled out a self-referral form for “gender-affirming care”, which I sent on to a private clinic. I also wrote a letter to my GP, informing them of what I was doing, and asking if they were prepared to assist in fulfilling any scripts offered if and when I had completed the self-referral process. (They agreed.)
Unfortunately, my timing was off. A lack of faith in the incumbent Labour Party, who had just won the 2024 UK general election — particularly the restrictions may assumed would be implemented by health secretary Wes Streeting, starting with the ban on prescribing puberty blockers to “gender-confused” adolescents — meant that my self-referral application was denied. To save myself the grief of digging the original email out of my inbox, I will paraphrase: the private gender-care clinic implied that they were only going to take on new patients that they were confident would more easily pass through the various hoops necessary to change one’s “gender”. Having perhaps been too honest about identifying as “non-binary”, this did not include me. I was deeply disappointed, but soon shook off my deflation as I continued to explore DIY treatment on my own terms.
In hindsight, this feels like a blessing in disguise. Many of my friends have successfully acquired treatment through the NHS and private health care (in collaboration), even recently. They have progressed along an “officially” sanctioned path of gender recognition, in feeling assured that they want a “binary” sex change, and so have begun hormones on the NHS and have also sought to change identification documents, etc. These are all expensive processes, of course, but here in Newcastle at least, we have established a network of community support that has reduced this financial burden considerably. Having spent the summer of 2023 raising funds for a friend’s top surgery, and being wildly successful in doing so, we have since extended this support to other queers in our community (via a platform we call the Big Gay Fund). Although our capacity is limited and voluntary, to date we have raised thousands of pounds for local trans people who have gone on to receive the care they desire through official channels. However, having acquired this access, these friends now fear they have much to lose.
It is a travesty that this now feels like a possibility, and I stand in furious solidarity with them. But speaking personally, and grasping for the faintest of silver linings, I retain a defiant stance. Speaking personally, I feel I don’t have anything to lose — for better or worse.
One of the virtues of DIY HRT — although at the mercy of supply chains and having a sustainable income, etc. — is that there is no institutional oversight with regards to what I choose to do to my own body. The only people in any position to deny me access to the medications I take daily are those inspecting my mail at the UK’s borders. So far — and here I am touching everything made of wood in my immediate vicinity — I have experienced no hiccups. So long as I can continue to afford the monthly cost, I feel confident that nothing else stands in my way. Again, this may be naive, even a symptom of denial, and I must of course acknowledge the financial privilege of this position — although I am honestly so overworked at the moment — but my feeling is that a lack of official recognition is not rock bottom. We each have our own sets of chains, we are each at the mercy of certain contingencies, but the government has not yet closed off all routes available to us, and though they may try to deny trans people access to care, I do not think they can realistically close off all of the avenues that are available.
This will no doubt bring little solace to the dolls — for which I’m sorry, as truly no one should fear losing anything they are entitled to — so I suppose I am speaking more to the eggs who are afraid of continuing down any one of the paths that lay open to them. In short, my message to the eggs is simple: healthcare professionals have seldom been loyal friends to trans people. It is despicable that the more “official” pathways may soon be closed, but there are alternatives, for all of us, and there are many people who can help you to access them. There remain considerable barriers — mostly financial — whichever route you take, but there is arguably more support available for those who take the DIY route than there are for those who proceed otherwise. It can be so intimidating and difficult to ask for this support, but perhaps it takes less courage to ask your community for help than it does to ask bureaucrats. It is essential that we remember this going forward. Where there is a will, there is always a way.
I am reminded here of a conversation had on Twitter a few months ago, which I ultimately found irritating — and my position here may well irritate others in turn. But when I was feeling the disappointment of failing to step onto a more official pathway towards accessing gender care, I registered my feelings online and was rebuked for apparently denying the wealth of trans knowledge available online. At that time, I was stressed about the burden of keeping up my monthly payments. The process of self-referral involves far steeper initial payments, of course, which I nonetheless felt I could raise via my community if I asked, and so this felt like less of an obstacle than the ongoing monthly payments I continue to make solely out of my own pocket.
It was a cynical rebuttal, to my mind, as I was certainly not denying the virtues of DIY HRT and the wealth of advice available online — that was precisely what I had been utilising for two years at that point — but I still hoped that an official pathway was more stable. On this point alone, I concede, I may have been wrong — but I see no advantage to denying fellow trans people any hope they might be clinging to. I want to avoid doing this as well. For the eggs, do not give up; for the dolls and kings, all hope is not lost.
Having one’s official documentation reflect one’s lived experiences is hugely important here, and must not be maligned. It is not simply access to hormones that matters, and not all trans people choose to undergo this kind of medical transition. But for those that do, being legally recognised in one’s gender is an integral next step. Social recognition is one thing; legal recognition is another. In fact, it is the disparity between the two that opens trans people up to all kinds of violence.
On a most fundamental level, it is painful to have to default to a gender assigned a birth that may no longer reflect the changes to sexual characteristics that someone has undergone. I want to reiterate the point above here that these changes are real. When interacting with people in my daily life, they continue to default to masculine pronouns. I can hardly begrudge them of this, as I continue to embrace the fact that I have a beard. But my facial hair has thinned out considerably over the last year, just as the hair on the rest of my head has grown far more feminine. The shape of my face has changed. I have breasts and now regularly wear a bra. At the risk of giving you too much information, I have developed the distinct shadow of a vulva along my testicles. My body, my sexual characteristics, have changed and are continuing to. It is changed my relationship to sex, it has changed my mood. It is changed almost everything about me, even if only in a small way.
Many of these changes nonetheless remain invisible to many, although not entirely. This often makes engaging with social bureaucracy a humiliating experience — personally, I have felt this most acutely when travelling internationally, feeling under far more scrutiny when a discrepancy is intuited between my official information and how I now appear. It is hard to articulate what this feels like. The term “micro-aggression” is useful in this instance; it is painful to feel under suspicion when a bureaucrat identifies a hint of social difference, whether on the basis of race, sexuality or gender identity. It painfully highlights one’s elusion of certain apparatuses of capture, and lays out our social hierarchy in painful ways. It makes you feel “wrong” for simply being who you are.
This is where the Supreme Court’s ruling may soon to bear on trans lives. But again, despite what has been reported — that the ruling constitutes a cut-and-dry decision that defines “women” on the basis of “biology” forevermore (whatever that even means) — it is a judgement riven with contradictions and betrays a total incoherency that brings various forms of legislation, each supposedly still upheld, into direct conflict with one another. It is, then, a contradictory ruling that further splays the disparities between legality and sociality that are so painfully felt by trans people in the course of their everyday lives.
I would like to defer to Ed Burrell here, who read the entire court judgement and posted reflections on Instagram that I found clarifying. For starters, Ed notes how, rather than being a sweeping judgement on categorisations of sex as such, “it’s all in reference to one specific Scottish representation law and whether trans women can be considered as part of [a] 50% woman/man split in representation quota[s] in senior positions of public life”. Ed continues:
The argument ultimately is that the Equality Act protecting women from discrimination shouldn’t protect trans women from discrimination on the basis of being a woman because it makes the application of equality law contradictory and incoherent.
Yet the whole argument is based on biological vs. certified sex, acknowledging biological transition but then essentially disregarding that as certified (e.g. GRC [gender recognition certificates]). The document sets out that it is not the court’s position to define sex, yet [it] bases its argument on completely incoherent ideas about biology and sex.
The irony missed by the presiding judge — who has priors for legislating against queer people on the basis of his religious beliefs — is that the whole case is about “the coherency of law based on ‘biological’ versus ‘certified’ gender”, whilst not even the distinction between “biological” and “certified” sex is coherent in itself. “No wonder trying to interpret a law with [these categories] makes no sense.” It’s an incoherent argument arguing for coherency?! Ed adds:
Look any further into what constitutes sex biologically and how that interacts in social and legal spheres, the definitions they adopt become so arbitrary and random.
It feels like they’re running around trying to plug holes in a crumbling ideology of sex. They can’t define it because it doesn’t make any sense and so they’re trying to rule on it and they can’t because the whole stupid ass thing doesn’t work.
Ed concluded his Instagram stories on the ruling as follows:
It finishes by saying that this ruling should have no adverse [effects] on trans people because they are still protected against discrimination for being trans under the Equality Act. But girl U literally just ruled that in some situations trans women should not be considered women and that they CAN be discriminated against on the basis of being a woman. Not only is [there] a glaring possibility of opening [trans women] up to … discrimination on the basis of being a woman, it also OBVIOUSLY (and especially because of press [coverage]) sets a precedent for other cases to further restrict the situations in which trans people can be considered their gender.
It is a ruling on one specific tiny Scottish rule, but the precedent is what the transphobes are celebrating[:] the GRC not being applicable in all cases like the law that established it said it should be.
This is what the ruling can be boiled down to: labelling. But how we are labelled legally is not the be all and end all. It is important, and it should not be something taken away from anyone. But just as the law threatens to turn its back on us, yesterday’s march in central London showed that thousands of people — and I do feel that it is a majority — and turning to stand with us.
It is despicable that any of the gains made by the trans community might be reversed, but just as we do not rely solely on what is legally sanctioned in other areas of political life, nor should we feel that the standpoint of the law is the ultimate measure of trans life. Our communities stand with us, and it with them that we have long had our strength. The Supreme Court ruling is nothing more than a small victory for the small-minded. We have so much more to win than they.
It’s become fashionable, over the last decade or two, for cultural observers to bemoan the lack of innovation in contemporary music. Heavily influenced by the writings of the late Mark Fisher, arguably the most influential cultural theorist of the 21st century, the notion that popular music’s innovative qualities are in a terminal slow down courtesy of neoliberalism’s culture-quashing hand has become a bit of a modern intellectual trope. One glance at major recent releases such as Playboi Carti’s post-language noise rap or FKA Twigs’ avant-pop artistry is enough to refute the notion that popular music has lost its ability to sound like today and/or tomorrow.
However, Fisher’s ‘slow cancellation of the future’ thesis holds more water when you assess the state of contemporary rock music.
Already I knew this article was gonna wind me up… Because Mark Fisher was also talking about contemporary rock music! But this leap is so common, it’s not even the first time this month I’ve written about this tendency to take Fisher’s critique of the Arctic Monkeys and blow it up wholesale, thereby conflating his hatred of the present with a sort of Adornoian hatred of all pop music, which is simply baffling.
But it’s Fisher’s misery that still grabs people’s attentions even now, perhaps because it resonates with a unreflexively pessimistic outlook that is already deep-rooted in us. The thing that most people who cite Fisher thus fail to separate is their pessimism from his negativity.
In a post from 2010 — oft-quoted here over the years — Fisher addresses this disparity as follows:
There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life — it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively — the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain — the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects — is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
Whether he was successful at this is another matter, but it’s ironic that the uncritical trotting out of Fisher-the-scapegoat has itself become indicative of an unreflective pessimism, demonstrating how susceptible today’s music journos are to getting stuck in the past, and so blatantly in the articles that insist on the contrary. (“I’m gonna show you the future; here’s some bands that sound like remastered mid-20th century prog rock to stick it to a man who was talking about a very specific moment ten-to-twenty years ago…”) In fact, I reckon if more of them actually had a read and a think about all of this, and didn’t just regurgitate second-hand summaries of people’s arguments, they might start writing about “the new” without the perfunctory flogging of a twenty-year-dead horse.
But this is only the beginning. It’s not even the main issue I have with this article. What is most irritating about it, in light of its attempt to counter the claim that contemporary rock is rubbish, is to argue that more attention should be paid to “maximalist indie rock” — just “don’t call it ‘prog'”.
I don’t think prog is a dirty word, personally, although it was once amusingly overused. Back in 2003, it was even a running joke in the blogosphere that just about any band could be “progged”. And I reckon most other bands could be “maximalised” today in the same way — at least when “maximalism”, as seems to be the case here, is reduced to “anything that’s not just guitar, bass, drums, vocals”. Or what’s less, “maximalism” is not when my senses are overloaded, as would be more appropriate — and there’s plenty of interesting examples of that right now — but a pleasant sort of fullness, a “Wall of Sound” vibe, which is again just a throwback to Phil Specter in the 1960s.
There’s nothing wrong with throwing it back, of course. Nor do we live in times when prog is hated quite so vehemently as it once was. I’m partial to Yes, personally, and have been since my teens, when Close to the Edge first entered my rotation and never really left. But the existence of King Crimson in particular — becoming a darling institution in later life, thanks to their persistent adventurousness and their ability to buck the trend of petulant in-fighting that characterised the downfalls of most of their peers — seems to have made up for prog’s various crimes against music for many people (so long as no one mentions Genesis).
People like prog then, whatever that word means. But that only highlights how what’s at issue isn’t necessarily the music itself (although it can be awful). In the UK especially, an animosity towards prog is only a deflected conversation about class. To this day, prog is weighed down by its association with private-school kids. Indeed, what is “boundary-breaking” is often just posh kids flexing their classical training with non-classical instruments. It’s what led Radiohead, who met at the Abingdon private school in Oxford, to rightly get tarred with the “prog” brush on OK Computer, I’d argue, and it’s what continues to haunt all kinds of bands today who are from all the same places (and this really is a new influx of Oxbridge natives).
It is class that keeps many other bands, who were a kind of prog, from getting lumped with the label. Throbbing Gristle’s “industrial music” was a conscious attempt at prole art in the 1970s. To call them prog is surely ridiculous — but they did get their start opening for Hawkwind. This is the faint line that has run through British music culture for 75 years. Prog is posh. That’s often the only thing that separates one experimentalism or maximalism from another.
Morgan misses this. Class doesn’t get a single look-in in his article, although it oozes out of the subtext like water under foot in a bog. Take the essay’s discussion of Black Country, New Road. They are a band that I have personally never found at all interesting; only painfully derivative. Early single “Sunglasses”, for instance, has the sparseness of Slint with the emotive brass overtones of American Football, and a spoken-word bark that is such a cliched post-punk staple at this point, I can’t listen to anyone who tries to make a go of it.
It’s a postmodern amalgamation of well-trodden tropes that don’t actually have any grit to them, nor any sense of contemporaneity beyond their streamlining of bands that have become darlings for Internet natives. In fact, their early sound is simply an adherence to the accepted standards of your average forum-dwelling hipster (and I say that as someone who was one). But what’s worse is that BCNR have only regressed further in 2025. Due to some lineup changes, they’ve moved on from aping 90s/00s post-hardcore to a new album that lets rip what every keen listener had always heard lurking underneath: a defrosted Canterbury-scene posho whimsy, which first accosted the British isles in the mid-60s.
It is abysmal, and to select this band as a pillar of modernity could not be more inapposite. Truly, no one should be abusing a semi-colon like this to write about a band this bland:
The Cambridge-based sextet’s compositional palette; ornate, orchestral instrumentation, a prog-minded approach to grand, unorthodox and maximalist arrangements as well as lyrics that oscillate between deeply sincere and archly playful, has struck a chord with not just online music fans … but also an emerging crop of ambitious and diverse young musicians.
What stands out to me is the vague tone of a glowing school report here. BCNR play well with others. It’s how people write about that other “star pupil” of the contemporary pop landscape, Jacob Collier, who is just as at home in this “maximalist indie rock” lineage, what with him being an incredibly talented musician whose studio recordings are often technical marvels without any soul in them whatsoever.
And this was always the main problem with prog: for all its jazz-infused sensibilities, it could be utterly soulless. Classic prog has nothing really to do with modernization or a postmodern bricolage in this sense, but is rather a kind of neoreactionary music that infuses classical music with rock music. It’s not all bad, but it’s never really been a vanguard, especially not in the US or the UK. It tries to align itself with jazz fusion, which can be just as proggy, but by travelling in the wrong direction. Prog always encapsulated the dizziness of looking over your shoulder from the present — confusion as an epitaph, to paraphrase King Crimson — whereas jazz encapsulates the dizziness of being whipped around toward the future. Jazz is often sexy too for this reason — because it desires. Prog rarely does, however, even if we can more generously acknowledge its other virtues.
Mark Fisher would have never, of course. When he poured scorn on hippies, it was similarly for their aversion to sensuality, and prog was embarrassing for the same reason.
Punk followed prog for good reason then — and one of my favourite anecdotes, never verified, is that it was a televised performance by Queen that lit the fuse on that moment (a story that made me feel vindicated about a long-term hatred for that band).
Post-punk emerges later as a kind of disjunctive synthesis of punk’s passionate but unsustainable fury with prog’s open ear and studiousness. But this is kids from polytechnics opening themselves up to all that culture has to offer, producing a “pop modernism” that Fisher adored. Prog and post-punk becomes synonymous only when the class distinctions are erased, and this makes it all the more telling that the two genres are continually blurred together today.
Fisher, as usual, gets to the heart of the distinction on his blog when he writes:
The Fall’s pulp modernism has become an entire political-aesthetic program. At one level, Grotesque can be positioned as the barbed Prole Art retort to the lyric antique Englishness of public school Prog. Compare, for instance, the cover of ‘City Hobgoblins’ (one of the singles that came out around the time of Grotesque) with something like Genesis’ Nursery Cryme. Nursery Cryme presents a gently corrupted English surrealist idyll. On the ‘City Hobgoblins’ cover, an urban scene has been invaded by ’emigres from old green glades’: a leering, malevolent cobold looms over a dilapidated tenement. But rather than being smoothly integrated into the photographed scene, the crudely rendered hobgoblin has been etched, Nigel Cooke-style, onto the background. This is a war of worlds, an ontological struggle, a struggle over the means of representation.
Grotesque‘s ‘English Scheme’ was a thumbnail sketch of the territory over which the war was being fought. Smith would observe later that it was ‘English Scheme’ which ‘prompted me to look further into England’s “class” system. INDEED, one of the few advantages of being in an impoverished sub-art group in England is that you get to see (If eyes are peeled) all the different strata of society – for free.’ The enemies are the old Right, the custodians of a National Heritage image of England (‘poky quaint streets in Cambridge’) but also, crucially, the middle class Left, the Chabertistas of the time, who ‘condescend to black men’ and ‘talk of Chile while driving through Haslingdon’. In fact, enemies were everywhere. Lumpen punk was in many ways more of a problem than prog, since its reductive literalism and perfunctory politics (‘circles with A in the middle’) colluded with Social Realism in censuring/ censoring the visionary and the ambitious.
What are we to make of a post-punk palette that shades into prog today, then? It’s unfortunately true that a saccharine music press won’t help us. Indeed, not for the first time recently, the sexlessness of public-school prog sensibilities have come to afflict the writing about it too.
For starters, I am always bored by the vague equivalence drawn between some things all bands do and a sense of contemporaneity: bands having happy and sad songs, addressing more than one social issue on an album, maybe even using musical techniques like counterpoint and dissonance, and isn’t that just like how you see lots of different things on social media… Hail! the sound of now!… I mean, fucking hell, the Arctic Monkeys actually start to look like revolutionaries compare to this lot, and half their lyrics are about pouring public-school-levels of cynicism on the wayward proles of left-behind Yorkshire towns.
But it is how this music is described that always tells you which “now” is being represented. Recall, for example, how the paragraph from Morgan’s article above, following a jab at Mark Fisher’s critiques of “neoliberalism’s culture-quashing hand”, later makes use of mealy-mouthed Starmer-worthy epithets like “ambitious” and “diverse” to show how far we’ve supposedly come from the era of “indie sleaze”. But these are the sorts of cultural descriptor that hook MPs into the zeitgeist. This is Keir Starmer clocking in to watch Adolescence for the “proggy” gimmick of being filmed all in one take, whilst displaying no understanding of the substance of the show. Technical marvel always trumps emotional register for people like this. It’s what makes them fawn over Big Tech whilst never really figuring out how to get themselves comfortably elected.
This wishy-washy liberal tone continues later in Morgan’s article when the discussion of complex orchestral arrangements slides into a discussion of gender representation in the music press more generally. But this is identity politics at its absolute worst, and “progressive” in just the same backwards way as prog music itself. Indeed, more diversity of representation along gendered lines overlooks the more glaring fact about contemporary British culture, which is that access to the arts is predominantly (even increasingly) the preserve of the upper classes.
This has long been apparent to anyone paying attention. It has arguably made Starmer’s New New Labour rerun all the more predictable as well. How many indie bands with cringe names and no politics have we had paraded in front of us over the last ten years or so? (This nightmarish profile of the band Sports Team from the Guardian in 2019 always comes to mind for me.) Never forget how Corbyn — no matter how opportunistically — sought to align himself with grime. He was interested in UK culture that wasn’t the preserve of pomo public school kids learning sonic rebellion by rote. It probably didn’t help him.
Mark Fisher, of course, has a storming critique of this tendency — even if he goes so far that I can’t fully get on board with it myself. In fact, Fisher hated prog so much that he hated anything that even tried to lampoon it.
A controversy that never really broke through to the rest of the music press, unlike Fisher’s hauntological writings, was his distain for Sonic Youth — and particularly Daydream Nation, the structure of which is clearly inspired by the sprawling prog overtures of Emerson Lake Palmer, et al. — who he saw as little more than representatives of “avant-conservatism.”
I love Daydream Nation, for what it’s worth. I think it is rightly lauded as their best record. But for Fisher, it’s precisely the contradiction of being universally admired renegades that he finds so stupid. When he is psychologised by a fellow blogger, hoping to explain his “oddly intense emnity” [sic] towards the band, Fisher comes back guns blazing:
If a group were genuinely challenging and experimental, “oddly intense emnity” would surely be expected from some quarters. But the point is that no-one, even their own supporters, really expects SY to provoke any sort of strong affect at all, just elicit a bland admiration. They’re on our side, they’re good sorts. And the fact is, it is indeed difficult to summon up any affect for them. The emnity is a second-order response to my first order action, which is one of boredom. (A boredom that I strongly suspect is shared by even their most ardent fan — could such a fan sincerely claim that the thought do we really need another Sonic Youth record? has never come to mind?) This renormalisation of boredom, this re-establishment of consensus around ‘accepted standards’, is precisely what is so pernicious about Sonic Youth now. They represent the embourgeoisiement of the rock avant-garde, its disconnection from overreaching, intemperance, intolerance and antagonism.
No matter how much I like Sonic Youth, I can’t disagree with this final line from Fisher. It’s something that jangles the nerves, an embourgeoisiement that stalks even the most shocking of former sonic styles (like Goldie performing his albums live with an orchestra for the BBC), but it is all the more glaring when the claim is made that our contemporary vanguard are made up of a musical bourgeoisie of Oxbridge prog rockers who’ve simply updated their palettes to Y2K sonics and thus tamed the intemperance of decades past.
Fisher continues:
Kim Gordon in New Statesman last week: “Are Sonic Youth political? Well, they are, in that they offer an alternative to mainstream music.” Well, they may not have hit singles (but neither did the prog dinosaurs of the 70s); but here they are on Later With Jools Holland; here they are doing compilations for Starbucks; here they are, the darlings of the broadsheet press, their pastiche-of-themselves records not exactly guaranteed a good review, but always automatically accorded event status. In what way is the so called mainstream perturbed by any of this? In what way, in the decentred era of web 2.0, is this not the mainstream? Their avant credentials rest on a few hoary old formal innovations – just as the prog rockers’ did in the early 70s. SY have disconnected experimentalism from social and existential maladjustment, just as prog rock did. But while punk annihilated prog after a mere half a decade of flatulent complacency, Sonic Youth are still lauded as countercultural heroes even though they have been making variations on the same record for over twenty years now.
SY’s precise function for Restoration culture is to be a hypervisible simulation of an alternative within the mainstream. That is why [2007 film] Juno provides such a depressingly accurate picture of certain impasses in US alt.rock culture: a supposedly smart alt.teen (not so smart that she avoids getting pregnant, though) as poster girl for reproductive futurism, giving up her child to baby-crazed professional, whose husband – a failed rocker now miserably writing advertising jingles — turns her onto Sonic Youth. The fact that Juno — who is into Patti Smith and The Stooges — has mysteriously not heard of Sonic Youth is the key to their fantasy positioning. When she falls out with the husband, Juno says that she “bought another Sonic Youth CD and it’s just noise” — at this point, everyone’s happy: SY are namechecked in an indie-mainstream commodity, but posited as something that is ultimately too extreme. There is no more stultifying mode of cultural conservatism than this avant-conservatism.
[…]
What’s at stake here is the very difference between pulp modernism and postmodernism. The Birthday Party, The Pop Group, The Fall up to 1983, were all impelled by the conviction that the only way in which rock could continue to justify its existence was by perpetually reinventing itself; they were death-driven forward by a nihilative motor which wouldn’t allow them to resemble anything pre-existing, even themselves: never settle, never repeat yourself, never give the audience what they want, were the unwritten maxims inducing them into further convulsions. It’s easy to forget now, after Smith and Cave’s Sunday supplement canonisation, how divisive this music was, how it engendered revulsion and denunciation as much as adoration, how it shattered any sensus communis. And then there is the Vision thing: listening to The Fall, The Birthday Party and The Pop Group, you tuned into a unique way of seeing the world — whereas SY offer only a bleary, weary confection of familiar alt.rock postures and signifiers. Importantly, also: The Fall, The Pop Group and The Birthday Party kept the Sixties behind them. … Punk and postpunk’s significance was to have overcome the Sixties, to have fingered the Sixties as the problem, whereas SY, with their even handedness and informed good taste, re-established a continuum between punk and the Sixties, mending the bridges that punk had incinerated.
Though we might argue to this day about the veracity of Fisher’s reading of Sonic Youth’s influence and status as a counter-cultural entity, so much of this is far more applicable to the “indie-prog” posh rock of now.
Mark Fisher may have not always done a great job of shining a light on what excited him about the future, but he did not mince words when it came to what terrified him about it. It wasn’t “the new” he was afraid of, nor did he fail to sense it when it arrived in front of him, but a pallid sense of “newness” that was little more than appropriation of dissent from a particular class of people. What’s telling about his example from Juno too is the structural positioning of dissenting culture that is otherwise palatable. It’s the classic hipster dad animosity of asking people whether they can even name three Ramones songs when seeing someone in a t-shirt, having not yet come to terms with that fact that they have been so reduced to a kind of commodified and palatable protest that the music doesn’t even matter.
It’s a good job he’s not around to see it; the embourgeoisiement of British rock has accelerated far ahead of anywhere he would have expected…
Hi. This is my 2000th post. I decided to make a mix for it…
It began as an attempt to construct something cohesive out of all the dariacored plunderphonic jersey club rips shared with me by Byro over the last 7/8 months, but only really came together — for lack of a better word — after I was further rabbit-holed by Kieran Press-Reynolds’ recent Pitchfork column on dariacore, Japanese hyperflip and Lost Frog Productions. (Kieran’s column is guaranteed to be one of the best things you can read about music online at the moment; “Chasing Yabujin” was another highlight.)
It’s not all full-frontal assaultive flips, admittedly. At a certain point, the sheer speed of these edits leads them to collapse under their own accelerating mass, and the sound of that is here too. But overall, the general vibe of this mix is probably one of dancing or pogoing into traffic.
This is where my head has been at for most of the past year. Somewhere between an admittedly overwhelming listening session Byro initiated in my flat for Leroy’s Graverobbing record and our trip to see Porter Robinson at Brixton Academy in February, everything has started to make sense to me. The world has opened out. I am surfing sine waves ushering out from the present and lapping at the shores of the future.
As soon as my bastard PhD is done, I want to throw myself back into writing about the rapid development of this scene in lockdown and its nonstop mutations ever since. But I’m particularly fascinated by this new approach to bricolage as the sound of non-transcendence in 2025, where there is no binary of on/offline but rather a wholly networked way of living amidst semioblitz, revamped to bite back at copyright capital.
It goes hard, and it has rewired my brain.
This is a short text built out of notes furiously scribbled a few hours before the event at Housmans hosted by Adam C. Jones and myself on 12th April 2025. The event was an anti-book launch of Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs. No books were sold, but Fisher’s work was discussed in the context of the boycott against Watkins Media and Watkins’ investments in Israeli AI and tech infrastructure.
Thanks to everyone who attended the event, and I hope many got something out of the disjunctive synthesis that Adam and I often offer audiences when we appear together. It is always a strange pleasure to find so much common ground, as an accelerationist in conversation with someone so skeptical and critical of those discourses. With that in mind, I found myself drifting repeatedly back to a difficult line of thought that I think runs throughout the work of Fisher and his peers — one seldom given the attention it deserves — and that is broadly the focus of what follows: the digitalisation of the black Atlantic and our living-through its consequences.
William Gibson, Count Zero:
— ‘OK’, Bobby said, getting the hang of it, ‘then what’s the matrix? If she’s a deck, and Danbala’s a program, what’s cyberspace?’
‘The world,’ Lucas said.
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs:
But if cyberspace is the world what is the world?
No online, no offline. No ‘touching grass’. Despite what we keep on telling ourselves, there is no transcendence from one domain or the other.
To ‘touch grass’ is already Internet slang for logging off, which has moved from online to off, as frequently heard in meatspace as it is read on social media. It is one of many instances wherein we ignore the inseparability of these two ‘worlds’, even in the act of drawing a hard line between them.
We know this, even if we don’t like to acknowledge it. We know the superficial irony of being able to buy Karl Marx’s Capital and have it be delivered the next day by Amazon. We know the stupid comments made regarding our critiques of society and our participation in society. We know Mark Fisher addresses this repeatedly.
But we are not trapped here, nor did Fisher think so. He was interested not so much in the easily observable fact that capitalism is indifferent to the content of what circulates — all capital cares about this is perpetual circulation. What he was interested in was the fact that not all the things that capital circulates are, by default, ‘owned by’ capitalism. Not all of capitalism’s products belong to it nor act in its own interests. Something things produced by our capitalist system have consequences for the system itself that it cannot foresee or easily contain. Fisher, then, was interested in the interzones of an as-yet undecidability, and maneuvering in this space politically to leverage new forms of freedom or, as he put it, aligning oneself with ‘postcapitalist desires’.
This situation is not only an issue for ideas or for commodities, understood rudimentarily as objects, but also for people — or, more specifically, modes of subjectivity.
The most obvious of these — in terms of the West’s particularly telling moral panics — may well be trans people: those individuals who disregard the gatekept boundaries of century-old biotech to hijack mutating strands of endocrinological knowledge in line with their own agency and desires, contradicting — even exceeding — the insistency of the signifying chain that we know as ‘capitalist realism’.
But what is far more pressing , in the context in which we are appearing here today, is the radical mutations of black and brown bodies and the various modes of subjectivity understood through a racialised lens, which also exist in and are a product of — but also exceed — this same capitalist paradigm.
We can address a disappointing rewriting of history here, in light of the first “official” edition of Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, written whilst he was a student at Warwick University and a member of the para-academic accelerator known as theCybernetic Culture Research Unit.
Ccru is today too often mired in an inapposite and totalizing whiteness. This is no doubt the result of white supremacists seizing upon the work of Nick Land and claiming it as their own — something that too many on the left have allowed them to get away with, as neither side of the political divide makes any attempt to engage with Land’s work or, even if they do, the surrounding context in which it appeared.
Lest we forget that the very first essay collected in Land’s Fanged Noumena damningly argues that Enlightenment thought — and its narrowly patriarchal, white-supremacist, family-chauvinistic understanding of ‘Reason’, which compartmentalises European excellence whilst othering all those who live otherwise — finds its logical conclusion in apartheid South Africa.
Lest we forget the attention Fisher pays in his PhD thesis to the synonymous entanglement — it is not a metaphor — of cybernetics and Haitian voodoo practices in the novels of William Gibson. Fisher is here interested in the proliferation of capitalist and anti-capitalist sorceries alongside each other, as both make use of the same materials, which he would return to years later in the essay ‘Digital Psychedelia’, when writing on the Otolith Group’s Anathema in 2012.
Lest we forget that Otolith Group member Kodwo Eshun shared an office with Fisher at Goldsmiths in the 2010s, and was likewise an affiliate of the Ccru who is often left out of its history, as is Jessica Edwards, a young woman of colour described in Simon Reynolds’ Y2K report on the Ccru as its “latest recruit” and “a researcher … who used to be a professional dancer at raves and recently completed an undergraduate thesis entitled ‘Mapping the Liminal — Pentecostalism, Shamanism and Drum & Bass’.”
Lest we forget how Kode9 recently described the name of his record label Hyperdub — another product of the Ccru —
as a kind of umbrella term to talk about the electronic music of the Black Atlantic that had converged into the 90s musical singularity of jungle. In a counter-parallel to how English had been the lingua franca of the modern world, the lingua franca of electronic dance music is the music of the Black Atlantic.
(Something that is all the more apparent today, as hiphop has become the lingua franca of pop music overall.)
I am increasingly of the opinion that the Ccru cannot remotely be understood without a consideration of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, its wrestling with the cultural consequences of the Middle Passage, transatlantic trafficking and migration, and the innate hybridity of national/cultural notions of race, which delve into the implications of referring to certain cultural currents — like jungle — as “black English” or “black American”. I am increasingly frustrated that very few who continue to write about Ccru today ever make this connection.
I would argue that the discourses of Ccru are a product of this same black-Atlantic hybridity, inseparable from Baudrillardian prophecy as they are from the aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and Fisher’s text from that time, in exploring all of these considerations in the context of our cyber-world, thus raises many pertinent questions that are no less integral now as they were in 1999. In fact, I’d argue further that they are all the more integral, as rather than take on the task of thinking the present in all of its hybridity, of doing the net-work, we simplify reductively ad absurdum. We rarely think — academically, pop-culturally, journalistically — in ways that the Nineties and early Noughties demanded of us, and in this way, we have never truly been (post)modern.
Although not much of Bruno Latour fan, I am thinking explicitly here of his text We Have Never Been Modern, where he calls for a critical thinking of (and through) the network that is not so dissimilar to that demanded by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds in their philosophical approach to popular music criticism:
Our intellectual life is out of kilter. Epistemology, the social sciences, the sciences of texts – all have their privileged vantage point, provided that they remain separate… Offer the established disciplines some fine sociotechnological network, some lovely translations, and the first group will extract our concepts and pull out all the roots that might connect them to society or to rhetoric; the second group will erase the social and political dimensions, and purify our network of any object; the third group, finally, will retain our discourse and rhetoric but purge our work of any undue adherence to reality … In the eyes of our critics the ozone hole above our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the autonomous text, may each be of interest, but only separately. That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law – this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly.
But this is the task we are left with, decades later. Indeed, with this in mind, what are we to make of the contradictory practices of Watkins Media in particular — their publication of authors openly critical of Israeli apartheid whilst investing in Israeli tech infrastructure? Just as significantly, what are we to make of the first genocide in cyberspace? What are we to make of the tandem violent suppression of a people and of information about their experiences? What are we to make of the unstoppable proliferation of pro-Palestinian solidarity on tech platforms that are otherwise complicit in a system that has made apartheid still possible — which is not indicative of our impotent capture, but rather an essential action that Israel cannot overcome? Indeed, what is this if not an example of Mark Fisher’s accelerationist dreaming, which “rejects … the idea that everything produced ‘under’ capitalism fully belongs to capitalism”; which “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.”
In Fisher’s various writings, from 1999 to 2016, this is the problematic that he engages with not so much as a contradictory entrapment, but rather as a starting point for the raising of political consciousness. Cyberspace is the world; the world is cyberspace. In this world, ideas, subjectivities, agencies proliferate that are both a product of and an inconvenience to our capitalist system at large.
The continued existence of the Palestinian people — against all the odds — is one such ‘inconvenient product’.
One topic of conversation that arose following this précis was the manner in which Mark Fisher’s “flatline” intersects this same problematic. In thinking about the flatline as a plane of immanence that is not so much between life and death, but rather constitutes their materialist relation, I thought about Giorgio Agamben’s writing on “bare life”:
The term originates in Agamben’s observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as ‘life’: bios (the form or manner in which life is lived) and zo? (the biological fact of life). His argument is that the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, the word ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension or zo? and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities.
Fisher’s investigation of the flatline shows that the bareness of zo? is promiscuous, making us all the more susceptible to the belief that inanimate objects — or something like AI — is ‘alive’. The blurring of the human and the machinic that so much black Atlantic culture has expressed likewise highlights the implications of “bare life”, albeit from the other side, where one becomes aware of one’s basic subsistence for capital, as quality of life (bios) is diminished and made secondary.
Agamben’s most memorable example of “bare life” is the malnourished Jewish bodies in concentration camps — hollow figures on the brink of starvation who remain alive only on a technicality, which is a consequence of their dehumanisation, but also effectuates further dehumanisation by those they ‘live’ alongside in the camps themselves, as individuals passed the point of saving.
How is this “bare life” further embroiled with Fisher’s flatline in the context of the violent images of genocide that have proliferated on social media for the last eighteen months? How are we to understand the cut made in our consciousness as we become accustomed to the images of the dead and barely alive alongside the proliferation of information that attempts to digitally emphasise the humanity of those suffering? “All recordings are ghosts”, Fisher declared in 2003, and who has not been deeply affected by the recordings of Palestinian life, in all its vibrancy, that only emphasise what has been lost?
It is in the context of Palestine, the amalgamated networks of propaganda and resistance, of Israeli fictions and genocidal facts, that the full weight of Fisher’s Gothic is brought to bear. For all of his engagement with fiction, this reality is not so far from his text. Rather, he engages with the difficulty of thinking theory as fiction (and vice versa), of the hybridity of knowledges required to understand all that appears before us. We need only consider the growing readership of a Palestinian literary culture in which fact and fiction are inseparable, and in which fiction becomes a mode of theorising Palestinian bios that can overcome an Israeli fixation on their zo?.
I am reminded of a talk given by Adania Shibli, author of Minor Detail, late last year in Newcastle, where she noted how the Arabic word for ‘literature’ can also be translated as ‘ethics’. It is a literary culture that, again, may seem at a distance from Fisher’s cyberpunk predilections, but just as cyberspace is the world, so too is the role of the Internet in contemporary Palestinian resistance and solidarity impossible to ignore. The future of Palestine is a flatline construct, and we must not forget this reading when using Fisher’s text for its critiques of contemporary techno-fascism. Because cyberspace is the world, so too is cyberspace the domain in which many radicals first cut their teeth. A techno-fascist infrastructure may own the means of proliferation, but it does not own all that proliferates.
Palestine exists in cyberspace.
Ccru, “Rinse Out”:
Cybernetics is not just about technical machines. Information warfare is not just about cyberspace. Its fundamental element is virtual reality, but an array of practical religions have been surfing it for many millennia. This is perhaps why so much of the ‘new science’ of complexity is ceaselessly converging with the cosmic materialism of Voodoo, Tantrism, Zen and the Chinese martial arts, pointing to non-Western influences on cybernetics, and the emergent lines of a future, beyond the pale. Situated on this continuum, information warfare is stripped down to a war of perceptions, hacking, jamming and stealth tactics in the nervous system, whether it be planetary telecommercial networks or the human organism.
Cybernetics includes resistance to cyberfascism.
Glutton for embarrassment Daniel Tutt has taken to his Substack again to deflect from the current boycott against Watkins Media for suppressing Palestinian solidarity, in order to cynically claim that there is another — apparently just as important — scandal engulfing (whatever is left of) the imprint. It hardly dignifies a response, especially because all of this feels so painfully repetitive, but also because it is an attempt to deter the momentum of something far more important. But since Tutt is once again publicly making dubious and unfounded claims, let’s get into it.
It’s about censorship again — censorship that Tutt claims came from Acid Horizon and myself in some capacity. But in what capacity I don’t know. I talked about this in February — in fact, what follows is nothing new from what I said back then, albeit edging into more and more detail, as Tutt very slowly catches up and announces gotchas and convenient omissions, when most of this has been on record going back four years. FOUR YEARS.
Anyway, back in February, Tutt emailed staff at Repeater to try and force me to delete tweets about him or face reprisals (who’s meant to be the “censor” again?). These reprisals, as it turned out, were simply to publicise Rhyd Wildermuth’s hurt feelings.
Both Rhyd and Tutt’s claims are baseless and basically amount to some authors thinking some other authors are reactionaries — which they are. But he keeps trying to spin our principles into more than that (and, for what feels like the tenth time, fails embarrassingly).
Desperately reaching for some sort of gotcha, Tutt asks: “why would Repeater Books bring on leftist authors that the staff of the press disagreed with so vehemently that they would censor and sabotage their books?” The first part of that question is good, but the claims about censorship and sabotage remain completely unfounded. As usual, Tutt makes lots of paranoid leaps here, when really this is all very simple.
Nevertheless, let’s go over everything again, for the sake of (further) transparency and to once again show what an idiot he’s being.
When Watkins Media bought John Hunt Publishing (the original owner of Zer0 Books) in 2021, many — myself included — were elated. (Here’s a report written for this blog at the time.)
It is with this moment that Tutt begins his latest post, writing how “the individuals who’d later push the boycott letter in March 2025 were at the forefront of a sustained attempt to defame the authors who had written for Zer0 in the 2014-21 period.” But he betrays his ignorance here immediately, as although he suggests that my animosity towards Zer0 2.0 wasn’t shared by its founders — never mind other authors and readers, before any of us wrote a single embittered word — it very much was.
All the founding staff of Zer0 had left the imprint in 2014. Two years later, they set up Repeater. The founders cited irreconcilable differences with JHP in the few public announcements made about their divorce. Repeater founder Alex Niven, for instance, wrote at the time:
In late 2014 all of the editorial staff involved with the original foundation of Zero Books … left to found Repeater books, a means of continuing the Zero project away from the control of a disliked and unsympathetic parent company. In our eyes the current manifestation of Zero has absolutely nothing to do with our original project … The current editors of Zero are of course legally entitled to use the name and back catalogue as they see fit, but we should make crystal clear that they do so without the blessing and against the wishes of the people who actually founded Zero in the first place.
As far as everyone at Repeater was concerned, then, Zer0 was being run by scabs. They didn’t need me to “defame” them; they’d already publicly registered their distain. No one at all seemed to think very highly of them, outside their little network of “anti-woke” shitstirrers.
Zer0 2.0 — as I came to call it in 2021, to distinguish it from its first and third iterations — came into its own shortly after the death of Mark Fisher, as they leaned into their circumstantial ownership of his first two books to claim some sort of authority over the interpretation of his work — a now-familiar line that centres the Vampire Castle and nothing else; something that felt all the more cynical in light of Niven’s statement above.
It was largely in response to this bastardisation of Fisher’s work by the Zer0 scabs that I began the work I’ve become known for over the last 8 years or so, building out Fisher’s arguments in his “Acid Communism” essay and highlighting how a reductive focus on the Vampire Castle essay maligns everything he went on to produce afterwards, particularly his far more open and enthusiastic engagement with feminist politics and philosophy (which I wrote about here).
For this reason, mine was probably the loudest voice to celebrate the buyback of Repeater, but it was nonetheless part of a chorus of celebration heard across left-wing Twitter and the publishing world in general. No one liked them. Shortly thereafter, the imprint set about course-correcting (apparently) by removing the stain of reactionary “anti-woke” leftists who’d spent a few years pissing on Fisher’s legacy.
Adam C Jones and I wrote a lot about this at this time: about how Zer0 2.0’s public allegiances lay with a reactionary current in British politics, emerging out of the Revolutionary Communist Party — a party whose name is a blatant misnomer, similar to the MAGA communists of today; its alumni include Tory baroness Claire Fox and Frank Furedi, one of the founders of Sp!ked Online and the head of a Viktor Orbán-funded thinktank.
The links between the two factions were strong; Ashley Frawley, a prominent associate of Zer0 2.0, was working for Furedi’s thinktank, for example. No one was under any illusion that these people were leftists, no matter how they chose to define themselves.
When Acid Horizon (of which Adam is a member) became more involved with Repeater and Zer0 Books following the buyback, this seemed to be a tacit endorsement of the position we had advanced on our own platforms already. That position was transformed into a mantra that came to dominate discussions had by those of us who’d written about moving on from the buyback in 2021: “No platform to anyone associated with Sp!ked” (or Compact or any other stupid website like it). It’s a sentiment that everyone seemed to be on board with, given what Doug Lain and co. had done to tarnish the work of the original Zer0 team.
Tutt hates this, but I’ve addressed what’s dumb about his position before (in 2023, for instance — I can’t believe he’s still banging on about it). He is the defender of a “post-left” — but nonetheless ostensibly liberal — marketplace of ideas, in which he believes that anyone with some politics and a backbone is a censorious authoritarian. Okay, Daniel…
Nevertheless, Tutt trips over a lot of this history, which he’s tried to summarise second-hand. He goes on to defend his suggestion that there wasn’t a consensus at Repeater at that time, for instance, by highlighting some of the original team’s publishing controversies, which weren’t so different from Zer0 2.0’s own. These are well-known. Mark Fisher had published Gilad Atzmon in 2011, for example — something he openly came to regret — a man infamous for an advocacy of Palestinian rights that nonetheless shades into blatant antisemitic tropes. They had also published James Heartfield, a Sp!ked contributor, via both Repeater and Zer0.
These are the same sorts of people that Tutt wants to defend. He can cry all he likes about censorship that’s never happened; the bottom line is he thinks that staff at Repeater — perhaps even someone like me, who never was a member of staff — are obliged to engage with bigots. For most people following this debacle, that speaks for itself.
Each of these aforementioned publications brought Zer0 controversy then, because they seemed like inapposite inclusions on its roster — a sentiment expressed primarily by its readership. They were bad judgement calls — a view I don’t think it’s wrong for anyone to hold. It can be tough when one of your favourite bands drops a duff album or whatever. For readers of the imprints, it was clear what these were duffers for them too.
For this reason, some of the imprint’s founders did come to regret these publications — I can’t speak for all of them — citing how relationships with some authors broke down, and so they were platformed by Repeater/Zer0 no longer. This only further bolstered a militancy among outspoken critics like myself and some of the new social-media team, who vowed to hold the line and do whatever we could to avoid anything like this happening again. We believed in the Repeater/Zer0 missions, and we agreed that these books were missteps.
In hindsight, our sense of unity and the long march onward to publishing glory was definitely naive, as none of us — least of all me — had any editorial oversight at either imprint. We made our position clear, and felt like it was backed by staff, but it was a hard line that was ours and ours alone. But it’s not like this was some sort of wallet inspection station that we kept manned 24/7. It was a public position and had no bearing on any of my work for Repeater.
During my time as proofreader, nothing arrived in my inbox that might warrant that kind of dissension. I have never proofread a book that I have taken any ideological issue with — lucky me. Regardless, neither I nor anyone else Tutt criticises has ever had any say over what should or should not be published — something he can’t seem to get into his thick head. But it is also here that Tutt nonetheless makes a good point, when he notes how “[t]he problem is that, after Zer0 had been taken over, the ownership didn’t actually seem to care much about upholding this agenda.”
That’s true, and it bothered some of us, considering we’d felt rallied behind. At a certain point, it began to feel like we’d done them a load of free PR work and they could now hide behind it, whilst making the same mistakes again and again.
In 2023, Repeater publishes Rhyd Wildermuth’s Here Be Monsters — a book that opens with a bizarre anecdote about neopronouns and cancellation, and then proceeds to ramble on about identity politics and how it is splitting the left. It’s all very familiar, and not very well written. The allusions to cancellation that Wildermuth makes are also notably to do with his previous work, for which he holds some notoriety, having faced accusations of ableism and transphobia. He’s a garden-variety reactionary, an anti-idpol gay man who loves to mention his queerness whenever it’s useful for throwing fellow queers (read: trans people) under the bus. Think Milo if he was less of a fascist twink and more of a crusty druid.
He was already “cancelled” for some, then, but not necessarily by us. But that’s because I’d never even heard of Wildermuth at the time, and it was only from some murmurings amongst Repeater’s readership — not its staff — that I took notice and made an attempt to read what had been published. (I didn’t get very far before tossing it aside.)
This was the general feeling at that time. No one really paid any attention to Wildermuth or his book. It was disappointing, yes, for its poor quality and poor arguments, but that didn’t really mean anything. It meant it wasn’t a book I was going to publicise in a personal capacity, as I’d often been happy to do with much of Repeater’s generally excellent output, without being asked or paid to. But who cares? I was under no obligation to publicise anyone. I shared the books I liked and have often become friends with other authors on that basis of a mutual appreciation and respect.
Is not having that with Wildermuth also censorship? The book sucked, but there was nothing anyone could do about it, even if they wanted to — and nobody cared enough to want to. Repeater had inexplicably published reactionaries before, and it was strange to see someone of this ilk be let back in, but it was whatever. Rhyd was one person. It was best to let him drift back off into irrelevancy.
When Rhyd nonetheless makes claims about censorship, it seems to be solely on the basis of having not been given the sort of attention he thinks he deserves. He makes some claims about spurious comments from a copyeditor in his own Substack post, for example — a person unknown; again, it wasn’t me — with which he disagreed, as is his right. But there’s the rub: although he feels like people may have stepped out of line, half of his comments come down to being dissatisfied with people just doing their jobs. Copyeditors question and make suggestions about your copy! That’s not censorship! But maybe Rhyd just isn’t used to having someone actually read his work and critique it.
Carl Neville was his editor, he says, and he was also mine for my second book. But Carl’s comments, in my experience, were basically nonexistent. He didn’t particularly like the book, and seemed incapable of offering up any kind of constructive criticism on it that wasn’t pointlessly vague, and so the book languished in a futile back-and-forth. Tariq Goddard later took over and sent one email that made me realise what the book needed, cutting it to bits and taking a lot out. It was great. I’d been looking for someone to actually take it to pieces, rather than just wave around it. That’s what a good editor does. If you let your ego get in the way of that process, your book will suffer as a result.
By contrast, Rhyd himself comes across as a man with a fragile ego, championing the disengaged yes men of editorial, who feels that the very fact he has been published affords him a certain amount of deference and attention, and won’t accept any criticism prior to or after publication.
But we’re drifting here, because no one in a position to give those sorts of comments in a professional capacity is in the firing line here. Those running the Repeater / Zer0 YouTube channel weren’t obliged to give him attention. Nor is anyone unaffiliated with the imprints. He might think it would have been polite of them to swallow their principles and platform him like anyone else, but that is a question of etiquette rather than censorship. And if he feels like it wasn’t marketed sufficiently, he should take that up with the marketers. I don’t know who those people are. And for what it’s worth, Repeater / Zer0 has never been that pro-active on that front, ostensibly leaving marketing up to the authors themselves.
[Update: 12/04/25: Tutt has similarly shared claims about editorial staff suppressing his work, but it would be useful for all of them to be able to identify who these people are, because — again — no one named and blamed online was in that kind of editorial position. And the instance he cited is also explicitly about his support of Sublation Media — the platform run by the Zer0 2.0 scabs — so it seems obvious to me this would raise concerns as it would be embarrassing to the imprints overall — and it was!]
All of the publicity garnered for my books, for example, has either come from press independently, or was organised without recourse to Repeater’s team at all. (Things were different with Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures, but since the author of that text is dead, he can’t be expected to do his own marketing.) My first book, of more obvious general interest given its subject matter, faired pretty well in that regard; my second hasn’t been reviewed by a single English-language publication, although my international readership seems more engaged. Is that Repeater’s fault? My fault? The book’s fault? I don’t care either way. It is what it is. You don’t see me having a tantrum about it. So maybe Wildermuth should reflect on some of his own failings as well.
None of this constitutes censorship. It is a reflection on the personal discretion of individuals. This is something that Sereptie has emphasised recently: the Repeater/Zer0 YouTube channel, although existing under the names of the imprints, was always a largely independent entity that focused on Repeater/Zer0 authors above anyone else, but nonetheless at his discretion. The decision not to engage with some others was made on a personal basis. It’s not sabotage if other press outlets appear to be in agreement with that. No one — reviewers, readers, YouTubers — is obliged to pay attention to him if they don’t want to — and many people simply didn’t want to.
This makes Tutt’s claim that myself and Acid Horizon “began to use their positions to sabotage authors they disagreed with who had contracts with the press” totally laughable. No sabotaging took place. There was simply a consensus that their work and politics sucked. And this is the sort of thing that really makes Tutt’s position so muddled. He talks about the integrity of the left, fighting against those who want to split it, but what he’s fighting against is a consensus (in the UK at least) that these people aren’t worth our own time. We reject their entryism and will criticise it in a personal capacity, as many of us did before publishing with the imprints. The majority of us share a politics. We are unified. Tutt is just upset that that unity doesn’t include him.
Why? Well, Tutt, being the useful idiot that he is, tells on himself here again and again. Addressing his tacit support for the likes of Wildermuth in his post, he writes:
I don’t agree with Wildermuth’s criticisms of the ‘declarationist’ model of trans identification, for instance, according to which one gains access to women’s spaces merely by declaring themselves a woman (a position that, to be fair, he has adopted out of concern that it risks undermining popular support for bona fide trans inclusion). But using mild reservations like this as a pretext to relentlessly attack Marxists while ignoring altogether the array of Repeater authors who promote milquetoast liberalism without the slightest concern for worker’s struggle is more than a little dubious from a Marxist standpoint.
Okay, so Wildermuth is a TERF who has “concerns”, and you think that’s not so great, but you also see this as a “minor reservation” in light of a larger class struggle. But as a trans person, I think that’s bullshit, and am inclined to suggest here again, as I have elsewhere, that you go fuck yourself.
These aren’t minor reservations for many of us, but nor does this mean we take class struggle any less seriously. We care about myriad political struggles — those that affect us directly, and those that don’t (which can’t be said for Tutt, clearly.)
Indifference to Wildermuth’s work aside, things did change a bit later when Angie Speaks — then claiming to be an editor at Sp!ked Online — announced on Twitter that she’d signed a contract with Repeater, something like two years ago (my memory is hazy). It was this that ruffled some feathers — far more than Rhyd ever did — as it brought the number of recently contracted reactionaries up to two. Some people feared this was the start of a trend, and in that regard, it wasn’t simply some Repeater-staff feathers that were ruffled, but those of its readership also, which tweets from those paying attention at the time attest to.
I can only emphasise my personal position here again. As someone close to Repeater, I’ve been privy to lots of discussions, no doubt in ways similar to Tutt. But I’ve never claimed to be a mouthpiece for the imprints. I’m simply an interlocutor, registering my agreement and disagreement in a personal capacity. I’ve never cared much about whether that makes life difficult for anyone managing the imprints — and some have told me that it has — because I’ve never been employed by them. Tutt’s paranoia shines through again, then, when he attempts to construct conspiracy theories about collusion, which are in fact only examples of a unified politics that he sits outside of. The boycott is surely a further example of this. I don’t personally know most of the authors who’ve agreed or asked to have their names added. They simply agree with an overall political position. Isn’t that a demonstration of the unity he finds so lacking?
It’s that same consensus that led no one to (prospectively) want anything to do with Angie Speaks either — a moot point now, since none of these people are involved with the imprints anymore in any capacity, and so will have no involvement in her still-forthcoming book. But even if Acid Horizon were still custodians of the Repeater/Zer0 YouTube channel — again again again — they would not be obliged to engage with it. They have always had final say over what appeared on their own platforms, just as the editors at Repeater at large did over theirs. I don’t see any problem with that. We disagreed, but nothing has actually changed. All of these authors have been or will be published. I think that’s wrong. Why? Another mantra again (so many agains) bears repeating: political publishing is political. At a certain point, Tutt just seems to be upset that people have politics different to his, and in that way we’re not so different.
But whereas we’re capable of a solidarity without similarity on a number of issues, the bigotry of the individuals Tutt is desperate to defend is a line we won’t cross. It’s as simple as that. Like the Zer0 2.0 crowd we were all glad to be rid off, we don’t want anything to do with individuals who we knew — and they’ve only proven us right since — would be useless in a situation like a boycott. They’re all scabs, in one way or another. They’re not comrades.
This is nonetheless an important point, as it is this solidarity among the majority of authors and our collective expressions of disgruntlement behind the scenes that Tutt again claims constitutes censorship. Here he starts parroting more claims from untrustworthy idiots. He writes:
There are … reports that the staff at Repeater attempted to get other staff members fired for signing authors that they disagree with ideologically …
We’re talking about Carl Neville here again, I presume, and it seems clear that some people questioned the quality of writer he was bringing on board, having been given some sort of free reign to scrape the bottom of a Zer0 2.0-adjacent barrel. But this claim is news to me — news that comes from Angie Speaks’ Twitter account, where she writes:
I just learned that someone tried to get the editor at Repeater books that I’m working with fired for giving me a contract a while back. It didn’t work of-course. The Book is scheduled for December so nice try seething losers.
Good for her, I guess. But it will be a lonely book, I’m sure, given so many other authors have chosen to pull their titles in lieu of the boycott, and probably a book strewn with errors since they’ll only have Etan’s AI or Neville’s soft touch to look over it.
The point remains: I don’t think anyone tried to get Carl fired. He was criticised maybe, and rightly, but no one came for his job. All I remember hearing about was a trans writer asking him not to contract any more transphobes.
Angie, like Tutt, doesn’t really understand the situation here, nor the consequences of what she’s claiming, even if it was true. After all, would an attempt to get an editor fired — if any such attempt had been made, and I don’t know anyone who sought to make that happen — mean that the book wouldn’t be published? I don’t think so.
When authors registered their disappointment with the editorial team — not staff, to my knowledge, although staff may have passed this feedback on; and some authors were also staff, of course — the response I remember being shared between a community of authors upset about this at the time was: “Okay, point taken, but its all signed away now.” I imagine an advance was sent. As soon as Angie announced her book, Repeater were legally locked in — and we knew that.
What I remember most from that time is that, in light of this deadlock, people were already thinking about pulling their own books from the printers. Certainly, no one sought to get anyone fired. We thought Carl was an idiot maybe, and assumed that it really was ignorance rather than malice, but people were more inclined to walk away from Repeater themselves, having had their faith in an imprint that saw itself as some bastion of left-wing thought thoroughly shaken by the fact it was now repeating the mistakes that had brought it controversy in years past. Some frank discussions were had, by the sounds of it, but nothing more came of it internally. Again, no one tried to get anyone fired — the only “Marxist” who likes to run and tattle to your boss is Daniel Tutt, after all.
Speaking of, his post continues with mention of another “report from autonomist Marxist writer Rhyd Wildermuth” — what are these credentials doing near this man, seriously, it’s trying too hard — “that describes how his book at Repeater was censored and then sabotaged in its promotion.” Censored by whom? You mean the book was copyedited. Promotional sabotage how? When you write a book, some people write nice things, some people don’t, some people write nothing at all. If Rhyd thinks the balance is tipped away from niceness, he should write a better book.
Tutt continues: “Thus far, the organizers of the current boycott have either denied these claims of censorship or in the case of Mattie Colquhoun, they have seemed to somehow justify them.” But I don’t think I’ve ever justified censorship… I simply disagree with what constitutes censorship in this context. You’d expect that censorship is a practice exercised by those with the power to censor, which no one Tutt criticises has ever held. It’s thus a bloviating term to throw around, as again, the only people who have actually had their speech suppressed by someone who holds any real power over it are the staff who were interrogated over support for the Palestinian cause by their boss, which Sereptie detailed a few weeks ago.
Is “no-platforming” censorship? We’ve had this debate before. I’m not interested in going back over it. Suffice it to say, I don’t think so — not when no one is obligated (legally or otherwise) to talk to you about your work.
But if Tutt really wants to highlight this other “scandal” at Repeater Books, let him do so. It’s probably something that warrants an airing, even if many of us have chosen to ignore it simply because it detracts from what is now a far more important issue. I’m sure there’s plenty more dirty laundry to be aired in publishing — and people don’t usually like to share the shit things that happen at the place they work (with) — again, a question of etiquette rather than censorship — and anyway, I think investments in countries committing genocide is a bit stronger than all that.
That’s the story so far. All already public, going back about four years. If things were tricky for those of us who’d been brought closer to Repeater, seemingly because of our staunch defense of it when it was ridding Zer0 of the scabs, it was a poisoned chalice when suddenly many of us felt we couldn’t express our political beliefs in the same way as we once had done, for fear of pissing inside the tent or irritating our bosses or those more compromised higher-ups we nonetheless saw as our friends. That is a real suppression of speech; a suppression with far more weight than not wanting to talk to published authors — yes, their work has still been published — on a secondary media channel, if that’s all these claims amount to (but even then, it’s not clear).
It still sucks that they were published, and if that is the direction Repeater wants to go in, it was a direction that many of us did not want to follow. I have no books on the horizon regardless, but already at that time, when Wildermuth and Angie Speaks seemed to suggest an emergent trend, I was planning to take my work elsewhere in future anyway. I had no interest in rubbing shoulders with the very people I’d spent many months denouncing over the years previously, not only for their manipulation of Mark Fisher’s legacy but for their shady politics more generally. I chose to use my voice, on Twitter and on this blog, and I chose to exit. I also wasn’t alone in that. But things blew over, as reassurances were made by editorial staff that calmed things down a bit. That is, until the revelations about Etan Ilfeld’s removal of the publishers from the “Publishers for Palestine” letter once again ramped up disbelief among authors who had become — quite literally — the public face of the imprints.
It’s worth joining up where we started with where things have ended. No one has sought to pour any scorn on the founders, as none of this is about them. But it is infuriating that Repeater has been so adept at repeating past mistakes. Almost ten years ago, Alex Niven wrote about continuing a political publishing project “away from the control of a disliked and unsympathetic parent company”, and what do we have now if not a gathering of authors who seek to do the same thing, no thanks to the past decisions of the founders themselves.
It is a familiar situation — one that reminds me of my time at Goldsmiths, University of London; an institution whose management loves to play up the radical politics of its students and alumni, whilst advancing down a disastrous path of neoliberalisation. It has begun to feel like Repeater Books has been counting on its most public-facing authors to launder its editorial dalliances into reactionary territory, but this did not extend to the ownership’s investments, which causes Tariq Goddard to leave the press in 2024. When Tutt highlights a disparity between authors and ownership/management, he is right that that is a sure sign of something going wrong. For a lot of the reasons Tutt highlights, I’ve no interest in helping them launder their reputations any longer. The conclusions he nonetheless draws from this are bizarre and hysterical.
The point bears repeating — although at some point you’ve got to accept Tutt is too thick to get it: no one who has publicly expressed disgruntlement with the imprints has had any editorial power. The contentions, discussed quietly, have been between the principles of those who managed or otherwise unofficially represented Repeater’s front-of-house (its YouTube channel and the majority of its authors), and those who actually run the imprints behind the scenes. This has led to some private tensions, yes. If Tutt thinks this desperately needs acknowledging, he can have his acknowledgement. But it’s the inexplicable leap he takes from this that further shows what a paranoid moron he is:
why the boycott now? Why was it launched after Acid Horizon and Colquhoun left the press?
Hmmm, do you think maybe it’s because, whilst all of this was being discussed in private, many of those aggrieved were workers? That a boycott of your own publisher isn’t really something you can do with inside of it? That leaving is its own form of boycott? That this was a question of tearing down their own livelihoods and those of others? Of washing our hands of years’ worth of work and imploring others to do the same? No one took any of that lightly. Adam Jones “left” the press at the very moment he chose to highlight Ilfeld’s investments and suppression of speech publicly. He sent those tweets and assumed the obvious: he wasn’t gonna have to awkwardly wait out a notice period for a few weeks afterward.
As for me, I had no position to leave. I hadn’t been called upon to proofread anything for Repeater in almost a year, nor was I waiting for anyone to come knocking, as I was only a freelancer with numerous other forms of income, and was already aware of suggestions that the imprints were being wound down because of the disagreements that arose over Palestine. What I left (behind) is my own work. Don’t buy my books. If you want a PDF copy, email me. It’s yours.
That’s the end of it, but not for Tutt. He ends by throwing down a gauntlet — at least that is how I assume he must feel:
the onus is on Acid Horizon and Colquhoun to explain and justify their specific actions against left-wing writers critical of identity politics, why they waited so long to call the boycott, and why they specifically sought to sabotage book projects at the press of authors that they disagreed with.
Daniel, what the fuck are you talking about? People waited so long because it meant leaving their jobs, and jobs aren’t the easiest things to come by in this economy. We were also told not to publicise these disagreements by the founders because they feared legal reprisals. Fed up with a year of cowardice and legal maneuvering, Adam set off a bomb.
That’s (economically speaking) self-sabotage. Adam put himself out of a job in favour of his principles. What other sabotage is there? What press? My “sabotage” is simply thinking Tutt is a paranoid idiot and shoddy scholar, as well as a tacit supporter of TERF writers, which is disagree with as a trans person. Is that not explanation enough? I have no obligation to him, nor to Repeater, to uphold some illusion of politeness, when I thought he was an idiot long before he published a book with them. He seems to have an acute inability to understand what my relationship to all of this is. I hold no power here. The only thing I take responsibility for — the only thing I can take responsibility for — is my own speech, on a blog that is totally independent and mine. If not being censorious necessitates giving him some good press rather than bad, he’d be best served being less of a wasteman.
I care about a free Palestine. I care about that more than Tutt’s or Wildermuth’s books. I care about that more than my books. I think not having had a book published, or not otherwise having any books available for people to buy, is a less disastrous fate than staying silent about my publisher’s investment in Israel’s tech infrastructure. It is on that basis that I hope our readers choose to boycott Watkins Media, and I hope everyone formally (and formerly) employed by them goes onto bigger and much better things, in which they do not have to compromise, self-censor, or embroil their work inadvertently with the interests of a shallow venture-capitalist. I hope for better forms of left-wing publishing, which are actually as “independent” as they claim and don’t kowtow to pathetically chasing culture-war income.
I extend these sentiments to Tutt as well, but I continue to reserve the right to point out the stupidity of whatever he chooses the publish next. That’s not censorship. That’s using my free speech to comment on his own. If he continues to insinuated that having an opinion is censorship, he’s even more a hypocrite than I thought.
Update: 08/04/2025
Rhyd was joined in on Substack, having seemingly missed all of this:
A few weeks after writing my long essay, “What Happened to Repeater,” one of the members of the collective that tried to suppress its publication — who also happened to be employed by its previous publisher to run its social media channels — threw an adolescent tantrum on his last day on the job. The result was a few hours of social media sabotage during which he claimed that the real reason he and others were pushed out was due to their pro-Palestinian beliefs.
He says this is all bullshit. But how? His claims of “suppression” amount only to his work not being sufficiently promoted by those who were not obligated to promote it. And the claim that staff were pushed out for this “censorship” rather than staff choosing to leave over Watkins’ position on Palestine is completely nonsensical. Adam’s actions on social media very much surprised the ownership. The insinuation that Adam already knew it was his “last day” is backwards. It was Adam who made sure the day he sent messages on social media was his last. Rhyd is simply struggling to imagine a struggle bigger than the one he’s had with this book.
Most galling, really, is the misuse of the Palestinian struggle as a cover. These social justice identitarians have set themselves up as somehow just as oppressed as the Palestinians they claim to defend. Sure, Gaza might be getting razed to the ground, but also a group of upper middle class would-be philosophers who shat where they ate don’t get to control what their former employer’s editors choose to publish any longer.
Again, only Rhyd and Tutt are trying to force these two issues together. The actions taken in calling for a boycott against Watkins were made without paying either of them a second thought, because as much as we don’t like them — and clearly we don’t — everything would have probably continued along as usual were it not for Israel’s genocide and Etan’s attempts to stifle opposition to it. Or, as explained above, if we had seen a continuing trend of reactionaries once again finding a place at the imprints, we’d have taken our work elsewhere in future.
That is the only exercise of agency anyone has had, because we’re not editors or owners. We’re workers — often precarious workers on zero-hours / freelance contracts. There’s nothing “upper middle class” about that. My income from Repeater has been infrequent — one proofreading job every few months, on average — a job I took on when I had nothing else, as I lost my regular job at the start of the pandemic. Five years later, I spend most of my time working in a bar. I’m a PhD student, sure, but Americans don’t seem to understand that that constitutes a very different set of material conditions in the UK than in the US, where it is surely a mark of some privileged. PhD funding in this country — if you can get it — amounts to little more than minimum wage. I am on a lower “salary” as a post-graduate researcher than I ever was when working as an arts technician or labourer, which is why I work a second job in a bar to boost my earning so I can simply afford my rent and food and whatever else. And that’s after three years where I had to occasionally solicit donations from generous readers, because I couldn’t afford those things for a while due to long-term illness. I might not fall at the lower end of Rhyd’s vibes-based class system, but painting precarious workers who take a stand as somehow putting their “luxury beliefs” ahead of all else is just one more instance of his “Marxist” politics having far more in common with a Tory politician than anyone who really cares about these things.
As for the repeated claim that his “censors” have had their power taken away from them — power never held — the editorial team has always and continues to hold all responsibility for what is brought into print under the names Repeater and Zer0 (for better or worse). That some of us felt the quality of what was being printed had slipped in some areas only redoubled our efforts to emphasise what was good in our own capacity. And that wasn’t so hard because there was a lot to like. Rhyd and Tutt truly are a minority here, and it’s completely self-serving that they’d try make any of this about them. They’re really not that significant — that’s what upsets them the most.
Update 14/04: Tutt is still going on about this. He seems to have some screenshots from emails where someone has told him that people wanted to scrap his book, but again, for all the ire and accusation he’s thrown at myself and Acid Horizon, none of that has anything to do with us.
No one tried to cancel your book, Daniel. You collaborated with Sublation, helmed by someone seen as a scab by those who rebuilt Zer0/Repeater. The rebuke wasn’t censorship. It was fidelity to a political/personal break you initially chose to ignore or weren’t clear about.
And from what I understand, you understood this concern and abided in Tariq’s request. And while we didn’t look fondly on that move, it was the old guard of editors, et. al who took the deepest offense. Please stop lying about this stuff, especially in public.
Daniel continues to make claims to the contrary, blurs various grievances together incoherently, and starts posting email correspondence from Adam C. Jones, in which Adam reiterates the overarching sentiment above, which is that the YouTube channel is a quasi-independent entity and it’s probably best that Tutt not try and settle Twitter beef over his reading of Nietzsche in a forum detached from that.
But Tutt seems to ignore the actual content of his screenshot in that regard, focussing on the apparent contradiction of trying to help facilitate a debate about his book whilst also thinking that debates grown from Twitter beef look dumb. But it seems that Tutt is simply unable to understand that his strategies for engagement and conversation are generally rubbish and the main source of people finding him difficult at the imprints.
Tutt spins out again, insinuating all sorts of conspiracies, leading Craig to continue:
my god man, you’ve absolutely lost your mind about this. the way you’re now grasping at fragments and recirculating half-contexts as if they were smoking guns is not just exhausting—it’s unbecoming of someone trying to be taken seriously in any public discourse.
for one thing, it is reprehensible that you’re posting private communications—when, in our own past exchanges, i asked if i could post emails you had sent that i was cut in on, and you said no. and i respected that. because i still believe there are lines one shouldn’t cross.
not only is there a legal liability here but there’s a basic moral issue too. even if you’re desperate to salvage your position, there’s no excuse for throwing professional ethics to the wind just to play gotcha online.
moreover, you’ve completely pivoted from the specific issue you posted yesterday and reverted back to the same muddled retread of old grievances that has characterized your response to all of this since 2023. it’s not evidence—it’s repetition with no clarity.
Tutt’s full paranoia is on display after this. He tweets:
You brought me into this right at the moment that my account was hacked and you neglected to divulge all the facts.
The insinuation here being that Tutt’s loss of his “main” Twitter account is somehow politically motivated. But DMs from a fellow Repeater author tried to get me with the same scam a few weeks back. I thought it was very apparent, after a very brief exchange, that their account had been hacked and was now being run by some phishing bot. Just because Tutt was stupid enough to fall for it and others weren’t, doesn’t mean that this is a conspiracy.
You promoted a narrative that neglected to mention that you wanted to suspend work on my book — that is a fact that you neglected to mention.
Tutt is here again accusing Craig of flexing editorial oversight he’s never had, which he extends to a recent radio programme in the UK where someone reports on the Repeater Books affair. Tutt gets a mention, since he tried to run with his counter-narrative, but so does Craig’s rebuttal that Tutt is wholly “self-serving” in this context. Tutt is apparently so upset about this reporting on the blogged back-and-forth that he’s threatening to sue for defamation… But here again, is commentary on things you say publicly, which make you look stupid, censorship or defamation or anything that warrants resorting to spurious lawfare? Or is it playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes?
You did not have to make me a scapegoat. It is reasonable for me to stand up for myself after you have decided to put me at the center of this boycott.
Only Tutt has tried to insinuate himself into the Watkins boycott. His whole argument — the argument with which this post began — is that there was a narrative “missing” from the boycott over censorship of pro-Palestinian solidarity, and that (in his view) is the “censorship” (read: critique) of reactionaries and their useful idiots.
He has entirely lost the plot.
Here’s Craig again with (what should be) the final word:
I’m sorry the collapse of repeater books wasn’t all about you, the only relevance you have ever had to the whole affair is when you started parroting etan’s narrative, the only part [in] this story you play is scab. That’s your fault, not ours
Here’s hoping Daniel finally chooses to log off and stops twisting his own brain in knots looking for gotchas and comebacks. Clearly, from this latest series of interjections, he’s lied to himself so effectively that he’s started to believe things he’s said came from those he’s critiquing. It’s like watching that scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton beats himself up in front of his boss, but rather than his boss, Tutt is additionally hallucinating a devastating power never held by a bunch of freelancers and podcast hosts.
There was a new article in Tribune the other day rejecting pop-pessimism and championing a new argument in favour of music’s futures — an article written in terms that, somewhat ironically, felt familiar and even dated to me.
Luke Cartledge reviews Liam Inscoe-Jones’ new book, Songs in the Key of MP3, in which Inscoe-Jones argues that the future isn’t lost to us in 2025; it’s everywhere, riding the ripples outwards from the paradigmatic innovations of five “new icons of the Internet age”: SOPHIE, Dev Hynes, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and FKA twigs.
The review begins as follows:
There isn’t often consensus on the British left. But for at least the last fifteen years there has been widespread concurrence on one thing: a highly melancholic view of contemporary music. The accompanying argument will be familiar to many readers. Here are its greatest hits: following a relatively progressive, dynamic period of pop-cultural production between the immediate postwar years and the triumph of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s (the era Mark Fisher defined with his concept of ‘popular modernism’), the aesthetic development of popular music has dramatically slowed.
The experimentation and popular creativity enabled by the relative equality and working-class empowerment of the social-democratic era has been subordinated along with everything else — so the argument goes — to the whims of the market. This has left us with little but a nostalgic fascination with pop music’s own past, and sets of disconnected, hyper-local, hyper-individualised subcultures, which do little to contribute to any kind of mass cultural project. At this point in human history, it would seem, popular culture, like politics, offers us no opportunity to imagine a more just future beyond capitalism.
Personally, I’m not sure if this left is in the room with us right now. But it is nonetheless a very nice review, with many productive offshoots, which has led me to order Inscoe-Jones’ book prior to its release. Having spent the day reading it, however, I can’t help but feel cynical about the terms in which the conversation is framed here.
Without wanting to pour too much cold water on a book that celebrates a bunch of artists I also love, I don’t feel like the book itself really measures up to the music it is considering. Particularly when setting itself against caricatures of a discourse that Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and others are associated with, I think it betrays a misunderstanding of the stakes of their arguments, ultimately glossing over the substance of what they have had to say about contemporary currents in culture, as well as the friction they produced in rubbing up against the “new normals” of our increasingly digital reality.
What’s most jarring to me, in being presented with an argument that is supposedly new and a breath of fresh air, is that I’ve written about this a lot before over the last five years, when arguments like Inscoe-Jones’s have become very familiar. With apologies to loyal readers who might find some of what follows to be a repeat of older writings, it is precisely because I’ve written about this at length over the last five years that I am left feeling self-consciously like a dog with a bone. But at the risk of being a belligerent grump, please allow me the exercise of sharping my teeth on it some more all the same…
Inscoe-Jones’ book is about how the Internet has led to the emergence of some wonderfully new currents and sensibilities in contemporary music. Somewhat inexplicably, however, he comes for Mark Fisher with regards to this argument early on.
“Even in the early days of the twenty-first century, there was already a fair bit of anxiety about what the newfound access granted by the Internet was doing to creativity”, he writes in the introduction. “Figures like cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that … the new technological breakthroughs like Napster, Limewire and MP3 stores were not about musical creation, but simply musical preservation, and he found great swathes of new artists beginning to simply remix or rehash the great leaps of decades past.” But, Inscoe-Jones adds: “Forecasts like these were premature to say the least.”
I don’t see how, personally. When Simon Reynolds gave the name “hauntology” to a then-emergent sensibility, it wasn’t to disparage it. Fisher loved a lot of this stuff too. Burial, The Caretaker, Ghost Box all deal with manhandle the sounds of (someone’s) youth and reflect back on them with age, through memory, making it new. It was a truly post-modernist. By the same token, however, this brief assessment, attributed to Fisher, of the function of music-streaming platforms is surely correct also. (See Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.) To conflate that with the work of artists themselves in a misnomer, however. A disparity is blurred together here, ignoring how both observations — the explosion of sonic experimentalism, and the conservatism of the platforms we listen to this music on — can be true at once.
Fisher held no animosity toward the recombinatory practices of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries — at least not in the broad strokes that Inscoe-Jones paints them. Nevertheless, he selectively quotes Fisher as asking: “‘How long can a culture persist without the new? … What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?'” But the exaggeration of this comment to be a wholesale dismissal of twenty-first-century cultural advances is ignorant, if not dishonest, as that is not what Fisher was talking about in the slightest.
Fisher had very particular targets for his ire in the mid-2000s, most of which were the stunted offerings of zombified indie rock, epitomised by the Arctic Monkeys. But the specificity of Fisher’s considerations is ignored here, painting him as someone wholly out of touch with the moment he was living through. This, above all else, could not be further from the truth. Fisher already came in for critique, via Alex Williams in 2008, with regards to the viability of “good postmodernism” (self-aware postmodernism; hauntology), and how it wasn’t really all that different to the “bad postmodernism”, and he took this critique firmly on board. This is the discussion that accelerationism emerged from, after al,, and Fisher took up the mantle and wrote about it regularly for the rest of his short life.
People constantly ignore this, and so you get arguments like Inscoe-Jones’s. He notes, for example, how, “[i]n 2016, hip hop, a style of songwriting invented by children of Caribbean migrants in New York City, overtook rock and pop as the most-listened-to genre in the world, shattering a paradigm which had lasted half a century.” The implicit suggestion is that Fisher paid no attention to this — a bizarre claim for someone who belonged to a generation so influenced by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the vibrant hybridity and pluralism of black music, no longer really separable into any essentialising racial categories — and here again, the pros and cons of (re)appropriation are unavoidable.
But still this suggestion clings to Fisher’s legacy. It is something echoed further in Cartledge’s review, when he notes another recent book that has singled out Fisher for critique:
Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis … takes specific issue with Fisher’s conception of popular modernism — ‘an inventive and counter-hegemonic culture running roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s, now discernible only in its withdrawal’ — arguing that such an idea is tied to a specific, linear narrative of progress enabled by Fordist capitalism, inextricable from a particular experience of time, labour and leisure, and exclusionary of social groups and sets of relations which do not fit with the typologies of this framework.
But again, no theorist so attendant to Gilroy’s work would think this. Fisher’s frequent tributes to jungle are a prime example. What interested him was precisely a scrambling of temporalities and modes of subjectivity accelerated so drastically in the 1990s and beyond. Fisher came up with the Ccru, of course, which is all about time spirals and the dissolution of identity through the digital. The last thing you will ever find in Fisher’s work, in this regard, is a “linear narrative”.
Case in point: Fisher saw hiphop’s ascendancy coming, as his writings on the now-defunct Hyperdub blog attest to, but it is unfortunate he wasn’t able to write about this moment specifically. Fisher passed away in 2017, lest we forget, but at that time he spoke to friends about his love of Kanye West’s then-recent album The Life of Pablo. Relatedly, one of the unrealised projects he hoped to pursue with Kodwo Eshun was a book called Kanye Theory, which intended to look at the significance of Kanye West — for better and for worse — within this moment of hiphop’s pop-cultural triumph in particular (just as his first book project on an equally popular and founding figure, The Resistable Demise of Michael Jackson, had done before it).
It is jarring, then, to have hiphop in 2016 be compared to Fisher’s writings a decade earlier — a very different cultural moment, to say the least. I’ve surveyed this mid-2000s moment for myself, of course, in the introduction to the reissue of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life (now on the blog here). In fact, given the moment Fisher was critiquing, now viewed with almost two-decades’ hindsight, it seems inevitable that hiphop was to reach such heights when it did.
2005, the year before “hauntology” discourse came into its own in the blogosphere, was the year in which the Arctic Monkeys were rising to prominence; the year of Nickelback’s “Photograph”; the year in which the best-selling albums in the UK were by James Blunt and Coldplay. In short, it was a year when rock and pop had never felt more tired and inoffensive. But it was also the year of Kanye West’s second album, Late Registration, and iconic singles like Amerie’s “1 Thing”; the year in which grime was making itself increasingly known to the mainstream, and proving that it was here to stay.
Hiphop was already, ten years prior to 2016, primed to overtake rock as a sort of musical lingua franca. But it was notably in-between these two moments that something else also came to the fore — the very beginnings of what Inscoe-Jones goes onto celebrate. The suggestion, then, that Fisher was somehow an old man yelling at crowds, left looking silly by the greatness soon to come, is question-begging. In spite of the fact that this is the dominant narrative now attached to his legacy, it is wrong. Fisher saw many fascinating things on the horizon. As much as he hated the present in general, there was so much about it he loved also.
If there is room to doubt here, it is due to Fisher’s careful avoidance of any premature poptimistic triumphalism. Indeed, he was by no means a “poptimist” in any sense, because his writings did not consider pop culture in some kind of hermetic isolation. Whilst it is true, as Inscoe-Jones argues (and Fisher himself acknowledges on numerous occasions), that technological innovations were vastly accelerating pop-modernist processes of appropriation, producing all kinds of sonic mutations for the average listener to feel excited about, these innovations could not, in Fisher’s view, be separated from the enshittification of industry platforms themselves.
This is the tightrope that Fisher attempted (not always successfully) to walk along. Yes, Spotify has hugely increased our access to the unfathomable depths of human culture — and isn’t that wonderful for us — but as a platform, it’s still a piece of shit, driven by homogenising algorithms and pioneering a techno-feudal deference to the monthly subscription model that leaves artists themselves poorer. I think we are all capable of dealing with this dissonance, and it was a dissonance at the heart of Fisher’s work overall, which was always in service of a more general critique of contemporary capitalism.
Far from Fisher believing that there was no future as such left to speak of, this was the very sentiment he named as “capitalist realism” and spent two decades critiquing. But if the popular perception of his argument is muddied, it’s because what Fisher takes issue with is the curtailing of certain futures but not others, echoing that line often attributed to William Gibson that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. With that comment in mind, it is integral we consider the futures imagined by music itself and the deeply flaw distribution models it is disseminated through. And this is worthy of consideration not only in terms of music, but all the mod-cons we uncomfortably enjoy.
Put simply, the friction of the postmodern that Fisher was interested in — and postmodernism is all about erasing frictions — is as follows: how is it possible to enjoy the unquantifiable wealth of contemporary culture at the same time as we live in an era of persistent austerity policies and an ever-rising cost of living? What good is this cultural abundance, the life-affirming proliferation of our artistic endeavours, when it is coupled with reactionary powers that slowly diminish our quality of life overall?
It is at this point that we should consider the plurality of the lost futures Fisher talks about. Because they are plural. Capitalism cancels the future for many of us on an individual level, as the “good life” promised starts to feel increasingly inaccessible, whilst this reality is hidden behind the simulacra abundance of culture itself. Thus, a political reality diminishes the possible futures attainable at a material level, whilst encouraging us to be satisfied by the hype machines of the cultural industries. It is in this way that Fisher is able to write about the “slow cancellation of the future” and remain attuned to music newly proliferating on the Internet. Indeed, if Fisher is so closely associated with an artist like Burial, it is because his music conjoins these two sensibilities adeptly. Burial’s music, then and now, feels exceedingly contemporary, progressive and visionary, whilst at the same time his first two albums are imbued with a melancholy with respect to everyday life. But for many music critics, these two poles — political futurity; aesthetic futurity — are blurred together, erasing the contradictions that interested someone like Fisher so consistently. And speaking more personally, this is precisely what makes so much poptimism deeply annoying in its uncriticality…
How, then, does contemporary culture, in 2025, address this discrepancy? How does it produce modes of resistance and raise our consciousness as to how different things could be or how stagnant they still are in spite of cultural proliferation? There are many examples; I think underscores is a particularly good one. Inscoe-Jones, somewhat regrettably, highlights Charli xcx instead.
I don’t know when his book was finished, but the celebration of Brat, in the book’s chapter about SOPHIE — where Inscoe-Jones points out (correctly) that Charli’s Brat “couldn’t have existed without” the pioneering sound of SOPHIE — rings hollow since the “Kamala is brat” debacle of late 2024.
Even before that moment, I personally felt like Brat was a very sad, “party-hauntological” album (to borrow from Fisher) that exacerbated the lost-futurism of hyperpop’s ascendence to the mainstream after SOPHIE’s untimely death. In short, whilst there’s no denying SOPHIE’s radicality and influence, I don’t think any of her successors have managed to make good on the “whole new world” she promised. Quite the opposite. Brat especially went from being the sound of the summer to achieving such a ubiquitous pop-cultural saturation that the sharpness of its production style was very quickly blunted, even made irritating.
At its worst, it was an album that heralded a new moment of “reflexive impotence” not unlike that of the Kaiser Chiefs and the Arctic Monkeys in 2005-06. It predicted a riot, but ultimately basked in the malaise of neoliberal anhedonia, all ketamine numbness to the complete lack of political futurity epitomised by the election of Keir Starmer last July and the return of Trump not long afterwards. Brat — not entirely through faults of its own, but certainly not helped by the album’s never-ending marketing campaign — felt completely anathema to the period of time when SOPHIE first came to dominate my listening habits, during that far more optimistic summer when ‘Lemonade’ was a new earworm that followed me to and from Jeremy Corbyn rallies. “Kamala is brat” was the putrid opposite of that.
How, then, does the music of the artists Inscoe-Jones considers help us to break free of the more egregious repetitions of the world around us? How is it possible that only (some parts of) pop culture make advances, whilst our political reality is a series of humiliating returns, via new forms of reaction and austerity?
This is the Fisherian gulf that Inscoe-Jones doesn’t seem to know about, or at least never addresses, but this was the bread-and-butter of Fisher’s conflicting analyses of the present in which he lived. One result of this lack, despite Inscoe-Jones’ gesturing towards new futures on the horizon, is that his contextualising of the artists discussed begins to erase all of the nuance of a previous generation of writers who did far more to open out the potentials latent in contemporary culture, in order to show how they might revolutionise other areas of culture in turn.
By way of an example, Inscoe-Jones champions the general code-scrambling of postmodernism — SOPHIE, for instance, is explicitly referred to as a “postmodernist” — despite the ways that a prior generation of critics were thinking more considerately about the nuts and bolts of PoMo and trying to describe how contemporary musicians working under postmodernism (as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”) were also able to position themselves against it, in order to express a kind of resistance or problematisation of its inescapable affects.
Fisher is enlightening on this point, writing about one of Inscoe-Jones’ new Internet icons, Oneohtrix Point Never, in a 2010 edition of The Wire. Here Fisher borrows the term “salvagepunk” from Evan Calder Williams and China Miéville to try to highlight the ways in which OPN is not so simply a “postmodernist”, but rather a twenty-first-century “pop-modernist” (again challenging Rekret’s presumption that Fisher think pop-mod was a thing of the past):
American theorist Evan Calder Williams’s concept of ‘salvagepunk’ provides a broader context for thinking about how these methodologies deviate from their banal twin, postmodernity. For Williams, salvagepunk — at once a sensibility; a kind of non-genre embracing film, fiction and other cultural spheres; and a theoretical framework — is to be opposed to the “inherent flatness and equivalency of postmodern cultural production.” It draws together (and from) the 20th century’s chief arts of reappropriation: montage (Eisenstein, Vertov, Chris Marker), collage (Heartfield and Gilliam), detournement (Duchamp, Debord and the Situationist International, hiphop), and farce (Monty Python and Richard Lester).
Inscoe-Jones appears to have little time for any of this, resulting in the strange contradictions whereby someone like SOPHIE, for all her jagged approach to audio synthesis, can be described using a term that some — I guess not all — still associate with the flat, frictionless banality of late-capitalist homogenisation. Although I might be quibbling with semantics here, to me the book slips regularly into ahistoricity as a result, further proliferating numerous misreadings of a generation of critics he otherwise hopes to set himself against, thus betraying a poptimistic anti-intellectualism that is superficially journalistic. Because of this, for me at least, the book starts to feel like a celebration of futurity that is actually far less futuristic and ambitious than the writers he repeatedly (but always briefly) chastises.
I want to address this quality of the text itself, but let me first introduce a (not so brief) self-reflexive caveat. In light of the discussion around Cartledge’s review that took place on Twitter the other day, I should acknowledge my own pedantic sensibilities going forward — if they weren’t already blatantly apparent.
On Twitter, Toby Manning made the point of whether my particular bugbears are at all able to connect with the ways in which certain texts, concepts or thinkers are actually used in everyday conversation and discourse. He commented:
I often think a flaw in my own work is knowing the history too well, whereas what the history is understood [as] is what’s out there and has to be engaged with.
What I take from this is that it is not always so helpful to fight for a purist reading of certain concepts, when these concepts have clearly taken on lives of their own and may well mean something different to what was originally intended — and that is not inherently a bad thing. It’s just what happens when these things are dispersed through culture as a whole, and separated from the more isolated discourses of bloggers (in this case). Overall, an escape from those more cloistered online spaces is desirable — even hermetic bloggers critical of the mainstream want to be read — and so the degradation of their critical armature is to be expected. That is something that cannot be forgotten and should be reckoned with. And anyway, the world would feel a lot like Twitter does in general if everyone was as much of a pedant as me, and that’s not a world I want to live in either. The question, then, is always how best to do that, and long grumbling screeds like mine are probably one of the worst vehicles for doing so. (I’d probably be better off making 3-hour video essays instead?)
All this is to say that, when it comes to falling into the puritanical, I am absolutely guilty as charged. But the point of knowing our history — even if “too well” — is so that we do not mindlessly repeat it. Indeed, what frustrates me, in reading a poptimistic book about futurity in 2025, is that it can be so ignorant of the recent past — that is, not only of how the discussions it critiques in passing developed two decades ago, but also of all the intellectual developments that have occurred since. The irony felt, then, in reading Inscoe-Jones’ refutations of a lost-futurism — and, relatedly but more obliquely, of hauntology — in 2025, is that these critiques end up only repeating the laziest engagements advanced two decades previously. The discussion thus feels like its stuck in 2008, rather than feeling shiny and new in 2025.
I can think of nothing more unfortunate for a book about the recent past and the proximate futures it has produced. It is thus a book that is nowhere near as contemporary as it thinks it is. It betrays an ignorance not only of Fisher’s 2010s work, but also the work of many others. As such, I struggle to find much merit in a critique that betrays a lack of engagement with the futures explored in music criticism itself — that is, the book’s own domain, apart from the music itself.
I think knowing this history is important, then, because, for my tastes at least, it can lead us to a better form of music criticism. In fact, it is the complacent role of the contemporary critic that I take issue with here above all else. Concerning Inscoe-Jones’ book, I again make no quibble with the artists under consideration. They’re some of my favourites too. But in terms of how they’re written about, how they are contextualised on an art-historical timeline, which is currently in the process of being written and canonised, I find it ultimately superficial and lacking, even if its positivity is a welcome reprieve from the drudgery of the present more generally.
As a result, I find the book speckled with little contradictions, or at least lots of confusion and disparity between terms. I don’t think that’s some kind of fatal flaw, however. Plenty of readers won’t be miserable cunts like me. But this confusion is also precisely what I find most interesting, as did the likes of Fisher, and it is this that I think needs to be engaged with if we’re to break out of a critical deadlock that seems to want to avoid any lengthy critique of its priors in general anyway. The point is that things aren’t so simple, and I only wish more music critics had a self-awareness in that regard, as well as a bravery to get stuck into the nitty-gritty of contemporary culture and the futures it promises.
Truthfully, as someone who loves music — listening to it, writing about it — I must confess I find most books about music to be as dull as dishwater. And maybe that too is nothing more than a matter of taste. Maybe it is even uncharitable to critique a book for not being something it doesn’t even want to be. It’s a pop work of poptimism, and not a weighty tome of philosophical critique. But it also doesn’t feel like a book that “breaks the mould” and “defines categorisation” as one of its jacket endorsements claims. It feels like dozens of other books that think poptimism is enough, and at a certain point, they all turn me off.
I think, then, that if we’re going to discuss the valences of something like hauntology or “lost futures” discourse in the context of a present-future, we cannot elide the paltry lack of affectivity common to the texts themselves, which try to convince us of the abundant affects produced by the music in question, but seem incapable of conjoining themselves to that affectivity within the confines of an achingly journalistic prose. That’s not to say that “academic” writing is the way forward. A lot of that is bunk too. But I find myself longing for a lost future within popular music criticism itself, when the various delineations between categories and modes of thought were completely disregarded, and music critics dared to channel not only their interest in music, but all the currents of contemporary culture that they came into contact with, be that music, film, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc. I miss a music criticism that used to really grapple with the strangeness of the present, and not just cherry-pick the “nice” bits.
If that makes me the arsehole, so be it. It may also make me a hypocrite, as I encase all of this in a long-winded rant about it for no-one to read. But that’s my cross to bear.
Cartledge’s review, appearing as it does in Tribune, goes some way to emphasise the political undercurrents of Inscoe-Jones’ book’s content, and so the focus on Fisher in the review itself isn’t that surprising. But when Inscoe-Jones uses him as a scapegoat for a kind of cultural pessimism, I can’t help but think (again) about how so much contemporary music writing still demonstrates a lag in how we actually talk about music in the present, despite all of its pronouncements to the contrary. It’s the sort of argument that betrays its own lack of futurity, I’d argue, because it still cannot fully exorcise the ghosts of critical modes past that continue to torment it, nor does it see this haunting as a defining aspect of the very thing it critiques in passing.
The in-grown nature of these discussions doesn’t seem to occur to Inscoe-Jones, but Cartledge himself recognises them:
The [book’s] broader arguments against a wholesale lost-futures denialism of aesthetic progress are convincingly made. The SOPHIE chapter is by far the strongest. In one key passage, Inscoe-Jones directly challenges Fisher’s contention that a great deal of contemporary music would not shock a listener from previous decades by listing a whole host of sounds which would not only have that effect, but would simply not have been possible to make before.
Yet the more specific and complex ideas he rails against are rebutted less effectively: for example, his response to Reynolds’ concern that what is often presented as uniquely synthetic, genre-splicing work is merely ‘diversely derivative’, ‘avoid[ing] having one influence by having lots of influences’, never quite meets the challenge directly, instead reaffirming that the results of such processes are aesthetically pleasing, without pinpointing how exactly they disprove Reynolds’ charge.
This is my feeling reading the book too, and as far as its arguments against “a wholesale lost-futures denialism” go, I happen to think that these arguments are all too easily made as well. Because of course things happen, of course things change. And of course, this isn’t something that Fisher ever really denied. Despite being associated with a “left melancholia”, Fisher explicitly and repeatedly takes issue with this himself (in Ghosts of My Life, in his first Postcapitalist Desire lecture, and in his intro to Acid Communism).
The strangeness of the twenty-first century, for Fisher, was how much had materially changed — with the rise of the Internet most obviously — whilst so much still remained affectively drudgerous and mundane. Rather than insert themselves into this bizarre disparity and open up the space between these two poles, critics of Fisher instead tend to talk about stasis and acceleration in the same breath, just as Inscoe-Jones does — what Fisher called our “frenzied stasis” — but an awareness of this complementarity and its centrality for a prior generation of critics is something that feels particularly lacking in Inscoe-Jones’ book. This is particularly apparent in the chapter on Oneohtrix Point Never — a figurehead for a hauntological and memoradelic current in contemporary music, who is nonetheless (rightly) praised by Inscoe-Jones, in Cartledge’s words, for his “semi-accelerationist attempts to mainstream fringe aesthetics”.
This is important because, for all the nods to Fisher as someone who has observed a cancellation of the future, OPN — a keen reader of Fisher himself — is surely the most “Fisherian” of the artists considered. In fact, this attempt “to mainstream fringe aesthetics” was the same motor behind so much of the music criticism of Fisher’s generation. It’s why their work cares so little about compartmentalising music criticism, philosophy, politics, etc. They jumped on these sorts of attempts to mainstream fringe aesthetics in order to simultaneously mainstream fringe ideas. But it appears we’ve since fallen back into an anti-intellectualism that these writers first started pushing back against, as far back as the 1990s.
Here’s the rub… Fisher’s mournful nostalgia for the future-shock of jungle might be one thing, clearly remedied by the arrival of footwork and countless other mutants who’ve sprang from the hardcore continuum — which, again, he wrote about — but the critics who love to remind us (and him, even posthumously) of that fact today also fail to notice how this lack of future-shock is just as (if not far more) applicable to music criticism itself.
I’m reminded here of a book by another of Reynolds’ peers: David Stubbs’ Fear of Music, with its provocative subtitle “Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen”. We might well extend this to a lot of music criticism today and ask, by way of some other (more awkward) couplings: why do people get Autechre but don’t get Wittgenstein? Or, why do people get black metal but don’t get Bataille? Or, why do people get Oneohtrix Point Never but don’t get Fisher?
Of course, many people do get Fisher, but in the case of Songs in the Key of MP3, it still seems strange to me that someone like Inscoe-Jones wouldn’t see the obvious parallels here. The now-familiar misreading of Fisher and Reynolds’ work is repeated in the book’s chapter on Oneohtrix Point Never: “In 2011, while writers like Simon Reynolds feared that immediate access to old music was leading to a stagnating culture” — did they though? — “no artist was delving in as excitedly as Daniel Lopatin.” Again, as already highlighted above, Fisher championed this too in The Wire. He didn’t write about OPN all that often — I can’t think of another instance off the top of my head — but the process of making an album like Replica is exactly the sort of thing Fisher refers to passionately as “digital psychedelia” and “capitalist counter-sorcery”.
Compare, for example, how Inscoe-Jones writes about Replica to how Fisher talks about the the Otolith Group’s Anathema.
First, Inscoe-Jones:
In 2011, Daniel released … Replica … On it, he made a sharp turn away from his first four albums — defined by heavily synthesised, completely original soundscapes — and brought the vapourwave method into the world of Oneohtrix Point Never. On Replica, the sources which influenced him were not pop songs but television adverts from the ’80s and ’90s which had been crammed en masse into endless YouTube playlists. The results were a fascinating experiment: taking the sonic palette of that turbo-charged moment of all-American consumerism and turning them into something mournful, and just a little out-of-time.
But to what end? What is it that’s really evocative about this album, the sources it draws upon, and what it turns them into? So much more could be said here, but the chapter as a whole feels superficial compared to other writing on this stuff that I’m more used to, including that by Fisher himself.
Here’s Fisher in 2012, then, in an article that’s notably contemporary with Replica, discussing a film that, also like Replica, is made out of warped samples of YouTube videos, drawing on its strange archive of television advertisements:
The advertisements were all gathered from one of the major nodes of communicative capitalism, YouTube, a site primarily generated, just as Baudrillard predicted, from the “active responses” of participants. YouTube illustrates very well the communicative capitalist apparatus of capture: the participants who make all those time-consuming analogue-to-digital conversions, all those uploads, and who are not paid for their labour. It is the parasitic predator, capital, which accrues the value generated from the site.
[…] Anathema‘s first step is to de-anchor the phantasmatic scenes that the advertisements construct from the products they are ostensibly selling. The de-anchorage is responsible for producing much of the overwhelming affect of eeriness that pervades the film. Anathema composes a place of consistency from these orphaned semiotic-libidinal fragments. As we watch, it is as if we are inside a machine dream. But who or what is dreaming here?
One way of seeing Anathema is as a glimpse of capital’s own dreaming. This world of smoothly yielding orifice-interfaces, of instantaneous contact, of hard surfaces dissolving into liquid when touched, may be how the communicational matrix looks (and feels) to capital. But the experience of its human users is somewhat different…
Swap out Anathema for Replica and Fisher’s essay could well serve as the liner notes to OPN’s album (not that it needs any). What’s more, it’s an essay that feels achingly futuristic for the moment it was written in, considering how these investigations into “capital’s own dreaming” seem to prefigure the AI aesthetics inaugurated by Google DeepDream a few years later. (Here we might compare Replica to Lee Gamble’s Models, which feels like an update on that kind of investigation to an AI present, but this post is already long enough…) And we’re supposed to take Inscoe-Jones at his word that Fisher and co. are somehow conservative writers making premature forecasts?!
This comparison nonetheless makes Fisher’s writing feel all the more heady and academic, and that mode of cultural writing is distinctly out of vogue right now. Inscoe-Jones even writes how, “[w]hen I first encountered Oneohtrix Point Never, he seemed like the kind of artist whose album reviews tended to come with references to critical theory, and a diagram.” God forbid music writing thinks with an abundance of material, never mind get critical… But the point Inscoe-Jones makes is taken on board; this style of writing might go some way towards explaining why it’s not that well understood. Regardless, I think we’re poorer without it, and Inscoe-Jones’ book is too.
What I think is clear from Fisher’s writings is that he was interested in music at the forefront of expressing a certain a ‘structure of feeling’ (whether present or to-come) — a phrase borrowed from Raymond Williams, whom Cartledge likewise brings into play in his review. In fact, the paradox Fisher contends with, when considering the work of OPN and others in the late-00s and early-10s, is that their psychedelic exploration of past forms of materiality was itself new, was itself pop-modernist — and in that regard, Inscoe-Jones and Fisher have something in common, but it speaks volumes that the former is trailing the latter’s arguments by ~15 years…
Readers might well take or leave music writing that contains critical theory, but in its bold engagement with all that is contemporary — not just the music — these sorts of books stand up just as well today as the albums Inscoe-Jones writes about. Will his book do the same?
To offer up some other books for contrast, I’ve been reading Simon Reynolds’ first book, Blissed Out, recently. It remains a fiery piece of writing about music, despite first being published in 1990, that also continues to feel futuristic today. This feeling is sharpened by the fact that the book is built out of articles that appeared in the music press, at a time when it is almost impossible to imagine anything like them appearing in the music press today. Songs in the Key of MP3, by contrast, gives me the distinct impression of reading the Guardian… But I don’t want this to come across as cynical ad hominem, so let’s think about this some more.
The critique often made implicitly by Fisher (and less implicitly by Reynolds), once upon a time, was not only that pop-rock music had lost its experimental edge, but that most writing about it had too — something that contemporary critiques like that of Inscoe-Jones fail to appreciate, which is a shame, as it batters the tonality of their own writing, despite being relatively ancient. But this is precisely why books like Reynolds’ debut hold up and still feel exciting: because a lot of music writing has fallen back into a journalistic complacency that they fiercely wanted to shake up.
To bring in another example, Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 book More Brilliant Than The Sun begins with an excoriating dismissal of everything else around it:
All today’s journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future’s cuts, tracks, scratches. Behind the assumed virtue of keeping rhythm mute, there is a none-too-veiled hostility towards analyzing rhythm at all. Too many ideas spoil the party. Too much speculation kills ‘dance music’, by ‘intellectualizing’ it to death.
What Eshun, writing in 1998, deplored most in so much popular music criticism — not just criticism of pop, but music criticism that was itself popular — was its staunch anti-intellectualism: “Respect due. Good music speaks for itself. No Sleevenotes required. Just enjoy it. Cut the crap. Back to basics. What else is there to add?”
Eshun had arguably taken his leave from Reynolds here, whose first book — published eight years earlier — begins with a furious disregard for this same tendency. He cares not whether his writing is too philosophical. Indeed, rather than dismissing out-of-hand the persistent failure of music writing to truly grasp its object — writing about music is like dancing about architecture, or however that stupid idiom goes — he sees this as the very motor driving rock criticism’s more poetic sensibilities.
“A fissure between experience and explication has been intrinsic to rock writing since its inception”, he argues, but rather than leave the gap between them unmolested, he drops whatever he wills into this cavernous hole and waits to see what makes a splash, what produces a klang that might resonate with the klang of the sonic avant-garde itself. He even identifies this as the enduring preoccupation of a post-punk generation of writers (think Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, et al.) and those like himself who basked in their influence:
And just as rock recovered for itself certain lost powers, so ‘we’ writers discovered, for ourselves, certain ancient truths. In particular, the truth discovered, separately, by Wittgenstein and Bataille, among others: that thought is a ladder you ascend only to pull up behind you and abandon; that it is only through language that you can reach that which lies beyond language’s reckoning. In other words, the only way for rock to live again was if the rock discourse could somehow manage to end itself — again and again. Enter gladly into an endless end. And so we directed our enmity towards ‘meaning’, and in particular, against punk. Or rather what punk had turned into, had bequeathed to British rock culture: a stifling fixation on the text, an overbearing neurosis for meaning and relevance, an urge to totalize, and a gamut of taboos and inhibitions about what was sonically permissible. Rather than respond to rock for its ‘spirit’, it felt more fun to rub against its ‘skin’. Rather than respond to rock as a series of ‘statements’, it seemed more exciting to be swept up in its incoherence.
What is so jarring about reading Reynolds from 1990 in 2025 is the wholesale forgetting of this reverence for any and all sources that might help us reach for what remains uncommunicable in the age of communicative capitalism, and the tandem irreverence (with regards to journalistic taste) for how they might be utilised. I mean, please show me a recent article that is as full of life as Reynolds’ essay on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and the Situationist International. Instead, so much contemporary music criticism today reads like little more than client journalism, no matter whether it’s writing about releases on major or minor labels.
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the rise of Substacks and the like, blurring together the subscription models of platform capitalism and the old freedom of blog culture. It’s still in places like this that you’ll find the most exciting cultural writing. It’s why I remain so stubborn in keeping up this blog, but that’s not for lack of trying to spread my wings. From experience, when I’ve tried to pitch articles to various outlets over the years, every idea offered up has been rejected on the basis that it might alienate a magazine or newspaper’s general readership — yes, even when the music under consideration is itself an alienating stab into the heart of the contemporary. You can’t get deep with it; you can’t express yourself as the cultural conduit you’re otherwise asked to be. Music criticism cancels itself out, shining a light on what is current whilst doing little to mirror the shocks experienced, as any enthusiastic writer might be compelled to. In that way, the cynical position Cartledge describes, in which “[t]he experimentation and popular creativity enabled by the relative equality and working-class empowerment of the social-democratic era has been subordinated along with everything else … to the whims of the market”, retains considerable validity.
It’s a tendency I’ve felt frustrated with for years, not only in terms of music writing itself, but also how it is represented visually. The harsh flash that long characterised the photography in The Wire magazine, for example, apes the 90s fashion photography of someone like Juergen Teller, but gets stuck there. For all the column inches that might be dedicated to lightly critiquing the work of someone like Reynolds, in light of his analysis of our retromania, here is a magazine that, more often than not, transforms the ‘energy flash’ of 90s photography into an acutely photographic kind of stasis. This is something that frustrated me when trying to find work as a music photographer in the early 2010s, and it’s something that continues to frustrate me as I see this affectlessness carried over into contemporary music writing as well.
Why is this so? Why does so much writing about the present refuse to be contemporary on its own terms? Why is so much writing, which insists on a superficial understanding of “the new”, seem so incapable of being new itself? Why does so little music writing feel attuned to the contemporary concerns of other forms of writing (poetry, literature, etc.)? This isn’t a wholesale critique; if things were completely like this, I’d probably give up and clock out. And this also isn’t simply a question of writing style, but also of whatever else might be thrown into the mix. Too much — if not all — music writing, to its detriment, retreats into compartmentalising itself, and too often feels closed off from all other modes of thought around it (never mind within it, as the caricatures of Fisher show).
Personally, I listen to music — shocker — but I do not solely feel like a pair of ears. As I attempt, as a writer, to navigate the confounding nature of our present, I tend to draw on many sources. I like to write about music and poetry and philosophy and film and literature, picking up examples of each as I march along a path to some unknown destination — that is, into the future. I think that is neither pretentious nor uncommon. But as far as the flailing of “traditional” media goes, when trying to move from the total freedom of a blog to somewhere more “official”, you’re not allowed to think with culture in the same terms… “Save all your references and preferences for the books no-one wants to publish” is the message received. Is it really possible to write about contemporary culture too much, when our semioblitz is already too much to begin with?
The irony of critiques made against Fisher and Reynolds looms back into view here. “Write about the new”, a hundred critics implore their peers — well, they are (or were, in Fisher’s case), and in a vibrant and dastardly way that gets itself involved in the very aesthetic sensibilities it was writing about — most boldly in Eshun’s case — but most don’t care enough to really read it, or put in the work to understand all that they have to say…
Is the reason for this simply that thinking is hard? That rubbing up against the new New Flesh of our post-Videodrome present might not be as soothing as we want it to be when we seek the escapism of reading about our favourite artists? Whatever cynical answers to these questions might be given, it seems clear to me that something, some era, has ended. Not in terms of the music itself, but certainly in terms of how it is written about. As Fisher wrote about his first book, Capitalist Realism, the intention here isn’t to be overtly pessimistic; the intention is to be negative. Yes, so much has changed, and continues to, but not enough. We still live alongside the spectre of a world [in which music] could be free.
To the contrary, it’s almost as if, in our increasingly dominant forms of poptimism, critics try to ignore the stuckness of music criticism itself by hiding behind the shield of music’s continuing development itself. Music is disconnected from life, from politics, and this is supposed to be a virtue. No attempt is made to consider the influence of our temporally skewed world on the music we listen to, or when an attempt is made, with a eye to criticality and contemporary thought as a whole, they fail to see how they are circling around a problem that Fisher (the convenitent scapegoat) was far better attuned to than they are.
The coda to Inscoe-Jones’ book ends with a brief discussion of one of the most pressing technological issues in music today: the role of AI.
First, he notes Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle” as the single that kicked off last year’s defining beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Here again, as the book comes to a close, I feel the spectre of Fisher’s absence lurking.
The AI verses on ‘Taylor Made Freestyle’ are immaculate impersonations. The software Drake used didn’t simply recreate the voices of Snoop and [Tupac]; it recreated their cadences and flows too. This had once been the stuff of pure fantasy, the kind written by Mary Shelley. Once-living people, revived, Lazarus-style, from the dead. It was theft, of a kind, a dystopian fiction let loose upon the real world. And what was the reaction to this song? One giant, colossal shrug.
The track “elicited a sigh from hip hop fandom”, Inscoe-Jones continues, and was met with threats of a lawsuit from Tupac’s estate. This seems to come as a surprise. “Something which the likes of Blade Runner had portrayed as revolutionary — magical even — was, when deployed amid a conflict between two real artists, completely and utterly boring.”
Here again, more strange disparities. Are you supposed to think that Blade Runner‘s vision of AI enslavement and persecution is at all positive? Blade Runner is an apt reference here only given the fact that Tupac’s estate shut the whole thing down, “retiring” the replicant Tupac who’d wandered outside of their control.
An alternative reference might be made to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the flatline construct that Henry steals from a corporate mainframe — the digital revenant of one of his old accomplices, nicknamed Dixie.
A construct, in Gibson’s novel, is a digital simulacra of “a person’s stored memory/personality,” which is capable of “replicating [their] memories, skills, obsessions, even kneejerk responses” but which “doesn’t gain new memories”. It’s a feature of the novel that Mark Fisher ran a marathon with, way back in 1999. His PhD thesis, Flatlines Constructs, recently reissued by Zer0 Books — you can read the original here, since there’s a boycott on — centres on the way in which the flatline isn’t just some artificial entity we interact with, but finds its way inside the novel’s characters themselves:
In Neuromancer, “Flatline” functions as both a verb — characters flatline (surf what, for the organism, is the border between life and death) — and a noun — some characters are Flatlines (Read Only Memory data-constructs of dead people).
What Fisher alludes to, throughout his thesis, is the way in which we are Flatlines too. Long before the rise of social media, Fisher prophesises a future in which our own Flatlines could be constructed from the wealth of information recorded about us in newly digital media. But far from seeing this as totally dystopian, it’s a quality he likens to Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and schizophrenia:
[I]t is Baudrillard who has been most explicit about linking the new cybernetic communication systems with schizophrenia. Another name for schizophrenia as Deleuze-Guattari understand it is radical immanence.
The era of immanence, as Baudrillard repeatedly tells us, is also the era of code … Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard have made a point of using this more loaded term in place of the ostensibly neutral cybernetic buzzword ‘information’. Code entails stratification (and vice versa). Baudrillard’s remarks that fiction and theory are collapsing into one another are impelled in part by the postwar emergence of code as a crossdisciplinary hyperconcept. Code is both the means by which the bio-social is controlled and manipulated and a kind of fiction (but fiction without an author, fiction beyond the text). Fiction, in Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari’s theorizations, moves beyond the textual and the specifically “literary”; in Deleuze-Guattari’s terms, it becomes a “machine.”
Fisher sought a machinic form of music writing in this regard. He wanted to move beyond the text and instead offer up delirious writings that were completely immersed in — immanent with — the affects of everyday life. These affects were numerous. His writings can be as joyful, positive and humorous, as they can be depressed, miserable and cantankerous. And he wrote at length on how these affects were preyed upon by — were even the product of — capitalism’s capacity for libidinal engineering.
Fisher’s PhD thesis is all the more enlightening in the context of Inscoe-Jones’s celebration of postmodern code-scrambling. On the one hand, Inscoe-Jones highlights “the resounding flop of ‘Taylor Made Freestyle'” to suggest that AI music “is very unlikely to take the place of artists themselves.” He even imagines the poverty of a future that is not that far from what Fisher and Reynolds already saw coming themselves:
[T]he software at the forefront of this ‘revolution’ cannot generate any new ideas of its own; it can only reiterate, remix and rehash ones conceived of by living, breathing humans. It does seem inevitable though, that by the end of the decade, streaming services will be rife with pretty good AI riffs on songs the likes of which we’ve already heard endless times before.
But here comes that poptimism again.
The consequences of this may not be as dire as they sound [because] originality will become an increasingly treasured characteristic, and there are few better things for a culture to hold dear. Basically: don’t count the artists out too soon. They haven’t failed us yet.
A lovely sentiment, but one that again fails to consider the ways in which this future is already here. The sorts of music that Fisher and Reynolds poured scour on where precisely those produced by this same iterative process of music production with living, breathing humans already. The music criticism they find so lacking also starts to look like a kind of “artificial intelligence” in its own right. Indeed, the humanism of Inscoe-Jones’ conclusion rankles all the more when we consider the successive generations of artists who have leaned into the feeling that they are already robots for the culture industries, such as Kraftwerk and even SOPHIE, in her own way.
I wrote about this too in 2021, shortly after SOPHIE’s death:
Simply put, she had become the face of the future of music — something that felt most apparent in clips shared again and again after her death, specifically those taken from the endlessly endearing conversation she had with Sophia the Robot.
There’s this wonderfully uncanny energy to the conversation, but not from Sophia herself. Sophia is very much of the present — certainly new, but janky and a little bit dysfunctional, like a self-service checkout. It is SOPHIE who speaks like a being from the future, telling Sophia of all the things she might have to look forward to if she ever manages to join her on the pop plane.
This is something else I find jarring about Inscoe-Jones’ book: the aching humanism of its presentation, the focus on the individual artist, their artistic choices, influences, experiences, despite the fact that many of them problematise their own humanity, sense of identity, or even their memories. SOPHIE and OPN both, in this regard, engage with themselves as a kind of flatline construct; as flawed machines fed on sugar-coated trash, glitching and stuttering through a cyberpunk sensitivity to technology’s breakdown of the self itself.
This is something that a prior mode of music criticism engaged in as well. One of the earliest posts on Fisher’s blog, for example, ends with the haunting provocation:
All recordings are ghosts.
But are we really more substantial than they?
It’s not so simple to champion the ghost in the machine today, when the two have become totally (or at least increasingly) inseparable. And why is Fisher, writing 25 years ago, more engaging on this than a book published now? Why does Zer0’s reissue of a 25-year-old piece of almost-lost media feel more like a manifesto for a post-SOPHIE generation than a book that only really talks about how spiffing she is? How is a music criticism, which itself feels like an unthinking exercise in the reiteration of received notions and ideals, shorn of all criticality, supposed to help us understand the present and the concerns of the culture it produces? It’s not the future that is populated with flatline constructs, but the present. You are a construct.
I defer to the intro from the new clipping. album, which makes the point most succinctly:
Innovate or get passed by dumb luck
Either way you a flatline construct
And created by everything that went amiss
Appetite for detritus is just what it is
Acknowledging this isn’t lost-futures pessimism; it’s a virile negativity against the lag of the now.
Look in the mirror. See yourself as a construct. SOPHIE did, and OPN has continued to. Both demonstrate just how fucking fun a Fisherian inhumanism is to play around in. They only help further prove the fact that Fisher himself, now eight years on the bad side of the Flatline, is still more future than you.
Tra le difficoltà che più si riscontrano nelle società contemporanee, afflitte dalla predominanza delle immagini sulle parole, da forme di agire performativo orientate al successo senza inciampi, indotte dai modelli legati alla società dello spettacolo o della prestazione veicolati dal web, v’è sicuramente quella di capire la linea sottile di demarcazione che intercorre tra un fenomeno sociale e il suo rovescio patologico. Per esempio, come possiamo distinguere l’insegnamento del mito di Narciso dal narcisismo, considerato ormai come una tra le patologie della contemporaneità?
Here’s a nice write-up on contemporary considerations of Narcissus and narcissism, written by Anna Simone for Il Manifesto, which culminates in a lovely reading of the Italian edition of Narcissus in Bloom.
I want to be able to reference this without tripping over the current boycott of Watkins Media, so here it is: the introduction I wrote for the reissue of Mark Fisher’s second book in 2022.
Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life is a book out of time, chronicling a time out of joint. This is evidenced not only by the book’s final content, but by its temporally disjointed gestation.
As is common with all of Fisher’s books, many of the essays found here can be dated back to different periods of productivity on his k-punk blog. But unlike Fisher’s two other books – Capitalist Realism and The Weird and the Eerie – only Ghosts of my Life is explicitly structured as a collection of disconnected but thematically linked essays, many beginning with an acknowledgement of where they originally appeared.
Taking note of the years in which each chapter was written, we find a series of ruptures hiding in plain sight. Generally speaking, the book’s various essays were first published either on k-punk in 2006 or in the film and music press in 2011. However, the book does not account for this five-year gap, nor does it make any explicit case for its subsequent publication in 2014, but this introduction will attempt to do so, with the benefit of far more hindsight than Fisher gave himself, in order to reveal the strangeness of these differing times not just for Fisher but the world at large.
In the process, we will uncover why this untimely book is still so relevant today. Indeed, what is most striking about the years documented – 2006, 2011 and 2014 – is that so much happened during the intervening years. But against popular misinterpretations of Fisher’s work, it was not his position that nothing ever happens or ever changes, whether in culture or politics. On the contrary, between 2006 and 2014 – and again, between 2014 and 2022 – everything has changed, and that’s why it is so weird that so much has stayed the same.
In early 2006, the blogger Mike Powell noted an increasingly dominant trend in contemporary music. This side of the twenty-first century, a growing number of bands and record labels were dedicating themselves to the “tracks and traces, absences and ideals” of various twentieth-century sonic cultures, in a way that was both pleasantly nostalgic and affectively disturbing. The sounds produced were technically pop music, he said, albeit perverted to evoke “a degraded ideal”. [1] But something interesting was happening here: it appeared this process of degradation was producing its own cultural mutations.
A few other bloggers had noticed a similar trend. From the Ghost Box label and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti to the Caretaker’s woozy waltzes for haunted ballrooms, our newly digitised music platforms were increasingly littered with analogue ghosts. For Simon Reynolds, equally enchanted and turning to the topic on his own blog, these developments suggested “the coalescence … of a whole new genre or network of shared sensibility”, and it was clear this sensibility needed a name. But what to call it? “Hauntology is my early bid”, he offers – a word already in blogospheric circulation at the time; a reference to this music’s Derridean “spectrality” and the cultural absences it paradoxically makes present. But there had to be a better name for it – something that was a bit “snappier”, Reynolds thought; something “more phantasmal” and amorphous than this appropriation from French philosophy. After all, “hauntology” sounded like a name for some pseudoscientific study of the paranormal rather than a catchy name for a new genre of music. He implored the wider blogosphere to “get your thinking caps on!” [2] But predictably, the first name offered had already stuck…
A week later, Reynolds unearthed something from his archive. “Talking of spectres stalking on the outskirts, negation, etc., here’s some sort of ghost – the ghost of future-passed, or past-futurism, or bygone-portent-of-the-now…. something uncanny like that, anyway.” It was an article Reynolds had written in 1994 for the music weekly Melody Maker about a long-forgotten band called D-Generation, who made “techno haunted by the ghost of punk”. They were an apt band to resurrect in that moment, a decade later. There was “something eerie” about the way their sound and their attitude resonated with Reynolds’ “recent and current preoccupations”, he said, which all eventually found a home together in his 2010 book, Retromania: “the past-gone-mad rift-of-retro nostalgia industry thing, the invocations of postpunk… hauntology / memoradelia…” But it wasn’t simply the band’s prescient projection of post-punk ghosts into rave’s undead futures that had reignited Reynolds’ interest in them. “Here’s the fun bit,” he adds: “can you guess which very active member of our little community was actually in this band?” [3]
Prior to this moment, Mark Fisher had been using his k-punk blog to develop a “cold rationalist” philosophy – a sort of anti-capitalist post-[cyber]punk pop-modernist Spinozism, which sought to “produce joyful encounters” whilst still seeking to nullify “humanity’s enslavement to a vast immiserating machine whose interests are not its.” [4] This tension between a joyful positivity and a resistant negativity was incredibly important, remaining central to all of Fisher’s work over the years that followed, but the two positions were not always in perfect balance; the motor of Fisher’s thought was arguably the pendulum-swing between the two.
Case in point: after a particularly productive 2004, during which Fisher’s icy Spinozism was his primary concern, the mood began to change on k-punk in 2005. In the UK, the bell was beginning to toll for Tony Blair’s premiership, following the disastrous invasion of Iraq – the fallout from which was brought home by the London bombings in July that same year. The attacks were something of a watershed moment, with Fisher penning a particularly excoriating attack on Blair’s leadership in the aftermath. [5] But whereas we might expect British pop culture to enter a new phase of productive negativity, as popular discontent with the political establishment spread, it instead spluttered and stuttered alongside, going about its own business as usual.
It’s worth reminding ourselves just how bad pop music was at this time. There were flashes of greatness, of course – it was the year of Amerie’s “1 Thing”, for example, and Kanye West had just exploded onto the scene – but the best-selling album of 2005 in the UK was nonetheless James Blunt’s Back to Bedlam, with Coldplay’s X&Y coming in second place. Nickelback’s much-memed single “Photograph” was released that year too – arguably not a bad song, as far as country-rock ballads go, but its melancholic reminiscences were so utterly inescapable, not to mention indicative of Nickelback’s bizarrely unchanging sound, that they soon became one of the most widely derided bands in the world.
The most politically significant hit of that year, vaulting itself over an admittedly low bar, was Green Day’s critique of manufactured consent, “American Idiot”, which re-entered the charts after its initial release late the previous year. Meanwhile, though the Kaiser Chiefs’ predicted a riot on their 2005 debut, Employment, they were only referring to the raucous powder keg of a boozed-up and overcrowded Yorkshire “indie” scene, with tracksuited men and loose women throwing themselves around city centres just to feel something, all whilst being subjected to an oddly middle-class scorn by the very bands soundtracking their lives. This wasn’t “Anarchy in the UK” but rock’n’roll chaos utterly defanged and depoliticised, reduced to weekend fodder for white suburbanites who found themselves utterly bemused by whatever was coming out of the nation’s more diverse urban centres. Such was the irony of “indie”, looking down its nose at any truly homegrown and independent music scene, which, in 2005, included the first few mutations of grime and dubstep, such as UK funky and wonky.
Things didn’t have to be this way. In fact, it placed the UK and its popular culture at odds with elsewhere in the world. As the nation’s youth sang along to “I Predict a Riot”, Fisher noticed that, over the Channel, French students were actually out protesting. It was the year that the Contrat première embauche was first introduced – a new type of job contract for first-time workers, meant to encourage businesses to hire young people. But the bill also made it much easier to fire young people, eroding their employment rights. It was the introduction of a legislatively enforced precarity – neoliberalism in action. It saw millions protest and dozens of universities go on strike. Fisher couldn’t understand why, in the UK, things were so much more relaxed. “Why are French students out on the streets rejecting neo-liberalism, while British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, [are] resigned to their fate?” [6] This was notably a few years prior to the UK government’s infamous trebling of university tuition fees, which rapidly politicised a generation. Nevertheless, a partial answer to this question, Fisher believed, was to be found in contemporary pop culture, which both expressed and further entrenched this new malaise.
It was a malaise soon epitomised by the Arctic Monkeys, whose debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, was released in January 2006, just as the blogosphere was naming “hauntology”. The album soared to the top of the charts, breaking the record for fastest-selling debut album in British music history. But the band were little more than a pretentious Kaiser Chiefs, with most of their songs also ridiculing the near-riotous atmosphere of your local town centre and the general emotional stuntedness of the North of England’s various “indie” scenes. Despite their open contempt for it, however, the band still exuded the same lairy complacency and political resignation they saw all around them.
Fisher had little patience for any of it. “It is [a] reflexive impotence that you hear in the Arctic Monkeys”, he writes, rather than a kind of apathy or cynicism – “yes, they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it.” [7] As far as Fisher was concerned, their unimaginative and utterly uncontemporary sound was just an echo of capitalist realism. This wasn’t rock against the status quo, but rock mirroring the establishment’s own complacency – and with far less self-awareness than their songs’ lyrics alluded to.
It was against this sullen backdrop that Fisher’s critique of the present fully came into its own. Reading and responding to the comments made by Powell, Reynolds and others, he felt that the connection between the reflexive impotence of pop and politics was increasingly obvious. Set against the stagnancy of both, the hauntological music the blogosphere had attuned its ears to was like something else struggling to be born, pushing through the suffocating surface of pop culture’s hegemonic retromania. Fisher raised a pertinent question: Why hauntology now? “Well,” he suggests, “has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of ‘reality’ has ever felt more pressing?” [8]
This question led to some of Fisher’s best-known essays and blogposts, many of which are included here – passionate odes to Burial, the Caretaker, Stanley Kubrick, the Ghost Box label, David Peace… But by the early 2010s, it was all over. Hauntology had been a flash in the pan for a somnambulic mid-2000s, which was quickly wrenched from its slumber by the era-defining calamity of the financial crash.
The blogospheric backlash against hauntology began around the same time. In 2008, as shock waves from the crash rippled outwards, Alex Williams argued on his blog, Splintering Bone Ashes, that the time for mournful critiques was over. The crash presented the left with an opportunity and it had to be seized, but hauntology was a little too comfortable operating within the bounds of the very complacency it was critiquing. In this sense, the problem with hauntology, Williams argued, is that it “cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose”, with its penchant for “ghostly audio … seen as [a] form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism”. [9]
Though underdefined in this instance, the tensions (or lack thereof) within postmodernism had been a near-constant topic of debate in the blogosphere for many years. Thinking on this topic tended to follow the likes of Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who often argued that postmodernism was most visible in architecture, particularly in places like Las Vegas or Disneyland, where otherwise familiar styles and aesthetic sensibilities, gathered incongruously from across space and time, are flattened and arranged alongside one another like the revolving sound stages of a movie studio. But the point for Fisher and others was not simply that these forms were able to exist together; the problem was that they did so friction-free.
If hauntology is a form of “good” postmodernism, it is in the sense that its degraded ideals are positioned newly in tension with one another. It is not simply the observation that recorded ghosts are fading away into the ubiquity of postmodernism’s melting pot, but that they are fighting for survival and, as such, are still capable of interrupting a status quo that wants them gone. However, for Williams, the alchemical mixing of cultural detritus was not, in itself, good enough. He continues that, whilst hauntology was supposed to name a well-meaning aesthetic strategy that finally addresses “the deadlock which we face,” its recombinant nature only serves to further illustrate the problem at hand: our mournful “inability to properly think the new as such, and [make] of this condition something positive.” [10]
At first, Fisher took issue with Williams’ easy conflation between hauntology and postmodernism. “Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts”, he writes, “but one of its roles is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.” [11] Though his diagnoses are still denounced as too melancholic and too depressive by his critics today, Fisher was far from a pessimistic thinker. He did not think this sickness was terminal. Nevertheless, he is still disparaged today as a thinker who had given up on the present – a mischaracterisation he fought back against repeatedly.
For example, when Fisher wrote poignantly about the financial crash (and the failures of imagination writ large by its immediate aftermath) in his 2009 debut, Capitalist Realism, he found the book critiqued along the same lines that hauntology had been a year earlier. “There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book”, he writes on his k-punk blog. On the contrary, the book “isn’t pessimistic,” he insists, “but it is negative”. The “pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what [Slavoj] Žižek would call the ‘spontaneous unreflective ideology’ of our times” – and it was Fisher’s intention to shine a light on this pessimism, revealing just how weird capitalist realism, as an ideological “given”, truly is. “Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism”, he writes. [12]
Fisher nonetheless took Williams’ critiques on board. There is notably no mention of hauntology inside Capitalist Realism, even though it was likely the concept Fisher was best-known for writing about at that time. Though he draws on certain hauntological tropes – post-apocalypticism, reflexive impotence, the false seamlessness of capitalism’s “common sense” version of “reality” – it seems that, in 2009, he was writing his way out of hauntology’s melancholic foundation. So were a lot of other people. Soon enough, to mention the term in any discussion of contemporary music elicited the sort of groan reserved nowadays for a similarly clunky quasi-genre like “deconstructed club music.”
Take, as an example, a 2011 interview with aural occultists Demdike Stare, conducted by Rory Gibb for The Quietus. Gibb suggests that the band’s preoccupation with horror and the supernatural, like Fisher’s before them, “comes in part from the fact that there’s something quite arcane or mystical about unearthing all these old records, these old sounds, these ghosts of people trapped in recording form, and reworking them into something new, giving them a new lease of life.” [13] Band member Miles Whittaker responds: “Of course. As long as you don’t mention hauntology – that’s a misnomer.” What Demdike Stare were doing was more like “what witches did”, he insists, “which was conjure spells out of certain ingredients”; a kind of sonic alchemy, injecting a mundane materiality with some “hidden factor that makes the end result more than the sum of its parts.” [14] But if this isn’t hauntology in practice, I don’t know what is. In the end, this dismissal only goes to show how far the term had fallen from its perch, reduced to a hollow genre signifier for anything a little bit retro or backward-looking. In a bizarre twist of fate, “hauntology” had come to signify the very thing it first sought to critique.
But despite this general hostility to the term, Ghosts of my Life was published three years later in May 2014. To publish this collection of essays when many thought the term’s moment had passed, buried by backlash, once again begs a question first rehearsed by Fisher himself: never mind “hauntology now”, why hauntology again?
By the mid-2010s, it seemed the world was fated to settle back into its prior complacency. The Occupy movement, which followed the financial crash, had gradually disintegrated, with its various energies dissipating into other projects. In response, the establishment took to insisting more and more forcefully that there was still no alternative to its way of doing things. Shaken to its core, capitalist realism had begun to defiantly reassert itself. Why hauntology again? The answer is, by now, surely obvious: to find gaps in the seamless surfaces of ‘reality’ was still as pressing as ever.
The publication of Ghosts of my Life in 2014 felt like a perfectly timed response to this potential slide back into “reflexive impotence”. Indeed, though Occupy and various other protest movements had newly politicised a generation of young people, it would take a few more years before this energy was fully galvanised by the far more stable mass protest movements we know today.
These movements were fuelled, in part, by various forms of conceptual engineering. The hashtag era was like a new age of incantations; our political lexicon was exploded with new concepts, terms and slogans. It was a particularly productive time for the blogosphere’s various wordsmiths. Following the initial backlash against hauntology, other (loosely gathered) schools of thought began proliferating online. Alex Williams’ initial critique of hauntology gave rise to “accelerationism”, for instance – an alternative that Fisher wrote about both positively and at length, but which has since faced a far stronger backlash than hauntology ever did. [15] Later, Evan Calder Williams, in collaboration with China Miéville, developed “salvagepunk”, hauntology’s less gothic cousin, which advocated for a similarly “radical principle of recuperation and construction, a certain relation to how we think those dregs of history we inherit against our will”. [16] (Fisher admired this sensibility as well. [17]) Though each had its particular nuances and differing points of emphasis, each project nonetheless shared something in common: an interest in what Fisher called “the crashed present … littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects”. [18]
What is interesting about this shared concern today, in 2022, is that the crashed present now includes the wreckages of recent decades. Europe is still haunted by the spectre of communism, but adds to this the spectres of Occupy, Corbynism, or the more literal dead who give a furious power to the Black Lives Matter movement; cyberspace, in turn, is haunted by the spectres of hauntology, accelerationism and salvagepunk, not to mention “fully automated luxury communism” and countless more, each project having succumbed to the accelerated hype cycle of cultural commentary in the twenty-first century. All have either experienced backlashes or been rapidly forgotten, but the wreckages are by no means off-limits to us as a result. Their interrupted histories are still accessible to the curious, waiting to be unearthed from the online salvage yard that is the WayBack Machine, ready to be stripped for parts. In fact, this is how Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life still feels and functions: like a new construction pulled from the blogospheric wreckage of late-Noughties argumentation and critique. These are the ghosts of his life; they beg the question: what are ghosts of ours?
Still, these writings on hauntology might feel like relics today, orbiting a theory out of vogue, reduced to a joke. But each essay nonetheless remains a “baroque sunburst”, perpetually rediscovered by new generations of digital natives, who are still stalked by the analogue pasts that preceded them. This is no doubt why Fisher’s most popular concoction today is his unfinished “Acid Communism”, the “lost future” of which has captured the imagination of many since his death. He seemed fascinated by a younger generation with no memory of the Cold War or its immediate aftermath. [19] But young progressives are similarly less aware of the other failed leftist projects that defined our previous century and the potentials that still lie in wait amongst them. The “harsh Leninist superego” of establishment centrists, declaring everything has already been tried, only further fuels the young’s defiance. Capitalism makes these failed projects more accessible than ever, after all. They float incongruously through popular culture and the churning maw of internet culture. But it is up to us to seize them, and place them once again in tension with one another, denaturalising our persistent retromania. Acid Communism was a kind of popular modernist project in this regard, revaluating certain lost strands of twentieth-century progressivism and insisting that we “make it new”.
One of Fisher’s final essays, published in 2016, addresses this sensibility explicitly, revealing how his thought, over the years since Ghosts of my Life was published, had come to synthesise all of the above. Towards the end of the essay, written for a collection on the pervasive influence of rave, he first quotes Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic: “from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.” [20] Fisher adds:
This psychedelic imagery seems especially apposite for the ‘energy flash’ of rave, which now seems like a memory bleeding through from a mind that is not ours. In fact, the memories come from ourselves as we once were: a group consciousness that waits in the virtual future not only in the actual past. So it is perhaps better to see the other possibilities that these baroque sunbursts illuminate not as some distant Utopia, but as a carnival that is achingly proximate, a spectre haunting even – especially – the most miserably de-socialised spaces. [21]
The paradoxes and contradictions of Fisher’s thought here weave a psychedelic and atemporal tapestry, where spectres of lost futures, sent to us from the past, set about denaturalising the grotesque present and shining new light on what may lie ahead. Rave is emblematic of this sort of rapture, this sort of horrific joy, and Fisher’s baroque sunbursts are themselves joyful encounters with the new, with the weird and eerie, experienced in spite of the political establishment’s pessimistic and reflexive impotence. It is joy breaking through depression like a firework, beautiful and terrifying, and it is a sensibility he held onto until the very end.
Fisher’s final book, The Weird and the Eerie, for instance, is another negative (but not pessimistic) study of denaturalisation, as found in horror and science fiction, pulp and pop cultures. The introduction to “Acid Communism”, though far more positive, nonetheless shares this sensibility, and suggests that there is a fine line between psychedelic hallucinations and haunting apparitions. Though these projects may be aesthetically opposed, politically speaking they were closely linked. The Weird and the Eerie interrogates our tendency to associate the new with the strange, whereas “Acid Communism” reveals how this same sort of encounter can be experienced as a trip, through which our fear of the new is finally overcome. “There are more than enough terrors to be found there”, Fisher writes in The Weird and the Eerie, “but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.” [22] The empty shells, the haunted houses, the spectral figures and the madness of the present are not things to smother and sweep away, but other worlds breaking through. Do not be afraid.
On the occasion of this book’s re-publication, one question remains unanswered: If Fisher himself moved on from hauntology after Ghosts’ initial publication, is there still a place for the term in our critical vocabulary, beyond its contemporary status as a meme? I think so. Though so much more has changed over the last few years, particularly since Fisher passed away in early 2017, pop and politics have yet to fully recover from their Noughties undeaths. Despite the fact that Fisher did not think his diagnosis was terminal, the symptoms he described have nonetheless proven themselves chronic. The job of finding gaps is still pressing.
We need only catch up with the Arctic Monkeys, who have reached the terminal beach of their predictable trajectory, entombing themselves in a Teddy Boy cultural purgatory of their own making — quite literally on their most recent album, 2018’s Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino. The titular hotel is a knowing pastiche of the Eagles’ “Hotel California”, albeit with the once-contemporaneous critique of Seventies decadence neutralised. In reality, the Tranquillity Base is to the Arctic Monkeys as the Overlook was to Jack Torrence in The Shining. But the Monkeys don’t “shine”; they have no awareness of the ghosts that surround them. It is a demonstration of yet more reflexive impotence. All too aware that the hotel is not somewhere they can leave, the band settle in. The album was lauded regardless, nominated for countless industry awards, but the band are being celebrated for tucking themselves into the crypt of rock’s undead mythologies. They see themselves as timeless, but stagger on like zombies. Something’s got to give.
Meanwhile, in 2022, Burial has released a new album-length EP, Antidawn, which, according to its press release, reduces his work “down to the vapours”. The results are striking. In light of Fisher’s early praise for his first two albums, Burial’s more recent work is less an ode to “London after the rave”, to garage tunes and jungle rollers echoing strangely across south London boroughs, the interzones of overlapping pirate radio signals; instead, his music now evaporates like lawn dew under the low heat of an early sunrise, as the long night-bus journey home from the club finally comes to an end, the rave not just over but nearly forgotten. It’s bittersweet. Burial seems to find joy and euphoria in the dissolution of his sound’s auditory hallucinations – the oneiric echo of two-step, imprinted on eardrums by the sheer force of a sound system, finally fading as your ears recover from the sonic shelling. The line between hallucination and apparition is well and truly blurred here.
But rather than lead us into the morning, Burial’s latest EP beckons the antidawn of a night due to begin again. It’s the warm-up not of dawn but for the night ahead, where the world we know disappears and strange neighbourhoods re-emerge. This was the revelation of rave’s original heterotopias. As Simon Reynolds writes of the UK’s late-Eighties acid rave scene in his 1998 book, Energy Flash, club culture then was like
a secession from normality, a subculture based around what Antonio Melechi characterizes as a kind of collective disappearance. “One of the things I found exhilarating at that point,” confirms Louise Gray, “was the idea that there was this whole society of people who lived at night and slept during the day. This carnival idea of turning the ordinary world completely on its head. Like slipping into a parallel universe, almost.” [23]
Burial’s music has always been nocturnal in this regard, but it seeks the light. Indeed, what haunts us in his sound is not so much the death of rave as such, but the perpetual sense of early morning twilight: that time between when the club lights come up and your morning alarm goes off, when the dream is still alive, when it seems the utopian worlds teased by the heat of the night might still find a way to exist under the cold light of day.
Rave was always already hauntological in this regard. It was only ever an oasis, phasing in and out of existence as the powers that be tried to deny the vitality of another form of (night)life. It was always “a portal in perpetual collapse.” This was how Mike Powell described those hauntological records in early 2006, giving sonic form to the undeath of rave, subdued but still struggling to be reborn. Hauntology was, in this sense, the sound of resistance. “Resistance to crossing over into a full flesh sound world makes the experience doubly psychedelic; reality and unreality flicker in the same space, the tactile and intangible constantly fade into one another.” [24] Though it seems a far cry from “Acid Communism”, this sensibility makes Ghosts of my Life and its subtitular concept, hauntology, no less an interrogation of the psychedelic nature of postmodernism, the inherently spectral nature of our dreams and utopias, and the impact of capitalist realism on their degradation, which, despite its claims to the contrary, is never absolute.
It is for all of these reasons that Ghosts of my Life – despite the fact it is Fisher’s second book – constitutes the foundation of his work as a whole. It is not a pessimistic book because Fisher’s hauntology is not a space in which we should hope to rest and dwell; hauntology is for us, and was for him, a point of departure. It is the séance that precedes the exorcism, and that is why we need this book now as much as we did then.
Why hauntology in 2022? It is still necessary, still pressing, that we find gaps in the seamless surfaces of ‘reality’. Identifying the desires that haunt us is the first step towards denaturalising their shifts out of phase, and materialising these persistent spectres once and for all.
[1] Mike Powell, “Big Think: Tracks and Traces, Absences and Ideals”, Peanut Butter Words, 11 January 2006: <http://revelatory.blogspot.com/2006/01/big-think-tracks-and-trace_113700205182945837.html>
[2] Simon Reynolds, “[untitled]”, blissblog, 11 January 2006: <http://blissout.blogspot.com/2006/01/mike-powell-evocative-and-thought.html>
[3] Simon Reynolds, “‘techno haunted by the ghost of punk’”, blissblog, 16 January 2006: <https://blissout.blogspot.com/2006/01/techno-haunted-by-ghost-of-punk-talking.html> For more on D-Generation, see Reynolds’ introduction to Repeater Books’ K-Punk anthology, published in 2018.
[4] Mark Fisher, “Spinoza, K-Punk, Neuropunk”, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), ed. Darren Ambrose. London: Repeater Books, 2018, pg. 695.
[5] See: Mark Fisher, “The Face of Terrorism Without a Face”, k-punk, pp. 447-449.
[6] Mark Fisher, “Reflexive Impotence”, k-punk, 11 April 2006: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007656.html>
[7] Ibid. This post was later repurposed for Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism, albeit with any reference to the Arctic Monkeys removed. See: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2009, 21.
[8] Mark Fisher, “Hauntology Now”, k-punk, 17 January 2006: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007230.html>
[9] Alex Williams, “Against Hauntology (Giving Up the Ghost)”, Splintering Bone Ashes, 20 July 2008: <http:/splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2008/07/against-hauntology-giving-up-ghost.html>
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mark Fisher, “‘Frankensteinian Surgeon of the Cities’”, k-punk, 23 October 2008: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010770.html>
[12] Mark Fisher, “Spectres of Revolution”, k-punk, 17 January 2010: <https://k-punk.org/spectres-of-revolution/>
[13] Note that one of Fisher’s earliest “hauntological” posts, dating back to 2003, describes Nigel Kneale’s 1972 BBC serial The Stone Tape, in much the same way. “All recordings are ghosts”, he writes. “But are we really more substantial than they?” See: Mark Fisher, “Recording Ghosts”, k-punk, 12 November 2003: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/000818.html>
[14] Rory Gibb, “Unholy Matrimony: An Interview with Demdike Stare”, The Quietus, 17 February 2011: <https://thequietus.com/articles/05699-demdike-stare-interview>
[15] Only later dubbed “accelerationism” by Benjamin Noys, Williams’ initially unnamed position argued that the only worthwhile response to the stagnant self-referentiality of postmodernism was “to speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse” – not just comment upon culture but actively intervene within it, purposefully midwifing this thing trying to be born. Williams later clarified his intention was not to recklessly and violently usher in “the downfall of capitalism” – or, indeed, Western civilisation, as many continue to assume is accelerationism’s ultimate goal – but to radically alter “the nature of the processes of capital itself” and “the kinds of subjectivations [it makes] possible”. Fisher found a lot to like in Williams’ heretically postcapitalist position and explored it at great length himself. Unfortunately, this area of Fisher’s thought is often ignored or disparaged today, as accelerationism has been overshadowed by, on the one hand, its relationship to the philosophy of Nick Land, and on the other, its appropriation by violent white supremacists. It should be noted that Williams originally developed accelerationism from an explicitly “post-Landian” political arm of the burgeoning philosophy of “speculative realism”. This fact has been wholly erased from our popular understanding of “accelerationism” today, leading to Fisher’s many references to the term now coming across as insensitive or bizarre to most readers. See: Alex Williams, “Post-Land: The paradoxes of a speculative realist politics”, Splintering Bone Ashes, 26 October 2008: <http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2008/10/post-land-paradoxes-of-speculative.html>
[16] Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2011, pg. 31.
[17] See: Mark Fisher, “Desecration Row”, The Wire, September 2010 (issue 319), pg. 46.
[18] Fisher, “Spectres of Revolution”.
[19] See: Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun. London: Repeater Books, 2021, pp. 53-54.
[20] Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso, 2009, 612.
[21] Mark Fisher, “Baroque Sunbursts” in Rave: Rave and its Influence on Art and Culture, ed. Nav Haq. London: Black Dog, 2016.
[22] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2017, 9.
[23] Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador, 1998, pg. 48.
[24] Powell, “Big Think: Tracks and Traces, Absences and Ideals”.
Desire always emerges from lack for Lacan, and as such, is decentred from any given subject. This is because desire is always obliquely shaped by another, by the Other: “man’s desire is the desire of the Other”. Such a desire, wrestled with from within, may nonetheless intuit its own ‘object’, but this is only a construction. For Deleuze and Guattari, this construction may well be “a real production”, “a desiring-machine”, but when the Other confronts us, Lacan sees that we are only making castles out of sand. For Lacan, then, the true ‘object’ is always missing – the object = a.
Although many may mistake Lacan’s theory of desire as a monument built to failure, the vector emphasised by Deleuze and Guattari uncovers a true monument to love. Indeed, Lacan’s great unattainable desire, in his own words, nonetheless “produce[s] a feeling, not of revitalisation, but of disorientation”, which “creates a split that will in and of itself … have an enlightening effect.”
It is a understanding of desire – albeit as non-knowledge – that Lacan, in his sixth seminar, compares to John Donne’s sixteenth-century poem, ‘The Ecstasy’, which dramatizes the way in which “desire’s position is profoundly marked by, moored to, and riveted to a certain linguistic function – that is, to the relationship between the subject and the signifier” — which we find again in the brotherly love of Deleuze and Guattari, those writers who are each already a crowd:
This ecstasy doth unperplex,
We said, and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex,
We see we saw not what did move;
But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love these mix’d souls doth mix again
And makes both one, each this and that.
There is an echo here, in Donne’s poem, of Lacan’s later declaration that there is no such thing as the sexual relation. Indeed, “it was not sex”, the signifying act of love, that makes us ecstatic, but a “[m]ixture of things” that “makes both one, each this and that.”
The sexual act, then, framed as that most intimate activity, becomes some sort of vague attempt at accessing what, in the Other and in ourselves, is most hidden. The jouissance experienced is itself a mixture of the carnal pleasure derived from an attempt at knowing that fails us as much as it enthralls us.
When truly in love, even post-coitus, do we ever feel like we have found ourselves close enough to the person we love? That the object of our desire, the desire of the Other, has been in any meaningful way attained? It is an affect common to erotic poetry going back millennia; what Anne Carson refers to, via Sappho, as the “sweetbitter” — the sense we have of a desire that “is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer”, but is rather “[f]oreign to her will,” and “forces itself irresistibly upon her from without.”
It is likewise from the Greek that Lacan is taking his leave here, since “[t]he Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’” And this missingness, this hole, imbues desire with a spatial aspect that lends itself to Lacan’s topology. “Eros is an issue of boundaries”, Carson writes. “He exists because certain boundaries do.” And it is the absent centre within these intersecting boundaries, the a at the heart of Lacan’s famous knot, she continues, that is the true subject of love poetry: “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”
The love poem, then, might be understood as its own (dis)intercourse – that is, disinterring the signs that mark the body, but which do not, in fact, touch upon what the soul contains; disinterring in the manner of a grave, a hole, a lack, which carries with it all the significance of a person, but which not satisfied by a body for us to hold, nor vanquished when the body leaves us. Remember Heathcliff on the moor:
I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down. “If I can only get this off,” I muttered, “I wish they may shovel in the earth over us both!” and I wrenched at it more desperately still. There was another sigh, close at my ear. I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but, as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once: unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me: it remained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home.
To Donne, then:
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change, when we’are to bodies gone.
It is this same body-book that Lacan also titillates, in its absence, through his own form of speech, famous for its complex linguistic play and love of puns – and puns are themselves the production of a kind of jouissance that attempts to make up for a lack.
In attempting to draw out some gap in a lexicon, we combine two words that sit together and apart. “A pun is a figure of language that depends on similarity of sound and disparity of meaning”, Carson explains. “Within a pun you see the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than is available from the separate senses of either word. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing.”
Love and puns alike are ghostly. Love in language, and the language of love, are always insufficient, unfounded in a speaking that attempts to communicate what one feels in ways that cannot do love the poetic justice it deserves, but nonetheless builds a monument, a gilded mausoleum, for all that cannot be attained. A mausoleum beautiful and tragic, like the experience of a petite mort, which is nothing less than to be overcome by a caress from beyond the grave.
The sublime, after all, is subliminal. And love is a pun(n)y thing.
