Month: August 2025

This blog gets a really nice shout-out in the latest episode of the No Tags podcast: “Will the AI slopwave ruin music for good?” It’s a great discussion on the current perplexities of AI music production, and towards the end of the episode, Chal Ravens quotes from my 2018 post “Blob Blob Blobby” — one of her “favourite pieces of cultural writing of the century” no less! Thanks, Chal. I’ve long been aware that I’ll probably never better it.

A clip from one of Mark Fisher’s mid-2010s lectures has been hooked back into social-media networks, bringing him more posthumous virality.

An account called ‘dailyconceptmedia’ has shared a clip of Mark talking about smartphones in which he explicitly makes a few distinctions — for instance, between cyberspace (in general) and capitalist cyberspace — that have nonetheless gone ignored in every comments section, as people fall back on the limited picture they have of Mark’s work. Indeed, despite the content of what he says, most discussion of the clip has taken dailyconceptmedia’s contextualisation at face value:

More than a decade ago, cyberculture theorist Mark Fisher warned: digital culture was causing “the slow cancellation of the future.”

This comment is taken to apply wholesale, but Mark’s critiques of a hegemonic capitalist-digital culture were never so total — not even in the lecture being clipped. Or rather, his ‘total’ critiques only served to highlight how incomplete capitalist totality truly is. He sketched out the ‘totality’ in order to better reveal the gaps in its firmament. Why do we continue to ignore this operation?

This misinterpretation of Mark’s work has been a bugbear of mine for a decade now. His conception of ‘capitalist realism’ — as a pervasive ideological belief-structure that entrenches malaise through the assertion that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism — is all too often perverted in contexts such as this, used to embolden the ‘reflexive impotence’ he first identified twenty years ago and was viciously critical of. This is a real problem for me, as we retreat from Mark’s most radical and contentious assertions to fall back lazily on his most tame observations, ignoring what he sought to do about them.

I have experienced this firsthand when invited to talk about Mark’s work, and it continues to frustrate me that most people aren’t that willing to listen. Back in 2023, for instance, I was interviewed by Vox for the ‘Blame Capitalism’ podcast series they were developing at the time on a few proposed approaches to our contemporary condition. One episode was due to focus on accelerationism, and I gave a long interview to Noel King on its claims and Mark Fisher’s work in general. But in the end, the episode was scrapped and never broadcast, with all attention instead being given to the ‘degrowth’ movement.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Vox has a track record of paying journalistic lip-service to interesting currents of radicality, whilst maintaining a liberal sense of (im)partiality that is ultimately toothless. It’s a shame. Although we didn’t talk about degrowth in the interview I gave, I would have had plenty to say about it, had they invited me to comment. Ironically, I’d have echoed a growing consensus that Vox themselves have more recently reported on: “Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet; 561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak.” After decades of austerity, the last thing we need is a ‘leftist’ (read: liberal) rebrand for it. But this is still how we are prone to thinking.

Mark had much to say about this too, and it is in his critiques of capitalist cyberculture that they are felt most forcefully. The talk that has recently gone viral again is, I would argue, a dress rehearsal for one of the last texts Mark published, which addresses the question of ‘what is to be done?’ succinctly.

In ‘Touchscreen Capture’ — an essay published in the sixth issue of noon, the South Korean contemporary art journal, given over to the topic of the ‘post-online’, in 2016 — Mark considers the rise of the smartphone in the context of Baudrillard’s prescient prediction of “a great festival of participation” in the social sphere. Although his critiques of digital culture under late capitalism are damning, he does not give in the reflexive impotence of a capitalist-realist perspective here either. He writes:

One trap laid by communicative capitalism is the temptation to retreat from technological modernity. But this presupposes that frenzied attentional bombardment is the only possible technological modernity, from which we can only unplug and withdraw. Communicative capitalist realism acts as if the collectivisation of desire and resources had already happened. In actuality, the imperatives of communicative capitalism obstruct the possibility of communization, by using actually existing cyberspace to reinforce current modes of subjectivity, desocialisation, and drudgery.

But as ever, we ignored all of this. We prefer to wallow in diagnoses and take no account of how we might learn to live with and respond to them. Indeed, both online and offline, this logic is pervasive; the distinctions we make between these two spaces, and the supposed ease with which we can privilege one over the other — for instance, by emphasising the need to ‘touch grass’ — are a misnomer. Cyberspace is a black mirror of meatspace; in both, we are machinic components for systems of control. What is striking about cyberspace, however, is that we have watched the reterritorialization of this digital Wild West in real time, and in living memory. Nevertheless, whilst we despise meatspace austerity, we continue to be seduced by its application to the Internet. But digital degrowth isn’t the answer either.

I may be a pitiful millennial, but I do remember a time before the internet. I also remember the excitement and freedom of its early instantiations. It is only really since Trump’s first presidency that the online has succumbed to rapid decline, used evermore perniciously to “reinforce current modes of subjectivity, desocialisation, and drudgery”, whereas the Internet that people like Mark and myself first inhabited deconstructed these modes far more readily.

Of course, the Internet has never been a utopia, but we should at least be awake to the manner in which its potentials have been actively curtailed by a billionaire class afraid of the free circulation of information. The response to this is not retreat, however; just as retreat from society at large is not possible (or desirable) offline either. What we seek an escape from is the Digital Enclosure Acts of various governments (and the UK is once again leading the vanguard here); we must refocus our attention on the forces shaping various structures of feeling, rather than take these feelings to be unadulterated and subjective ‘truths’.

Yes, another modernity is possible. We are not hopelessly tethered to the only system on offer to us, online or off. And we must recognise that the ever-increasing and draconian restraints placed on cyberspace by capitalism are themselves reactionary responses the discontent of younger, digitally native generations, deepcooked in its machinations, particularly during the pandemic. Their digital culture is a frenzied space of new cultural assemblages that gives me great hope in this regard, and we should update our understanding of the present to account for what an online pandemic-modernism briefly made possible — because it was during the pandemic that everything changed (once again), although we have yet to register its reverberations.

Just as Mark argued in 2010, speaking of society more generally:

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 [nostalgic] 68ers, the hay bale [agrarians], or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.

The same can be said now. The bank crisis has been eclipsed through an imposed cultural amnesia, whilst we also face more pressing crises today as well. The pandemic is another crisis, for example, which changed everything. It is a crisis we are also at risk of prematurely repressing — not only to cover over the traumatic disasters it occasioned, which we might all understandably wish to forget, but also the glimmers of possibility that surged up in our imaginations with new potency following its total elision of social ‘normality’.

We can still use Mark to think through this moment, but instead we fall back on his diagnoses of a world pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre-genocide — as if his posthumous cultural spectre and the clarity of his diagnoses enables a shadowy nostalgia for a relatively less complex time. This is to say that Mark is absolutely still useful, still pertinent, still inspirational, but we choose to use his digital ghost otherwise. Speaking personally and by no means hyperbolically, it is one of the greatest disappointments of my life.

Mark’s death has allowed casual readers of his work to select only its most depressive aspects, and we continue to do him (and ourselves) a grave disservice when we do so. Mark was the first great thinker of the digital age, with most of his writing remaining online. He never thought that digital culture was itself the problem, slowly cancelling the future; it is capitalism that is responsible for the digital crises of the present, and its claim of monopoly on digitality is only a recent development, albeit one Mark foresaw with great clarity. But his critiques were only a diagnosis; not a prescription. He thought a great deal about how to respond, and I imagine he would have hated to see his work become cheap fodder for the reflexive impotence he raged against for two decades.

We must remember, now more than ever, the overarching position of his writing in the 2010s: the problem isn’t ‘digital culture’; the problem is capitalism.

Following the recent prelude…

I’m thinking here, initially, of Mark Fisher’s interest in Michael Jackson. His introduction to 2009’s The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson begins with the assertion that the “King of Pop” was “a symptom that needs to be reckoned with and analyzed”, in large part because “his death — which happened just after the disintegration of the economy and the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency — came at the end of an era, an era which he has done as much as anyone else to define.”

Perhaps most obviously, Jackson was emblematic of a creeping new reality of celebrity. Elvis came first, no doubt, but Jackson’s rise to fame saw him become “a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it’s scarcely possible to think of him as an individual at all … because he wasn’t of course …”

Fisher’s writing, as was generally true at this time, is deep-cooked in Lacan. It is easy to read his introduction to the collection, entitled “MJ, the Symptom”, as a play on Lacan’s “Joyce, the Symptom”, and it is a reading that certainly makes sense for Jackson on a comparative level. Jackson is a racialised Joyce, and we can spin this analogy out endlessly. He is the free radical breaking free from a family unit, the Jacksons; he is a man who identifies interminably with Peter Pan, a fictional child failed by Oedipalisation; the artist engaged in a white-becoming that, like pop in general, is increasingly distanced from its black mother-tongues; the man abused by his father, whom he left out of his will, struggling constantly to escape and reconstruct the childhood block that Joe Jackson corrupted.

But this was only Fisher’s interest at the start of his publishing career, and what is so often ignored today — and if you know me, my bugbear is precisely that so much of what is most interesting about the later Fisher (2013–2016) is perpetually ignored — is the way in which his developing lexicon was increasingly shorn of Lacanianisms. In the mid-2000s, for instance, Fisher believed that the “most productive area of conceptual discordance is that between Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari” — a discordance partly based on their respective attitudes towards Lacan. But towards the end of his life, the likes of Badiou and Lacan feature less and less in his writings; Deleuze-Guattari instead become the more essential background to Fisher’s postcapitalist desires.

So much of my work over the last eight years has been dedicated to contextualising the various shifts that occurred in Fisher’s work towards his unfinished Acid Communism, and it is here especially that Deleuze and Guattari’s influence becomes more pronounced. In the introduction to Postcapitalist Desire, I wondered if Fisher’s unfinished Deleuzo-Guattarian text might even be made analogous to Deleuze’s own unfinished book on Marx:

The sixth lecture in the series was scheduled to consider the autonomist movement in Italy in the late Seventies. In particular, Fisher asked his students to read a chapter from Nicholas Thoburn’s 2003 book Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Although Fisher intended to focus specifically on the book’s fifth chapter — on the politics of the refusal of work — it is nonetheless interesting to consider the fact that Thoburn’s text is similarly concerned with the unrealised plans of a great thinker.

Before his death in 1995, Gilles Deleuze had announced that his final book would be called The Grandeur of Marx. It remains an intriguing title, not least because Deleuze’s seemingly unorthodox Marxism has dogged the political reception of his work for many scholars. But, as Thoburn writes, this unfulfilled promise of a final work on Marx “leaves a fitting openness to [Deleuze’s] corpus and an intriguing question.”

“How was this philosopher of difference and complexity — for whom resonance rather than explication was the basis of philosophical engagement — to compose the ‘greatness’ of Marx? What kind of relations would Deleuze construct between himself and Marx, and what new lines of force would emerge? Engaging with this question and showing its importance, Éric Alliez [argues]: ‘It can be realized therefore just how regrettable it is that Deleuze was not able to write the work he planned as his last…’ But this is not an unproductive regret. For, as Alliez proposes, the missing book can mobilize new relations with Deleuze’s work. Its very absence can induce an engagement with the ‘virtual Marx’ which traverses Deleuze’s texts…”

The spectre of Acid Communism looms productively over Fisher’s thought in much the same way.

In light of this, I am also left wondering what other projects might have further buoyed Fisher’s thesis. Capitalist Realism has The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson; would Acid Communism, the true sequel to Fisher’s first monograph, have had a corollary?

I think it would have. One of the projects Fisher hoped to work on that I’m most disappointed did not come to fruition was a book with Kodwo Eshun called Kanye Theory (which Kodwo mentioned in his inaugural Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths in 2018). I do not imagine that anything was produced for this project, beyond the general idea. But it would have been fascinating to compare his writings on Jackson to West, and I imagine that the shift from Fisher’s interest in Lacan and onto Deleuze-Guattari would have been writ large here.

Kanye is another pop-cultural psychotic; an extreme example, partly because Kanye’s psychosis is so disastrous. But whereas Jackson can be understood somewhat neatly as a Lacanian psychotic, à la Joyce, Kanye is better understood in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms.

Although his mother’s death is often held up as the moment when all of his troubles began, this is only notable given the fact that the Kanye-self starts to careen violently through pop-cultural plateaus following his orphaning. The Kanye that we now know, and generally despise, is still a symptom, but not a sinthome. The names-of-the-father are too myopic here. His psychosis does not pass through mommy-daddy, who are instead supplanted by something else — perhaps fame itself, which West does not shy awkwardly away from like Jackson did.

Guattari is instructive on this point when he speaks of the phallus that so preoccupied Lacan, but which he also distinguishes from the father as such, separating the organ from the body. This is important, as although Jackson’s ‘castrated’ relationship to the phallus — as symbol of fantastical authority / authoritative fantasy — is made clear, West’s childhood raised by a single mother produces a very different symbolic relationship. If we wanted to remain Lacanian, we could say something about him symbolically being his own father — single child to a single mother; the ‘man of the house’. If his upbringing hardly seems disrupted by his absent father, being ostensibly middle class and well educated, it also lends itself to explaining his self-possession and self-confidence. But a Lacanian formatting starts to quickly lose its valency here. West has a far more immediate relationship to culture, and here we can turn to Guattari in The Anti-Oedipus Papers for a better understanding of the context in which West should, I think, be understood:

The phallus … plays a particular role in consciousness raising. It threatens mercilessly — in the name
of the socius — to explode consciousness, it haunts the structure as if it were its own machinic alterity. It speaks in the name of the most deterritorialized machinic alterity.

… The phallus promotes individual consciousness, the subject of the statement. In archaic societies, things were enunciated collectively, because there was less imperialism of one flow over others … Machinic alterity is taken to the extreme with the phallus. Ultimately, the phallus supplants the Oedipus. This is the endpoint of capitalist psychosis.

What I take from Guattari’s commentary here is the observation that the family and its associative psychoanalytic metaphors becomes unnecessary in any analysis of the late-capitalist subject. We are already aware of the fact that the family has been eroded, de- and re-territorialized by capitalist flows, and so capitalism’s supreme individualism has no need for the family any longer.

This is the irony of so much reactionary prevaricating from the right about traditional family values. “There is no such thing as society; only individuals and their families”, Margaret Thatcher infamously claimed, but her formula buries the lede here. We might read this instead as “There is no such thing as society; only the phallus and its families.” We could alternatively say ‘individual men and their families’; however, the Iron Lady complicates things here. But she makes herself an exception that proves the rule. Guattari’s ‘individual’ leaves space for anyone to ‘own’ the phallus, and so the apparent contradiction produced by Thatcher’s proto-girlboss feminism isn’t so contradictory after all. Families are only important on the basis of giving patriarchs a small social group to lord over, and Thatcher, despite her gender, was nonetheless still ‘the patriarch’ of both her family and, indeed, of the nation. (And no, not a ‘matriarch’, because this too suggests a feminist reading of her standing that is inapposite.)

This is one instance in which Guattari goes further than Lacan. For Lacan, “[t]he phallus belongs to the father. It is attributive. I.e. marked.” Lacan does his best to separate his terms from any reference to biology — anyone can ‘possess’ the phallus qua law (of dissemination) — and whilst some argue that he is betrayed by the linguistic (and gendered) structures to which he remains loyal, we’re still talking about appropriate symbolic forms of patriarchal power here. The issues only really arise when Lacan’s language is not only gendered, but also remains familial. The lede buried even deeper in Thatcher’s infamous utterance is that the equation is set up to retain an illusion of consistency. The truth of neoliberalism, fascism, and capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, can be reformulated as follows: “There is no such thing as the family; only individuals and society.”

We can return to Kanye here because he is the most blatant pop-cultural product of this new equation. The orphaned Kanye loses all balustrades between self and society, and thus finds himself utterly alienated from the all pretensions of participation in family life. We need only think of his fleeting appearances on Keeping Up With The Kardashians: the ‘reality’ show about the Kardashian family, which West is technically a part of, but does not participate in; when he appears on screen, is there any scene in which he actually speaks? West does not participate in the family, or what’s more, he does not participate in Oedipus (as an ongoing process).

But West appears very differently from the psychotics that Deleuze and Guattari have a tendency to romanticise. For all his contributions to popular culture, is he really any sort of revolutionary? The revolutionary must learn from the psychotic, they argue, for his resistance to encoding. But this is not necessarily a fully positive consideration. We might also learn from the psychotic by way of the encoding forced upon them, which is perhaps what drives them most ‘mad’. As such, the problem for West, perhaps, is that he cannot actually escape the family. His slide to the right, to its obsession with ‘family values’, its penchant for family chauvinism, makes it impossible for him to reckon with the freedom afforded to him.

Consider the following point raised asked by Deleuze and Guattari: “Everything changes depending on whether we call psychosis the process itself, or on the contrary, an interruption of the process (and what type of interruption?).” Psychosis, for Freud and Lacan, for example, is an interruption of Oedipus; psychosis arises when we cannot find our place in a signifying chain. It is an interruption, or eruption, within the symbolic family. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, psychosis is a process of life, an Orphic eruption of desire. But they also recognise that it can be difficult to tell the difference between the two, and even blame psychoanalysis for this. In always referring back to the family, the orphan is left desiring the thing they do not have — the thing that our psychoanalytic society insists upon: the family — without appreciating the freedom they actually have.

Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari reiterate Reich’s question — why do we fight for our oppression as if it were our salvation? — they are referring here to family chauvinism explicitly. It is our obsession with the family, as an inalienable and preternatural form of relation, that makes us fight for this utopic thing that fails us everywhere. It is the family that is exclusory, protective, isolationist, atomised, individualistic; it is family chauvinism that leads us to fascism. West is a fascist, then, because he is an orphan, a psychotic, fighting to secure an authoritarian sense of social order he has actually been freed from.

Far from contradicting Deleuze and Guattari’s romantic vision of the psychotic, West exemplifies it. The ambiguity of Anti-Oedipus, after all, is that it is capitalism that has made us psychotics, in the sense that its deterritorializing forces have freed us from oppressive hierarchical ties like never before. But in reterritorializing what is abolished back onto its own ideological rot, it is also capitalism that makes us “crazy”. Capitalism orphans us so violently that we went up scrambling for what is most reactionary within us: that most narrow sense of sympathy, our ‘family values’.

By way of another example, I would like to use my own. I have often thought about my own reactionary tendencies as a teenager. Being an adoptee made me anti-abortion, for example, because I felt that the very existence of abortion was an insult to my own continued existence. There is no logic to this position, of course, as if it were at all sensical to argue that it is worse to live as a child rejected and dead than a child rejected and alive.

This sort of argument isn’t uncommon, however. Sophie Lewis, in Full Surrogacy Now, notes how adoption rights activists have seldom been the friends and allies of feminists seeking family abolition. This is because, Lewis argues, such activists see in a politics of family abolition the very thing they “abhor most”, which is the argument that all children “are contingently rather than automatically their parents’ children; the products of an active choice of care, rather than a necessity borne of nature.” But if adoption rights advocates abhor this argument, perhaps it is because it is a contingency that they have already had to wrestle with, and in ways that the general population has not. This is to say that adoptees already live with the consequences of family abolition, whilst the world around them refuses to accommodate their experiences.

We live in a society that prizes the family so dogmatically above all else that it is precisely those have not experienced the family according to a norm that can end up fighting for its efficacy most forcefully. Michael Jackson’s version of this was similarly corrupted. His lack of a childhood led him to actively reconstruct one for himself, and within the bounds of his corrupted childhood, he reproduced various forms of abuse as well. The contradiction of Jackson, of course, is that he was already deemed a creep before his crimes were further brought to light. His corruption of a childhood held and protected by the family was double-edged in this regard. People would have seen him as a creep whether he’d abused any children or not — and indeed, they did, before everything seemed far more obvious after his death. West travels in the other direction. He seeks not a postmodern infancy, which Jackson represented, but rather a recapitulated family chauvinism. Both are symptoms, in this regard, corrupted by a far more immediate relationship between self and society. But whereas Jackson fantasised about a life freed from familial tyranny, West seeks that familial territory again, as it is the very thing that has been vanquished. Faced with this situation, however, he, like the rest of us, fails to see just how free he is.

This is why Fisher’s Acid Communism — had he finished it — would have been prescient. At a time when everyone else was fearing the rise of the Acid Right, he looked to the Acid Communism that this newly explicit socio-political situation was actively covering over. West would have suited his argument as a corollary because West is that most extreme pop-cultural example of what happens when this new freedom is reterritorialized by capitalism. But whereas many others have since leapt upon this current as a scapegoat, they have also helped to further erode the potentials offered to us within the present, suppressing any potential for consciousness-raising by instead trying to keep tabs on processes of reterritorialisation. We have missed the moment of deterritorialization, that moment when things were primed for intervention.

Kanye West is symptomatic not only of the present’s worst excesses in this regard, but like so many other celebrities who have succumbed to over-exposure to society, he is also symptomatic of our failure to offer up a narrative capable of competing with, even defeating, capitalism’s family chauvinism. West is an orphan we have failed twice.

Last week I read Sherry Turkle’s first book, Psychoanalytic Politics, which offers a very helpful overview of Jacques Lacan’s relationship to and influence on May ’68. Having spent most of this year working on Lacan and trying to understand the finer points of Deleuze and Guattari’s break from (or exaggeration of) his thinking, Turkle has very deftly cut to the chase and helped me filter out some of the noise.

What Turkle gets to grips with are the various successes and failures of psychoanalytic discourses in orbit of May ’68, and the ways in which they were utilised by radicals, reformists and conformists alike. For example, whilst the subversive quality of (particularly Lacanian) psychoanalysis is its identification of the mainsprings of social discontent, such as the family — enclosures previously believed to be protected from or otherwise positioned above societal instability (a la Hegel and his principle of ‘natural right’) — psychoanalysis was nonetheless called upon to offer guidance to families navigating the status quo’s attempts to address a crisis of its own making. It is from this promiscuity — and the inconsistency of its application by Lacanians and others alike — that has led to so much misunderstanding around what psychoanalysis is actually for.

The error of psychoanalysis is made worse — in Deleuze and Guattari’s view at least — by its Janus-like comportment towards the family in this regard, becoming a reterritorializing accomplice for the ‘normativity’ it simultaneously calls into question. For example, whilst psychoanalysis presents the family as a source of all our problems, rather than a shelter from the chaos of society at large, in viewing the family as an interminable structure, the universality of which must be (structurally) preserved, it often undermines its own radicality. This is to say that, in retaining its focus on the societal microcosm of the nuclear family, in order to express how the various crises modern families face reflect the crises of society at large, psychoanalysis fails to attend to the ways in which society’s fragmentation has far surpassed that of the family, meaning that the “one-to-one relationships” psychoanalysis tries to draw up between self, family and society are no longer in alignment. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family is increasingly irrelevant as a mediator between the self and society. Today we should be considering this relationship in all of its complexity and stop using the family as a reductive capsule for crises that far exceed it.

The psychoanalytic predilection for using the family as a constant point of reference, even as it questions its efficacy, is thus called into question most powerfully in orbit of the events of ’68. More specifically, the problem is that this ideal rests on an Oedipal triangulation that is no longer apposite under late capitalism, and every time the question is posed in terms of a liberty in relation to the (symbolic) father, revolutionary charges towards freedom are always doomed to fail.

In paying passing attention to the various challenges brought to Lacanian orthodoxy, Turkle’s analysis of Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless leaves much to be desired. She refers to Anti-Oedipus as “[o]ne of the most powerful and … popular expressions of post-1968 naturalism”, for instance, ascribing to Deleuze and Guattari’s project a kind of diatribe in favour of a return to an Edenic ‘state of nature’ — an argument that doesn’t hold up for me, even in the context of Turkle’s own analysis. Nevertheless, the broad points she makes are nice and succinct, and I’ve been thinking about them a lot.

For example, when addressing Lacan’s affiliation with the antipsychiatry movement, Turkle writes that “Lacan’s support comes most directly from the way in which he demolishes the notion that there is a ‘normal’ self that is autonomous, coherent, its own ‘center’.” Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus at its most subversive when undermining an American ego psychology; when “it undermines the formulations of the self that are implicit in our language, and … puts each speaking subject in an intimate relationship with the fragmented self experienced by the schizophrenic.”

This is a position that reaches its limit in Lacan’s later seminars on the sinthome, wherein we find Lacan strafing closest to Deleuze and Guattari’s position in his reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and its ‘psychotic’, creole prose. But even here, Joyce is understood through microcosmic Oedipal dramas, which blunt a more fitting analysis of British imperialism in Ireland and its consequences.

It’s a position within Lacan’s writings that has been coming back into fashion recently, but this rerun tends to ignore a lot of the (much better) work that went on around him. As an aside, Maks Valen?i?’s recent project, “psychotic accelerationism”, is attempting a synthesis of Lacan and Nick Land, but is making too much work for itself in this regard. It is a project that is attempting to “refocus” accelerationism by going back to Lacan, rather than understand that the basis for Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy was already going beyond him, or what’s more, accelerating beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis’s rigid structures. “Life must never get caught in the trap it sets for itself” is a mantra invoked; Deleuze and Guattari’s position, expressed through their project of schizoanalysis, however, is that “Lacanism must never get caught in the trap it sets for itself”. And truly, as I’ve found over the last year, Lacanian psychoanalysis is nothing less than a trap for the psyche.

Lacan’s psychotic — especially right now, and especially in the context of Nick Land’s writings — is a lot less relevant here than Deleuze and Guattari’s. They avoid Lacan’s trap very successfully. Indeed, I have noticed, throughout my recent readings of postcolonial discourses, that it is not for nothing their work is far more regularly cited by the likes of Édouard Glissant when addressing a new “poetics of relation”. This is because, for all of psychoanalysis’s useful critiques of Western normativity, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is better suited to a more global purview, which gets out from under imperialist and colonial biases and enclosures of thinking. Lacan may well be subversive when questioning the ‘truths’ of Western society from within, and he may well enjoy the moments when those truths ‘psychotically’ break down, but everything is still concerned with the Father, leaving out the mechanisms of imperialism that are much more complicate,d and this is always its point of downfall.

By way of an example, Turkle, summarising these different positions, writes:

Deleuze and Guattari take Lacan’s ideas about the decentred subject and carry them several steps farther than he does. Although Lacan believes that the self is constituted by imaginary misrecognitions and rupture, he still works to diagram and even mathematically express the relationship among its elements. But Deleuze and Guattari describe a self of such flux and fragmentation that a methodology of trying to grasp discrete relationships between determinate objects is clearly missing the point. For them, the self is a collection of machine-parts, what they refer to as “desiring-machines” … Each person’s machine parts can plug and unplug with the machine parts of another: there is no self, only the cacophony of desiring-machines … Fragmentation is a universal of the human condition, not something specific to the schizophrenic.

It is on this basis that “Deleuze and Guattari advance a ‘politics of schizophrenia'”, because they believe that schizophrenia is “a privileged experience”, because “the schizophrenic, in the grip of this experience, is in touch with fundamental truths about society.” The multifaceted consciousness of the schizophrenic thus becomes of interest to Lacan in Ireland, but his position is lacking when situated within black studies, for example.

Considering the ways in which this epistemic privilege is made manifest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Turkle continues:

For them, the first way in which the schizophrenic is privileged is epistemologically. The schizophrenic has not entered the symbolic dimension: he has not accepted the epistemology of signifier to signified…

Deleuze and Guattari also present the schizophrenic as privileged politically because, essentially, capitalism cannot tolerate the multitude of possible relationships that can exist among the desiring-machines.

Since capitalist society “cannot tolerate the free circulation of this revolutionary desire”, it thus “imposes limits on it, constraining the relationships among the desiring-machines, enforcing order where there is only flux” — in this way, Lacanianism and capitalism share too much in common to ever be true opponents. But it is also capitalism itself that lubricates this free circulation. It sets up a prohibition of desire at the same time as it attempts to unleash it. It’s the sort of paradox that Deleuze and Guattari identify within the family and also at the limits of the Oedipus complex (whether Freud’s or Lacan’s).

For example, in Anti-Oedipus, they write how psychoanalysis cannot seem to think subjectivity as such without a kind of foreclosure; persons, they write, “do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them, any more than they exist prior to the triangulation into which they enter” — the triangulation of mommy-daddy-me, but also of Freud’s ego, superego, id; Lacan’s RSI; even Hegel’s triadic dialectic. “We can therefore see the property the prohibition has of displacing itself, since from the start it displaces desire.” Capitalism, in the large, functions like this by way of its reliance on an artificial scarcity. Under capitalism, you are free to desire anything you please, but unfortunately for you, you child-like pleb, resources are scarce and you need to learn to live within limits. Capitalism thus rests upon its own logic of the dangling carrot. It instigates prohibitions in order to structure desires, and this results in mundane paradoxes and traps, whereby we are told we cannot critique the form of society we actively participate in. This is why capitalism, like Lacanianism, is fundamentally structured through lack. Lacan’s theory may rest on this in order to critique it, but it also struggles to get beyond it, hence the ambivalence that later surrounds him in far more revolutionary moments.

In attempting to escape this trap, Deleuze and Guattari develop what was later explored in the blogosphere under the name accelerationism. As Mark Fisher wrote in 2013, accelerationism rejects

the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits. Accelerationism is also the conviction that the world desired by the Left is post-capitalist — that there is no possibility of a return to a pre-capitalist world and that there is no serious desire to return to such a world, even if we could.

Projected back onto Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of schizophrenia, we find them arguing for each of these points in turn. First, not everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to is — a position akin to their position regarding the family; not every mode of subjectivity produced “within” the family fully belongs to it either. There is often errancy, which capitalism attempts to contain by infinitely adding new axioms to its lawful structure (colonialism). Whereas Turkle interprets this as a naturalism, a state-of-nature return to pre-capitalist modes of sociality, the question here is one of escape rather than return. As Deleuze and Guattari write, in their book on Kafka, that “the problem isn’t that of liberty but of escape”:

The question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.

The psychotic is still an interesting figure in this context, and it is certainly the figure central to Anti-Oedipus, constituting a bridge between Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan. But I am increasingly of the opinion that all historic attempts to strengthen this bridge — of which there are many — too often miss the point, replicating the Lacanian trap that Deleuze and Guattari themselves sought to escape from. The focus of my PhD is that there is another figure in their work, given far less airtime, that is rather more appropriate, less intellectually scandalous, less Lacanian, and less impotent. That figure is the orphan.

But I am less interested in the orphan right now, at least in writing all of this here — I am saving all that for my thesis. What interests me is the way in which we remain fascinated with psychosis at a pop-cultural level.

Even though Deleuze and Guattari’s project is often disparaged for the ways in which they romanticise psychosis, we all do this today, or rather, we have done until recently. Indeed, I think Deleuze and Guattari have been vindicated, and one way in which we can demonstrate that is by looking at two figures, each representative — or symptomatic — of a certain pop-cultural era: Michael Jackson and Kanye West…

To be continued…

Somehow copy the sweet conduct of these
Young olives in the spring mistral a-quiver…

One becomes sorry to become so soon…

— “Why Wait?”, Lawrence Durrell

Bouldering gingerly across a rocky outcrop, K. takes up her perch. We are close to the summit of the Massif des Albères, where the view is everything.

Looking north, the ground plummets far beneath us. Green fades to grey as the city of Perpignan spreads itself thick across the horizon. Looking south, glimpses of Catalonia break the treeline.

On the drive up, we passed isolated hamlets and the occasional hikers’ refuge – all now hidden by the canopy of the surrounding forêt domaniale. Strands of mist and low cloud cling to the treetops uncharacteristically, even as the leaves rustle gently in anticipation, waiting for the arrival of the north-westerly wind known as the mistral, which rushes upwards from the distant sea, cutting across a coastal curve that stretches from Toulon to Girona.

I begin to meander towards K., following her along the craggy ridge. The wind blows me this way and that as she looks across the Pyrenees, which flows westward as far as the eye can see. At her back, the sea glamours. We look past each other and grow evermore distant.

Barely visible in a distant cove, I try to catch a glimpse of the temporary centre of our universe: the port town of Collioure.

‡

In Collioure, re-enchantment with the world still feels possible. Dazzling is even a profession here. By night, small boats shine lights on the surface of the Mediterranean sea, coaxing anchovies and sardines into invisible nets. The fishermen learn their trade from the sun, no doubt, which dazzles everything.

It was the perfect environment for Henri Matisse, who arrived in Collioure in 1905, looking to escape Parisian poverty and a cosmopolitan art scene he found stifling. But the town was not his first port of call. He had first travelled to the south of France a year earlier in 1904, landing in St-Tropez at the encouragement of a more seasoned transplant, Paul Signac, who had arrived in the region at the end of the last century.

An influential neo-impressionist, Signac was also an enthusiastic anarchist and vice-president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. He arrived by the Mediterranean sea in search of new freedom in life and in art, and he claimed to have found it through an adherence to the pointillistic style then in vogue.

Signac’s enthusiasm for the region did not hurt, but Matisse took little convincing to join him in the southern sun. Having grown up in a dreary northern textile town that supplied the French capital with its linens, he was anxious to break free of Paris’s orbit, and Signac’s forceful personality soon made him an important mentor to the artist in a new and alien environment.

Matisse’s time spent with Signac was not as liberating as he had hoped, however. Signac was abrasive and bull-headed in both his artistic and political beliefs. Their fellow Tropézien, Henri-Edmond Cross, perhaps most succinctly captures the will to power expressed by Signac’s assembled renegades. Nature, they believed, was nothing but “disorder, chaos, gaping holes”, and it was the job of the artist to bring order to the Real:

Offset this disorder, this chance, these holes with your order and profusion … Select fragments or details of the beauty on offer. Impose order on these fragments, always bearing in mind the end result. At this moment, we make a work of art. We transform, we transpose, we assert power.

But Matisse, who had journeyed south in the hopes of developing an artistic vision all his own, was struggling to assert himself under the group’s influence, feeling overshadowed by their politicised aesthetics. When he tentatively began to move away from pointillism, utilising much broader brushstrokes than was customary, Signac was not shy in expressing his distaste for Matisse’s developments. Now feeling suffocated by his friend and mentor, Matisse grew anxious, plagued by insomnia and self-doubt. He sought new climes to make his own.

‡

It was 2021 then. Lockdown restrictions had been tentatively eased. K. and I had moved to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, nine months into the pandemic, in hopes of escaping the pressure of London under quarantine.

It was a difficult time to meet new people, and we made only two friends during our first eighteen months in the city – a young couple who lived opposite. Introductions were first made via neighbourly greetings card, kicking off an epistolary friendship that grew over weeks. We started leaving gifts on each other’s doorsteps – mostly plant cuttings and booze – before inviting each other into our quarantine bubbles. When spring arrived the following year, we drank beer in our respective gardens, exchanging tips on what grows best in the city’s soil.

As the world began to hint at a reluctant return to normality, one of our new friends explained that their uncle had a house in the south of France, and they’d love it if we joined them there for a week in the sun. Whereabouts? In Collioure, they said.

I had been two Collioure twice before: first with my parents in 2008, who were so taken with its light that they began planning their retirement to a caravan park outside the neighbouring town of Argelès-sur-Mer; then again, with K. in tow, in 2013. But a few months later, tragedy struck. My mam started to lose sensation in her legs and had major surgery to remove something large but benign that had been pressing up against the nerves in her spine. The anaesthetic wore off along with all her senses.

The doctors suggested that psychosis was sometimes triggered through steroid treatment in alcoholics. She terrorised the ward, got moved onto a mental health facility, and terrorised that place too. They moved her home and she terrorised us. I barely left the house for six months, before eventually breaking free, moving nomadic and traumatized between the towns and cities across England and Wales. I’ve never stopped running since.

It had been eight years since all that had transpired, and I had not thought about Collioure much since. But I was nonetheless struck blind by the serendipity of our new friends’ intended destination. K. and I accepted their invitation gladly. I had loved it and still loved it, irrespective of all that came to pass. in orbit of each visitation. I thought about rewriting my future there. Instead, I should have recognised the omen of a new return.

This third trip to Collioure was shrouded in a bright melancholia. The heat, the light, the mountains, the mistral: they were all tonics. But I found myself despondent and uncommunicative, smoking copious amounts of cheap tobacco and disappearing into a tattered copy of Madame Bovary, barely keeping up appearances. Finding myself far more haunted by my parents’ dashed daydreams than I had anticipated, it soon became clear there was no future for K. and I in Collioure either.

We called time on our decade together shortly after our return home.

‡

On a trip to visit her sister in nearby Perpignan, it was Amélie Matisse, Henri’s wife, who first set foot in Collioure. Not that it was an entirely unknown location to a fin-de-siècle generation of pointillists; Signac himself had visited and painted the town’s harbour and belltower in 1887. But no artist had yet chosen to settle there.

On his wife’s recommendation, Henri arrived in the town by train and was immediately taken with it. He implored his friends and the rest of the family to join him as he found bed and board for the summer. All seemed to confirm his fascination with its light. Each of them in turn describe not a dazzling, however, but an enlightenment.

Andre Derain, with whom Matisse would develop the most fruitful artistic companionship, was particularly inspired by the town’s colours: the tanned skin of its working people, the blue beards of its sailors, the tones of the trees, the colourful pottery so popular in the region. “But it’s the light, a pale gilded light, that suppresses shadow”, he wrote in a letter to another painter, Maurice de Vlaminck — it is the light that makes it all come alive.

The question now was how to capture this light for all to see. “The work to be done is fearful”, Derain adds. “Everything I’ve done up to now strikes me as stupid.”

The light’s effects on the northerners did not come as a surprise to Paul Soulier, a native of Collioure. It is “this intense light, this perpetual dazzlement, that gives a northerner the impression of a new world”, he writes, “struck above all by the bright light, and by colours so strong and harmonious that they possess you like an enchantment.”

Later befriending Soulier, Matisse translated this enchantment onto canvas with a bold flatness, and according to one biographer, it is his 1905 work The Open Window that “is perhaps the richest and most radiant expression of Matisse’s sense that painting gave access to another world: a mystery, glimpsed through an open door or window”.

‡

Collioure has continued to linger on in my dreams. I have thought about it often. I have thought about the crack-ups and new beginnings that have orbited each visitation.

As I begin to write these words, it is 2023. The pandemic is over, but its lingering effects are hard to shake. I live in Newcastle now, where I am pursuing a doctorate and transing my gender, trying to build a new life on top of the wreckage of my twenties.

On arrival in the city, six months after our last trip to the south of France, I suffered through a mental breakdown as all of life’s familiar habits turned sour and curdled in a post-pandemic malaise. Nine months off work, with no complacent relationship to hide behind, I was finally forced to reckon with the trauma of homelessness and a lifetime of repressed queerness. But for all my bold attempts to start afresh, I cannot escape the bittersweet knowledge that everything I once knew about my life is now over.

I live alone now on the third floor of a block of flats, unable to weather co-habitation without it triggering a slow descent into agoraphobia. Through the windows, the sky performs for me nightly. Coastal winds leave the air frigid, but if you’re lucky, aurora borealis can be seen above on an evening.

For all the city’s beauty, the winds cloud my eyes and lungs during the long and damp nights of winter, in ways that stifle my mood in turn. I have yet to relearn how to care for myself as a single entity. I am sick constantly. My dad, having grown up in nearby Sunderland, refers to it affectionately as England’s ‘Bronchitis coast’.

My penchant for rolling tobacco only makes matters worse. Rather than kick the habit, I cling onto the mildness of its effects. Lesley-Ann Brown writes that “tobacco is considered to be the grandfather of plant medicine … traditionally used to treat grief.” Today, it is the only remedy I self-administer with any regularity, most often late at night when I set about writing all my thoughts down. This only offers me a temporary reprieve, however. The stale smell left behind by indoor smoking accumulates alongside my own stagnancy. I am too often nocturnal here.

Turning away from the drabness of a Northumberland winter, I look to the wall behind me, where a familiar light emanates from my newest and most-prized possession: a large framed print of Henri Matisse’s The Open Window, depicting a view of Collioure’s harbour from the artist’s studio.

I situate myself beneath the open window with ease, imagining myself drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes just beyond the window’s balustrade. I have done that, I tell myself. I will do that again.

I transport myself there constantly.

‡

In The Open Window, we see the shutter doors leading out of Matisse’s studio, located above what was then the sandal-makers, to three potted plants sitting on a short balcony. Beyond, we see the beach, a gathering of sail boats, and the harbour walls. The vista, however, is rendered completely flat across a dynamic field of colour.

To focus in on the painting’s details, one is reminded of the brightest examples of Mark Rothko’s journeys into inner space, from the miniature colour fields he daubed onto the concrete columns of New York subway stations to the towering planes of his more famous later works.

Rothko arguably encapsulates the end point of a modernism that Matisse inaugurated. His Seagram murals – monuments to tragedy – are named after their originally intended destination: the walls of the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. Growing increasingly nauseous at the thought of his works looming over New York’s dining well-to-do, he withdrew the paintings and cancelled the commission in 1960, later donating them to the Tate in London a year before his suicide.

The commission was already disagreeable to Rothko, as he hoped his paintings would “ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.” The murals were a conscious protest against the decorative. Matisse, by contrast, exploded what decorative art could be. His experiments in Collioure drew painting out of itself. The flatness of his paintings becomes a radical immanence. Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, reflecting on Matisse’s 1911 work Interior with Aubergines, argue that it constitutes a kind of “setting-in-becoming, which Matisse describes as ‘decorative’ in a sense that is entirely his own since it implies a radical new relation between art and its outside, one that touches on the problematic of the decorative itself.” They add:

It is this truly radioactive decorativity of Matisse’s painting that renders virtually possible, and even demands … a new alliance with architecture [by asking] the question of how to integrate the ‘human’ into the decorative.

‡

The painting becomes a focal point, an anchor around which I organise my new life. It is my Combray; my Hawaiian postcard tucked in the crevices of a vehicle’s dashboard; my bittersweet escape. Its prominence in memory soon takes on a further significance that is life-changing. Remembering is transformed into hallucination, and out of its flatness grow visions of life to be lived full-heartedly.

Following a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I spend twelve months on the waiting list for a course of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR). Its efficacy disputed, it is a controversial form of therapy that essentially replicates REM sleep – that phase of unconsciousness when the body is paralysed and the eyes dart wildly, left-right, left-right, behind closed lids; that phase of sleep when dreams occur. With my therapist, I revisit painful memories of entrapment in the family home, periods of capture and neglect, unwitting abuse. Left-right, left-right, my therapist’s arm swings like a metronome as otherwise inert memories become pools of swirling emotion. It is an acutely hallucinatory process; a process in which one dreams awake.

Since a trauma is a memory made free radical, the unconscious cannot neatly arrange such experiences into a narrative to be told to itself – a chaos that our dreams, it is believed, are able to alleviate. But unlike dreams of life’s general joys and stresses, trauma is free-floating, like a molten pinball ricocheting through past, present and future. When afflicted by a trauma, the memory factory at the centre of the brain, the hippocampus – its name given for its seahorse-like appearance – metamorphosises into something more resembling a hydra.

My therapist guides me through memories that are suddenly no longer ancient marks, gouged permanently onto the walls of the unconscious. Instead, they are oil paintings yet to dry, primed for reworking. I intervene in old haunts and interact with past selves to finally suture long-gaping wounds. It is hard work, and in the midst of therapy, my darkest thoughts become overwhelming; all the better, then, that at the end of each session, we return to a ‘calm place’ I have chosen for myself weeks before.

That place is Collioure. I stand on the promenade, smelling a mixture of sea air, cigarette smoke, sardines and anchovies, fresh coffee. I look out at the people walking by. I feel the history of the place coursing through me. I feel the air glitter as light passes through airborne crystals of salt and sand. I feel grounded suddenly, my feet firmly planted in the rivers of time.

‡

For months, I ache with longing for a return to Collioure. I begin to write a book that will, I hope, enable me to do so. At the very least, it will give me a valid excuse to take a research holiday. It is a book that functions as a way to keep meditating on this calmest of places; as a way to further order all I have encountered there.

Over years, this book became the product of a délire – what Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls “a reflexive delirium”; a “poetic text” or “cryptogram concealing a pretext”; the sort of text written when one “yields to a mild form of mania”; a delirium common to a writerly madness. Although approached today with a clear-minded sobriety, I cannot ignore the fact that many of the ideas contained within first occurred to me on the threshold of a suicidal despair. But this was not intended to be a book about despair; just as Jacob, in his dreams, saw a ladder that led him to heaven, so too in my dreams have I seen a path that leads beyond the present to pastures new. It was a book about climbing out of despair, along a path hitherto untrodden.

It was a book intended to be a treatise on a place, and also about other treatises on that place, enthused with the forces that have long encircled it. Indeed, I am not the first to have been so enchanted with this town and the surrounding area, although few records of the lives lived there have ever been translated into English. In fact, its remove from English interests has been part of its attraction. It is a region with an occulted history, a hotbed for gnosticisms and, more specifically, Catharism. It hardly feels like a modern place in this regard, but appropriately, it has birthed its own modernisms.

My third visit to Collioure, in the midst of COVID clouds, felt like the beginning of a meditation on a pandemic modernism. I had hoped to uncover this bright modernism, which is not so much browbeaten by an Outside but opened up by it, producing new affordances that cut fissures across time. Again, that it was meditation taking place in a principality far from Britain is no accident; our modernisms have for too long felt melancholic, informed by sad readings of tragic souls. There is something attractive about this too; about the gothic modernism of the British Isles, and at another time, this idea for a book might have found its sense of place far closer to home, but I endeavour to deny myself the familiarity of such sad passions.

Already have I followed in the footsteps of others who have traversed this rainy isle, buffeted by the occulted forces that drive so many of us to despair. I have walked the Suffolk coast with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in one hand, Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie in the other, two diametrically opposed journeys through a landscape that both are stalked by, and which even culminated in unhappy deaths for their semi-present authors; I have walked the busy streets of London and the seaside idylls of Cornwall with Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier for company; I spent my thirtieth birthday in Heptonstall cemetery, pockets stuffed with poetry by Ted Hughes, Slyvia Plath and Emily Brontë. There is a book to be written about these journeys too perhaps, triangulating a quintessentially British-modernist melancholy, but I fear Justin Barton has already written down a (truly underrated) meander in this zone that I dare not enter into the shadow of.

Barton’s journey is quintessentially English, although it cannot be so neatly situated in England proper. His is an England still dreaming, a phantasm unsubstantiated, whose fortified interior is perforated by counter-histories, memories of elsewhere, poetic excursions into the unknown that is still within and alongside us. Modernism, in this manner, has often been susceptible to reactionary forces that fear the contamination of exterior forces, which can be mythologised as readily as they are exoticized and racialised. But modernism at its finest understands each perforation from without as being a simultaneous extension into the unknown. This is not so much an exoticism in practice as it is a wrestling with poetic problematics of relation, wherein no being is so pure, whole and consistent as to sit comfortably in any man-made category. It is for this reason that, for many a British reader, a British modernism still excites. There is a sense of a place called England, with its own conditions of existence, that are nonetheless scrambled by the fallout of empire and capitalist homogenisation. But again, I did not want to write a book about Britain. It is worthwhile momentarily deferring to Barton, then, on his sensory habitation of this modernist interzone at length, in order to both situate the book I had in mind in its errant lineage, whilst also explaining further why I have chosen to look elsewhere; why I have chosen, ultimately, to write it no more.

‡

Beginning his physical journey across the North Yorkshire moors (which is also a mental journey across the far reaches of the globe), Barton writes how modernism “is really an eerie ancientism. Or to be more precise, an ‘eerie arcadianism’.” Modernism was always, in this regard, a questioning of modernity; of our place, as apparent ‘moderns’, caught in the interzone between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, which are themselves only vague heuristics denoting a line between conscious experience and the Real. “There is always a wilderness or semi-wilderness: a hauntingly (and hauntedly) positive hinterland, or Outside”, Barton continues; “the world of modernism is always transected by an anomalous dimension inhabited by forces that are both positive and negative, and can recurrently prove to be at a higher level of power than the forces of the ordinary world”.

Modernism can be explicit, or it can be a kind of shadow of itself, which carries some of the elements of modernism, but is either a dreaming utilised, and largely destroyed, by a theoretical field (as with Freud and Oedipus), or it can be a mere tracing that creates no new dreaming primarily from the ancient sources, and merely suppresses the power of existing dreamings (as with Joyce’s Ulysses).

The eerie wilderness in modernism can be the mountain in Picnic at Hanging Rock, or the places by the sea in The Waves … It can be the beach in Neuromancer, or the night-countryside emptiness of the places across which the horse-god worshipping boy rides his horse in Equus – or it can be Zarathustra’s mountains, or a forest somewhere outside Athens, or “the eye of the forest” in Patti Smith’s Horses…

The wilderness in a modernist dreaming is in fact much less fundamental than the anomalous dimension that transects everything – the body without organs, as it has been called – but it may nonetheless be much more in the foreground. Modernist writers enact a lucid awareness of the body without organs, but the exact extent and nature of this dimension tends to be left open. Aspects of the oneirosphere of the human world can be suggested – as with Shakespeare’s organic beings having a contact with India that does not involve travel in any ordinary sense – but a modernist dreaming in invoking the body without organs lightly suggests its existence, but does not firmly map its extent or aspects.

The modernism I hoped to unearth was no less gnostic, no less occulted, no less frightful and challenging, but it is of another order. It does not belong here in Britain. That is perhaps why it is so enchanting to me.

Now more than ever, I hope to one day take leave of this sad little rainy fascist island for somewhere new. Although it is a region little known to most, I hope that place is the south-west coast of France. I want to tell stories about those who have made a home there, as I still long to. I hope to begin with the Collioure of Henri Matisse, who found its light so dazzling he birthed a wild and beastly modernism there. From there, I would move outwards, travelling paths frequented by Claude Simon, Joë Bousquet, René Nelli, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze, Ezra Pound, the Trobadours, and many more. Though despair and madness lurk in its darkest corners, I would follow the light. I would break free of the imagined wilderness of a British modernism to explore the wild interzone that is as inside as it is out: a radical immanence devoid of culture, which is not nature either. I hope to exist there in order to resist nostalgia’s hardening of the present; in order to recover some sense of our lost futures.

But how to capture the spirit of this strange place today? How to account for its peculiar postmodernity? How to excavate dead dreams from beneath the generations of sand that has accumulated on every surface?

‡

I return to this vision of Collioure perhaps because The Open Window complicates my perception of the world outside, of dreary England. Its chaotic colouring is at once dynamic and entirely flat, as the window, the balcony beyond, the small boats bobbing in Collioure’s port, all appear with an illusory lack of perspective, at once vibrant and without depth.

The painting’s presentation makes it close to a visual pun. As a depiction of the world outside, painted inside, it encapsulates Fauvism’s innate “destruction of Form … its explosion of figurative space, its ‘anti-visual’ character, its absence of stylistic unity, its ‘schizophrenic’ tendency”. It is a style that “free[s] painting of all interiority”; that “open[s] up painting from the inside to the Outside, to the multiplicity of forces and to their multiplication, in an unprecedented conjunction of the arts.” It is in my memories of Collioure that life in the present is also freed from a claustrophobic interiority, where the world is unfolded by outside forces.

The pandemic has made us all more fearful of these forces, no doubt. I’m reminded perpetually of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. “My particular province is speculative philosophy”, the story’s narrator confesses in the epilogue, and he speculates wildly on the fate of the Martians, who have succumbed to a non-human invasion of their own. Deferring to scientific investigation, he notes how, “in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found.” The Martians were killed by a epidemic of all too familiar viruses.

As the novel draws to a close, its narrator writes down all he has experienced, but confesses to a lingering post-traumatic stress, which has “left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind.” The new world is haunted by spectres of recent upheaval. “I sit in my study writing by lamplight,” he ruminates, “and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate.” Visions of normalcy “become vague and unreal”. His descriptions of London after the end of a world once known, a world now disturbed, are strikingly familiar, in spite of the fact they were written over a century before a more recent horror from the twentieth-first century.

‡

The day before the UK embraced lockdown restrictions to help fight the spread of the coronavirus, I was working as a photographer’s assistant for an architectural company in south-east London. None of our team wanted to be out in the world then, but we were tasked with taking photographs of the London skyline from Hampstead Heath, so that an architectural render of a proposed skyscraper could be created digitally back at the office. The penultimate paragraph of The War of the Worlds captures something of our experience, albeit right before the impending catastrophe of mass infection:

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day…

Our last great day was already anxious. The virus was among us. We would never see sights like it again, not without the echoes that haunt Wells’ narrator still.

I wonder what it would be like to look beyond my open window and not feel afraid of these invisible forces that continue to perpetuate horrors, years after COVID was claimed to be defeated. These days, I install myself in the bay window of my one-bed flat and recognise, on occasion, how this otherwise normal place of writing is only an echo of the places I have installed myself to write books the last six years, and how far from Matisse’s vision it feels.

‡

The shutters that enclosed these windows by night are fastened tight, lest the mistral open dreams onto the night outside. It too hopes to free all from interiority. By day, the ships that sail in and out of the harbour flock along the wind’s perturbations. When it blows, it coats everything in glass, making the air itself glisten. It grinds the gears that make every thought turn, unrelenting. Antoine Montes, the protagonist of Claude Simon’s Pyrenean novel The Wind, reflects on how the mistral haunts all that it touches, recalling

how the wind blew almost continually for three months, so that when it did stop (a few hours or a few days – but never more than two or three) you thought you could still hear it, wild and wailing, not outdoors but somehow inside your own head: voices emptied of meaning, nothing but noise and, so it seemed, dust – the dust that penetrated everywhere, insinuated itself under your burning eyelids, in your mouth, communicating its taste to the things you ate, interposing between the skin of your fingertips and what they took hold of (papers left on the desk the day before, plates, napkins) that haunting, imperceptible, granular film.

Everything is carried along and changed by the mistral. From atop the Massif, we feel the grit of the region’s interlocking histories. Although the mountains act as a natural point of delineation, marking the ragged border between France and Spain, they covet a hidden diversity. We do not only reside along the backbone of what a contested Catalonia calls the Pirineu, but also the Spanish Pirineos, the Aragonese Pirineus, the Basque Piriniaok, the Occitan Piréneus. Each name contains echoes of its other. Nonetheless, it is here that dialects deviate as incessantly as time itself is dilated. Medieval troubadours share dusty breath with twentieth-century modernists. Contemporary occultists are haunted by the spectre of an ancient Catharism. Grail tales are whispered constantly. Picasso and Braque, Matisse and Derain, along with many others lesser known, witness shapes and colours previously unseen here, where the light vibrates with the mistral. Simone Weil skirts the borders of an Occitan wilderness in Vichy France. Walter Benjamin meets his end. Catalonia, Provence, Languedoc: each occupies a distinct region, seemingly far removed, yet all understood as the South of France. For all their various distinctions, they are conjoined by the paths of those who have traipsed between them.

Before long, one has an acute sense of how space and time, geographies and geologies, cultures and currents bifurcate here on uneven keels, melding with the various strata of the Pyrénées. The mistral’s insinuating dust, lathered over the entire region, soon necessitates the advancement of a Mallarméan materialism, “somewhat more complicated than that ‘physical vibration of language in the air’ to which traditional Marxist materialism has prided itself on assimilating literature.” So much else is caused to vibrate here too, such that the invisible hand that rolls the dice incessantly can only be embraced. But the wind’s presence in cultural life is not mere aestheticism, nor Romantic symbolism; it buffers all experience, both virtual and actual, whistling through the tumult of emotion and commerce, inherently embroiling the two. The “haunting, imperceptible, granular film” it leaves behind is so quintessentially tangible, after all.

A reference to Marxism is far from inapposite here; windy climes necessitate a more aleatory materialism in matters of life. But what else does the mistral bring to the region? Over centuries past, it has brought peoples from much further afield. Lawrence Durrell, making a home for himself in Provence, finds a region still haunted by “Caesar’s vast ghost”, which has “consequently [become] a ready seat for dissent”; which “has remained a crucible of dissent and a prey to conquest from all sides, often in a chronic state of destabilization.”

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Don’t you miss the days when time ran so slowly we were able to invent loads of accelerationisms?

During the COVID years, I realised quite quickly that I had gotten stuck. I wrote various blogposts that were timid vents expressing a feeling of writer’s block. To write about writer’s block was an ironic way to overcome it. The posts became repetitive — and I knew that they were repetitive whilst I was writing them — but I did it anyway because it worked. It helped me to loosen the cogs so that I could then go back to book-writing.

It is now 2025. A melancholic but hopeful reprise of my interest in Mediterranean modernism has persisted as a private companion, as I await the chance to immerse myself in four-year-old thoughts and finally reckon with all that the pandemic induced within me. But in 2025, a peculiar COVID nostalgia has never felt more distant from my life right now. Meeting Byro a year ago, beginning a love affair that has developed with an unprecedented joy and ease, has made me realise all that I missed when stuck inside.

The COVID years were painfully para-social for me. The loss of all prior sources of income out in the world triggered an experiment with monetised para-academia. I could not keep it up. I spent my days writing and doing my best to ignore the world outside, making weekly incursions across the Yorkshire Moors, driving through Brontë country whilst listening to Phoebe Bridgers before reading poetry in frigid graveyards. I had no idea how depressed I already was.

Byro’s experience was different. We both spent lockdown lurking in Discord servers, but whereas I was arguing over the validities of the latest accelerationist offshoots, they were consuming dariacore productivities that were faster than anything our Internet scene could imagine.

What fascinated me about Matisse’s modernism was the total collapse of inside and outside. The radical immanence that existed between the two, distilled into a vibrant new decorativity. I was thinking about how the Internet age has been inappositely structured across a divide. The ‘terminally online’ are told to ‘touch grass’, but we are all online, we are all terminal, and we all go outside. The frightful truth of the early twenty-first century is that the separation between online and offline has always been a misnomer. We have maintained it anyway, perhaps fearful of what the leaking of cyberspace will force us to become. But we have already become what we must feared. We have become so soon. Now, I sense that the Internet is over. It is everywhere, and is therefore no longer the place — a place — to be.

This is a strange realisation for a blogger to come to. A few months ago, I longed to finish my PhD and play catch up. But now I realise that it is all already over. A pandemic modernism has been eclipsed by violent reaction, a live-streamed genocide, and the discordant paces of life that are at once trapped in amber locally and accelerating faster than I am able to think globally. Those who birthed this modernism — the digicore artists now attracting massive audiences at gigs in meatspace — have inaugurated a new era before most of us are able to comprehend the consequences of the last one. Nothing is the same.

Maybe I will return to The Open Window one day. Maybe I will return to Collioure. But right now, I sense that a power shift is coming, which will make all prior thoughts and habits redundant. I have no publisher with whom to disseminate my more long-winded ideas, even if I felt able to write fast enough to distill them. I have this blog, but now cannot write fast enough to keep up with everything. I offer up this snapshot of the last few years as a capstone to a project no longer relevant, no longer worthy of completion. I offer it up to shed myself of the burden, and to ready myself for a radical new environment.

The window has been open for so long. We have defenestrated ourselves in a digital delirium.