Let me start by getting something off my chest… I’m frustrated with my PhD at the moment.
My funding stopped at the end of March. As a result, I’ve had to get a new job to pay the bills. The job is great, but I am left wondering why anyone’s PhD funding would be stopped at what is probably the most crucial time for concentration. Ridiculously, this is entirely usual. I knew it was coming. I’d even planned to finish my thesis before my funding ran out, but there were inevitably a lot of corrections to be made to the manuscript submitted back in February. Now I don’t have the time to make them. I’m especially annoyed about it because I’ve persisted with this project in a timely manner through so much personal turmoil. It would be so ironic (if fitting) if it was the university itself that made me fall at the final hurdle.
At this point, I don’t even know what I’d do with a doctorate anyway. Not just with the title of Dr. — although it is attractively gender-neutral — but with the thesis itself. Since Repeater Books succumbed to the censorship of its Zionist owners, relegated to a zombie press engaged with only by those ignorant of or indifferent to that context, I no longer have a home in publishing. I could send the thesis to a more academic press, but adjacency to academia has never been something I’ve wanted. I went to art school. My Masters was a brief stint of writing practice that left me looking for an undercommons. When I started my PhD, I was homeless and directionless post-pandemic, and mostly did it for the money and time afforded to put my life back together. In that regard, it has already served its purpose. Meanwhile, academia has remained on its knees, reduced to a swamp of immiserating bureaucracies. Four years as a postgrad has not persuaded me that it’s worth engaging with any further.
Still, it feels like such a waste of energy to leave this 100,000-word monstrosity in some folder on my laptop gathering digital dust. But maybe that’s fate. It’s not been a complete waste of time; I’ve learned a lot, that’s for sure. But I do have mixed feelings about having nothing publishable to show for it. That was what I’d hoped for. But the world also feels so different from when I started with that humble aim. From the vantage point of 2026, it feels less humble and more myopic.
At least I still have my blog. But who reads it? Yes, the death of the blogosphere has been declared many times, but now it seems assured. Even Substack, which briefly dominated as a side-hustle space for all sorts of jobbing commentators, feels increasingly irrelevant. I don’t remember the last time I felt moved to read one. The Internet has instead become an energetic wasteland. In many ways, it always was one. But I see no positive value in it whatsoever anymore. Nothing truly fruitful has come out of its discourses in years.
There is still so much to write about and talk about, but what is the point of writing about it here or there? What good comes from flinging things online? Or sequestering them away in academic journals? Who has the time and resources necessary to sustain a writing practice in any regard? I certainly don’t. I know I published three books not that long ago, but you should have seen the state of my personal life by the time they were done with. It would be nice to have the time again one day, but I’m done with suffering for a craft. There’s enough suffering to be experienced already, which results in a sense of urgency that writing does not alleviate.
Do I sounded jaded? Frustrated? Disheartened with everything? I am. The Gaza genocide has changed everything. The years spent blogging feel like a decent education that now needs to be put to better use.
I write anyway. I try to write myself out of a persistent year-long disillusionment.
THe University Discourse
Part of me blames Lacan for all this. I have spent the last four years largely getting to grips with him, which has mutated the direction of a PhD that I originally intended to be about Deleuze. The endless explication needed to demonstrate my knowledge of a figure I intended to be marginal feels like quicksand. It has taken all energy out of a project I was initially excited about. That is the Lacanian trap.
Don’t get me wrong: I might be grumpy, but Lacan is useful, for sure. Wrestling with the issues he raises is a good exercise in sharpening one’s wit (even if it is one only appreciated by a specific in-group). Still, it hardly feels indispensable. The inexhaustible task of elucidating the system he produced only makes one primed for co-optation by a university machine. At the risk of throwing stones from my glass house, I feel frustrated with this sort of thing precisely because I almost walked zombie-like into the same situation.
Lacan may have also been onto something when he built a body of work, like that of James Joyce, that remains a veritable honey trap / gravity well for academics. Frustrating them is the point! But speaking personally, I really don’t want to fall into all that, thanks very much.
Still, there is one piece of Lacan that I have found useful, at least in framing the frustrations I have. (The paradox of structuralism is that it is always well placed to frame the consequences of its own shortcomings.) For the past few months especially — whenever I’ve had the time — I have been immersed in writing a chapter on Lacan’s four discourses.
In particular, there is Lacan’s theorisation of the ‘university discourse’. Here, ‘knowledge’ itself becomes the agent of discourse — there is no clearly defined hierarchy or jostling for symbolic power. Everything is made more diffuse. It is a discourse that signifies a major shift in the production of knowledge that, for Lacan, epitomises modernity. As Adrian Johnston writes, it describes “a shift from the dominance of ‘the discourse of the master’ qua social bond” — which is “structured on the basis of traditional pre-twentieth-century paternal-style authority” — “to the hegemony of ‘the discourse of the university’ qua social bond” — which is “structured on the basis of anonymous bureaucratic and scientific authority underpinned by allegedly neutral, objective knowledge”.
The main problem that Lacan’s ‘university discourse’ represents, of course, is that, whilst the university may epitomise this sort of knowledge production, it does not ‘own’ it. In fact, for Lacan, it was the USSR that epitomised the university discourse on a global scale. But here he betrays his own biases, doing a sort of psychoanalytic version of an admonishment of communism that is far more applicable to capitalism. Indeed, today, the university discourse feels more appropriate to the late-capitalist world in which we currently live: the world of a ‘technocratic’ capitalist realism, beholden to its own sense of ‘grown-up‘ politics, which is no appeal to parental authority, but rather a kind of sickeningly Millennial ‘eldest daughter’ sense of responsibility.
You need only look at the attack ads circulating around the recent local elections in the UK to see this discourse in full view, wherein Labour centrists decry again and again the crisis of ‘sectarian’ politics afflicting the nation. As Slavoj Žižek once argued:
One of the telltale signs of university discourse is that the opponent is accused of being ‘dogmatic’ and ‘sectarian’. University discourse cannot tolerate an engaged subjective stance.
In the form of the Labour Party, it’s a politics beholden to the focus group, fiscal responsibility, lofty centrism, the ‘professional-managerial class’… It’s capitalist realism built on a foundation of ‘think tanks’. It’s why Labour’s likely forthcoming leadership contest is little more than an exercise in changing the window dressing. Contemporary politics puts big, dumb inflatables in suits on display, but it’s typically rudderless and leaderless.
This suits a university discourse, because it makes superficial reboots and revamps easier to pull off. After all, a further mechanism of university discourse in this regard is its quintessentially capitalist mode of ‘reterritorialisation’, albeit at the level of knowledge production, which feeds upon those most resistant to the institutions of knowledge production themselves. Mark Fisher’s brief stint within Labour’s technocratic machinery feels like an example, but it is one that is again epitomised by the university itself. Žižek notes, for example, how figures like “Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Benjamin” are “three great antiuniversitarians whose presence in the academy is today all-pervasive”. Together with many others, they “demonstrate that the ‘excluded’ or ‘damned’ authors are the IDEAL feeding stuff for the academic machine.”
It’s why the lauded para-academics of the twenty-first century — the Ccru, for example, and those who came after — are now everywhere in academia, and even provide an intellectual cornerstone of the Big Tech companies that the Ccru lampooned. Hell, I’m even aware that my own work has been taught on university courses, leading to various assumptions that I’m part of that machinery. In light of this, Žižek suggests that one aspect of Lacan’s ‘university discourse’ is that it serves as a mechanism of institutionalised knowledge-production “endeavouring to integrate, domesticate, and appropriate the excess that resists and rejects it”. Speaking from experience, it’s hard to argue with that. But what are we — what am I — to do with the resentful disillusionment that inevitably follows?
The Four Discourses (of Web 2.0)
Thinking more about the present, Lacan’s four discourses have led me back to Mark Fisher’s (oft-ignored) schema of Y2K social links, which can perhaps be read as a less formal attempt to update Lacan’s theses for the social-media era.
What Fisher presents us with, in 2009, is a schema of fans, vampires, trolls, and Masters. Like Lacan’s four discourses, Fisher’s symbolic figures can be framed as stand-ins for certain types of social bond ensnared within a diffusively networked master’s discourse.
“The dominant modes of subjectivity at the end of history / web 2.0 are those of the Troll and the Grey Vampire, the two faces of the Last Man”, Fisher begins. He first analyses the Troll, suggesting that the “academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence”:
Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity (opposed, in their minds, to the allegedly infantile attachments of The Fan). But there is nothing more adolescent – in the worst way – than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from – the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only […] in terms of time and energy wasted – the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them).
Trolls are everywhere. I could not possibly count the number of times someone has tried to shame me for being a ‘fan’ of Mark Fisher, for instance. But my allegiance, even when critical, is steadfast. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. My investments run deep.
Fisher continues by discussing the Grey Vampire, who is “related to” the Troll, “and in some ways even more dangerous”:
Grey Vampires are creatures who disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but [are] unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Troll, the Grey Vampire’s mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is … moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive – everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything.
The great irony of Fisher’s posthumous interpretation, especially amongst a particular brand of American para-academician, is that the Troll and Grey Vampire are pulled adrift from Fisher’s wider libidinal schema and weaponised to always apply to everyone else. The Grey Vampire, as per Fisher’s infamous “Exiting the Vampire Castle“, may still apply to a certain type of moribund too-woke leftist, but when detached from his wider schema, we fail to see how it is Trolls themselves who have utilised this image of the vampire for their own immiserating aims. In fact, Fisher already predicted that this blurring of his schema might best apply to the
postmodern academic, complicit with the system that immiserates them, reflexively impotent, [who] is required to oscillate between being Troll and Grey Vampire, between hyper-critical scholarliness and convivial sociality, kept locked into the system by just the right level of prestige and self-loathing. That’s why most of the interesting work done in institutions is achieved by people who have infiltrated the academy after periods of (intellectual and subjective) destitution.
Fisher counts himself amongst this crowd, of course. He long sought a position within the academy, even whilst he was critical of it, and it is no doubt for this reason that he hated the way he, like so many, longed for its degraded promises. After all, what is the alternative? Is it not better to find fulfilment doing what one loves in an imperfect system than affirming one’s impotence resentfully from outside it? One of the more acute crises Fisher faced towards the end of his life was undoubtedly that he loved teaching and he loved his students, but he also found the academy’s bureaucracies immiserating and Kafkaesque. He seemingly never resolved that tension at the heart of his precarious dayjob.
My reason for returning to Fisher’s informal schema is that I want to resist the transformation of my own disillusionment and resentment into any of these negative figures. I see bits of myself in each of them. With regards to a particular relationship to the university, the schema suitably draws on universals. Any ‘truthful’ answer to the questions above is always going to be personal. Let each individual find a way to make peace with their own relationship to the university, whether inside or outside of it.
I feel like I have made my peace with being on the outside. I have loved my PhD for the space and funding it provided me to pursue a long-form project I’d likely never have gotten round to otherwise. But I have hated the bureaucracy of the whole process and I have struggled to force an interest in its communities. I realised long ago that I’d have preferred to just write another book whilst being left alone, as I had done previously. But that is hardly a solution to the problems raised.
In truth, I have been experiencing a reckoning that sees this process of disillusionment as inevitable, even essential. The task, however, is not getting stuck there. On the one hand, perhaps all of this is merely the self-loathing impotence of a ‘Last Man’, in Nietzsche’s formulation, but I also see a vent in this position that acknowledges it in terms of being a ‘Last Man’ in a particular era, which has come to a close.
The future is already here, and to occupy it is to feel oneself ejected from a moribund present — for better and for worse. It necessitates a loathsome subjectivity that wants all prior fixations and habits to be torn asunder.
I hate the world as it currently is, but remain impassioned that there are other ways of comporting ourselves to midwife a new world struggling to be born.
That hatred is essential. I want to betray the present.
Militant Dysphoria
Continuing to elucidate his schema, Fisher writes:
Betrayal is just as important a cultural engine as fidelity; hate is just as important as love. But only the fan can betray, only the lover can hate. That’s why betrayal and hate are as alien to the Troll as they are to the Grey Vampires.
The fan is neither loved nor hated. The trolls, vampires and Masters are largely indifferent to the fan’s chattering, since “the vicissitudes of fan-adoration have no relationship to proper philosophical discussion, and fan exasperation, the nihilation of the former idol, is somehow juvenile.”
Staking a claim, Fisher was as defiant on this point as ever:
I am a fan, and this holds for my philosophical, as much as my cultural, investments. The two are in any case interchangeable – there is a philosophy implicit in any cultural product worth its salt…
In parentheses, he briefly alludes (with admiration) to the late-00s fanaticism of Dominic Fox, Alex Williams and Reza Negarestani, demonstrated via “their method-analyses of Black Metal,” which takes on the form of a “black mirror reverse of the overground kingdom of Trolls and Grey Vampires.” As provocatively as ever, Fisher adds that “the anti-social dysphoria of Black Metal – being no-one – has far more to offer any 21st century Marxism than the moralising homilies of clubbable, pubbish socialism…”
On this point, there is much to quibble. Fisher himself did not remain immersed in this social dysphoria and, as far as I can tell, was never much of a ‘fan’ of Black Metal, even if he enjoyed the writings of those who were. Indeed, “the moralising homilies of clubbable, pubbish socialism” arguably took a hold of Repeater Books — and, relatedly, Tribune mag, which might epitomise it in the present — a decade on from this point. But since the former project succumbed to a lack of vigilance regarding the Zionists in its midst, perhaps there is a truth to — or at least a worthy return of — the “social dysphoria” he entertained in 2009.
Fisher was especially interested in this ‘dysphoria’ at that time. Following the publication of Dominic Fox’s Cold World, Fisher organised a conference at Goldsmiths on ‘Militant Dysphoria’. Alex Williams’ contribution to that event — the only one still online, as far as I can tell — helps clarify the stakes.
Militant dysphoria speaks to a symptomatology defined by
the collapse of the familiar paradigms of leftist politics, be they democratic parliamentarian, or street-protest based. Though neo-liberalism as reality principle might well appear to have imploded following the economic crisis of 2008, in the West we have pointedly not seen a serious renaissance of the left … Thirty years of triumphant post-Fordist neoliberalism seem to have critically weakened the usual avenues for left politics, to have driven those who keep faith with the truths of Marxism or Socialism to either an in-denial fervour for the theatrical acting-out of a party in the street, or a kind of numb remove, an immiserated state. So the left is trapped in a sort of depression, in a dysphoric state itself. Here “militant dysphoria” means the dysphoria of the militant. The hope arises that it is through a radicalisation of this very negative state that a future emancipatory politics might be born. A radicalisation in what sense though?
Williams’ question is less open-ended in the present. As I’ve noted recently, I do not see a contemporary left as having imploded in this way before the challenges that it now faces. The tandem vanguards of direct and indirect action have shaken up British politics profoundly, despite — or even because — the political establishment has sought to imprison all those who throw their weight behind these currents.
Regardless, leftist politics has been strengthened as a result, achieving considerable gains after the failure of the Corbyn project a decade earlier. We live in a very exciting and nerve-wracking time as a result. Nerve-wracking because the forces of reaction have also intensified to meet the left’s defiant advances. Exciting because it is also the emboldened forces of reaction that have led to a new ‘militant dysphoria’ biting at our heels.
Williams continues:
One interpretation of a militant dysphoria would hold that dysphoria acts to separate the subject from their world, and that [subject,] once suitably energised by this negative relation … might act to change it. In this sense of “militant dysphoria”[,] dysphoria is a necessary stage of subjective transformation, a making[-]strange of the everyday world of life and the vital, a subtraction apart from its quotidian ensnarement and the first step on the path towards its transformation. Here then, militant dysphoria breaks down into first dysphoria, then militancy, in that order.
It is a process of subjective transformation that is very familiar, and one I admittedly have a tendency to forget about when the dark cloud looms overhead… Which is ironic, as it is a process intuited at the very heart of what “xenogothic” was always meant to refer to: a world-dysphoria that has an eye on its outside, on a transformation beyond the capitalist-realist chrysalis, which also wrestles with the difficulties of starting from a dysphoric position. As Williams writes:
The primary difficulty here is to think the transition from the moment of refusal, of separation, of scission, and the conversion of this negative energy into action, the shift from rejection and dejection to engagement. Here we would certainly need the supplement of a form or vessel into which this negative energy might be poured, a structure, a party, a battle group, some degree of institutionalisation of negativity which would serve to give form to the otherwise potentially solipsistic tendencies of the dysphoric.
For me, more recently, the Palestine solidarity movement has been serving precisely as that vessel. Many new friends I admire have enacted this transition from depression to action emphatically, when faced with a genocide. Nevertheless,
the politics of this form of militant dysphoria is deeply paradoxical, and seemingly always in danger of either sliding back into the logic of the vital or its dark inverted doppelganger, a reification of dysphoria itself.
It is a tension found at the heart of many writers who take a blackened (and even cold, metallic) view of the world. Fisher nods to Fox, Williams and Negarestani; Williams himself nods to Thomas Ligotti:
At the level of content there is a radical denial of the vital [in Ligotti’s writings], and yet this very disavowal enables the works to pulse with [a] certain inhuman vitality. Within the libidinal economy of the depressive mind, whilst life itself is refused, the life of the depressive economy, of the inverted libido, becomes omnipresent, becomes a new kind of life. Ligotti, for example, whilst claiming an absolute anhedonia, a freezing[-]up of the machinery of desire and enjoyment into a crystallised, timeless, ice-like tableaux, at the level of productivity remains motivated. Fundamentally[,] of course, Ligotti still writes. Instead of a refusal of the vital, of enjoyment, the dysphoric libidinal economy seemingly learns to enjoy displeasure, to metabolise disenchantment itself as a new kind of alternative energy source.
It is relatable, even if embarrassingly so — I wish fewer posts on this blog began with dejection, only to write my way out of it, but that is a precious function of this blog, which I’ve long made peace with and, yes, actively enjoy…
The Analytic-Hysteric
Taking this militant dysphoria together with Fisher’s informal Y2K schema of social links, we can also return to Lacan’s four discourses — in particular, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse.
Here, a bit of explication is necessary: the position of the dysphoric militant resembles the Lacanian ‘hysteric’s discourse’, that is, the position of someone who says, “I am the master of a master become impotent”. This position contains its own jouissance, in that this subordination to a decaying master’s discourse can nonetheless be enjoyed.
Alenka Zupancic frames the hysteric as follows:
The hysteric’s indignation about the master really being just this miserable human being, full of faults and flaws, does not aim at displaying how castrated he is; on the contrary, it is a complaint about the fact that the master is precisely not castrated enough – if he were, he would utterly coincide with his symbolic function, but as it is, he nevertheless also enjoys, and it is this enjoyment that weakens his symbolic power and irritates the hysteric.
But is there not something else at play here?
Lacan’s hysteric’s discourse takes place in a world where a master’s discourse is decaying, and an awareness of this fact — the sense that one possesses a privileged knowledge of the master’s deprecation — amounts to a sense of usurping the master’s discourse with one’s own. It is a discourse no less susceptible to co-optation by the university discourse. In the context of the Palestine liberation movement, it is where distain for NGOs and researchers sometimes comes from, who risk only ever trying to hold the master to account in the context of his own legislature. The hysteric may well take the place of the conmen in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ in this regard, — the ones who exploit the master’s vanity, like jesters of the court, ridiculing but hardly overcoming, because the emperor is more than capable of withstanding the jeers of his subjects.
The dysphoric militant is less a jester than a wolf in the throne room. Lacan’s position is one of knowledge, interpretation, and always vying for meaning. The dysphoric militant may well take on a more nihilistic position that gladly sees meaning — especially a ‘masterful’ meaning — emptied of its pretensions.
A Wolf in the Throne Room
Lacanians would undoubtedly tightened the trap here again. There is no escaping the knot of language. Even Fisher knew that action was nothing without its proper narration. Maybe this is a flaw — actions speak louder than words — but Lacan too noted how the meaning applied to language was a human predilection. The system itself (whether of language, as that which is most fundamental, or any other other system for that matter) does not need meaning to function; only we do.
But do we, really? In the late-00s speculative-realist blogosphere, we must remember that nihilism was also newly affirmed. Ray Brassier offered up the most salient rallying cry for the new nihilist when he argued:
Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter.
It is a view affirmed also by Badiou — a notable Lacanian with formerly Maoist tendencies — whom Bassier quotes. Badiou writes:
As far as nihilism is concerned, we shall grant that our era bears witness to it precisely insofar as nihilism is understood as the rupturing of the traditional figure of the bond; unbinding as the form of being of everything which acts as a semblance of the bond.
Which bond? Social bonds? Perhaps…
All of this lingers in the background of Williams’ militant dysphoria too when he writes how
a world protects its consistency by rendering itself a black box, invincible and invisible, taken for granted. The human world is one determined by vitalistic principles, and it is these which are undone in dysphoria, hence undoing the world which they construct. If capital has subsumed the world of life, has exploited and manipulated its processes to such an extent that it becomes synonymous with life, and indeed a form of life itself, then perhaps the way of death, of non-life, of the freezing[-]over of the vital offers a way out of its particular strictures. It is certainly true to say that capitalism as it stands now requires a degree of acquiescence with the “big other” — to at least pay lip service to the affirmationist common sense. This means that at the level of microeconomics, we must “enjoy” or at least pretend to do so, and at the level of macroeconomics that the dogma of growth of gross domestic product as strictly equivalent to the common good and the elevation of the general standard of living of humanity must be maintained. So in identifying with the state of dysphoria itself and hence to subtract from this world, the militant dysphoric effectively abandons a world already made cold by capital’s alien life, and then perhaps, undoes it. Perhaps.
I find all of this clarifying… I hope I’m not the only one.
Again, as I keep repeating as of late, this sort of militant dysphoria — as a process of transformation — that can only result in direct action, which does not petition the master to fully cohere with his symbolic function, but rather acts when and where he won’t. In many ways, it is all the more fitting that this is a position that the master cannot understand. He sees every would-be usurper as a hysteric. This will (hopefully) be his downfall.
Coda
Writing time is precious. It does not present itself so often these days. This post has become a kind of cork in latent energies that I’ve been desperate to release somehow. It barely takes the edge off, but it is better than nothing.
The world is cold. It’s nearly June, but it feels like summer came and went over a few days in early May. I pick up my phone and my headphones and scroll through iBroadcast until I find Wolves in the Throne Room. I’ve not really been in the mood for metal in years. I’m in the mood for it again now.
