It’s my birthday today. I am 34 years old. As is tradition, I’ll be making the same lame observation I do every year. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26th December 1991, it is also 34 years since the end of history.
As the years tick by, each birthday becomes a measure of distance from another world. As an adoptee, it’s a distance made especially poignant. I think about this day 34 years ago as a day when so many things were set in motion, both personally and politically. It makes for a good “individual myth”, as Lacan might say; a readymade complex that
is the product of history, the result of stories lived by others. As Lévi-Strauss explains, myth is not thought by men but rather “thinks through men” and the same holds for the neurotic’s individual myth despite its personal form. The other pre-exists the individualized person and this co-determination of the group and individual expresses itself in the paradoxical formula ‘individual myth.’
What better ‘individual myth’ to acquire as a melancholic millennial communist than a reflection on one’s birth at a moment of closure? December 26th becomes a day of co-determination, where familial dissolutions mix with more global forms to predetermine a melancholic consciousness.
This year, everything is felt more acutely. The 26th day also happens to mark one more month that my partner Hana has spent in prison, after being arrested for alleged involvement in direct action at the end of August. Today we carve another notch into the wall, inscribing the four-month mark.
I have wanted to talk about this experience so desperately, but it is impossible to know what to say. I have a persistent urge to blog every development, and when I tell Hana this, they say “I’ll not contain you.” But I feel uneasy. Nothing I might say feels complete without their voice alongside mine, but they do not want to speak. They worry about the repercussions, as do I. We write to and call each other daily, but to speak beyond our bubble is too vulnerable to bear.
We remain co-determined. They are the one in prison, but my life is also on hold. They are looking at ten months on remand, which is four more than the statutory limit, for a single charge of criminal damage. It is an unprecedented move, made by government and judiciary, that can only be explained by an authoritarian desire to break the UK’s pro-Palestine movement. But on a personal level, the cruelty of a lengthy period of remand is that it makes life impossible to plan ahead for. We have no known release date, and life does not continue without one. We sit on our hands, saying nothing. For someone who has spent the last ~19 years of their life blogging openly through various personal and political crises, it has felt unnatural to keep so schtum.
Everything is put into letters instead. Rather than write publicly, I express myself to a new audience of one. It is surprising that I now feel more comfortable writing letters, which may well be intercepted and scrutinised by the state, than I am comfortable writing online. But I prefer to write letters because I wish to feel the co-determination of this moment more directly: the moment that is being lived not so much by us but through us.
So much is coursing through us, what has been written so far is a torrent. Even at the very start of our ordeal, the writing flowed. I felt like we were building something — some monumental future tome. Four months in, we have written over 250,000 words between us. Unfortunately, whilst documenting the minutiae of this experience is one thing, to read it all is another. There is nothing digestible to extract from this outpouring. There is nothing of great significance to anyone but us within it. And yet, we acknowledge that this labour of love remains significant to all.
Perhaps Hana will extract a short book of poetry from it one day. Poetry would be all because it is obscure, and because it does not require us to show our working. The impact of this writing project is felt within us and we take ourselves out into the world so that both are changed at the intersection of individual and myth. That is where poetry lies, and similarly, it is why writing poetry makes sense in prison.
On September 10th, we were discussing Mahmood Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, where he writes:
Prison deprives one of the sight of a tree and the sea. Freedom is the imagination capable of recalling them both in prison, making the invisible visible. No, that is what poetry does. Poetry, then, is an act of freedom. It makes what is visible invisible when facing danger.
Processing this experience through the bittersweetness of our presence/absence for each other, Hana wrote to me that same day:
Prison is a density of faults and glitches when you experience it in immediacy … From inside, I find in you [the] secret focal point Darwish refers to – emitting rays and words depriving darkness of the eternity of its attributes.
In that moment, “prison density” emerged as a shorthand for what we feel daily, for what we’re dealing with, combatting it by always vying for a grace that is alien to its gravity. All we can do, when up to our necks in this density, is take each other by the hand and walk onward through it. I think of Derrida in Glas, Derrida the militant, the ‘mile-goer’:
I shall say no more about procession or method. As Hegel would say, they will speak of (for) themselves while marching.
Months pass by. The marching continues. We talk about all that we write and don’t write once again on December 17th. That morning, I receive a letter from Hana penned four days previous in a funk:
What good are these words about those quiet moments alone, sombre, but with solace? What good without you? I don’t want to share this with just anyone… I am sorry I’ve been distant this past week and that I’ve written to you less… There has been so much more empty space, I’ve been afraid to give shape to it in words, that depressive voice in my head asking what good it is for. For loving you of course!
That evening, I wrote a response about noticing but not minding this shift in our procession, which I then read to Hana down the phone:
That feeling of not knowing how to fill a void, shrouded in a cloud, only to realise that time can be filled by loving you — I know it well. Why do you think I have written to you so much? [The writing has] slowed for me too, of course… I was reading back thru our earliest correspondence yesterday… It’s so strange to see that desperation in my written voice; the frantic grasping at philosophy, a crutch in hard times. I think I reach for Deleuze in a crisis like some people reach for the Bible… “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.” I needed that then. I needed it affirmed… I needed to remind myself and you of those core principles for weathering something — Groundhog Day, pulling difference out of repetition by way of a “selective principle”, making myself worthy of you and of this. In the midst of the panic, I needed to affirm the method. Since then, I feel like I’ve reached less frequently for theory. I’ve not talked about an approach to a crisis, I’ve simply gotten on with approaching you. And I feel you near.
For all that we write to each other, there is always so much left unsaid. History unfurls before us, fueled by fear and hope. It is all the more difficult to register because of that.
Our experience right now is significant — we will be talking about it for the rest of our lives. But it is impossible to comment on how we are coping because we are not coping with it alone. Some days we do not cope at all. There are others in our orbit who cope even less, and who do not have the support networks that we cling onto for dear life. Hana speaks of missing me desperately, but inside, the pain of our separation isn’t relatable to all. Others might think having someone to miss is a privilege.
Counting even our paltry blessings soon becomes uncouth. What use is affirming the beauty found in each other when prison sharpens the edges of all that cannot be shared, on the inside, on the outside, and through the concrete skin that exists between them?
On November 28th, we were discussing Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, which they had read inside and felt deeply moved by. “We were never meant to survive”, Lorde writes, speaking — at least in my interpretation — to the softness that nourishes existence, set across from solid death.
What survives in the fossil record is that part of each being already tough. We dig up bones, shells, exoskeletons that are already hard in life and hardened further after it. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will be chicken bones and irradiated concrete. The soft parts disappear, whether in an instant or over time.
What enables our survival in the here and now is precisely all of that activity that will not be registered in the fossil record. What enables our survival will not itself survive. It’s how I feel looking at the archive of prison correspondence amassing around me. Our poems, letters, and drawings are inconsequential when viewed from the perspective of a much larger struggle. But aren’t they all the more beautiful for that? Isn’t this archive all the more precious in its fragility? Isn’t it a humble accrual of all that helps us to survive this?
It is precious, and in being so precious, we sometimes find ourselves wishing to share it. But we can’t. We cannot bring ourselves to share the softness of this experience. It is too precious to share, and to do so might even be cruel, since it has the potential to lead others astray from hard reality. There are no words for how inhumane prison is and how difficult life has become. There are no words to describe the efforts made to sustain some beauty within it all regardless. But more than that, there are no words because it is not yet history.
When I told Hana that I was plotting to write some reflection on our co-determination, on the individual myth, on poetry and prison, on the nightmare of British authoritarianism and complicity in genocide, they were eager to add their voice. They wrote me a letter — a celebration of my birthday and the ways in which we are weathering this moment, steadfast in love, humbled in strife — but the next day, they asked me not to share it as planned. It did not matter to me either way. The original version of this post scratched an itch, but most of what is expressed within this moment is just for us.
We’ll write each other poetry for as long as it takes, and we’ll write our history when the nightmare is over. Until then, the two shall not meet. Instead, Hana suggested their contribution should be curatorial. They read the following Mahmood Darwish poem to me. “Copy this down.” Enough said…
Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen to the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history has no compassion that we can long for our beginning, and no intention that we can know what’s ahead and what’s behind… and it has no rest stops by the railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look toward what time has done to us over there, and what we’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it. History is not logical or intuitive that we can break what is left of our myth about happy times, nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors of judgement day. It is in us and outside us… and a mad repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder. Aimlessly we make it and it makes us… Perhaps history wasn’t born as we desired, because the Human Being never existed? Philosophers and artists passed through there…
and the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers then passed through there… and the poor believed in sayings about paradise and waited there… and gods came to rescue nature from our divinity and passed through there. And history has no time for contemplation, history has no mirror and no bare face. It is unreal reality or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it. Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!
This talk was given at ‘Making and Breaking the Rules: On Operating and Other Systems‘, the third salon hosted by The Wire Magazine at London’s Cafe OTO. The presentation was preceded by a Fluxus performance by Loré Lixenberg and Elaine Mitchener, and followed by a talk from Vicki Bennett (People Like Us).
After a request from an attendee for the full text, I’m posting it below.A heavily edited TL;DR version was published in issue #500 of The Wire and can be found on their website here.
“I think, therefore I am.”“I own, therefore I am.”
When thinking about the growing influence of artificial intelligence, not only on the music industry but on music production as such, it is interesting to see how arguments for and against its use echo those made around sampling at the end of the last century. In many respects, these similarities are obvious – there are questions around authenticity, originality, formal experimentation, property rights. But the way these questions are brought together are also disappointing, as an anxiety around our capacity to think for ourselves becomes embroiled with anxieties around property rights, with the two being made co-constitutive.
Personally, I am of the opinion that the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence is little more than a black mirror, utilised too often as a convenient scapegoat to distance ourselves from the problems we’ve already been facing. AI presents us with very real problems, but rather than address these material concerns, we fall into an AI idealism. We might worry, for example, about the capacity of automated systems like ChatGPT to spread misinformation, whilst research has shown this is only because our media landscape is saturated with misinformation already. Rather than address this, our conservations slide too readily into reactionary positions that blame generalised ideas about technology itself for our all problems, and what I personally find most frustrating, in the context of the arts in particular, is that the rise of AI has led us to engage in conversations about ‘property’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’ that quickly start to sound no different from a standard liberalism.
This is particularly apparent in conversations around electronic music. To give you an example, out of numerous to choose from, I recently read Liam Inscoe-Jones’ book Songs in the Key of MP3, which seeks to canonise some sonic pioneers of the 2010s like Oneohtrix Point Never and SOPHIE, but ends with a discussion of AI music that attempts to ward off a bleak future generated by algorithms. “If purely iterative music does one day become the norm,” Inscoe-Jones argues, “then originality will become an increasingly treasured characteristic, and there are few better things for a culture to hold dear.”
But how are we supposed to measure originality, exactly? What becomes of an aesthetic sense of originality that is now framed as a return to tradition, or a return to the ‘authentically’ human? Is it ever possible to demarcate an origin or a true original, and does this have any real significance outside of property law? How does this make sense in the context of musicians, like Oneohtrix Point Never and SOPHIE, who were so enthralled by questions of authenticity and artificiality, constructed identities and the uncertainty of memory, the ways in which we can become alienated from ourselves through all of these things, for better or for worse? Artists who precisely question whether any of us are really as original as we like to think, or who enjoy both the generative and degenerative effects of technology? Who might well understand themselves already as fleshy large-language models playing around in regimes of signs?
In order to suggest how we might rethink our contemporary moment more effectively, and better understand the not-so-dissenting arguments of so-called ‘poptimists’, what I’d like to do today is reflect on a few different ways in which various writers have sought to contextualize our fascination and discomfort with cultural appropriation and derivation, all within the context of what is still tentatively called ‘postmodernism’ or ‘postmodernity’.
Postmodernism is an all-too-familiar term, of course, used as a kind of shorthand for the contradictory character of our present, which can quickly (if appropriately) lose all of its meaning when invoked superficially. Nevertheless, I want to begin by defining it as simply as possible.
The late Fredric Jameson is our best source for this, and we can immediately relate his definition of postmodernism to sampling and music production. Jameson begins his 1991 book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, by offering a distinction between modernist and postmodernist understandings of history, and relatedly, the imperatives that have constituted their different understandings of cultural development and progress.
Modernism, for starters, “thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography)”. Postmodernism, in contrast, “looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the ‘When-it-all-changed,’ as [William] Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change.”
Now, what better indication of the arrival of postmodernism into music culture do we have than this? Yes, the postmodern looks for breaks, and in the context of dance music in particular, it has found plenty to play around with.
But it’s also in this context that the paradox of postmodernity arises, further scrambling cultural temporalities. For all our hunting for breaks of a political nature, what we are struck by is how difficult they are to concretise, or what’s more, the way in which breaks themselves become ubiquitous, even normalised.
When regarding sonic breaks, which we might make analogous to the political, we can take the ‘amen break’ as an obvious example. The track from which the ‘amen break’ was sourced, as is today well-known, was an obscure 1969 B-side by Washington, D.C. soul outfit The Winstons. But it wasn’t until almost twenty years later – in 1986, when the track was featured on the inaugural Ultimate Beats and Breaks compilation – that it began to be interpolated by just about everyone, starting with Salt-N-Pepa and NWA most significantly. Plucked from obscurity, the break was only felt, then, when it was not only repackaged but bootlegged as a DJ tool, readily accessible to anyone and everyone, and even becomes fixated on, despite being curated as one break among many.
This re-contextualisation and eventual ubiquity perhaps helps illuminate what is strange about the breaks sought in postmodernity. The breakbeat is so named, after all, for its interruption of a song. Most exuberant in the context of jazz performance, in the break the band stops playing and the drummer goes off-piste, before returning to a groove. This motif, in itself, isn’t necessarily new. But what then happens when we normalise the break that has been extracted from the song? What happens when the break, the interruption, becomes a foundation, even making it interminable? A further question of interest is: How is this new methodology of break-sampling, like the black mirror of AI, already reflected of certain structures of feeling that are at work within society?
This is how Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs approach sampling in a collaborative essay later included in Reynolds’ 1991 debut, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. Beyond sticking it to record company execs and beyond the apparent democratization of technologies for music production, the “‘real’ politics of sampling”, they suggest, “may lie in [its] effects on [a] consciousness of formal futurism”, even suggesting that sampling took off as a methodology precisely because of the ways in which it reflected certain structures of feeling already present in society.
Considering the work of the late Mark Stewart, Reynolds and Stubbs argue that the “cut-up”, as an aesthetic technique, already “signifies the psychic state of being cut-up”, that is, the “destabilizing of … values [and] common sense perceptions”, such that the cut-up “reflects … what’s already happening in popular culture” at that time: “the death of the Song, to be replaced by the decentred, unresolved, in-finite house track; the brain-rotting vortex of quick-cutting in video and TV; the supersession of narrative, characterization, and motivation by sensational effects.”
But by emphasising this reflection of pop culture at large, Reynolds and Stubbs also displace where the drive to sample comes from. If we are all already cut-up, then it is not music producers who are stripping culture for parts; they are rather reflecting a process already at work in our collective (un)consciousness and trying to make good on it, even attempting to put things back together, albeit in disjointed ways that further reflect contemporary modes of subjectivation. Sample culture is, then, like two mirrors facing each, with the first iteration of this cut-up process being hard to identify. We are but cut-ups making cut-ups of cut-ups, just as a rose is a rose is a rose. Thus, with music culture already long stripped of any semblance of linear historicity, sampling is innately deconstructive (if you’ll forgive me for the Derridean reference) – that is, not destructive, in the sense it destroys something whole, but rather plays with what is already cut-up to interrogate how a sense of wholeness is artificially generated. Deconstruction thus interminably perpetuates a break that has already occurred, if only to fully extract all of the possibilities that exist virtually with it.
This is something characteristic of modern music production in general. Reynolds and Stubbs note how, in the modern music studio, “[d]ifferent auras, different vibes, different studio atmospheres, different eras, are placed in ghostly adjacence, like some strange composite organism sewn together out of a variety of vivisected limbs, or a Cronenberg dance monster.” But since this is already a methodology common to music production as such, in the sense that most recordings are not documents of a single live take, but numerous takes spliced together, what sampling does is exaggerate a breaking already ubiquitous. Sampling takes “the fictitious nature of recording even further,” not only by splicing together recordings of events that have already occurred, but by “creating events that never could have happened”, achieving a strange sort of “‘balance’ between fusion/fission, between the organic/machinic, between seduction/alienation.” A ‘balance’, that is, within the break itself, such that the break is simultaneously a bridge, but between objects that are themselves without a clear origin, like a mutant jigsaw made up of pieces from many other puzzles, with what was ‘original’ being impossible to reconstruct.
It’s worth remembering that Reynolds and Stubbs are making this argument in 1991 or thereabouts, with Reynolds’ debut published the same year as Jameson’s Postmodernism, but also two years before the publication of the first English-language translation of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, where the ghostly nature of political breaks is considered so explicitly, giving the world the concept of ‘hauntology’, which Reynolds would notably sample from and repurpose to describe a new sonic sensibility around fifteen years later in the mid-2000s – another example of a break, like the ‘amen break’, only being felt at the level of popular consciousness once it has already been spliced and bootlegged from its point of origin.
This is significant, as we should also note that this argument is being made at the height of rave’s cultural power, rather than after its apparent demise. But rather than jumping the gun, Reynolds and Stubbs are in fact describing a situation that made rave itself possible, or at least already defined its quasi-existence. This is something forgotten today whenever hauntology is invoked. Although it’s a concept generally associated with the death of rave, rave itself was always-already hauntological, in being described as a spectral or otherwise hallucinatory heterotopia out of phase with dominant culture at large. Rave culture, then, was already another world existing within this one, destabilizing prevalent norms and common-sense ideas of what constituted culture as such (at least for capitalism).
When hauntology, in the context of music culture at least, was later popularised by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2006, with a surrounding discourse eventually reaching its saturation point with the publication of Fisher’s second book, Ghosts of my Life, in 2014, it is important to remember that this was hauntology’s second coming. It was arguably an attempt to preserve rave’s hauntological essence, once it had gone mainstream, albeit with its melancholia intensified. Fisher’s interest was thus in the effects of capitalism on music culture in this way, its depressive qualities, but also ways in which the ghosts lingering on the B-sides of ‘original’ recordings later became the A-sides themselves. Here again, the break, the fugitive background process of dubbing and queering, is now in the foreground, privileged over its now-discarded source material.
This is a process common to all of postmodern culture, with the tension identified by Fisher being the way in which certain forms of fugitive music are eventually recuperated by capitalism itself – a process that has only accelerated over the decades. Here, Fisher remains indebted to the critique of capitalism advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their first collaborative work, 1972’s Anti-Oedipus. For all that book’s difficulty, a more succinct version of their argument is supplied by Deleuze in a Paris seminar he held a year earlier, where he outlines
what we call the well-known power [puissance] of recuperation within capitalism – [and] when we say recuperate we mean: each time something seems to escape capitalism, seems to pass beneath its simili-codes; it reabsorbs all this, it adds one more axiom and the machine starts up again.
Deleuze and Guattari identify this process in the very origins of our understanding of class struggle. It is the bourgeoisie, they argue, who are in the business of defining and categorising social life, taking their own position as normative. So the bourgeoisie, first of all, defines itself as a class. But then they ask: ‘what are we to make of this hoard of plebs who live beneath us and who swarm errantly underneath our social codes?’ They realise they must necessarily define them as a class in their own right: the proletariat.
Fisher takes this understanding and applies it to the music industry itself, and even to its critical armature, being critical – even self-critical – of the role of the critic, whose job is to codify the new and recuperate what is fugitive into a more stable understanding of any given cultural moment, to place ‘the new’ back into an already-existing order of things. This was Reynolds’ contention also, with Blissed Out being a ‘nihilistic’ work of criticism, asking “whether people really do have ordered desires that are expressed clearly through style or ‘passionate consumption’”, and answering that the role of music criticism in 1991 is to stay with the trouble, stay in the break, and assert that “the only way for rock to live again” is to allow “the rock discourse [to] somehow manage to end itself – again and again. Enter gladly into an endless end.”
This is the position that inspires and is engraved within Mark Fisher’s now infamous cultural negativity, often mistaken for a cultural pessimism, as he becomes a thinker who is primarily responsible for the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Cue, in response, a host of writers who have, over the decade since Fisher’s death, thrown polemical punches at him for failing to notice the new in his midst, and who make arguments, to the contrary, that there are breaks everywhere for those with ears to hear them.
Each critic of Fisher thus attempts to identify specific breaks within the recent past that we should all remain excited about. But as we’ve already pointed out, this defiance – no matter how enjoyable it is to read – is nonetheless a core symptom of postmodernity itself, which, as Jameson argues, is defined by its desperate attempts to identify and locate breaks in the midst of a resistant structure of feeling with regards to pop culture’s increasing homogeneity.
This is the tension that Fisher’s work investigates explicitly, asking repeatedly: what are we to make of the very real and identifiable breaks of the twenty-first century – for instance, grime, the financial crash, the rise of social media, even the pandemic – in the midst of a feeling that so much of what surrounds them remains the same? What is the significance of a break within our capitalist world – and note here again that these are breaks within the world, rather than escapes announcing a new world as such – that is, breaks in a world that already feels so broken?
Other attempts were made to nonetheless challenge the popularity of hauntology, including accelerationism and salvagepunk. Although each has its own particular emphases, they still share much in common. Accelerationism, for instance, to the contrary of a political enshittification it is not associated with, was, for Alex Williams in 2008, an attempt to rescue hauntology’s cultural psychedelia from its weighty melancholia. As Williams explains on his Splintering Bone Ashes blog:
Hauntology’s ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning, deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories etc) it is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive.
But Williams takes issue with the fact that remaining within a never-ending break can ever make good on an otherwise melancholic position, in the sense that hauntology tries to sustain a tension within capitalism’s homogenising tendencies, but is so self-aware of this fight that it gets sad about this secondary position in relation to a process of recuperation more powerful than the process of creation itself. Williams instead suggests that “we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music” against this, “which in some senses would operate in a similar manner [to hauntology, but] would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning.”
Williams suggests two ways we might achieve this: on the one hand, “[r]ather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance,” we should seek “a deliberate and gleeful affirmation” of the ways in which capitalism is capable of scrambling its own codes; on the other, “we might consider … a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecidable.”
Although a confusing set of assertions out of its temporal context, Williams’ argument isn’t that different from Reynolds’ here. Both attempt to break with a prior generation of critics, through a kind of nihilism – understood as a questioning of all values – which must be reasserted once the last generation to make this call succumbs to melancholia. Rock critics, then, on both sides of the millennium, find themselves caught between each other’s breaks. It was the task of accelerationism to knot these two positions together, both understanding the historical development of capitalism’s power of recuperation, if only to better identify the moments of the recent past and unfolding present that remain fugitive to common sonic sense.
Fisher later came around to this position, providing the best summation of the accelerationist position for e-flux in 2013, writing:
A certain, perhaps now dominant, take on accelerationism has it that the position amounts to a cheerleading for the intensification of any capitalist process whatsoever, particularly the “worst,” in the hope that this will bring the system to a point of terminal crisis … This formulation, however, is question-begging in that it assumes what accelerationism rejects – the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.
Here again we have a preoccupation with errancy and fugitivity from capitalist recuperation, but this is not a blind lust towards some future ‘originality’. If Fisher retains a certain predilection for hauntology, it was in the sense that he did not see even the past as fully neutralised by capital. He saw the role of the nomadic cultural producer as one oscillating between a popular modernism and a postmodernism, capable of intervening in a paltry sense of novelty to extract the new from what is already in the process of being recuperated. He believed that:
The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over … We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
One way in which we might do this is via what Evan Calder Williams has called ‘salvagepunk’. The best summation of salvagepunk’s relationship to culture is again found in the writings of Mark Fisher, specifically a short column he wrote for issue 319 of The Wire magazine, published in September 2010, where he considers the ways in which a more attentive consideration of certain approaches to sampling can provide “a broader context for thinking about how these methodologies deviate from their banal twin, postmodernity.” Enter salvagepunk, which, for Calder Williams,
is opposed to the “inherent flatness and equivalency of postmodern cultural production” [by] draw[ing] together (and from) the 20th century’s chief arts of reappropriation: montage … collage … detournement … and farce.
By opposition to postmodern pastiche, in which any sign can be juxtaposed with any other in a friction-free space, salvagepunk retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages. That’s precisely because salvagepunk is dealing with objects rather than signs. While signs are interchangeable, objects have particular properties, textures and tendencies, and the art of salvage is about knowing which objects can be lashed together to form viable constructions.
All three of these positions – hauntology, accelerationism and salvagepunk – thus share something in common, which is an attempt to preserve the formal potentialities still latent in objects strewn throughout the scrapheap of our crashed present. And over the last few years, it has become my personal bugbear that none of these positions has been sufficiently understood in our popular discourses, which leaves us wanting as we attempt to make sense of the functioning of AI, which – at its worst – demonstrates a rapid recuperation of what was previously always in question for sample culture – that is, the tension held not between originality and derivation, as Inscoe-Jones frames our present moment, but rather between an artist’s capacity for making decisions about the bolting-together of particular cultural forms, and a latent indecision with regards to the production of the new.
The threat of AI is that it not only emphasises this indecision – such that we relegate the act of decision-making to a machine – but also the sense in which AI, in striving for ever greater fidelity and mimesis, neutralises its own capacity for true invention. AI is, in this sense, the ultimate postmodern technology that is desperately sought by those wanting to unburden themselves of their own autonomy.
AI was most interesting prior to this moment, when it seemed incapable of this unburdening; when its errors were so much more blatant, when its outputs were incomplete without human intervention and discretion, that is, when its productions were still dominated by the frictions of its infancy, when its own understanding of what was a viable construction was skewed and challenged our own preconceptions of formal viability. AI was most interesting, that is to say, when its interventions within culture at large came from a far more marginal and inchoate position.
Here we can emphasise the point at hand. AI is not a threat to originality. As we go about trying to correct its errors and make it a monolith to ‘truth’, we are threatened in the sense that AI will neutralise what is most human in culture – our excessiveness, our irrationality, our errancy. Take the example of the Fluxus performance we have just listened to. A Fluxus score is inherently incomplete. It is a set of inputs used to generate unpredictably human outputs. We might well consider how a Fluxus score is similar to the new ‘art’ of writing AI inputs, but this equivalence can only be made right now, and perhaps not in the future, as it is hoped by many that the outputs of AI systems will be entirely predictable and verifiable. Fluxus, to the contrary, has no interest in veracity.
Returning to the break, I want to end with a brief consideration of how Fred Moten understands the break, positioning him as an integral successor to the maligned discourses so far discussed.
Moten’s interest in the break focusses on its centrality within m black performance in particular. Blackness is itself a break, he writes, since blackness “continually erupts out of its own categorization”, which is to say that blackness is only in that which
exceeds itself; it bears the groundedness of an uncontainable outside. It’s an erotics of the cut, submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory, damaged love; freedom drive.
But what happens to this freedom drive, exactly, when the break never ends, or when the break is recuperated and normalised? How do you continue to identify a break as such when it is seamlessly conjoined with the perpetual crises that surround it? For Moten, it seems the only thing to do is stay in the break, stay with the trouble, but rather than regiment the break, we must continue to make it swing.
This, for Moten, is the heart of black art: breaking is the methodology of those he refers to as “my people”, whereby another paradox may well appear before us. Sampling, after all, has long been enveloped in a politics of ownership, of property rights, just as AI training models are today. But what is owned, in the break of blackness, is not an origin. For black people in particular, what is owned is a shared experience, itself broken and made to swing, of having been owned quite literally. What comes to swing is a tension between enslavement and self-possession, with freedom and unfreedom all too often discussed in the same terms – we can think of Grace Jones’ 1985 single ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ as an especially explicit example of this tension, in being a song about chain gangs turned into a disco anthem. We might say that what is owned, then, less pejoratively, is a movement; paradoxically, what is ‘mine’ is a displacement. The tension that remains is that the break is not so much placed in ‘common ownership’, but what Moten and Stefano Harney might instead call an ‘undercommon ownership’.
For this reason, at a certain point, the source of the ‘amen break’ – its originality; its origin – becomes irrelevant, or rather, it should do. This is only really a concern for capitalism, after all, and knowledge of the break’s origin has been recuperated primarily for the sake of profit for the Winstons – or rather, their label – who own it as a piece of property. But against sampling discourse’s preoccupation with property rights, what is more difficult to describe, because of its disturbing of an undercommons, are the broader, more “formal possibilities and aesthetic implications” of sampling as a practice, quickly cutting through all proprietary prevaricating to instead consider the impact of sampling, as a form of cut-up, on a collective and creative (un)consciousness that is itself already cut-up, as well as its ability to reflect upon affects already felt within us – thus producing another kind of swing.
In the foreword to Moten and Harney’s most recent work, 2021’s All Incomplete, Denise Ferreira de Silva brings this difficult position, as it pertains to the swing of decision-making, to bear on AI explicitly. She writes:
Every decision always includes a choice of one thing among others: a choice is always also of the lesser because no one thing can meet all demands of what is called desire … [T]he algorithm, the formal deciding tools of logistical capital fails where it has to work with more than what is adequate for it to do its thing, to choose, to decide. When the input does not match the data, the process stalls … Input is data, it has a form and a purpose. It is always ready to be in relation, to make a connection … [In order] for it to work, for the algorithm to do its thing, the input needs to fit as part in the structure and be able to facilitate the procedure it is submitted to, it needs to be processable. This is the way an input cannot be a thing. It is always an object.
Here we can think of Fisher’s summation of salvagepunk, which is similarly interested in the properties of a given object, which is not a sign. Signs are interchangeable; objects, however, are excessive.
The example I think of here is an attempt to play a game of chess. I take the chessboard down from the shelf, and in laying out the board, I find that a piece of missing – let’s say a bishop. In order to continue playing the game, I rummage around for a replacement. I go into the kitchen and take a pepper pot from the cupboard and place it where the bishop should be. The structure of the game itself makes this metonymic shift possible, as it is ultimately irrelevant that the pepper pot is a pepper pot, since it now takes on a new position in the symbolic order of the chessboard. I continue with the game as planned. However, the sign – in this case, the bishop-pot – always means more than it wants to. We are thus ‘forced’ to exclude an excess in order to maintain the meaning of the bishop-sign that the pot is standing in for. We recuperate the bishop, at the level of the sign. But the pepper pot remains an object, which exceeds the new regime of signs I place it into. For de Silva, this is what is significant: “That which in the thing exceeds the parameters of form and efficacy can never enter into the process [of recuperation], unless it is already deject, reject, or just as well as dead.”
The task of a near-future AI is to eradicate this excess, either through semiotic recuperation or through discard. This is how capitalism has long functioned in its attempts to eradicate the objects – the bodies – that confuse and frustrate and even reject the system. We need only look to Israeli’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, aided by AI systems, which fights to eradicate the excesses of its colonial endeavours – the Palestinian people. This is why the only two outcomes of the “conflict”, for the decaying liberal mind, are genocide or a two-state solution: discard or recuperation. Israel functions as a recuperation for the near-eradication of the Jewish people. But there is power and force in being the dejected, rejected, and the dead.
This is the point at which hauntology intervenes, and this example isn’t so distant from our present concerns today, as the Palestinian people also constitute a culture. How a culture remains fugitive to the powers of recuperation and annihilation, which are in many instances the same thing, is the question of our age. AI, at its most interesting, exacerbates the tensions found within this presently incomplete process. The fear is that it will one day be completed. Some artists find a certain fugitivity within AI’s infancy, and this is, to a certain extent, valid. But as AI matures, it will constitute more of a threat to what we hold dear than we presently realise. Not a threat to our originality, but a threat to the very fugitivity of all those objects – human and machine – that interest us precisely because of their excess and lack of origin.
Today I am hosting a statement written by Tristam Adams, friend of the blog and formerly Editor-in-Chief at Zer0 Books.
Both Zer0 Books and Repeater Books have continue to stagger on, in spite of the boycotts organised against them this year (see here and here). The internal goings-on that have led to a moment of fissure — which Watkins Media has sought to avoid any acknowledgement of, ignoring both the private and (later, necessarily) public concerns of its own authors and staff — have been shrouded in obscurity.
Tristam’s statement below sheds some much-needed light on what has been happening behind these beloved but beleaguered imprints. My thanks to Tristam for his trust in wishing to host this reflection here.
I started working for Watkins in 2021 as Editor-in-Chief of Zer0 Books. Tariq Goddard, the then founder, publisher and EiC of Repeater Books (and previously Zer0 Books) brought me in to oversee the imprint he founded and left (along with other Zer0 founders) to form Repeater Books. I am generally quite ‘British’ in my expression, nonetheless it is perhaps appropriate for me to say here how grateful I am for his trust and faith. Thank you, Tariq.
With both imprints under the same ownership, there was certainly a risk of the pair being in competition with each other, but in practice it was harmonious. Occasionally, submissions not quite right for Zer0 found their home in Repeater, and vice versa. At Zer0, my objective was quality control. Zer0 had, in the years before 2021, pursued a volume-first approach, to such a degree that it had damaged its own reputation and market standing. I worked through approximately 80 titles, contracted by the previous EiC, with quality as priority. During and after this ‘turning the ship’ period, I contracted authors and edited for both Repeater and Zer0.
Both imprints were gaining momentum and in good financial health when Goddard was dismissed. In my view, his treatment was beyond unfair. But there is something more notable and curious here. The episode that initiated Goddard’s ‘redundancy’ was the business owner’s disagreement about the signing of an open letter in support of Palestine. Parking the painful urgency of this for a moment, two questions from a flatly financial and business perspective are apposite:
Firstly, why remove a man that had largely built two successful imprints, against the odds of trends in publishing, when Repeater was doing well?
Secondly, and from the same gilet and pinstripe POV, was it an adroit business decision in terms of optics for the investor of ostensibly the UK’s largest radical-left imprint to veto the signing of this letter?
I am a dreamer. But my imagination for a business rationale behind these decisions fails me, leading to speculation that it was either personal or political or both. After Tariq’s departure, there were ‘no plans’ to cease publishing. Staff were told how financially viable the imprint was. Then there were plans to cease commissioning new Repeater titles. Then there were plans to mothball the imprint indefinitely. Watkins’ management of Repeater has been a pattern of disingenuous and subtle ‘mismanagement’ and ‘incompetence’ – an opaque and covert project of smothering and dismantling.
Since Goddard’s ostracism and the details of the business owner’s politics and financial connections to Israel, and the resulting boycott, I have worked in a state of torsion between supporting authors (many of whom are releasing their first books), and my own ethics and politics. During this time, I was informed more than once that there were no plans for any changes at Zer0 and that the imprint remained financially viable.
My thoughts were this: We are all complicit. One cannot be pure from genocide. Complicity is always a question of degrees. I was supporting authors on the just side of politics and publishing texts with urgent humanitarian arguments – some of which have pro-Palestine sentiments (not least my introduction to the new edition of Goddard’s The Picture of Contented New Wealth). Despite the discomfort of complicity, I felt on balance it was better to give voice to arguments and causes I support rather than no voice at all in a pyrrhic and doomed attempt towards purity.
This view shifted in October when my working arrangements were changed. I’d no longer be free to contract authors independently. Instead, I’d only contract titles subject to sign off from the business owner. Editor-in-Chief in name, not practice. This change fits the pattern of the unsaid and unacknowledged strangulation that characterised Repeater’s ‘pause’. It also meant that my agency to do good, to publish and promote the causes and arguments that matter, was gone. I worked for a single frantic month under the new terms, pushing as many authors as I could into production to ensure their books would be published, and resigned.
Much of the bravery and conviction of youth is no longer with me. I’ve grown cautious, perhaps reticent. I am wary of partisanship and dogma and latterly I increasingly hold that trust, empathy, commitment, and love are the routes to good without the former’s risks of violence. Yet the irk, the smart, of being subject to dishonesty, specious manipulation or deception has not waned – only my patience. As I type this, there remains the offensive managerial guise that these imprints may continue. In some comatose sense, they do – the back-catalogue rights continue to be sold around the globe, ensuring future profit. Yet any investment or conviction for new titles from authors with urgent arguments about today has gone.
I am very proud of the authors I contracted and had the pleasure of editing. Tom White’s Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster, Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism by Eugene Rabkin, and Trav: A Novel by Taylor Burns are just some I am particularly fond of.
I feel for those I have left behind. And I feel for those I did not join sooner. Torsion, but it feels right.
