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Extreme Romanticism and Baroque Sunbursts: Notes from ASSEMBLY at Somerset House

on November 22, 2018January 10, 2019 By xenogothic 5 Comments

The ASSEMBLY programme at Somerset House last weekend was pretty incredible. Unfortunately, I found out about it all far too late. I scrambled to get a couple of tickets for events but, in the end, only went to see two talks.

(I was very excited to see Gazelle Twin perform on Friday night but illness meant her show had to be cancelled last minute.)

The two talks I went to see were “Extreme Romanticism” and “Baroque Sunbursts” — the former a panel about a new mutant goth revival, also meant to feature Gazelle Twin (the panel was changed up in her absence), and the latter a k-punk book launch event (and a sort of public iteration of our wonderful Monday night reading group).

Extreme Romanticism

“Extreme Romanticism” turned out to be an odd one but I found it complementing the k-punk talk in strange and unexpected ways. It was advertised as follows:

Terror, power, awe, hitherto darkness brought into the light. A gothic revival or a new ‘Romanticism’ for Modern Britain? Agnes Gryczkowska, Seb Gainborough and John Bence discuss emotion and extremity and their ASSEMBLY performances with writer Chal Ravens.

With Xenogothic being heavily invested in the revitalisation of our otherwise captured gothic tendencies, the idea of a panel discussion on a new gothic extreme romanticism seemed right up my street.

Whilst it was a fun talk with some brilliant people, unfortunately I couldn’t help but feel frustrated with the way the discussion went. It revolved, primarily, around ideas of a new communality in extreme music, a new sense of compassion, but I was left unconvinced it was anything new… It felt instead like watching a group of people rediscover a forgotten element of goth’s DNA, and an unfortunate example of a music scene demonstrating the internalisation of its own bad press.

Amongst discussions of the politics of BDSM and John Bence’s barely repressed murderous impulses, what struck me most was a discussion around the failure of atheism. Ravens noted how, as a teenager, she was an adamant atheist, as were most kids, refusing to entertain any form of irrationality. Atheism was synonymous with a (proto-)neo-rationalism but this is, apparently, in 2018, no longer cool.

Goths today, it was suggested, are less defined by a cosmic pessimism and more by an occulted spirituality. The things that many people would previously not have been caught dead near are now all the rage: horoscopes, tarot, crystals… The oddities of our spiritual pasts have now reemerged to constitute a more broadly populist spiritualism, with goth dragged into the milieu and given a new superficial foundation in the 21st century. There’s nothing wrong with those things exactly, in and of themselves, and I know many people who dabble with them under the light of a lucid materialism, but I refuse to swallow the argument that these things are indicative of gothic innovation or a new form of romantic extremity. Surely, it’s well-trodden ground, with this “new” form being nothing more than a symptom of goth’s continued capitalist capture?

The pervasiveness of capitalism means that, of course, it has become an integral (albeit contradictory) component of our innumerable contemporary subjectivities and ideologies — even those that profess to stand in opposition to it. To miss this and direct the blame at our countercultures in themselves is very symbolic of our current melancholic mindsets.

For the panel, regardless, the verdict was damning and framed in a way that I really did not expect to hear: these elements have been revitalised within goth culture because atheism has failed. It’s too cold. Too cold even for goths…

I couldn’t help but think that this was a false characterisation of a nihilistic atheism informed by its own critics; by the inherent religiosity of a moralising contemporary Left, its problematic outcries caught in their own echo chamber, only strengthening the inner Catholic whip, caught between an attempt to heretically invert Judeo-Christian rituals whilst nonetheless being immediately captured within their normalised parameters.

This was something that the panel themselves were nonetheless humorously aware of. The abject tension of John Bence introducing his Kill EP as an opportunity for him to channel his very real murderous impulses felt like a case in point — until somehow laughed and crossed the impasse of British politeness. Bence then continued to poke fun at this by feigning(?) a sensitivity to the anti-Christian. But it was hard to know to what extent everyone was in on the joke or how far down the joke went, and, as a result, much of the conversation seemed to continue with a bizarre sincerity…

This was most evident when music itself was held up as central to this new communality — the panel was made up of musicians after all — and it is true: music does resonate with the outside most effortlessly. However, for this panel, music’s affective nature was limited to its associations with an organised religiosity. No one thought to make the point that the “sacred” in music is an expression of something that is “religious” by association only, incapable of being limited to religion in and of itself. I kept wanting to jump in, stick my hand up, and champion the Bataillean “sacred” — that atheological but nonetheless sublime experience of “communion”; of “communication”.

The “sacred”, for Bataille, is a world distinct from work; a world of “festival, intensified delight, joy, and abandonment.” And Bataille was, of course, the OG Goth of the 20th century, viscerally informed by Nietzsche’s thinking. The intensive compassion of his communism seems totally in line with this “new” gothic that the panel had gathered to discuss, albeit ejected into some new beyond through a templexed association with a moral antiquity. (But when they was familiar territory even for Bataille.)

Here I was reminded of my Wednesday night out with @thejaymo, at one point discussing our shared interest in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, with its aim towards “updating and de-mystifying religious thought [through] magick, technology, poetry, musick, whatever!” I still like TOPY’s self-aware appeals to magick. They’re clear in their intentions. For example, their “statement ov intent” is downright Deleuzean. It reads:

As first steps towards change, we attempt to cultivate an awareness ov thee consequences ov our thoughts and actions, and to direct our energies in constructive directions. All this is done on thee understanding that our thoughts and behaviour form thee interface between our lives and thee lives ov others, and their repercussions are therefore endlessly returning.
Awareness is consequently a requirement for our personal and collective survival and evolution. Still, we recognise that awareness itself is dependent on information, communication, and personal commitment. Our work is subsequently practical, exchanging models and methods we have found useful to ourselves. Thus we do not dictate, but rather focus on expanding thee available possibilities through thee cross-fertilisation ov suggestions, successes, and failures. And for us this is a full-time commitment, a continual process ov being, an endless myriad ov becomings.

I mention this here only because I feel like so many post-80s (cyber)goth cultures have been rooted in some form of these same beliefs. It was a 21st century anethics presented via a language and aesthetics that was wholly other to the prevailing interests and discourses of the time but nonetheless centred around the power of collective rituals, whatever they may be. It likewise echoes the delirious mythos of the Ccru: the irrational rationalism of technomagick explored in tandem with the rational irrationalism of stock market hype. (What is hyperstition if not a magick that de-mystifies the religious pathologies of financial speculation in cyberspace, amongst other things?)

Here, the suspicion remains: perhaps I’m not in on the joke. Perhaps everyone knows this. Each of their works traverse these lines with skill and with ease, containing and dramatising all of these elements, traveling far beyond them. (Gazelle Twin, most specifically, even in her absence, epitomises this new gothic.) None of their bodies of work can be reduced to a wayward panel discussion, but I was nonetheless left bemused by it. If all of the above is familiar to them, they’re doing an awful job of articulating it…

Then I hear Gainsborough’s suggestion that we are, in fact, all to blame for goth’s subcultural failings, saying something along the lines of: “When God died, we threw the baby out with the bathwater” — conjuring up a wonderfully and inadvertently grotesque image. His argument seemed to be that the death of God also killed our communality and a renewed pop cultural interest in the materiality of the occult and the esoteric is a reaction against the normalised nihilism of our mandatory individualisms, emboldened by a societal fear of the collective ritual. But we might note that TOPY’s statement ov intent reads like a rave sensibility made goth and there are many other subcultures like it. So where is this sensibility now? It seems long gone, and most certainly neutered, but by what? By our own lack of faith? I don’t think so. All this new pop irrationalism signals, for me, is the project’s failure to ward off capitalist capture. I’d even go so far as to argue that the death of God has nothing to do with it — at least not explicitly

I have always felt like the image of Nietzsche’s madman in the marketplace was particularly prescient in being situated in a space of commerce, as if capitalism had long been primed to infiltrate that space reserved for God’s slowly decomposing corpse. The point of the parable of the death of God is surely that the world is indifferent to its announcement, preoccupied by the market. It is he who mourns the death of God — a death that can only of interest to the philosopher — who momentary ruptures the new everyday in his hysteria. But nothing happens. The shock to the madman is the world’s indifference to indifference.

If we are to nonetheless stay with Vessel’s analogy for a moment, it seems to me that, with God out of the bathtub, Goth subcultures have long been drinking deep, ingesting this soiled bathwater so that they might spread a gnostic dyssentry throughout the popular imagination. The intention being to cultivate an active nihilism, and act in the face of indifference, affirming it.

I’m reminded of that brilliant and blood-drunk post from Southern Nights on the cosmologies of Nietzsche, Bataille and Land, echoing the rantings of Nietzsche’s madman with an atheological prose that entangles the triumphs and humiliations of rationalism:

What if all we see around us in this visible universe of dust and light is nothing but the byproduct of endless expenditure, an excess expunged by the engorgements of a darker world of forces that the ancient dreamers, shamans, and Gnostics could only hint at in their negative theologies, and our scientists can only mathematize in their theoretical alchemy of this universal degradation and catastrophic trauma? What if we are mere shit in the drift of things unseen? Dead waste in a floating sea of black impenetrability? The Big Bang nothing more than a burp in the body of some great blind entity roiling in its own excess? Is this madness a metaphoric marshalling of strange tales from heresies of dead worlds?
Modern cosmology stripped of its ancient lineage of myth forces the cosmos into the procrustean bed of a bare and minimal system of holographs, strings, and vibrating systems of chaos and order. Has this given us anything better than the older myths? Is this universe bled of its fabrications, emptied of our desires, become a mere artifact of our insanity — an indifferent and essentially blind machine without purpose or telic motion? And, even if we revitalized a gnosis stripped of its redemptive qualities, its soteriological thrust how will we move those dark forces to reveal themselves? How unconceal their potential by way of math and technology? And, to what ends? Utilitarian ends for some human destitution? A bid to enslave the elements, develop even greater destructive power than our atomic weaponry? Are we nothing more than sorcerers nibbling at the table of existence, seeking ways to tap into its secret machinations, control and master its dark blessing?

This Baroque nihilism is the epitome of the Gothic stylings I was drawn towards in my formative years. The Gothic, specifically in its traditionally Frankensteinian mode of new myth grown out of new science, has always been about the paradoxical attempts to de-mystify that which we can still never hope to know. (It’s why Kant and Lovecraft work so well together.)

In this way, we can understand the Gothic itself as inherently tied to the Enlightenment, in much the same way that Gryczkowska acknowledged the entanglement of Somerset House’s neo-classical architecture and status as high-flying London arts institution and subterranean location of her band’s performance earlier that week in the Deadhouse, a crypt-turned-venue-for-hire… Such a relationship can be seen as a critical positioning that nonetheless depends on the Enlightenment for contrast so that it might define its own structures in negative. Goth, too, in hindsight, feels like an 80s subculture gilded in a similar forge, negatively echoing the new moralities and immoralities of a Thatcherite neoliberalism. Lest we forget how omnipresent vampires were to that time, as both figure of a timeless bourgeois decadence and the youthful abandon of a generation lost to politics.

This feedback loop, viewed cynically, demonstrates just some of the ways that capitalism’s greatest trick has been to sell back to us those things that we have always already had in our possession. It affirms itself and sells its homogenised worldview back to us, offsetting our alienation with the superficial salve of data-mined connections. Vampires remain poignant figures for both state and subject, depending on how you choose to look at things. However, the death of God never resulted in societal collapse because capitalism swooped in to sell our spirit back to us, at new and competitive prices. Capitalism has effectively upcycled human nature, reducing that which was always ours to little more than a novel Christmas gift. (I am left wondering how a new Light Gothic may truly be emerging but, instead of being Sad Christianity Lite, it may function as a movement of conscious and critical complicity with the developments of the Dark Enlightenment, so infamously explored by Nick Land. (Something to explore another time.)

As such, if there is to be a new Gothic, it is doomed to the same impotent fate of past subcultures if it cannot account for this inherent positioning, parallel to, if nonetheless framed negatively against, the new complicities and complexities of our age. What is this new popular magick if not a response to the post-truth of a ruling capitalist class, echoing the market itself in its indifference to the quality and content of a message, just so long as there is something to circulate? It is the epistemological slippage of contemporary politics reflected in the contingencies-for-sale on the counter of your gentrified neighbourhood crystal shop. To assign this socio-subcultural development to a latent Christianity seems, to me, like an utter waste of time.

The panel ended somewhat abruptly, unsatisfactorily, having started late and being cut down promptly, as is the usual struggle of festival scheduling.

But then, an hour later still, the work of Mark Fisher was invoked to set things straight for us…

Baroque Sunbursts

The k-punk session revolved around Mark’s little-known 2016 text, “Baroque Sunbursts”, from the book, Rave: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture. With Laura Grace Ford also being sick — London is a viral piece of shit this time of year — we were left in the very capable hands of Dan Taylor and Repeater Books’ Tamar Shlaim to guide us into Mark’s later work and their newly-published k-punk collection.

It must be said that “Baroque Sunbursts” is one of Mark’s best texts from recent years and, as Dan and Laura have highlighted time and again, it would no doubt be a cornerstone of what was to come in his Acid Communism.

The essay takes its name from a passage from Jameson (emphasis added to those parts most relevant to us here):

We may argue that Utopia is no longer in time just as with the end of voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of the fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics — the conception of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes — in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grapsed in this logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world after or before this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world — better to say the alternate world, our alternate world — as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

What is this Jameson text if not a wonderfully expressive instantiation of what our subcultures can make possible, setting the gothic grotesque and the baroque across from each other in a way that rings as true with Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie as it does with the psychedelia to come.

The diffuse frustration of the previous session aside, the k-punk talk, in light of this text, would go on to address — and not just address, but demonstrate — the sociopolitical problems that any modern goth subculture (and other subcultures besides) must inevitably contend with — which is to say, whilst “Baroque Sunbursts” may only address the halted legacy of rave, in very general terms, it also describes a fate that has met many a subcultural music current, seen through the homogenising gaze of capitalist control.

For example, Mark describes the programme of capitalist neutralisation as being pursued in three steps:

The campaign against rave might have been draconian, but it was not absurd or arbitrary. Very much to the contrary, the attack on rave was part of a systematic process — a process that had begun with the birth of capitalism itself. The aims of this process were essentially threefold: cultural exorcism, commercial purification and mandatory individualism.

He goes on to note that the radical communality of rave was precisely a core threat to the newly established neoliberal status quo, but that is not to say that it was, in itself, new.

Rave’s ecstatic festivals revived the use of time and land which the bourgeoisie had [long] forbidden and sought to bury. Yet, for all that it recalled those older festive rhythms, rave was evidently not some archaic revival. It was a spectre of post-capitalism more than of pre-capitalism. Rave culture grew out of the synthesis of new drugs, technology and music culture. MDMA and Akai-based electronic psychedelia generated a consciousness which saw no reason to accept that boring work was inevitable. The same technology that facilitated the waste and futility of capitalist domination could be used to eliminate drudgery, to give people a standard of living much greater than that of pre-capitalist peasantry, while freeing up even more time for leisure than those peasants could enjoy. As such rave culture was in tune with those unconscious drives, which as Marcuse put it, could not accept the ‘temporal dismemberment of pleasure… its distribution in small separate doses’. Why should rave ever end? Why should there be any miserable Monday mornings for anyone?

Mark continues, chiming with our present clawing for collective joy and abandonment:

‘As the bourgeoisie laboured to produce the economic as a separate domain, partitioned off from its intimate and manifold interconnectedness with the festive calendar, so they laboured conceptually to re-form the fair as either a rational, commercial, trading event or as a popular pleasure-ground.’ Such a division was necessary in order that the bourgeoisie could make a clean and definitive distinction between morally improving toil and decadent leisure — the refusal of ‘the temporal dismemberment of pleasure’. Hence, ‘although the bourgeois classes were frequently frightened by the threat of political subversion and moral license, they were perhaps more scandalised by the deep conceptual confusion by the fair’s mixing of work and pleasure, trade and play.’ The fair always carried traces of ‘the spectre of the world which could be free’, threatening to rob commerce of the association with toil and capital accumulation that the bourgeoisie was trying to impose. That is why ‘the carnival, the circus, the gypsy, the lumpenproletariat, play a symbolic role in bourgeois culture out of all proportion to their actual social importance.’
The carnival, the gypsy and the lumpenproletariat evoked forms of life — and forms of commerce — which were incompatible with the solitary labour of the lonely bourgeoise subject and the world it projected. That is why they could not be tolerated. If other forms of life were possible then — contrary to one of Mrs Thatcher’s most famous formulations — there were alternatives, after all.

And then, he concludes:

This psychedelic imagery [of Jameson’s gothic baroque evocation] seems especially apposite for the ‘energy flash’ of rave, which now seems like a memory bleeding through from a mind that is not ours. In fact, the memories come from ourselves as we once were: a group consciousness that waits in the virtual future not only in the actual past. So it is perhaps better to see the other possibilities that these baroque sunbursts illuminate not as some distant Utopia, but as a carnival that is achingly proximate, a spectre haunting even — especially — the most miserably de-socialised spaces.

Mark’s genealogy of the rave as a form of postcapitalist festival fervour chimes with Bataille’s notion of the “sacred”, but here, at Somerset House, in a packed room in the West Wing, these forms were demonstrated, rather than just described, through the musics that Mark loved so much and, also, often wrote about.

Rufige Kru are a case in point. The mundane refrains of “Ghosts of My Life”, from a mournful David Sylvian to the libidinal exorcism of that most famous of First Choice samples, crashing against the rocks of its rolling breaks, dashed in all directions. Ghosts slip into the everyday, just as an illusory mundane begins to haunt the extraordinary weirdness of capitalism itself. In this way, jungle is Jameson’s diseased eyeball or, rather, an afflicted inner ear. Your libido has been thrown off balance with an acidic labrinthitis. “Do you want what you say you want?” The elusive answer drags you into the downward spiral. Egress is imminent.

Mark once wrote for The Wire that jungle “was best enjoyed as an anonymous electro-libidinal current that seemed to pass through producers, as a series of affects and FX de-linked from authors.” It was “less like a music and more like an audio unlife form, a ferocious, feral artificial intelligence that has been unwittingly called up in the studio.” It remains the Gothic antithesis and grotesque mirror image of a 90s technoculture. The acceleration of alienation that complemented the accelerated accumulation of capitalism’s Thing-like functionalities. The popular imagination is what suffers.

Next, we would fast-forward to the 1970s with The Temptation’s Psychedelic Shack — the song at the heart of Mark’s Acid Communism introduction.

It’s got a neon sigh outside that says
Come in and take a look at your mind
You’ll be surprised what you might find
Strobe lights flashing from sun up to sun down
People gather there from all parts of town
Right around the corner, you know it’s just across the track
People I’m talking about the psychedelic shack
Psychedelic shack, that’s where it’s at
Psychedelic shack, that’s where it’s at
Psychedelic shack, that’s where it’s at

Mark writes:

A new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism, and it was the promise that you could hear in “Psychedelic Shack” and the culture that inspired it. Only five years separated “Psychedelic Shack” from The Temptations’ early signature hit “My Girl”, but how many new worlds had come into being then? In “My Girl”, love remains sentimentalised, confined to the couple, in “Psychedelic Shack”, love is collective, and orientated towards the outside.

Such talk of love is not antithetical to the Gothic — something I think has been made very clear on this blog previously. What is most important, and must continually be emphasised, is this orientation towards the outside.

This was what was missed in “Extreme Romanticism”. The compassion and libidinal fervour is not akin to the dewy-eyed and godly “love” of your Sunday school service, though they may inevitably share a language. Goth love is necrophilic and spectral. It is not a love for what has passed, but the libidinal energy flows of unlife and undeath, skirting along the edge of a doorway to somewhere new. A cock in the glory hole of an unknown politics. A grotesque image, no doubt, but one with a form that capitalism understands. Get ready for the bait and switch…

Dan then picked a song by The Jam, the subject of a blistering k-punk post on the political function of pop music.

If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough
For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me —
And what you give is what you get

Mark writes — and the whole post is absolutely worth reading in full:

The Jam thrived in public space, on public service broadcasting. It mattered that they were popular; the records gained in intensity when you knew that they were number one, when you saw them on Top of the Pops — because it wasn’t only you and fellow initiates who heard the music; the (big) Other heard it too. This effect was maximised in The Jam’s case because their best work happened in the three minute single. At that point, singles staked a place in the mainstream, directly affecting the conditions of possibilities for popular culture. What we witnessed with punk and postpunk — or more broadly, with the whole efflorescence of popular modernism since the 50s — was an ‘affective contagion’, to use a term discussed in Frederic Jameson’s enthralling new book The Antinomies of Realism. One of the problems with many of the horizontalist models of political action is that they assume that we already know what we think and feel, and we are simply prevented from expressing ourselves by oppressive power structures. Yet mass mediated art could name and focus feelings that were not only suppressed — by ‘internal’ as well as external censoring agencies — but which were inchoate, unformed, virtual. Mass mediation transformed, not merely ‘represented’ these affects; after they were named and brought into focus, the feelings ‘themselves’ were experienced differently. And you could say that all of this was self-consciously worked through by Weller, with his Mod(ernist) affiliation, and its hunger for new sensations.
As Marcello Carlin put it in a post that is as moving an account of a fan going back to a former obsession as you’ll ever see, it’s now unbelievable that something like ‘Start’ — a record ‘which goes so far as to debate with its listener what a pop single might be for, and that it might actually be a stepping stone in helping people get along and bond better’ — could ever have been a number one record. I’m pretty sure that this song about a fugitive encounter in enemy territory — which contained the line, ‘knowing someone in this life/ who feels as desperate as me’ — was another one of the Jam records I first heard when it was played on Top of the Pops.
I took The Jam for granted, but the thirty odd years since they ruled the charts have been a painful process of watching what we once took for granted being taken away from us. Seeing — and working with — John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation and The Stuart Hall Project has prompted many thoughts, one of which concerns confronting just this process of watching the taken for granted become the (retrospectively) impossible. The way to avoid nostalgia is to look for the lost possibilities in any era, and Hall’s work — from his earliest writings on Cool jazz and Colin MaccInes in the late 50s, through to his New Times essays at the tail end of the 80s — alerts us to a persistent failure to make connections between left-wing politics and the popular culture, even when both were much stronger than they are today. Parliamentary socialism could never come to terms with, still less hegemonise, the new energies that had come out of jazz, the Sixties counterculture, or punk. By the time that explicit attempts were made to link the parliamentary left and rock/pop — in the earnest hamfistedness of Red Wedge — it was already too late. Blair’s Britpop flirtations, meanwhile, were like a double death, (the end of) history laughing at us: the corpse of white lad rock summoned to serenade socialism succumbing to capitalist realism.

The relevance of this is obvious here, I hope. That which was once taken for granted, the inherent communality of extreme musics and the gothic, has now become something to be rediscovered, made speculative and impossible. Extreme musics and pop music are not dissimilar in this respect, conjoined in Mark’s thought by the thread of a “popular modernism”. Again, outsiderness remains the orientation in the best examples of both. Extreme musics must understand that their form alone is not enough to escape the gravitational pull.

The tone of the first panel was frustrating in that it seemed to miss this (admittedly subtle and elusive) point, placing an extreme romanticism beyond our immediate capabilities, as a new striving, and whilst it is a post capitalist spectre, as Mark himself wrote on rave, we must likewise account for the ways it has been purposefully exorcised from our ways of being.

K-Punk rectified this, emphasising the immediate malleability of cultural production.

This was a point emphasised most poignantly, I thought, by David Stubbs. Sat in the audience, he arose for a moment to play a clip from Luigi Nono’s Non consumiamo Marx, a dose of acid communist mystique concrete in which the sounds of revolution become the foundations for a new music, bringing to mind the technomagick of William Burroughs’ tape experiments. Here, the everyday was — literally — sampled and reshaped for a politics to come.

The final track played was a mix, apparently made by Mark and Laura, of tracks by Jam City. Jam City is perhaps the perfect demonstration of the above.

Tamar noted that, for Mark, Jam City was to his “Acid Communism” as Burial was to his “Ghosts of my Life“. The sounds heard are all somewhat familiar, but rather than being haunting, as Burial are, they are evocative. They likewise portray a lost future, albeit positively conceived.

Whereas Burial, for me, and countless others, evokes the future musics heard by the uninitiated, further twisted and mutated by their environments, out of the windows of passing cars, muffled by the void between your pavement-dwelling self and a lofty tower block flat party, mediated through your body rather than your afflicted and colonised ears alone; Jam City glimmers through the gaps in between.

The track was illustrated by a photograph by Laura, taken in a graveyard near Canary Wharf, the gothic loomed over by the HSBC building, or rather London’s dead threatening to unground those buildings that seem to sure of themselves. The track appears along the edges, the “jam” in between a patchwork cityscape, where something else bleeds through.

It’s as gothic as it always was. It’s xenogothic. Disco as a dark weapon against the dayglo irreality of a mundane workday. It is, and always will be, Hull fair to me — a square-mile of neon and bass bins, palm reading and caravans, carny jungle and gabba on the waltzers. Travellers stop, just for one week, coming from all around Europe, to open up a hole in the middle of the city, turning a match-day car park into the zombic heart of autumn. It’s a gigantic and effervescent rupture, brighter and louder than anything you’ve ever seen. It’s sugar-fuelled penny gambling and chip spice and a new community grown in a council-sanctioned Petri dish, transforming the whole city that you might think you know so well. It’s not new. It’s over 100 years old. You can see the lights for miles around — at least 15 miles away by one count one year — and it’s still goth as fuck.

A separate and far more personal highlight of the evening was later being introduced to David Stubbs at the bar. Stubbs’ writing has been just as important to me as Mark’s over the years. When Fear of Music came out, it was a revelation for me. It was a book I read wishing I’d had it a few years earlier, which spoke to me as a young A Level Art edgelord who loved noise music and was Rothko obsessive and had a hard time articulating why they were two sides of the same coin. The rest of his work is masterful in much the same way and this year’s Mars By 1980, a personal and twisted history of electronic music, from the Futurists to Aphex Twin and beyond, was something I demolished in a week. Go check it out.

It was truly an honour to meet David and chat about the history of British comedy, of all things, over a few drinks at the ASSEMBLY bar. Later, after exchanging Facebook profiles, I saw a status update David wrote on the night and Mark’s legacy that encapsulated things perfectly. I’d like to end this post with a part of it:

The scope, audacity, penetration of [Mark’s] writing went way beyond music journalism. I’m convinced that this volume will be a cornerstone for future young thinkers if the world survives; that he will function like a latter-day Nietzsche, a fireball, in that it won’t so much matter what judgments he arrives at as the flamethrowing, impassioned, impossible-demanding eyeballs he casts around our present, seemingly impossible situation to which he demands, outlines reasonable, near-impossible solutions.

No More Miserable Monday Evenings: An Introduction to “Egress”

on November 12, 2018January 10, 2019 By xenogothic 5 Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote about the marvellous Acid Communis m reading group I’ve been attending these past couple of months at Somerset House, led by Dan Taylor and Laura Grace Ford. Tonight I was really honoured to accept an invitation from Dan and Laura to lead a session.

Dan asked that I pick the week’s readings as a way of introducing some of the concepts found in The Weird and the Eerie into our reconstructive readings around Acid Communism. I suggested we all read “…The Eeriness Remains” — the final chapter of The Weird and the Eerie — and “Practical Eliminativism: Or, Getting Out of Our Faces Again” — a short talk Mark gave that was featured in the Speculative Aesthetics edition of Urbanomic’s Redactions series. (I also suggested my own “Reaching Out Beyond to the Other” essay as a here’s-some-connections-I-made-earlier intro for generating discussion around two very different texts.)

Before getting into things, I wrote a little intro which I read out at the start of the session, presented below.

(Note: many of the references in here are regurgitated from various posts on this blog, written over the last year, so it might all be familiar to regular readers, but this is a presentation for a new context and a new audience).

I want to start by thanking Laura and Dan for inviting me to pick the readings for today. I’m hoping this means I’ll talk less than I do most weeks rather than more…

That being said… I’ve written a roughly ten-minute intro to start off with, if no one minds listening to me ramble for a little bit… Not that you really have a choice either…

A lot of what we’ll find in these two texts resonates with the discussions we’ve already been having in recent months, I think, but they are also of a distinctly different tone to those other texts that we’ve read so far. I don’t want to say too much about the texts themselves and leave that up to us all to discuss as a group but I would like to contextualise why I’ve chosen them and, specifically, why I think an acknowledgement of their ton;e is important to our fortnightly pursuit and exercise of collective joy, even though the affects articulated may seem antithetical to this. Whilst the likewise of Jeremy Gilbert have bastardised an Acid Communism, emphasising a affectless positivity, it has to be acknowledged that Mark’s project, like all his work, was reaching out beyond the pleasure principle…

This is a complex suggestion, however, so I’d like to spend a bit of time unpacking this using a few more unusual but perhaps accessible references.

Back in 2017, a few months after Mark died, I was part of a reading group much like this one. We were all Goldsmiths students and staff, many of us already friends with each other, but we were nonetheless a thrown-together bunch, each with our own distinct experiences of and relationships to Mark and his work.

Mark’s death and the release of The Weird and the Eerie felt like tandem occurrences at that time. One thing entered the world just as he left it. Holding the book close and closed, we all shared an anxiety over the prospect of reading it in isolation, and so we decided to do it together, to share the weight of it in that moment.

We would read a chapter a week, going round in a circle, tackling the book a paragraph at a time, before attempting to unpack its concepts and attend to its more puzzling moments, but more than anything we just wanted to spent time together with Mark.

Our group was initially a support group, an assembly, a weekly opportunity to touch base with each other and our grief, and so, as we made our way through the book over a period of a couple of months, many struggled with the shifting dynamics within the group itself, as we inevitably moved away from this affective grounding.

Some weeks philosophizing would overtake our looking out for each other. Other times reading the book was secondary to checking in on each other’s wellbeing. For me, personally, I never wanted the two things to be distinct. The book felt like a vector through which we could process the horror we were facing, aesthetically rendered through the ghost stories and science fictions that Mark so obviously loved.

The final paragraph of the book, however, pulled this already rickety scaffolding down and made the book feel, for one sullen moment, like a suicide note.

As Mark writes about the ways in which Marion and Miranda, two characters in Joan Lindsey’s 1967 novel The Picnic at Hanging Rock, “are fully prepared to take the step into the unknown … possessed by an eerie calm that settles when familiar passions are overcome”, I couldn’t help but think about Mark himself, putting the finishing touches to his final book as he struggled through that dark December, preparing himself for what was to come.

Once Marion and Miranda disappear, their absences, Mark writes, leave “haunting gaps, eerie intimations of the outside.” Mark’s absence, too, from the Visual Cultures corridor at Goldsmiths, was experienced in very much the same way.

This was a reading overly influenced, no doubt, by the horror of that time. Looking around the room, expressing my own discomfort, I felt like I was saying what everyone else was thinking but what no one wanted to hear, and it made my stomach churn. I immediately regretted voicing it, because it is all too easy to imagine Mark somewhere, fuming at the thought of such melodramatic projections being allowed to stain his work. In light of this mental image of an angry Mark, a short while later, my reading less coloured by melancholy, this ending began to feel less like a full stop and more like a challenge to the experience of grief and melancholy in itself.

But then again, aren’t both of these readings inherently and fatally entwined?

6996933993_695bff13be_b — Mount Eerie @ ATP Curated by Jeff Mangum, Minehead, 2012 (Photo: me)

A few months ago I read an article, totally unrelated, that crystallised this uneasiness for me in a new way. It was an article for the online metal magazine Invisible Oranges by the American musician Phil Elverum, better known by his monikers The Microphones and, currently, Mount Eerie.

His Mount Eerie project found a much wider audience last year with the release of its eighth studio album, A Crow Looked At Me, a solitary and diaristic singer-songwriter affair about the grief of losing his wife to cancer in 2016. The first verse of the first song, “Real Death”, lays out the paradoxes the album intends to explore with a heart-wretching but also almost humorous frankness, attending to the ironies and contradictions of death felt so closely by those that keep on living. Elverum sings:

Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk into the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead
All fails
My knees fail
My brain fails
Words fail

The album hits like a hammer, transposing the tandem representations and obliterations of Elverum’s ever-shifting inner experiences.

Subject matter aside, the album is, in some ways, a return to an older performance style for Elverum, whose output over the previous ten years has been increasingly shaped by the sonic influence of US Black Metal. Big guitars. Big bass. Big drums. Encapsulating a very Black Metal kind of sonic solitude, distinct from that of your typical singer-songwriter in its attempted sonic gutterings of the ego.

However, in the article for Invisible Oranges, Elverum writes how, following the death of his wife, he had struggled with his love of this aesthetic darkness, particularly in its original Norwegian form. How does a music scene defined by death-obsessed, satanist-LARPing teenagers hold up to any scrutiny under the light of an experience of Real Death, he wonders.

He writes:

In a lot of ways, the defining aspect of this music for most people, its “evil”ness or whatever, is not something I think about at all. It seems so clearly a joke or a performance. Even with the early Europeans who killed each other, I don’t see them as evil but just confused and carried away. The black is just a costume. It’s Halloween. It’s cool, I love Halloween. But also honesty is important to me, and there’s something embarrassing and facetious about that performative darkness, living in it too much.

Then, on the day of his wife’s funeral, Elverum writes about his decision to play the song “Prison of Mirrors” by the one-man US black metal band Xasthur as loud as he can before her memorial service took place. Following his immersion in Xasthur’s “shredded screaming, extreme sorrow”, he says that, then, “the room felt ready.”

It felt like “ah, yes, this is the use of this music. This is the moment, once in a lifetime hopefully, or maybe never in a lifetime for people who are fortunate enough to avoid experiencing devastation like this, this is the moment where music this extreme can tear through the veil of the difficult present moment and reveal something beyond.”

If this feels like a strange and extended tangent to take here, I mention this article only because I feel it articulates, better than I ever could, my own experience of embracing Mark’s Gothic mode after his death. I worried about living with his darker texts too much, as if it appear I was romanticising what happened to him, the mode of writing I’d always enjoyed the most now inevitably facetious. However, I found that Mark’s own work — The Weird and the Eerie especially — provided a vector of intensity through which to navigate the difficult then-present moments of 2017 — and there were plenty of those… — and reach into something beyond.

The earlier text presented here, “Practical Eliminativism”, articulates an almost cosmic pessimism which treats “death” as a sort of line in the sand of experience, and nothing more. It is Mark’s “astropunk” sensibility writ large. Yes, Mark the Spinozist might have argued for a freedom from sad passions, but this is not, as he writes on the Hyperstition blog, “the end of the story if it is at the price of a ‘happy’ passivity, a blank-eyed disengagement from all Outsides, as all (your) energy is sucked up by the ultimate interiority”. Joy, in this sense, is not a guard against suffering. We know this. I’m sure none of us are under any illusions that the sheer English repressiveness of a ‘Keep Calm & Carry On’ attitude is the epitome of a forced and petrified happiness. To quote Mark: “The price of such ‘happiness’ — a state of cored-out, cheery Pod people affectlessness — is [the] sacrifice of all autonomy.”

But does all this really mean we that we have to revel in horror? No, I don’t think so, but horror is certainly this thoughts most effectively affective mode. Horror is a libidinal short-circuiting towards action, towards fight and flight, towards rebellion and emancipation. This is likewise not to will bad things to happen, but when they inevitably do, in some form or other, we can affirm that terror and find its beyond.

In light of this, we might also think about Fisher’s conceptual deaths as a return to — or even an extension of — his first “book” that remains bootlegged but officially unpublished — his PhD thesis: “Flatline Constructs”. Here Mark formulates a Gothic Materialism, orbiting “death” in the Nietzschean sense of just another form of life. Whilst he writes, in 1999, that his Gothic Materialism is a way to jettison the “supernatural, ethereal or otherworldly” from our conceptions of the Outside, in favour of a radical plane of immanence, The Weird and the Eerie nonetheless demonstrates the return of these elements to the heart of his thesis, rehabilitated as prime cultural examples of our perpetual grasping at other ways of being.

The paradox of doing this is an echo of Elverum’s wrestling with grief. As Mark writes in a separate essay, written for Pli, Warwick University’s journal of philosophy, called “Gothic Materialism“: “It is not a matter of speaking the unspeakable, but of vocalising the extra-linguistic or the non-verbal, and thereby letting the Outside in.”

In this way, the speculative aesthetics of death, with their provocations of horror, can assist us as we look — even reach — beyond ourselves and the abject interiority of the neoliberal subject. “Death” needn’t be an end — rather it is a cognitive challenge that forces us to engage with a necessarily difficult thinking that can only ever be speculative until we’re ready to throw off, as Mark writes, the “petty repressions and mean confines of common experience”.

This is a thinking that is not just the navel-gazing of a depressed and dejected contemporary subject. It is a thinking echoed in the thought of Donna Harraway, Eugene Thacker and Thom Van Dooren in their writings on the possibility of thinking extinction, whether our own or that of another species. If we are to reengage with the end-of-the-world thinking that Mark made his name writing about in Capitalist Realism — that is, the suggestion that “the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism” — we have to confront collective death at the same time as collective joy. Both are increasingly necessary for thinking about and challenging the politics of our time, from austerity and the implications of well-spread mental ill-health, from artificial intelligence to new materialisms, from climate change to an expanded species-consciousness.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, in light of all this, becomes a pulp-modernist fable of exit from the corsets of a moralising and — most importantly — gendered subjection, enforced under the preparatory pretensions of Australia’s well-to-do high society. “Practical Eliminativism”, with Mark wearing his more explicitly philosophical hat, likewise tackles the subjective capture of high modernity at the absolute limit of experience itself. Whilst its talk of Kantianism and subjectivity might frighten off the more casual reader, what Mark is discussing here has become an central concern of pop culture in recent years.

If anyone here has seen The OA or The Walking Dead or Games of Thrones or the return of Twin Peaks or Westworld or any number of other shows — I have no doubt this list could continue endlessly — you will have seen these same questions and their stakes played out in innumerable ways, where the question of another world and another life are two-fold, each encompassing the other, with the end of the world and the death of the individual held up as interscalar contingencies rather than absolute limits. It is my view that Mark’s own death shouldn’t undermine this thinking but intensify the necessity of its immanence for thought. It is necessary to recognise all that happened to Mark, all that led to his death, and render it impersonal, as he would have done, as obstacles to the instantiation of an Acid Communism which we must fight against.

I’ll end here with some questions posed by Mark himself, in a K-Punk post he wrote in 2009 after an event at Goldsmiths called “Militant Dysphoria“. He writes:

There’s an special urgency and poignancy about the concept of militant dysphoria just now, when dejection is so widespread amongst the young. The regime of anti-depressants, CBT and relentlessly upbeat pop culture enforce a compulsory positivity which treats the negative only as failure and pathology. Dejection is not an extreme state so much as a generational condition, as invisible as it is ubiquitous, sometimes treated as a medicalised disorder, sometimes condemned as a depoliticised apathy, often not acknowledged at all, but normalised as an existential horizon of lowered expectations and minimal hope. If, from the perspective of a vitalist commonsense, militancy and dysphoria is an impossible collocation, then the dejected young (and among them, all those who aestheticise their dysphoria, such as Goths and the devotees of Black Metal), must simply be abandoned as depoliticised, unpolitical or — at best — pre-political. But as Dominic [Fox] put it in his own comments box recently, “Dysphoria is ‘militant’ when it refuses to be framed as a personal mishap, and instead poses itself as a question and a challenge to the society in which it occurs.” […] What can politics learn from the perspective of the “abyss that laughs at creation”?

All Roads Lead to Alienation: Melancholy and Communicative Capitalism

on November 6, 2018January 10, 2019 By xenogothic 8 Comments

I had a conversation with l?ves last week on WhatsApp about the pros and cons of various messaging services…

Whilst she had her preferences, I was resolutely more… “disenfranchised”…

To my mind, how best to communicate feels like the ultimate generational problem these days. How many times have you asked yourself something along the lines of: “How do I opt out of this social media hellscape without my actual social life taking a hit?”; “How do I reject the alienation of social media without becoming even more alienated?”

These are interesting, if infuriating, problems — not just for users of these platforms but for those who have built them as well. Facebook is, of course, the most obvious example. As it continues with its efforts towards world domination, consolidating a whole variety of platforms and features under its monolithic “F”, it seems that — surprise, surprise! — many people don’t actually want everything they do online to be consolidated under a single platform. (The difficulty of establishing this gradually in the West has not stopped the company pitching it wholesale elsewhere.)

The more Facebook tries to connect people, the more people criticise the platform’s tandem attempts at monopolisation, undermining the fragmentary principles — “high connectivity, low integration” — that the internet was supposedly built on. Whilst older generations nonetheless continue to flock to Facebook as a Friends Reunited substitute, many younger people have been turning their backs on the enforced ubiquity of its various societal uses, particularly in light of its data misusage debacles.

I made the decision to “opt out” of Facebook quite recently but what has horrified me about the process of making this decision is that I was unable to “opt out” absolutely.

Since initially (but not very consistently) shirking off my meatspace identity for this blog, my relationship with Facebook has fundamentally changed. It is no longer something that I need for social networking — in fact, I’ve found the benefits of posting without a face to be innumerable — but it nonetheless remains a platform that I continue to need solely for work.

Until very recently, I spent a lot of time doing freelance work which required me to run a pretty big Facebook page with thousands of “likes”, using it to upload events and respond to various enquiries and things like that. I’ve done this a few times in the past. In fact, I’ve done a fair amount of consulting work related to digital media, advising arts organisations and universities on how best to build up and use web platforms in interesting and perhaps unfashionable ways, recommending blogs rather than social media accounts — I have always been an advocate for the blogosphere — as alternatives twhich allow staff and/or student bodies to have more control over how they represent themselves online: blogs as platforms for workers, not just marketing departments and CEOs.

Case in point: having run a blog for the entirety of my undergrad years — and for some years before — I was asked by my course leader in my third year to set one up for the course itself to function as a multipurpose online space run by and for students. Part student newspaper, part newsletter, it took off once I graduated and became a place where the staff could show off their activities to prospective students whilst the students used it as a space to post irreverent opinion pieces and exhibition reviews. It was brilliant — institutionally practical (ensuring its survival) whilst also challenging expectations. Unfortunately, it died with the course itself.

Blogs like this made a lot more sense 10 years ago than they do today. These days, blogs are seen as being a bit cumbersome and old-hat — laying the foundations for fully-functioning websites in and of themselves rather than being additional nodes for diffuse representation and communication. Instead, social media now reigns supreme as the only way to connect with “your audience”.

When I now dabble with digital media, for work rather than play, Facebook is almost always the first thing I end up working with, meaning that it has stopped being an escape from work into procrastination and instead become wholly associated with work in and of itself. (I have misused Twitter far too much for this to ever be the case for that platform. It’s too easily corruptible.)

It’s not unlike that age-old problem with emails. Who answers their personal emails in a timely manner anymore? No one — especially if its what you already do at work all day. Now it seems like this problem has spread, like a virus, as media monopolies continuously mutate, in a constant state of flux and disarray, vying for attention and encouraging the most bizarre behaviour and habits. It’s as if Facebook has some sort of autoimmune disease, a victim of its own success as a carrier for digital viruses.

Of course, none of this will be news to anyone working in these areas today — most will no doubt know far more than I do about these sorts of trends — but it tells us something about where we’ve been and where we’re going, somewhat imperceptibly.

I found all of these thoughts and experiences coalescing together as l?ves and I discussed how best to stay in touch with one another in the coming months, trying to balance out seemingly conflicting desires for personal connection and digital disconnection.

After our conversation, I ended up turning to Jodi Dean’s writings on “communicative capitalism” — a term of hers that I think deserves far more attention that it has so far received (as far as I’m aware), not least because, in recognising how common these conversations are in my own life, it feels like an apt and under-explored arena for consciousness-raising.

Communicative capitalism, in the simplest terms, is Dean’s name for capitalism’s newest obsession: data. For Dean, capitalism in the early 21st century has parasitically attached itself to our communicative technologies with such success that it has found new and unprecedented forms of libidinal engineering and cultural subjection.

I’ve written about Jodi Dean’s work a few times in recent years, although I’m not sure if much of that — or any of it — has made its way onto the blog. I was specifically interested in her writings via her influence on Mark Fisher. In a number of lectures and talks, Fisher would speak generally about the rise and further rise of the smart phone as, primarily, a device for communication but one which continues to infiltrate all areas of our lives as an almost transhumanist capitalist appendage.

In his short talk “Practical Eliminativism”, Mark would not mince words:

The constitution of our subjectivity in everyday life is the product of various forms of engineering and manipulation; the reality in which we are invited to live is constructed by PR and corporations, is a form of libidinal informational engineering. So I think this mandates a kind of counter-engineering practice that must be undertaken. … [W]e’ve seen massive behavioural mutations of the human population in the last decade. But they’re turning towards banal ends, such as Facebook, smartphones, etc. What you’re seeing are behavioural tics that have passed through a population, i.e. looking at a screen, digital twitch, etc. These behaviours were not in place ten to fifteen years ago; it was impossible for them to be in place. Now they are ubiquitous.

He continues:

… mainstream culture has become increasingly reduced to folk psychological interiority. Whether it’s reality tv or social networks, people have been captured/captivated by their own reflections. It’s all done with mirrors. The various attacks on the subject in theory have done nothing to resist the super-personalization of contemporary culture. Identitarianism rules. Queer theory might reign in the academy, but it has done nothing to halt the depressing return of gender normativity in popular culture and everyday life. Elements of ‘leftist’ politics not only collude in, but actively organise this rampant identitarianism, corralling groups into ’communities’ defined according to the categories of power: a Foucauldian dystopia. … [I]ncreasingly cultural time is taken up with forms which, at the psychological level, mirror people back to themselves in the most banal possible kind of manifest image. The question now is whether a certain kind of defacialization can be recovered — whether a practical, not merely theoretical, eliminativist project can be resumed, and whether we can start getting out of our faces again.

It is all too easy to hear Mark’s critique here in the voice of a luddite moralism, decrying millennial narcissism. The myth of Echo and Narcissus is most certainly applicable here, but the message is rather that resistance is futile. The tragic conditions of both Echo and Narcissus are imposed on all. Self-love has nothing to do with it. It rather describes the conditions under which subjectivity is formed, through which a subject forcibly ricochets off its own image as its strives impotently for its outside. It is the very basis of subjection under communicative capitalism, all too readily dismissed as a fault of the individual who is only acting according to widespread social imposition.

I’m reminded here of Bataille’s various writings on “communication” in which he wonders about the ways that we can’t help but debase ourselves before each other, undermining our own idealisms of the subjective whole.

Communication, for Bataille, is inherently evil. It is an absolute necessity for being but it is also inherently violent. It is predicated on conflict. Communication, in this way, is a constant challenge to the Idea of the subject as an intact and bordered entity. Communication is the constant piercing of subjects by other subjectivities. It is not limited to language in its form but rather flows from the outside continuously, even in our silences. It is like smoke out the exhaust of inner experience, ruining itself, outside itself. To remedy the onslaught with absolute isolation is to sit in your garage with the engine running. You won’t stop “communication”, you’ll just suffocate on it.

This is likewise an analogy applicable, I think, to the alienation of social media. Under communicative capitalism, communication itself is captured. All our talk of echo chambers and identity politics simply marks the various ways that the subject wrecks itself on its own shores rather than on the shores of others. It is constituted by communication made profitable through the mechanisms of a kind of human centipede. To capture communication is to render it toxic to itself. What is needed, perhaps, is a return to the evil of communication as Bataille described it.

For Bataille, communication does not submit to the structure imposed on it by linguists (sender, receiver, message, etc.); it destroys this structure. It is never the transmission of a message existing independently, as a signified, between two subjects whose identity remains intact and untouched by the process: communication is loss of self in the absence of message on both sides…

With regards to this, I hear cynical echoes from Twitter and the blogosphere that wonder, incredulously, why Accelerationism is even still a thing. If you look around you, all we’re doing is slowing down. This is certainly true of the forms of capitalism we’re now all too familiar with. As far as communicative capitalism is concerned, it seems like we’re only just becoming aware that the brakes have been cut.

To return to Fisher: in order to get out of our faces again, he argues that we must resist the apparatuses of capture embedded within our communications technologies. This is why, for Fisher and for Dean, the smartphone is the primary instantiation of a Marcusean “biological foundation” for communicative capitalism; the most visible example of how the libido has been most recently engineered for capital’s benefit.

The question nevertheless remains: How are we to get out of our faces again when faciality is today more forcibly imposed on us than ever before?

This is not a new challenge although it has been entrenched ever deeper. Herbert Marcuse, in his brilliant Essay on Liberation, even predicts it, way back in the 1960s, presaging the new materialism of Deleuze and Guattari by conflating a Nietzschean genealogy of morality with a Freudian analysis of our civilisation’s discontents. Marcuse writes:

Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behaviour, it is not only introjected — it also operates as a norm of “organic” behaviour: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” and repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society. In this way, a society constantly re-creates, this side of consciousness and ideology, patterns of behaviour and aspiration as part of the “nature” of its people, and unless the revolt reaches into this “second” nature, into these ingrown patterns, social change will remain “incomplete,” even self-defeating.

I didn’t appreciate just how much I felt this before, struggling with my own bemused pursuit of a politics of communist collectivity, inevitably trapped under the mask of neoliberal subjectivity. I had not previously connected Dean’s analyses to the constant low-level depression that Facebook, specifically, has fostered within me as a major part of my working life. I had not previously considered just how complicit so many of my interests and daily activities are in this overarching system. And what about this blog? Does it teeter on the edge on the hypocrisy as its audience continues to grow?…

Following this melancholic crisis and returning to Dean’s writings, I came across an article of hers which I wasn’t previously familiar with: “Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle“, a 2014 essay written for the Spheres Journal for Digital Cultures.

Dean has written about communicative capitalism a lot and I’m always amused by how many of her essays include multiple footnotes to her own previous works. Here, quoted for the sake of further clarity, drawing on her own vast back catalogue of other writings on the topic, she defines “communicative capitalism” as follows:

Communicative capitalism refers to the form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy materialize in networked communications technologies. Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion and participation are realized through expansions, intensifications and interconnections of global telecommunications. In communicative capitalism, capitalist productivity derives from its expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes. This does not mean that information technologies have replaced manufacturing; in fact, they drive a wide variety of mining, chemical, and biotechnological industries. Nor does it mean that networked computing has enhanced productivity outside the production of networked computing itself. Rather, it means that capitalism has subsumed communication such that communication does not provide a critical outside. Communication serves capital, whether in affective forms of care for producers and consumers, the mobilization of sharing and expression as instruments for “human relations” in the workplace, or contributions to ubiquitous media circuits.

This is what we all inherently know, deep down — and now more than ever, following the data scandals of recent years. “Communication serves capital“.

Dean’s analysis begins to feel like a tightrope between those aspects of modernity that are so hard to think about: the occulted yet monstrous scale of our communcations networks and their co-opting of the minutiae of our quotidian online existences. Rather than jettisoning the problematics of “platform capitalism” out into the barely thinkable scale of “Big Data”, communicative capitalism allows us to consider, practically, just how complicit our daily communications now are in capitalism as a global system, allowing for the initiation of practices of consciousness raising immanently at our fingertips. The task of resistance, however, is not to be underestimated.

Mark wrote about this in his essay “Touchscreen Capture”:

The genius of communicative capitalist capture is that it is indifferent to content. It doesn’t care how many anti-capitalist messages are circulating, only that the circulation of messages continues, incessantly. This is a seemingly perfect system of capture in which “[c]hanging the system seems to entail strengthening the system.” One consequence is that an “invidious and predatory political-economic project that concentrates assets and power in the hands of the very, very rich” is disguised as its opposite: an open, participatory system that offers increased access. By this sleight of hand, structural antagonism is made to disappear, “multiplying … into myriad minor issues and events”. And what is it that drives this circulation if not our desire — one more connection, to give one more reply, to keep on clicking? […] It is not human groups or individuals who have access to an unlimited wealth of information; it is capitalist cyberspace that now has virtually unlimited access to us — to our nervous systems, to our appetites, to our energy, to our attention. We become a channel through which communicative capitalism circulates and proliferates, slaves to click drive, a drive which erodes our impulse control at the same time as it keeps a permanent record of everything we do.

Such is the minefield of personal-political problems that so many of us now openly and articulately struggle with. My 2018, for instance, feels defined by the guilt associated with the impact of my messaging (or lack thereof) on a localised scale; the guilt of wanting more control over my cognitive expenditures.

I am repeatedly blindsided by the guilt of not being as attentive as I perhaps should be to the messages I receive on social media or in my inbox. I’m always paranoid that people must think, “Well, you spend so much time blogging, why can’t you just look at an email or a Facebook message since you’re already online?” The answer is — genuinely — because it’s work.

This isn’t to go so far as to dismiss texting as some kind of “emotional labour” or anything like that — “emotional labour” being a phrase so frequently and incorrectly deployed, as if its mere use, signifying the act of pointing and naming cognitive expenditure, is enough to wriggle free from ubiquitous processes of subjection. In fact, I suspect that what I feel is so common as to no doubt have helped birth this very misuse of the concept of “emotional labour” — that is: as far as my brain is concerned, at the most basic Pavlovian level, communications technologies have dissolved any healthy distinction between the cognitive work I do in an office or during set hours at home and what I do when I’m at home on my own time, interacting with people not in my immediate vicinity.

And that’s bad, especially when these are now the only ways in which I can stay in touch with some of those people that I love but who live far away.

Related to this, we can observe that Dean makes clear that she is only talking about “affective forms of care for producers and consumers, the mobilization of sharing and expression as instruments for ‘human relations’ in the workplace, or contributions to ubiquitous media circuits”, but who can draw the line between those communiques made under the watchful eye of an office manager and those which you do at home? Communicative capitalism infects your superego, making any technical distinction moot. How are you supposed to set boundaries for yourself when technology insists on erasing them completely?

To feel the benefits of time off, of time to myself, I personally feel like I have to be (communicatively) off the radar. This has never been a necessity for me before, and sometimes it wanes when I’m out in the middle of nowhere.

During the most recent years I spent living in Hull, for instance, Twitter was my lifeline to the rest of the world. London, however, feels like a city where you are constantly buffeted around like trash in the wind, and I am often desperate here in wanting to feel like I have more control over what occupies my mind.

In orbit of this problem, Fisher goes on to address similar concerns in “Touchscreen Capture”, drawing on the politics of boredom, best encapsulated by his subheading: “Everything is Boring, No-One is Bored.” He writes that “capitalism has effectively solved the problem of boredom” but with that comes a lack of control over your own (over)stimulation. The suggestion seems to be: how can you be sad or anxious when everything you could ever want is at your fingertips? Running parallel to this is “neoliberalism’s successful tendency to privatise stress, to convert political antagonisms into medical conditions or failures of will.” The neoliberal logic of inner experience seems to be that mental illness, taken to be an individual deficiency, is obviously antithetical to our current age of cultural collective abundance, even when the causes of both are one and the same.

Dean puts it perfectly — so perfectly, in fact, I think I want this on a t-shirt — when she writes:

[C]ommunication has become a primary means for capitalist expropriation and exploitation. Linguistic, affective, and unconscious being-together, flows and processes constitutive not just of being human but of broader relationality and belonging, have been co-opted for capitalist production.

My personal politics — apparently sometimes unclear — revolve intensely around this last point.

Some eagle-eyed readers might recognise in this diagnosis the seeds for many an argument made in orbit of the patchwork debate around these parts. I’m reminded, yet again, of some of Justin Murphy’s recent writings and discussions around communism in which (perhaps intentionally or inadvertently — it’s hard to tell) he highlights the fateful confluences of much contemporary thinking about capitalism and communism.

“Actually existing communism”, understood in its supposedly pure form as the ontopolitical opposite of capitalism, is paradoxically more possible now than ever before, thanks to the very mechanisms of communicative capitalist capture and its harnessing of collective energies. Justin, in recognising this, seeks to follow it through to its logical conclusions. The acceleration of the status quo under the guise of a nonexistent radical intervention, like accelerationism popularly (and incorrectly) understood as the willful acceleration of things as they currently are.

Defining communism basically as “a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs”, we might observe that it is communicative capitalism that seeks to own our communities, empowering us superficially so that it might mine the noise we make for its own ends as we suffocate in our social vacuums. Too few of us admit that our visions of a 21st century communism are inherently useful for capitalism.

Were it not for the political upsets of the past two years, Facebook might have instantiated a form of communism like that which we see in the 2017 film The Circle, blogged about recently, echoing Justin Murphy’s own “aristocratic communist” patch. Communicative capitalism allows for the reemergence of the spectre of communism in the popular imagination, but only on capitalism’s own terms, instantiating a communist ideology that remains self-defeating, albeit in a new way than those instances that indelibly mark the theory’s history.

Patchwork (as I personally see it anyway) is like a jagged rock to communicative capitalism’s birth canal hall of mirrors. This might explain why it provokes such untold and superstitious terrors in the minds of many, but drastic measures are surely necessary to reclaim a politics of relationality and belonging from capitalism’s consolidated mimicry of leviathan.

Whilst the Left continues to talk so much about being-together and the feel-good politics of its historically communal (and sometimes communist) thought, it repeatedly fails to attend to the forms in which it presents these ideals, under the shadow of capitalism as its historical “oppressor”. Patchwork might likewise cunningly echo the movements of some capitalist mechanisms but they are decisively less about capture and more about breaking of the chains of subjection.

Here, it is worth backtracking somewhat, to how Dean’s previously referenced article starts: provocatively, with a roll call of examples that show just how necessary our thinking about the nuances of communicative capitalism is, not just so we might resist it but so that we might better understand what it is exactly that we are already rebelling against:

We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, the Montreal protests, European anti-austerity protests, some components of the protests of the Arab spring, as well as multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world, are protests of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, and declining home values. They are fronts in a class war under the conditions of global communicative capitalism.
Mainstream media babble about Facebook and Twitter revolutions was right, but for the wrong reasons. It was right to draw our attention to networked media, to suggest a link between the protests and ubiquitous communication networks. But it was wrong to think that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals. These revolts make sense as class struggle, as the political struggle of a knowledge class whose work is exploited and lives are expropriated by communicative capitalism.
I am using the term knowledge class very broadly to designate those whose communicative activities generate value that is expropriated from them. I have in mind both the wide field of knowledge labor and the voluntary, unpaid, everyday activities of media use that are traced, stored, aggregated and analyzed as a proprietary resource for capitalist accumulation. Paid, unpaid and precarious labor should not be treated separately. As Enda Brophy and Greig de Peuter powerfully demonstrate, they constitute a “circuit of exploitation”. Brophy and de Peuter use the smartphone to articulate this labor circuit, making sense of it in terms of work typical of a “cybertariart”. The “circuit of exploitation” around the smartphone moves from extraction, assembly and design through mobile-work, support-work, and e-waste.

It’s a bleak outlook but she concludes by highlighting the most obvious other forms of resistance that so many engage already with, many examples of which are explored in these blogospheric parts on an almost daily basis:

[F]ragmentation, the use of images over demands, and being out of doors, are not remarkable tactical innovations and advances. They are practical responses to a setting in which our communicative engagements are expropriated from us.

There’s use for a patchwoke U/Acc yet.

Exercising Freedom

on October 21, 2018January 10, 2019 By xenogothic 1 Comment

There was a point raised by Gail Lewis at a recent screening of Twilight City, a film by the Black Audio Film Collective…

The film, made in 1989, explores a changing London, along lines of race, class and finance capital. It’s a beautiful, meandering film essay that demonstrates a striking metropoetics, emerging from the gaps in the city’s spatiotemporal authoritarianism. In a discussion after the screening, Lewis focused on two moments in the film in particular, which she thought resonated most with our situation today, almost thirty years later — one was a comment made by the author David Yallop, interviewed for the film, in which he laments the dying culture and community of the white working class in Clapham; the other is a comment from Lewis’ own younger self, in which she champions the new confidence with which black communities are moving around the city.

These two moments aren’t related in the way you might assume, having put them next to each other. Yallop blames property developers for the withering of London’s white working classes rather than the growth of any other racial minority, but his view of the future is nonetheless negative (and perhaps perceptively so). Lewis, however, in recognising the inherent violence of black communities claiming and embodying their own space — a necessary violence in which a community claims a space of their own rather than confining themselves to space they have been given — champions a more positive view of that moment.

The imposition of black communities under a widespread societal racism had waned over generations — which is to say, emboldened senses of self growing despite racism’s ever-presence — to the point that the youth of the day found a new confidence in calling this country home, demonstrating how necessary it is for maligned bodies to carve out their own space.

This is something instilled in everyone who lives in London, I think, under the constant threat of the privatisation of space. I’m shocked, having lived here two years, how it is changed the way I walk through most busy public spaces, whether in London or elsewhere.

Any walk through central London on my lunch break is ruptured by a negotiation between other Londoners and tourists. Tourists are oblivious to everything, clogging up space like driftwood, whilst everyone else walks with a kind of purposiveness that demands you get out of their way. It is the London mindset that you have to walk straight and confidently and with self-determination, or else you find yourself battered by the city’s flows. (Everyone moving in this way, of course, only makes everything worse.)

I too tend to walk around like an arsehole these days — fast, in straight lines, scowling — making people move around me. You have to drive in much the same way in this city. It’s always worse in the most affluent spaces, in which the rich seem to count themselves as too good to turn left or right. I have no issues with bumping into some shiny-suited cunt stepping out of a £100 luncheon if it serves to remind him you can’t buy everything in this city.

I never used to be like this or think like this. I never had to. Up north, cities might be just as busy but no one manoeuvres themselves with the arrogance of a Piccadilly prick. Most of my walks through urban centres were once defined by a bobbing and weaving, a constant moving out the way of others’ trajectories — in part out of an attempt at conscientious politeness and a lack of confidence in my own existence.

In London, there’s no space for such a self-deprecating skittishness. You either hold your ground or end up under a bus. This is one thing to observe about central London but in the rest of the city’s boroughs, the vibe is somewhat different. As Lewis highlighted, it’s a new and necessary confidence; a situatedness that many of the city’s more maligned communities have had to grow and strengthen over decades. It’s an attitude which may intimidate and make many uneasy but it is necessary. The swirling processes of gentrification make many people believe that money is all you need to belong. This city’s black and working class communities dismiss any such sentiment, attempting to alienate those who make a living through alienation. However, whilst Yallop’s melancholy connotes a mourned loss, Lewis’ optimism shows an innate acknowledgment of and willingness towards adaptation.

I thought about all this again last night, reading Bataille’s On Nietzsche in bed:

It is the positive exercise of freedom, not the negative struggle against a particular oppression, that elevates me above mutilated existence.

John Cussans on the ‘Hermitix’ Podcast

on October 8, 2018October 8, 2018 By xenogothic

Following our chat about the works of Mark Fisher in episode #1 of his new Hermitix podcast, Meta-Nomad is back with a sprawling conversation with John Cussans that I’ve been enjoying hugely today whilst I navigate a swamp of emails.

Cussans is a bit of a hero of mine. I was very excited to see him speak at Goldsmiths in 2017 for the launch of his book Undead Uprising, which I devoured whole like a snake in a matter of days after the lecture. He was likewise hugely influential on the upcoming Egress book, referenced on multiple occasions throughout, and much of the connections I draw upon quite tentatively there — as well as on the Vast Abrupt — are expanded on magnificently here and taken into many new places. I was admittedly a bit starstruck to hear him mention the name of this blog.

My fixation on Bataille as a postgrad reached comical levels that year. I had to preface every nod towards him in every class with an apology — and still feel like I must do that in certain company — but I have found (and continue to find) that his work resonates with so much of contemporary experience and thought — particularly in the context of our contemporaneous and fraught communities, implicitly informing all of this blog’s writings on patchwork as the proliferation of acephalic communities exorcising the god-king leviathan.

Whilst I’ve since sidestepped into Blanchot’s unavowable communisms and Fisher’s Acid Communism, Cussans here explores so much of that which remains untapped in the background.

Go listen to Cussans!

No More Miserable Monday Evenings

on October 2, 2018October 3, 2018 By xenogothic 6 Comments

I am in love with my Monday evenings at the moment. Laura Grace Ford and JD Taylor have been convening an Acid Communism reading group in a snooker room in the bowels of Somerset House over the last month and, after only three sessions, our group has begun to feel beautifully enmeshed, with discussions flowing smoothly for hours without stopping, carrying on effortlessly in the pub afterwards.

Over the past two weeks we’ve been considering Mark’s unfinished Acid Communism introduction — out soon in Repeater’s mammoth anthology. Last night Laura brought her early copy of the book with her…

Seen in the wild earlier. Hand for scale. It will most definitely be the biggest book I own once it arrives. pic.twitter.com/e3XrAmOSA7

— ? ??? (@xenogothic) October 1, 2018

…and I can confirm that Steve is very correct:

this new K-Punk book is one of the largest objects ever invented

— 9 (@kodenine) September 25, 2018

After we ran out of our allotted time in our allotted room, we moved upstairs to the pub. The volume, sitting on a table between us, was imposing in its weight and size.

There was a strange sense of déjà vu to the whole situation. I remember after Mark died, many of us had just bought The Weird and the Eerie and when we convened forlorn in the pubs of New Cross, passing it around, it would always eventually end up closed on the tables between us, like an object at a wake with which we were all communally in the presence of: the latest and last thing that Mark was able to give to us. It felt so small, then, but nonetheless emitted a certain energy. K-Punk, by contrast, feels like a black hole, absorbing everything into its pages under the gravitational pull of its own swollen mass. Press k for collapse.

In resisting this somewhat inevitable drainage of energy — I do not envy the task that Repeater have so diligently and bittersweetly undertaken — as we stagger into autumn and the nights draw in — it has been wonderful to discuss Acid Communism with this disparate group of people as something to be constructed collectively and joyfully.

Laura is the perfect person to chair this. She was present and working with Mark throughout his research on the project — he had written a new introduction to the Verso edition of her book Savage Messiah (due out next year), as well as planning to dedicate a chapter of Acid Communism to her work as he had also done in Ghosts Of My Life. She undoubtedly has the best sense of the shape of the project to come.

What has become wonderfully clear, through Laura’s sense of the outline of Mark’s project, is that Acid Communsim is a project that it is still possible to reconstruct. There is work to be done but there are chapters scattered all over the place — introductions and forwards and blog posts and articles and essays — and the potential to (re)construct something in between these disparate materials, something which is able to hang together in such a way as to remain diffusely but poignantly productive, becomes more palpable the more that we read together.

In this way, it is an unfinished project like communism itself, the very acknowledgement of the immaterial nature of which is what allows for its potentials to be produced. It is a living project — in explicit contrast to the monolithic K-Punk compendium — and, as the release date of that volume looms, these Mondays have been like a preemptive measure for offsetting the encroaching bittersweetness of the Repeater volume’s finality.

Last night, my sense of this joy coalesced in a new way…

It’s been almost eighteen months since I first read the Acid Communism introduction, in a friend’s living room, slightly worse for wear, having printed out a bunch of copies in the Goldsmiths library, unearthing our hastily stapled and already dog-eared copies from our backpacks as we mellowed out following a stoned and laughter-ridden excursion around the big Sainsbury’s in New Cross. We sat in the half-dark and read a paragraph each, slightly cross-eyed, going around our little lethargic group of four with tired and bloodshot eyes.

Much of what we read didn’t really “go in” under those circumstances. We read it and let it wash over us but I remember absorbing very little. Danny Baker’s autobiography loomed large as the most bizarre and memorable reference point but not what Mark had to say about him. It was just the fact of reading it together that was important and we laughed and laughed, all the more receptive to Mark’s wonderful sense of humour.

Over the past two weeks at the Acid Communist reading group we have not read the text collectively in this way but we have nonetheless discussed the implications of the text as I felt I had previously lived it: via an explicit consideration of an inebriated laughter from the outside.

As Mark himself writes, channeling the Deleuze of Logic of Sense and discussing a 1966 BBC adaptation of Alice in Wonderland:

The laugher that this Alice provokes — sometimes uneasy, sometimes uproarious — is a laughter that comes from the outside. It is a psychedelic laughter, a laughter that — far from confirming or validating the values of any status quo — exposes the bizarreness, the inconsistency, of what had been taken for common sense.

It is here that, much to my surprise, I find Mark’s Acid Communism taking on a distinctly Bataillean edge. Throughout the text, and in a number of essays written prior to it, Mark is channeling the collectivised outsider joys of the “carnivalesque”, charting the distinct class unconsciousness of the rave, the party, the fair, the carnival. Beyond the musics that defined rave, what is laughter if not the soundtrack to these displays of frivolity?

I’m reminded of Lucio Angelo Privitello’s essay in Reading Bataille Now, in which he writes that laughter “is the joyful s/laughter of subjectivity.” Rather than giving ammunition to some sort of defence of the likes of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, laughter can instead be termed as the tearing open of interiority. Laughter, in its purest and most involuntary form, remains our central communal convergence through which the individual falls apart. Laughter affirms the non-sequiturs which penetrate all of experience and social life. To laugh at our boring dystopia is to poke holes through its seams and — as I’ve written about at length here on the blog — this is always best achieved through the collectivising, the externalising, of subjectivities.

Privitello goes on to write that laughter “is a shedding or a slipping out of what was once believed true in relation to the future, which Bataille adopted from Nietzsche’s ‘I love not knowing the future.'” He describes how, for Bataille, the

space of laughter requires “two conditions: (1) that it’s sudden; and (2) that no inhibition is involved.” Laughter is thus always on the edge of slippage, exposing, in the words of Nietzsche, the “superabundance of means of communication”…

It is here that we see the truth of Mark’s declaration, in The Weird and the Eerie, that “terrors are not all there is to the outside.” The Outside can be as hilarious as it is horrific, and this is simply down to the subject crossing an internal line within itself: the dichotomy of the good and bad trip.

With all this in mind, I’m left wondering if it is actually more than circumstance which lead Mark, in “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle“, to consider the trials of comedian Russell Brand so explicitly.

On the occasion of seeing Brand’s 2013 stand-up show Messiah Complex in Ipswich, he notes how it is a show underpinned by a kind of politics, somewhat alien to that pop-cultural moment, which was “a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality.”

Perhaps Mark’s mistake, in expressing an obvious bitterness that he had accrued under the moralising eye of the Left in that moment, was that he did not reach the depths of the analyses that would come later. Or, perhaps the backlash was precisely what drove him to better articulating the necessity of joy and laughter to processes of consciousness raising which the Left’s impotent moralism, at that time, only served to snuff out. (It’s worth noting how, over the last two years, the Left has embraced a newly memetic sense of humour but only after seeing the success of the Right’s deployment of such tactics.)

This Leftist interiority, where it still dominates, resembles the mirror image of the ‘happy’ affectlessness of neoliberal professionalism — “a blank-eyed disengagement from all Outsides, as all (your) energy is sucked up by the ultimate interiority”, as Mark wrote in the Hyperstition blog post “Megalithic Astropunk“. It is an image which is constituted by what Nick Land once called a “transcendental miserablism”, notably in a criticism that he had levelled squarely at Mark himself back in 2007. Around the time of Land’s post, Ben Woodard summarised his critique on his own blog in a way that notably echoes Mark’s later concerns. He writes that transcendental miserablism, for Land, is “an impregnable form of negation which places all negation in one entity — his example being capitalism.” He continues: “Land argues that the miserablist collapses all change (or time) or process or flux into misery thereby denying the possibility of change.” Mark was certainly guilty of this on occasion, diagnosing it whilst likewise being affected by it in the more explicitly depressive moments of his “hauntology”, but his miserablism was by no means absolute. His work would frequently swing back and forth between miserablism and mania with an honesty and a transparency that many nonetheless failed to pick up on, taking the whims of subjectivity to be an intellectual inconsistency rather than understanding each critical “face” as always already addressing a different inconsistency of the subject itself.

For the Mark of 2013, this miserablism that he was himself once accused of had since been sharpened by a movement at large into a politics and culture of vicious interiority, its edges jagged and spiked, consigning this transcendental miserablism ever more explicitly to the horizon of the self. In a moment such as that one, in 2013, Russell Brand becomes precisely the sort of figure we needed, for all his whimsy and facetiousness, so that we might see, in the shadow of his grandiose self, the inherently ridiculous and slippery nature of that which the Left was trying so hard and so authoritatively to cordon off: the late capitalist leftist subject itself.

That is not to say that the Left, in its demands, is necessarily unreasonable but its sense of truncated sense of reason is precisely the barrier it needs to overcome rather than allowing it to define itself. Previously, Mark had already written about this, offering an alternative that he termed “Psychedelic Reason“: a Spinozist rationality that foreshadows the “psychedelia” of his last years and its various contemporary misreadings; a Spinozist rationalist that was far more effective than the desperate escapism of intoxication — whether that be religious and moralising or drugged-up and care-free. He writes:

Well, what makes these things dangerous is the thing that make drugs dangerous — i.e. it is not the state of ego-loss itself but the imprecision of the art of maintaining it, the fact that the organism might resume its rights at any moment, crashing you into psychic mini-deaths and melancholic catatonia.

The problem with drugs is that they only put the Alien Parasite Entity (= His Majesty the Ego = the thing that calls itself you) to sleep. Their dissolution of the APE is temporary, all-too temporary. And after a while, the neuronal battleground — what you are fighting over AND what you are fighting with, i.e. the only resources you have — is itself damaged. APE has its way as you are dragged/drugged into permanent low-to-deep level depression.

It is only as part of a Cold Rationalist program that you can begin to permanently dissolve the APE. It’s a lifelong struggle, it’ll always lurk in the shadows and in your reflection and photographs, waiting for another opportunity to drag you back down into the looking glass world of personalised misery.

APE won’t listen to reason but it can be dissolved by it.

Hey kids: could there be a better reason to read Spinoza? He tells you not to get out of your head but how to get out through your head.

It is here that the moralising nature of a so-called Cathedral and a so-called Vampire’s Castle becomes worthy of staunch critique from a leftist perspective. Each points to a deeply embedded system of reason that is its own worst enemy, infectiously and inadvertently exacerbating the most violent interiorities of capitalism rather than expanding outwards into its outsides. As Mark continues:

Drugs are like an escape kit without an instruction manual. Taking MDMA is like improving MS Windows: no matter how much tinkering $ Bill does, MS Windows will always be shit because it is built on top of the rickety structure of DOS. In the same way, using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end because Human OS has not been taken out and dismantled.

The Cold Rationalist program tells you how to auto-affect your brain into a state of ecstasy.

This, too, whilst being embedded in his Spinozism, nonetheless rings true of Bataille’s secular “sacred”, his obsessions with “inner experience” and “the impossible”. Mark’s essay “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle” comes across as a last ditch attempt, in the sphere of social media at least, to challenge this very same foreclosing of the subject into alienation that Bataille had so violently resisted. Mark, however, is warning us more specifically against a retreat into identitarian bubbles which, at present, threaten to foreclose the contemporaneous possibilities of our coming-together, our collective subject which is brought about explicitly through the elevation of (a class) consciousness that expands outwards rather than retreating inwards.

What I fully realised last night was how essential laughter is to this Nietzschean “superbundance”. It is a laughter so fundamentally different to the sneering humour that has categorised much of the left over the last few decades: “a wheezing parody of laughter teetering upon the abject nakedness of a sob.” It is laughter that escapes the reification of the academy. It is a laughter “which is lost to discourse”, rupturing the subject in its isolation and — always; always — reaching out beyond to the other.

UPDATE:

In the comments below, Ed is back with a great comment. He points to one of his favourite K-Punk posts, “Portmeirion: An Ideal For Living“. (It goes without saying that this is classic K-Punk, even in the title alone. One of his magnificent and hilarious “What I Did On My Holiday” posts, pivoting on The Prisoner and Joy Division — what more could you ask for?)

Ed picks out two passages of note. The first:

It’s disastrous that the Situationist insistence upon the ludic has degenerated into a smugonautic celebration of bourgeois circus trickery (juggling and unicylcists as the shock troops of the revolution against Corporate Kapital). You have to reread Ivan Chtcheglov’s astonishing Formulary for a New Urbanism — written in the year of our current Queen’s coronation (attn: Robin Carmody), 1953 — to be reminded of the force of the Situationist critique. How could architecture — i.e. the places in which we live — not be an intensely political matter? And why should we live in boring, utilitarian spaces when we could live in grottoes and crooked caverns? ‘A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences…’

Ed adds that “smugonautic celebration of bourgeois circus trickery (juggling and unicyclists as the shock troops of the revolution against Corporate Kapital)” is “probably the best description of what the alter-globalization movement of the late 90s and early 2000s manifested as, this sort of privileged “festival hopping” caravan that tooled around Europe, disrupting a summit here and another there.” He adds at the end:

The social movements articulated themselves as a carnivalesque experience, precisely because it is this sort of joy that is (anticipated to be) found in the sweeping mutation in the character of life, but the capacity to grapple with, get a handle on, or even pursue this to a higher position has been lost. This is no small part thanks to the reversal of the festival under late capitalism — what does one do when the inversion of power relations and the grotesque and macabre autonomy that characterize the festival becomes the very thing that affirms the dominant order? — and this is what makes the questions Mark was posing in his late work (or maybe he was posing all along). How to get from this debased position to that higher one, or to paraphrase Vaneigem, to find that alchemical method for converting the base metals of everyday life into revolutionary gold?

I really recommend you read the whole comment in full. Scroll down for more.

The Importance of the Unavowable in Community

on September 27, 2018September 27, 2018 By xenogothic 6 Comments

Communism remains the best conceivable form of human organization, and it can work, but the major catch is that it requires something that smells intolerably fishy to those who are most likely to want communism (left-wing activists). I will try to show that a workable and highly desirable communism is possible on the condition of accurate social valuation of individual characters. Some people are better or worse at different things, including ethical conduct. To the degree a group calibrates itself to these differences, it can have true communism; to the degree it denies or inaccurately assesses these differences, it cannot have communism.

Justin Murphy’s post “Aristocracy and Communism” — his more in-depth summary of his idea for a kind of aristocrommunist patch, expressed at a recent #WyrdPatchwork conference — has caused quite a furore recently; a furore I addressed quickly here.

I wanted to take a more careful look at this sense of a communism, positioning it against my own. My communism is primarily conceived as being defined by a collectivised ontology of difference — something I’ve tentatively been piecing together on the blog here and here.

A discussion of this sense of communism underpinned my first conversation about patchwork with Justin on his YouTube channel. We seemed to be in agreement then, but what he has suggested more recently seems antithetical to that… I want to figure how and why with a little more certainty.

The difference between us, as I see it, is that Murphy is led by his data into all the usual traps of communism, applying statistical solutions to ontological questions rather than building purposefully around the impossibility of their resolution.

My immediate reaction to Murphy’s thought experiment is that, as Mike Crumplar called it on his blog, it is a form of “microfascism”. As Sam Kriss (of all people) notes, in an old blogpost, it’s a DeleuzoGuattarian coinage. Kriss writes:

Deleuze draws a line between historical Fascism (of the type that came to power in Germany, Italy, Romania, etc) and microfascism: a field of destructive, authoritarian impulses that permeates capitalist society. In ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ microfascism is the result of a blocked line of flight, a molarisation of repressed desire…

We know this already. Patchwork, as a thought experiment, produces lines of flight indefinitely (in principle) but, paradoxically, this is likely to include a spectrum of possibility from overtly consolidated dead-ends to never-ending chaos. The gambit is: surely the proliferation of alternatives is better than our dull existences amongst consolidated nation-states, each increasingly infected with capitalism and neoliberalism.

How this is remotely compatible with a classically understood communism is a tricky point to make and, in this way, I’ve previously been sympathetic to Justin’s often expressed “imposter syndrome” when talking about communism, in which he acknowledges that just because he thinks he’s a communist, he’s aware many “real” communists might reject him as one of their own. I can appreciate this. I think I might be a similar sort of communist, because my communism, rather than being purely Marxist and adhering to contemporary left-wing expectations, is rather built on foundational texts from Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy.

In many ways, Justin and I are beginning from the same position. The interpersonal differences that tend towards fragmentation are based on the inherently fraught nature of friendship and communication which Georges Bataille, in his essay “The Labyrinth”, reduces to a “principle of insufficiency”; an inability to account for the inner experience of the other as that primal wound at the heart of all of human civilisation and existence.

For me, this is not something to get rid of or solve. This is not something to attempt to rectify. It’s the productive engine of community that is often curtailed and stunted by politics of the state. Instead, it’s a condition of subjectivity that is to be exacerbated and held within thought so that all action and politics can begin from its acknowledgement.

Blanchot takes up this principle explicitly in his communism, making it central to his philosophy of community. I think it’s worth turning to Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community at length here. He writes:

I am reading the following lines by Edgar Morin which many of us could make our own: “Communism is the major question and the principal experience of my life. I have never stopped recognizing myself in the aspirations it expresses and I still believe in the possibility of another society and another humanity.”

This simple statement may sound naive, but, in its straightfor wardness, it expresses exactly what we cannot escape: Why? What about this possibility which, one way or another, is always caught in its own impossibility?

This is likewise a communism that Justin has explored in his essay “Atomization and Liberation” in the Vast Abrupt, but which he ends up taking in a direction already forewarned by Blanchot himself, who continues:

Communism, by saying that equality is its foundation and that there can be no community until the needs of all men are equally fulfilled (this in itself but a minimal requirement), presupposes not a petfect society but the principle of a transparent humanity essentially produced by itself alone, an “immanent” humanity (says Jean-Luc Nancy) . This immanence of man to man also points to man as the absolutely immanent being because he is or has to become such that he might entirely be a work, his work, and, in the end, the work of everything. As Herder says, there is nothing that must not be fashioned by him, from humanity to nature (and all the way to God). Nothing is left out, in the final analysis. Here lies the seemingly healthy origin of the sickest totalitarianism.

This is likewise how Murphy’s communism, as most recently enunciated, appears to us: as that sickest totalitarianism, built around a foundation of technologically instantiated and absolute equality.

So, what then of “community”? What is it in relation to this communism? Perhaps a small-c communism that is not enforced by the infrastructures of the state into consolidated groups but rather a social infrastructure that is modelled on its own casual and already existing dynamics.

Whilst the state tries to enforce its model of itself on the subject, this communism instead calls for a sociality that is uninhibited and attentive to the already existent flows of human life, as fragmentary and fluid, and which does not get in their way. As I recently said on Twitter: a patchwork has always been, for me, a Frankenstate that reflects the makeup of the modern subject. In this way, patchwork inverts the processes of subjection. It is to eradicate the political (as we know it) through the forces of the extrapolitical, not — as Murphy seems to be suggesting — to neuter the extrapolitical through pervasive state control and administration.

Blanchot again:

We are grappling here with difficulties not easily mastered. The community, be it numerous or not … seems to propose itself as a tendency towards a communion, even a fusion, that is to say an effervescence assembling the elements only to give rise to a unity (a supra-individuality) that would expose itself to the same objections arising from the simple consideration of the single individual, locked in his immanence.

That the community may lay itself open to its own communion (which is of course symbolized by all eucharistic communions) is shown by a variety of examples: the group under fascination, as attested by the sinister collective suicide in Guyana; the group in fusion, as named and analyzed by Sartre in his ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ …; the military or fascist group where each member of the group relinquishes his freedom or even his consciousness to a Head incarnating it without running the risk of being decapitated because it is, by definition, beyond reach.

I could go on quoting passages at length but surely it is already clear by now that Murphy’s communism is a version of that already familiar fascistic variety, built on technologies but ignoring any questions raised about the logistics of a communism since the mid-19th century.

If it’s still not clear enough: read more Blanchot.

Aliens

on June 12, 2018February 26, 2019 By xenogothic 1 Comment

Following on from the most recent Westworld post, I’ve been reminded of this old draft written about Arthur Jafa, Black studies and Ridley Scott’s Alien.

It feels more whole now, when read in light of these recent Wild West discussions.

The alien is a monster, but in my reading of it, I think the first time I saw it, I realised that I was that alien. You’ve got a company that’s out there mining, or whatever they’re supposed to be doing in space, and you’ve got two… it’s funny using this term in mixed company, but I have to because it’s the appropriate term — it’s two niggers. There’s the good nigger and the bad nigger. The good nigger is Yaphet Kotto, who works for the company, and the bad nigger is the alien. When they first start to confront this xenomorph, is when John Hurt is at the dinner table, eating, and he’s like, ‘I’m feeling fine’, and then suddenly he starts having this seizure until the alien, in its first permutated state, pops out of his chest. If you look closely, there’s this moment where the whole crew is pulling back, except for Yaphet Kotto, who’s pushing forward with a knife in his hand. I always felt that that moment, where the baby version of the alien and Yaphet Kotto are facing each other, is a moment of recognition. This was the brother who couldn’t be reasoned with; the brother who said, ‘No, I come to rape and pillage and procreate with you whether you want to or not.’ It’s a sort of primordial vision of Black people in a way.
Over the years, I’ve been struck by the additional information that came out, which verified my feelings about the alien. For example, there was a 6? 9? Sudanese guy named Bolaji in the alien suit. Remember that this is Hollywood, where if a Black person gets a job, there’s a very specific reason why they’re getting that job. It struck me on some primordial level that it’s not an accident that they put this 6? 9? Sudanese guy in this suit. I also remember seeing one of H.R. Giger’s books in his studio, which had a picture of a Yoruba staff, an Elegba staff. If you look at that staff in the book, you actually see the alien’s head and where the design came from. As is often the case with great science-fiction films, ‘Alien’ is bound up with these ideas of the Other. And the Other, as far as it exists in the Western imagination, is bound up with who Black people are imagined to be. [via]

I’ve been enthralled by Arthur Jafa’s reading of Alien since seeing Bolaji Badejo skulking around the set of the Nostromo in a screen test featured in his blockbuster exhibition from last summer.

Following this blog’s various explorations of the role of fragmented identities within patchwork, and most recently the integral role racial otherness places in American fictions via Westworld, the thread that Jafa has picked up on here — integral to much of modern black studies — warrants further considerations in taking the Alien analogy to its various conclusions.

In recognising the alien, and in framing the moment as a battle between “good …” and “bad …”, it suggests that Yaphet Kotto (who plays the character of ‘Parker’) is wrestling with a kind of dual consciousness.

Lest we forget, he is a disgruntled worker, resisting the unnecessary risk of investigating a distress signal — a request that, he believes, is way outside his job description — for no additional pay. One of only two working-class crew — the other is ‘Brett’, played by Harry Dean Stanton — his suggestion is to nuke the alien’s planet from orbit and have done with it.

In the end, he cows to the threat of voiding his contract.

How is Kotto supposed to “do battle” with the alien under the thumb of the Corporation? How is he supposed to attack that which he is “imagined to be”?

W.E.B. DuBois says:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

And yet, in Alien, this “Negro blood” is unquestionably something to fear. As we all know, you can’t attack the alien in conventional ways — its corrosive blood burns with a horrifying intensity. If you attack the alien, you threaten burning a hole in your “world” (or at least the ship’s hull, as the crew of the Nostromo almost find out when they succeed in injuring their stowaway), threatening the sudden influx of the voidic black outsideness of outer space.

The only solution, as happens repeatedly throughout the franchise’s various films, is to invert this threat and jettison the alien into outer space through the airlock.

Towards the end of the film it is revealed that the Nostromo‘s science officer, Ash the android, is acting on secret orders from the company to keep the alien alive for research purposes, with the rest of the crew deemed expendable.

Ash is, of course, “white” but he is nonetheless wedded to the Corporation in an even more extreme fashion than his working-class counterparts. Parker and Brett are able to, at least superficially, resist their programming. Ash is, however, “purified” — racially and ideologically. He suffers no internal dual consciousness like his “colleague”. His loyalty is ontological — not just contractual.

The extent of his programmed loyalty is nevertheless acutely dehumanising. Ash is the opposite of the alien, embodying the other side of its violent extremity.

I wonder if, following Jafa’s good/bad reading, Ash rather than Kotto is the “good …” to the alien’s “bad …”. Both are, of course, as dangerous as each other. Kotto is stuck in the middle, resisting both, stuck between a black-and-whiteness.

This, in turn, injects a dual consciousness into the film itself. The “mind” of the film — if we can think of a film as having its own social consciousness — fears the Absolute Other and likewise that Other who has “assimiliated” with horrifying efficiency: the android as robota and “slave” to whiteness, an extension of the Corporation that seems devoid of consideration for human life.

Susan Bordo describes the alien — and its periods of gestation — as reflecting “the werewolf genre” in this way: “a new, alien, libidinous, and uncontrollable self literally bursts through the seams of the victim’s old flesh.”

Mental Health Asteroid

on February 9, 2018September 27, 2018 By xenogothic 5 Comments

Originally part of yesterday’s post, After the End of the World (Part 1), this post feels more at home on its own. Nonetheless, there’s a cross-pollination of references.

Social trauma, in the process of making-sense, often requires analogies to be formed — regularly channelling apocalyptic imagery to exacerbate a radical destruction of the sociopolitical “world-for-us” that violence of many kinds affectively instantiates.

Such analogies have been endemic in the aftermath of the neverending disruptions to the sociopolitical landscape that have occurred over the last few years. In late 2016, writing in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in the US, Laurie Penny diagnosed the extremity of psychological affects being experienced by many in that moment as precisely the destruction of “our world”.

The rise to power and election of Donald J. Trump is the sick recrimination of a society shriveled by anger and anxiety, and the response from deep within the psyche of the same society has been various degrees of panic, depression, and grief. Illinois suicide hotlines have been overwhelmed since the election, with calls up 200 percent, according to Chicago public health officials. A mental health asteroid has smashed into the carapace of a culture already calcified with anxiety and ambient dread. Major newsrooms are rumored to have hired in therapists so their journalists can continue to work. Everyone is wondering what this crisis will mean for their future, for their families, trying to work out how they’ll cope. Some coping strategies, however, are more dangerous than others.

I repeatedly referred to this passage within the community that formed in the aftermath of Mark Fisher’s death in 2017 as we tried to make sense of and inhabit the rupture that it opened up within and around us.

“A mental health asteroid has smashed into the carapace of a culture already calcified with anxiety and ambient dread”.

Whilst the affective catastrophe this phrase described resonated with the “structures of feeling” that arose in late 2016 and early 2017, as time progressed that resonance dwindled as our “community” repeatedly changed shape. (A lot more on that here).

Despite its eventual redundancy in the face of flux, the image conjured by Penny is nonetheless powerful in its paradoxical nature. The disaster she describes is an asteroid without a crater; a shockwave felt but not seen; a horrific planetary event without the disaster-movie spectacle and mass extinction it seems to promise. It is a disaster that leaves everything standing.

Continue reading “Mental Health Asteroid”

After the End of the World (Part 1)

on February 8, 2018September 27, 2018 By xenogothic 5 Comments

January 2015: Darryl Pinckney reports from the front line in Ferguson, Missouri, for the New York Review of Books. He is present for the announcement that the police officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted for killing Michael Brown.

Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, a Boston pastor and well-known civil rights activist, is also present and welcomes Pinckney into his group whilst they look for shelter following the announcement and the subsequent civil unrest. Riotous scenes of social self-harm travel around the world.

Sekou, despite being a staunch advocate for nonviolent protest and resolution, does not blame Ferguson’s residents and their supporters for attacking the police and the town itself:

[Reverend Sekou] feels that the system hasn’t worked and now needs to be born again. The young demonstrating in Ferguson had faced tear gas and assault rifles. “There isn’t any political terrain for them to engage in other than putting their bodies on the line.”

Thanks to Tobias Ewe for sharing the following post of Jehu’s on social media recently: Land, Wilderson and the Nine Billion Names of God. I hadn’t read it previously.

(As ever, I miss Jehu’s Twitter.)

What Jehu’s post does is articulate a position that I’ve been thinking about for some time now but he does so more astutely and more succinctly than I ever could — and it is the sort of treacherous position that it is better not to articulate at all if you can’t articulate it well.

Reading Jehu’s post has made me want to pull further at the frayed threads of the Left’s inability to write off humanity as Nick Land supposedly dares them to do.

Jehu writes:

For the longest time, I thought — mistakenly — that people just didn’t get Land — and in large part because they just didn’t get Marx. There is no way, I thought, you could lay Land and Marx side by side and not see they were talking about the same thing.

I have to admit now that I was wrong. The Left will never get Land because Land only offers them death. The idea that death is the culmination of history is a concept that can never be embraced by the Left.

This is a position I’ve tried to explored (tentatively) on this blog a few times over the past few months, or at least I feel I have orbited this point. It was also the central drive behind a paper written in late 2016 which was to be my first foray into notions of community and exit — Monastic Vampirism:

Let us take a shuffling step away from Left melancholia towards of a new Gothic politic – from Old Left to New Left to Dead Left.

There is a sense, in this (now old) articulation, that the invocation of death is facetious but I have always taken it seriously.

The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has been a primary inspiration that I have always been dissuaded from considering head-on (a fair suggestion).

BLM is a humanist political movement that has been built upon chants in which protesters self-identified with the deceased. Desiring to build on this sentiment is not to invoke All Lives Matter but rather to try to learn something from the communality of death that All Lives Matter fails to account for; to learn from the specificity of BLM in the aid of other specificities, all of which orbit each other in their intensive affectivities.

As such, these issues of race and black radicalism have lurked constantly in the background of my readings and writings over the past year but they have always ended up as footnotes and offcuts, primarily because it doesn’t feel like my place to articulate a cultural perspective that is not my own.

I also have a number of friends who are much better informed about these issues than I am.

Despite this, as I find myself reading various elucidations of the horror of whiteness and its disintegration in so much SF, to avoid an adjacent recognition of the horror of blackness (whether in its xenophobic or xenophilic mode) feels increasingly short-sighted.

If we are to learn anything about how to proceed from moments of collective trauma, ontological questions of blackness are essential.

Continue reading “After the End of the World (Part 1)”