Mental Health – Page 2

Bodies Without Organs: Deleuze’s Transcendental Materialism, its Legacy and its Antecedents

on July 22, 2019July 22, 2019 By xenogothic 7 Comments

Yesterday’s post — an introduction I wrote for the XG Discord to the “Image of Thought” chapter of Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition — received a comment from Joseph Ratliff, the answer to which became far too long to leave below the comment line. I hope Joseph doesn’t mind me responding to him a bit more publicly.

Joseph asked whether we can say that Deleuze gives a certain “agency” to thought as a way to remove “the organs” of human thinking.

The short answer, I think, is “no” but this is also one of my favourite questions around Deleuze’s thought so I thought instead of something that I’d give a long answer, connecting the infamously misunderstood concept of the “body without organs” to a transcendental materialism that places Deleuze at the end of a controversial philosophical lineage most readily associated with the likes of Nietzsche and Bataille.

Nietzsche was a particularly interesting materialist for Deleuze because it was he who set the groundwork for affirming not only the freedom afforded by materialism but also its restrictions.

Much has been made of this part of Nietzsche’s thought but it is particularly interesting to consider from a biographical perspective.

Sue Prideaux’s recent Nietzsche biography I Am Dynamite! is exceptional on this. She begins, very early on, with a brief account of the life of Nietzsche’s father, his career as a pastor and his various health troubles, particularly in relation to the rest of his family.

Friedrich Nietzsche was famously a very sickly man but he was also from a very sickly family, on both his mother’s and his father’s side. His genes undoubtedly doomed him from the start.

Each member of the Nietzsche family going back generations seemed to be affected by disorders both mental and physical, and Nietzsche’s father was no exception. He is worth focussing on in particular for the affect bearing witness to his father’s demise probably had on the young philosopher.

Prideaux describes Karl Ludwig Nietzsche as a pastor who was “both pious and patriotic” but also as a man who “was not free from the nervous disorders that affected his mother and half-sisters.”

He would shut himself up in his study for hours, refusing to eat, drink or talk. More alarmingly, he was given to mysterious attacks, when his speech would abruptly cease mid-sentence and he would stare into space. […] The mysterious paroxysms were diagnosed as ‘softening of the brain’ and for months he was prey to prostration, agonising headaches and fits of vomiting, his eyesight deteriorating drastically into semi-blindness. […] Karl Ludwig’s sufferings grew worse, he lost the power of speech, and finally his eyesight deteriorated into total blindness. On 30 July 1849, he died, aged only thirty-five. […]
The cause of Pastor Nietzsche’s decline into death has been extensively investigated. Whether the pastor died insane is a question of considerable importance to posterity because Nietzsche himself suffered from symptoms similar to his father’s, before he suddenly and dramatically went mad in 1888, when he was forty-four years old, remaining insane until his death in 1900. The considerable literature on the subject continues but the first book, Über das Pathologische bei Nietzsche, was published in 1902, just two years after Nietzsche’s death. Its author, Dr Paul Julius Möbius, was a distinguished pioneering neurologist who had been specialising in hereditary nervous diseases from the 1870s onwards. Möbius was named by Freud as one of the fathers of psychotherapy and, importantly, he worked directly from Pastor Nietzsche’s post-mortem report which revealed Gehirnerweichung, softening of the brain, a term commonly used in the nineteenth century for a variety of degenerative brain diseases.
The modern interpretation includes general degeneration, a brain tumour, tuberculoma of the brain or even slow bleeding into the brain caused by some head injury. Unlike his father, no post-mortem was performed on Nietzsche and so it was impossible for Möbius or any later investigators to produce anything like a post-mortem comparison of the two brains, but Möbius, looking wider, revealed a tendency to mental problems on the maternal side of the family. One uncle committed suicide, apparently preferring death to being shut up in the Irrenhaus, the lunatic asylum. On the paternal side, a number of Nietzsche’s grandmother Erdmuthe’s siblings were described as ‘mentally abnormal’. One committed suicide and two others developed some sort of mental illness, one requiring psychiatric care.

This information is important not only because it fundamentally refutes one of the most persistent myths about Nietzsche’s life — that he went mad following the contraction of sexually-transmitted syphilis — although he may have had a habit for visiting brothels, it wasn’t the death of him — but it also gives further context to much of Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically his materialism and infatuation with the concept of fate.

Prideaux gives a thorough account of this also. She notes how Nietzsche was influenced in tandem by the thought of Spinoza but also the scientific advances of his time. She writes that Nietzsche “read Robert Mayer’s Mechanics of Heat, Boscovich’s theory of non-material atoms, and Force and Matter (1855) by the materialist medical doctor Ludwig Büchner, whose bestselling book spread the gospel that ‘researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings’.” Nietzsche also read F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism which, she writes, “asserted that man was only a special case of universal physiology, and thought was only a special chain in the physical processes of life.”

Prideaux continues by noting the explicit instances that the newly materialist thought of the day was influencing Nietzsche’s philosophy. The philosopher was very open about this, writing in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, that he was

in thrall to a burning and exclusive fascination with physiology, medicine and natural science. This is what he set out to explore in [his 1881 book] Daybreak: the idea that man is merely a bodily organism whose spiritual, moral and religious beliefs and values can be explained by the physiological and medical. Greater interest at that time was growing in the idea that man might control the future by controlling his own evolutionary development through diet. It is an attitude famously summed up by the philosopher and anthropologist Feuerbach, who had died only a few years earlier: ‘If you want to improve the people, give them better food instead of declamations against sin. Man is what he eats.’

The broader importance of this for Nietzsche’s thought is that he would not only become fascinated by the potentials of materialist “self-overcoming” but also the necessity of a certain amor fati. Man may be what he eats, but Nietzsche would also stress the importance of “becoming what you are, once you know what that is.” And the importance of this for Nietzsche was undoubtedly fuelled by the trauma of not only his father’s and broader family’s sickly demises but also his own perpetual sickliness.

Once we understand the innate sense in which Nietzsche lived with and amongst a knowledge of his own pain, suffering and mortality, we understand the importance of his thought for himself — the importance of not only affirming your limitations but also overcoming them in whatever way you can. For Nietzsche, that was perhaps more philosophical than physical.

It is here that we can see the initial tensions in Deleuze’s “image of thought”. For Nietzsche, this was changing quite fundamentally in his time. Thought was taking on a newly populist and anti-Cartesian bent in that the observations that thought was influenced by (subjectively if not quite bodily) “outside” forces were being given form within scientific understanding.

But rather than this freeing up thought — although it seemed to for Nietzsche — it was rather the beginnings of a new dogmatic image of thought that we still know well today.

We should likewise note, at this point, that this experience of familial sickness and ill-health was one shared by Nietzsche’s greatest philosophical friend, Georges Bataille. In fact, Stuart Kendall’s brilliant biography of Bataille tellingly begins from this point. He starts the first chapter by writing:

In 1913, when Georges Bataille was about fifteen, his father went mad. Joseph-Aristide Bataille’s syphilis was simply running its course. Contracted long ago, perhaps before he had abandoned his medical studies, certainly before he moved the family from Billom, in the volcanic Puy-du-Dôme, where Georges was born in 1897, to Reims where they now lived. Joseph-Aristide had been blind since before Georges’ birth and paralysed for more than a decade. The unhappy conclusion of the disease was inevitable.
Confined to a chair, coursed by tabes, Joseph-Aristide lurched in agony. Decades later, Georges would remember his father’s ‘sunken eyes, his hungry bird’s long nose, his screams of pain, soundless peals of laughter’. And he would remember the degradation of the old man, despite his own attempts to help.

Kendall proceeds by quoting from Bataille’s first pseudonymous novel (as Lord Auch), The Story of the Eye, drawing on what seem to be some of its most autobiographical elements. Bataille writes:

What upset me more was seeing my father shit a great number of times… It was very hard for him to get out of bed (I would help him) and settle on a chamber pot, in his nightshirt and, usually, a cotton nightcap (he had a pointed grey beard, ill kempt, a large eagle nose, and immense hollow eyes staring into space). At times, the ‘lightning sharp pains’ would make him howl like a beast, sticking out his bent leg, which he futilely hugged in his arms.

Kendall continues:

We can imagine the boy aiding the invalid in his agonies. As a youth, Georges loved his father, but as an adult, he found his love unnatural: most young boys loved their mothers, he thought in terms testifying to his recent psychoanalysis. But Georges loved his father, at least early on, even in his father’s degradation.

There are, however, various other allusions throughout Bataille’s writings that seem to suggest his father may have been abusive to him. However, all of these allusions, Kendall notes, are too shrouded in the cloak of fiction for us to draw any real conclusions. What is self-evident is that Bataille’s relationship with his father was deep, fraught and complicated, painting a far more difficult and violently honest picture of the terms of living with an invalid parent than Nietzsche ever did, but nonetheless vicariously illuminating the experiences of both philosophers.

For both thinkers, the experience of seeing parental men of God fall into madness must have been traumatically informative.

Kendall continues with an anecdote that firmly grounds Georges Bataille’s entire life and philosophy — his founding ordeal. This was during the spring of 1913 when Bataille’s father “lost his mind.” Kendall writes:

Georges’ older brother Martial had already moved out of the family home, so Marie-Antoinette bataille, Georges’ mother, sent him to fetch a doctor. He returned quickly. The doctor undoubtedly did what little he could for the raving patient, but Georges’ father was beyond help. When the physician stepped into the next room, Joseph-Aristide shouted after him, ‘Doctor, let me know when you’re done fucking my wife!’
The inexplicable statement seared the son. Years later Georges wrote: ‘For me, that utterance, which in a split second annihilated the demoralizing effects of a strict upbringing, left me with something like a steady obligation, unconscious and unwilled: the necessity of finding an equivalent to that sentence in any situation I happen to be in.’ The statement carries the contagious taint of Bataille’s entire thought and style: it contrasts a split second and a steady and lasting obligation; an unconscious, unwilled or chance event and a necessity and, most importantly, it functions by means of extreme reversals of logic and perspective (what is demoralizing about a strict upbringing?). Everything follows from here.
Joseph-Aristide’s mad accusation ripped the mask off Georges’ youth, off propriety, off his parents’ and doctor’s faces; the respected, beloved faces of order and authority. The odious utterance opened a world of infinite freedom. Forever after, Bataille’s obligation, his necessity, would be to find an equivalent of that phrase in every situation throughout his life: not only in every story and erotic encounter but in every action, every experience, every word, every thought. That which previously has been held on high would be brought low, that which was low would be raised on high. This slippage would characterize every experience. He would submit all of life to a similar trespass, debasement and inversion: an endless irregularity, ceaseless turning and overturning; an endless repetition of the rule of lawlessness.

This is recognisably the very foundation of Bataille’s “base materialism” and here we can see the tension of Nietzsche’s own work struck in even more explicit relief. Becoming what you are, and knowing what that is, as Nietzsche put it, becomes for Bataille an encounter with (and indeed, the very embodiment of) an all too human horror.

This horror, however, is a “truth” — and to affirm it is a challenge necessary for us to undertake, precisely because it ruptures the moralism and restrictions of a wider society. We attend to so many beliefs about the body and what it can do but also what it should and shouldn’t do, and we will find that, despite society’s taboos, are bodies will do things irrespective of the morals of the day. The affirmation of this truth is, however, more nuanced than first appearances suggest.

Bataille’s father’s outburst was no doubt offensive to all present in the moment but, in attending to its root cause as a symptom of his neurological afflictions, we may ask ourselves how we can — materially speaking — “judge” it. It undoubtedly disturbed the young Bataille to no end and yet Bataille’s affirmation of this disturbance is not the same as the act of forgiving an immoral act by deferring to the material reality of his father’s existence as a kind of base-authority.

For Bataille, the task is to affirm the horror of human materiality without such deference. He would write that the challenge becomes not “submitting oneself … to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being.”

Here Bataille retains the subversion of Nietzsche’s original thinking in the face of a materialist progressivism. Whereas, for Nietzsche, the benefits of a materialist thinking were somewhat naive and sought simply to alleviate a persistent suffering with walks in the mountains and baths in Europe’s spas, in the 20th century the bodily materialism of “you are what you eat” or “what you do” began to carry with it a sort of dietary moralism.

You are what you eat… So eat better! You are what you do… So exercise more! The insistence that you should treat your body like a temple could not be a clearer indictment of the continuation of the religious moralism that Nietzsche despised taking on a new life in the materialism he openly embraced.

Bataille knew of this, however, refusing to give to the matter of which materialism is concerned “the value of a superior principle (which this servile reason would be only too happy to establish itself above itself, in order to speak like an authorised functionary.)” Instead, Bataile would speak of “base matter” as “external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, [refusing] to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations.”

This is likewise the “raving mad” charge at the heart of Antonin Artaud’s vision of a humanity that has “had done with the judgements of God.” For Artaud, as for Bataille, scientific materialism has done nothing but imbue the insights of already well-established spiritualities and gnosticisms with the false authority of an apparently objective “scientific reason”.

Artaud would proclaim, without mincing words, that modern scientists

have reinvented microbes in order to impose a new idea of god. They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his microbic noxiousness.

And so, Artaud sought to liberate humanity entirely from the patronising cruelty of scientific reason, writing:

I have found a way to put an end to this ape once and for all and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man. So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate [by] placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. […] Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god his organs.

It is in this sense, following Nietzsche and Bataille, that Deleuze would further affirm Artaud’s provocation, declaring, in the face of decades of scientific truth and progress, that we still do not know what a body can do.

Joshua Ramey, in his book The Hermetic Deleuze, begins with a wonderfully concise explanation of this point. He writes:

The decadence and debilitation of twentieth-century Western culture were, for Artaud, linked directly […] to the technoscientific apparatus — military, industrial, nutritional, and hygienic — continuously marshalled in the name of God and order to stultify the human body. Artaud’s theatre of cruelty was designed to disturb this docile creature, to shock and shatter its organs, and to force the body to react otherwise than in accordance with the habitual limits of sense and sensibility. As he wrote, “you have made him a body without organs, / then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions / and restored to him his true freedom.” For Artaud, humanity possessed a “body without organs,” a subtle body accessible at the extremes of experience — in suffering, delirium, synesthesia, and ecstatic states.
[…] Extending Artaud’s vision of a renewed sensibility into his own unique vision of thought, Deleuze argues that immanent thought, at the limit of cognitive capacity, discovers as-yet-unrealized potentials of the mind, and the body. That is to say, what connects Deleuze to Artaud is the conviction that what matters for life, and for thought, is an encounter with imperceptible forces in sensations, affections, and conceptions, and that these forces truly generate the mind, challenging the coordination of the faculties by rending the self from its habits.

To return to Joseph’s original question, we should be careful to note that this is not Deleuze’s way of conceptualising an independently agentic thought. Nothing about the processes at play here can be discussed in those terms. In fact, “agency” here becomes the sort of deference to authority that Bataille would routinely denounce. For him, speaking in appropriately scatological terms, this would be like applying agency to a turd when you find yourself needing to go to the bathroom for a bowel movement. The challenge to thought is recognising this movement for what it is, precisely devoid of agency and reason. (Because what is the attribution of “agency” but a way to give something a reason to exist.) (Again, this is something discussed last time — the tandem base-horror and affirmation of acknowledging that “the Queen poops too.”)

From here, we might note that Deleuze’s affinity with this thought was likewise an affirmation of his own fate as another sickly philosopher.

Like Nietzsche, Bataille and Artaud before him, Deleuze’s life was wracked by pain and suffering. Having undergone a thoraxoplasty and having one of his lungs in the late 1960s — in the midst of those months when he was meant to defend Difference & Repetition as his doctoral thesis, we might add — Deleuze was plauged by ill health and weakness for the rest of his life.

We may also note here the sorry fact that Deleuze committed suicide — a significant biographic event which is so often under-considered, perhaps because it cannot (or rather, should not) be thought in terms we are accustomed to when we hear that someone has taken their own life.

There is no evidence that Deleuze was depressed or mentally ill. He was just as physically ill as he always had been and, as an elderly man, aged 70, the mortal barrel that he had long been staring down was getting closer to him by the day.

Rather than allowing his body to have the final say, Deleuze chose to end his life on his own terms. In this sense, his death can be seen as the drastic affirmation of a man who chose no longer to live with the sickly body he had been lumbered with.

Without wanting to romanticise his death, Deleuze’s suicide nonetheless presents us with a fitting example of where a thought such as this libidinal materialism can lead us. Finn Janning would go so far as to call Deleuze’s suicide a “happy death” for the way it encapsulates the power of the Will to exceed the body in which it is contained.

Cybergothic posthumanisms aside, Deleuze pushed up against the edge of what his body could do, finding it at war with his Self and so he chose instead to undertake a spectacularly counter-intuitive attack on his woefully organ-anchored body. Janning writes:

A life worth living is a life that has the power to actualize its will to will. In relation to this definition, a happy death might be seen as the equivalent hereof, i.e. when a life no longer has this will, or simply accept that it no longer can act as becoming worthy of what happens. Such acknowledgement is the closest one can get to the Greek dictum: Know yourself by knowing your position, because such acknowledgement is fully knowing your place in time, knowing what is possible and what is not possible. — Acknowledging your limits in order to justify certain beliefs as being true, for instance, committing suicide as the only positive activity. Thus, let me stress: Know your location or position in life is not knowing your position in relation to pre-defined external categories or systems, like career-pattern, but a life’s position. The unique position of a life within the different forces of life, such a position emerges when encounters are dealt with: either in an active and positive way, or in a reactive and pessimistic way.
[…]
Deleuze didn’t kill himself because life was absurd or meaningless — as it obviously is for many who commit suicide. He didn’t kill himself due to a sudden emotional shock, e.g. loss of a child, divorce, et cetera — as it also happens to many. No, he committed suicide because his life had already ended. If life is an offspring of our will to do something, to create and such will can’t actualize itself, then you are not just dying, but already dead. In that sense he became equal of the event. He died with the event

It is from here that the “transcendental materialism” of Nietzsche and Bataille finds its next step in the thought of Deleuze and, later, Nick Land.

Land’s “libidinal materialism” is precisely another form(lessness) for this bodily overcoming, refusing to adhere to the tyranny of human anatomy and the sacredness applied to this flawed all-consuming and shit-producing machine which we insist on saying has been constructed in God’s image.

This all too easily opens out onto a cyberpunk landscape but contending with the abject realities of our present is far more prescient before we drift off into escapist fantasy.

Here Nyx’s gender accelerationism and its call to become a “body without sex organs” can be held up as a brilliant example of the contemporary political stakes of such a thinking.

The Primal Wound — A New Essay for Lapsus Lima

on July 11, 2019July 21, 2019 By xenogothic 2 Comments

“The Primal Wound”

A new essay from me now online at Lapsus Lima.

Many, many thanks to Tobias Ewe, Max Castle and Robin Mackay for looking over some earlier versions of this essay and giving some much appreciated tips and pointers!

I was honoured to be asked to contribute something to Lapsus Lima way back in November of last year by Mónica and it has taken me numerous false starts to finally end up with something that I’m happy with. Apologies to her for taking so long but her patience and enthusiasm have been very much appreciated!

Tomorrow’s #LapsusLima will feature a truly remarkable piece by @xenogothic that’s half hard theory and half hardcore confessional.

Anybody with an interest in embodiment (and disembodiment) and its/their psychoanalytic implications will want to read it.
— The Nightjar (@LapsusLima) July 9, 2019

It’s called “The Primal Wound: An Anti-Oedipal Consideration” and it’s an attempt to bring together various events and philosophies through which I’ve come to terms with — and even tried to affirm — my experiences as an adopted child.

#LapsusLima I Embodiment I In which @xenogothic challenges established psychoanalysis with a new and vitally destabilising triad.https://t.co/NXQnDKFkbQ
— The Nightjar (@LapsusLima) July 11, 2019

It goes without saying that it’s a very personal essay but readers of the blog will no doubt be aware that this isn’t exactly a step outside my comfort zone. I get the impression that an open and often personal standpoint is something this blog has become known for and, frankly, that’s a very conscious choice on my part — I’ve written about why before. Showing your working and your own intellectual pathway, rather than just presenting the destination, is a mode of writing that can be effective when you’re trying to carve out a way into otherwise difficult issues — philosophical, political or otherwise — but it is, of course, not for everyone…

Undoubtedly, there are hazards when taking this kind of approach. I have been told — both critically and lovingly — that I have a regrettable tendency to comes across as narcissistic in so often centring myself within my texts. This isn’t often something I take to be a problem. It is rather something of an occupational hazard.

More to the point, I think there is a certain power that comes from this kind of narcissistic writing when it is done well. It’s a mode of writing that I admire in everyone from Georges Bataille to Maggie Nelson and it’s a register that I have always admired, always attempting to capture my own version of it as best I can when the moment presents itself.

This is done in order to leave a door open for others, leading — I hope — to a more empathic entry point to various philosophies that are often hard-nosed in their own context and, secondary to this, discussed in ways that are typically academic, with all the repressive rigidity that comes with that.

However, I would want to emphasise that autobiography is not the aim but rather the starting point, opening the “I” outwards, unfolding it and laying its flayed skin over the top of a poetics; an interscalar and even “violent” or “evil” movement — in a Bataillean sense — between the personal and impersonal. The intention is less autobiography and more autobiopsy.

I hope that this essay speaks for itself in this regard but there is one bit of context that I would like to add here on the blog because there’s a dribble of Twitter toxicity niggling at the back of my mind at the moment as I watch this thing go out into the world:

The elephant in the room here is an awareness that some seasoned blogospheric ankle-biters — one in particular, let’s not kid ourselves — take the view that my style of writing is little more than “new-age self-help” and , in hindsight, this essay has emerged as an unconscious response to this. A way of saying, “Okay then, hold my beer…”

Oftentimes I think many of us forget (or even deny within ourselves) the frequency with which people come to philosophy as a kind of last resort.

There is a cliché in those who study psychology often being those most in need of a psychotherapist and I would argue that philosophy shares a similar sort of relationship to thought — especially today, when psychoanalysis and philosophy are often seen as being (theoretically at least) so closely related.

This is not to confuse psychology and philosophy as disciplines but rather to highlight that both nonetheless share an interrogative relationship with our patchwork realities.

In my experience, philosophers and philosophy students often seem to have been through something or perhaps are living with something that weighs on them and which demands interrogation if they’re going to keep going forwards in this world. Rather than looking inwards, however, they look outwards… But we must ask how absolute this orientation really is…

(This is a point that was central to many of Mark Fisher’s writings. His declaration in The Weird and the Eerie that the “inside is a folding of the outside” is a phrase that echoes around my head perpetually and is, perhaps, the ontological manoeuvre that imbues an unspoken paradox and labyrinthine sensibility onto this blog’s unofficial tagline: “Looking for an exit.”)

(I’m also remembering somewhat fondly that the first work of philosophy I ever read was Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and there is perhaps no better example of all this form of questioning than that.)

I was reminded of all this after recently picking up Joshua Ramey’s wonderfully strange book The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal — unfortunately after I finished writing this essay.

In the introduction Ramey summarises his book’s position and reason for existing with a note on Deleuze’s thought that I think must be common to many but often left unacknowledged. It will be a sensation familiar to anyone, I hope, who still remembers the initial (and often prolonged) intoxication of reading philosophy — and this is an experience that is extra persistent within Deleuze’s writings in particular. It is that sensation of, at first, not understanding a word of what you’ve just read but nonetheless sensing something within it; some sort of force which escapes his writing (and which is otherwise missing from so much other impenetrable philosophy).

Commenting on this, in relation to one of Deleuze’s most often misunderstood influences, Ramey writes:

Deleuze argues that immanent thought, at the limit of cognitive capacity, discovers as-yet-unrealized potentials of the mind, and the body. That is to say, what connects Deleuze to [Antonin] Artaud is the conviction that what matters for life, and for thought, is an encounter with imperceptible forces in sensations, affections, and conceptions, and that these forces truly generate the mind, challenging the coordination of the faculties by rendering the self from its habits.
It is the argument of this book that the power of thought, for Deleuze, consists in a kind of initiatory ordeal. Such ordeal transpires through an immersion of the self in uncanny moments when a surprising and alluring complicity of nature and psyche is revealed.

Ramey’s grounding rings especially true, for me, with this new essay. If it reads like an introduction to DeleuzoGuattarian thought, that’s somewhat intentional. Speaking of initiatory ordeals, this essay conflates two of my own that I have found frequently overlapping — one deeply personal, the other intellectual.

The primal trauma of adoption is my own initiatory ordeal: a problem at the heart of my existence that has troubled me for longer than I can remember, escaping the trappings of cognitive memory and instead lurking somewhere else, somewhere impenetrable. It is an ordeal that psychotherapy has never gotten anywhere near. It is, rather, an experience that can only be accessed via philosophy and, beyond that even, a poetics.

Political Ethics and Capitalist Moralism

on May 24, 2019July 21, 2019 By xenogothic 2 Comments

Designer Communism is an interesting concept of Mark Fisher’s and undoubtedly a precursor to his Acid Communism. Explaining it in a lecture from 2016, however, he immediately comments on his own sense of being a fish out of water, presenting to an audience that is somewhat alien to his usual crowd. The first thing he is recorded as saying is: “I don’t know why I decided to talk about designer communism to a room that includes a lot of people who do actually know something about design.”

He goes on to note that, as far as he’s concerned, even as an outsider to the field, designers have a really important role to play in raising issues and, indeed, raising consciousness around issues of political importance.

We know this already, no doubt, but it seems obvious that Mark is tailoring these points to his audience. He points out that this term of his is an attempt to reclaim “designer socialism” — a somewhat out-dated phrase for a kind of bourgeois utopianism that lacks any (material) self-awareness. It was a term that particularly pointed at the design industry in the 1980s — perhaps even internally, as it is an industry that has often been seen as broadly politically conservative.

We might think this and that about so-called semiocapitalism, but who is there to take these ideas to the people who need to here them? Who inspires the designers to think critically about the world and their specific place within it? I suppose that was Mark’s intention.

I’ve written about all these issues as they appear in Mark’s late work before — in the most detail here. One of the centrally invigorating questions for Mark towards the end of his life was: in what ways can the mechanisms of capitalism itself — practically speaking — help us to reach its outside? This is a vague gesture deployed by accelerationists of all stripes but Mark wasn’t talking about DeleuzoGuattarian double articulation or accelerations of the process, at least not in this instance; he was talking about the ways in which the skills and knowledge of marketing companies, for example, can libidinally sell us the possibility of a new future. If you want to accelerate the process in a way that’s a bit more materially measurable, maybe get involved in design!

As Mark argues in the lecture, not doing this (at least not successfully) was where the left failed in the 1980s and, as he goes on to say, it is a point from which the left arguably never recovered. Capitalism made itself out to be the only path to the sexy future we have always been promised. The left’s concepts of the future, by comparison, were dreary. (Mark would cite adverts by Levi’s and Apple from 1984 as particularly egregious examples of this, borne out of Cold War anti-Soviet posturing but nonetheless with a clear subtext: “Capitalism is sexy and they don’t want you to have it.”)

This is a general argument of Mark’s that would become tragically prescient just months after his death when two designers from Bristol made and began selling parody Nike t-shirts, keeping the iconic “tick” but replacing the name of the brand itself with “Corbyn”. They were a huge success — even my girlfriend owns one — and they seemed to signal a new approach to raising public consciousness around socialist issues (even if somewhat adjacent to Corbyn’s particular personality cult).

This momentum — no pun intended — didn’t seem to amount to much, however. In fact, it crashed back in on itself all too predictably, with Corbyn’s initial failure to win a general election stoking the usual feelings of left melancholia. This also isn’t to say that t-shirts are going to start the revolution but it has shown that it is not just politicians who function as “libidinal technicians” — as Mark calls them in his related essay, “Digital Psychedelia” — but also PR companies and advertisers, and when they work together or at least have an awareness of one another and their roles in the wider system, interesting things can happen… Maybe…?

I’ve found myself thinking about this a lot recently because, for seven days in May, I was working at D&AD Festival.

D&AD is a somewhat corporate / start-up designer hub of industry talks and advice and they also have an awards ceremony where agencies from around the world submit their adverts and campaigns and typography and book design stuff and it’s all judged by industry experts across 14 categories which are then all shown in the exhibition that then becomes a big book afterwards.

It was a really great week and I worked with the best team who made a lot of hard work really fun and so I hope it goes without saying that the forthcoming critical view of some of the work has nothing to do with those people who worked so hard with me to make the festival happen, because what I want to talk about first is this concept of “Woke Capital”.

I’ve written about this before: the phrase “Woke Capital” is the product of an ostensibly right-wing cynicism regarding the ways in which capitalism now forces everyone to swallow typically left-wing political standpoints and put on a left-leaning face thanks to a totalitarian left-wing cultural tyranny. My own view of this term is that it’s nothing new. It’s “Rainbow Capitalism” viewed from the “other side” of the political divide. Capitalism has been absorbing “outsider”, “queer” and “minoritarian” politics for decades, much to the frustration of activists, and now the right is annoyed about it too because they now have to parrot politically correct viewpoints because not to do so is probably bad for business.

What’s interesting about this shift, with the right leading the charge on criticising this tendency within contemporary capitalism — at least in our little corner of the internet — is that it seems to suggest the left is less concerned about capitalism performing the wholesale appropriation of a lot of these issues. In many ways, I suppose there isn’t much to complain out. It’s all about normalising conversations and concepts and political positions, right? If a car advert helps to normalise anti-racism, is the fact it’s ultimately selling something worth worrying about?

At this year’s festival, the best examples of this work being done — and I’m selecting the least contentious topics here — were projects related to mental health and inclusivity. (Two of my favourites from the product design category below.) In giving tours, it felt very easy to structure explorations of the space around dominant political issues that could be threaded throughout the categories and consider how the industry has responded to this and that issue that has loomed large in the public consciousness. (The other most prominent topics addressed in advertising campaigns, perhaps unsurprisingly, were climate change and school shootings / gun violence.)

On the one hand, the role advertising agencies can play here — particularly in supporting charities and not-for-profits — is really important. However, there is evidently a fine line between this successful so-called “brand activism” and the shameless appropriation of liberal politics.

Unsurprisingly, McDonalds’ was one of the most cringe-worthy examples here. The print version of their “More In Common” campaign was horrendous. Whilst the video goes for a “different walks of life” vibe, the juxtaposed photographs of their print campaign were split incredibly unsubtly along racial lines, taking the “if you think about it, we’re all from Africa, really” approach to identity politics but shifting it subtly to “if you think about it, we’ve all eaten at McDonalds, at some point”. Truly, this will heal the nation.

Elsewhere we have adverts for Staedtler and Stabilo highlighter pens which chose to “highlight” lost women of history (that was a good one) and also “highlight” genocide (that one was nice looking but actually pretty fucked up — bit weird to aestheticise atrocity in order to sell pens.)

It’s very easy to be cynical about all this and none of it is new but questions arose for me when considering the wider talks and workshops that took place in orbit of these examples of “Woke Capital”. It seemed to me that the ways in which designers were approaching these issues were, on the whole, pretty innocuous but this wokeness-as-business-strategy vibe was particularly pernicious when it came to discussions of neoliberal professionalism. There were so many talks about the individualisation of branding — the “brand” of the individual over the company — which leads to an internalisation and reduction of the broader processes that these wider campaigns demonstrate. The main issue I have with this is that we see a feedback loop emerge where bad attempts at ethics are subsumed into a blanket and innately capitalist moralism.

This is interesting, I think, because it’s not just an issue in the design industry. It’s rampant on the left as a whole. There is a sense in which it is not just leftism that has infiltrated the public image of capitalism but capitalism which has infiltrated the public image of leftism — that is to say, it’s logics and norms.

This is such a common error around these “weird theory” parts too and something I’ve wanted to address for a long time. It amazes me how often people will throw around accusations of unethical praxis or a lack of ethics altogether. It’s been a frequent accusation thrown at me too but I’m not sure what it’s based on. I spent a large portion of my MA writing on and studying various systems of ethics and yet how often how I’ve heard those words thrown at me based on… I don’t even know. (FYI: I had written these words prior to Crane’s latest tantrum in which he threw this accusation out before deleting his account again — he is of course a case in point.) In my experience, it is often people who accuse others of having no ethics that lack an ethics of their own.

What’s worth is that this is something intrinsic to these issues of capitalist design and optics. “Ethical” advertising is a very powerful but also dangerous thing, and I think we can perhaps lay the blame for the left’s innately capitalistic moralism squarely at the hypothetical feet of Woke Capital’s negative feedback loop. Because, to be absolutely clear, moralism is not an ethics. Not as far as I’m concerned anyway.

My understanding of ethics comes from a course I did at Goldsmiths as a student which really shaped my thinking. I’d wanted to do the course because I was sick to death of the lack of conversation around ethics in documentary photography exhibitions that I was spending a lot of time around as part of my day job. I found so much of the world I was working in to be completely abhorrent but didn’t know how to articulate why, so a course of ethics and the art world sounded like an interesting course to take.

Going through my old notes, we understood ethics to be “the process of defining, systematizing, defending, and/or recommending concepts of right and wrong to an individual or society at large.” But within this very broad dictionary definition we find there are three primary branches of thought which take very different approaches to this overall task — meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, etc., etc.

My own personal interest ended up being anethics — best explored by Paul Mann in his amazing book Masocriticism and with its antecedents in the thought of the likes of Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot and others.

Anethics is a sort of meta-meta-ethics that interrogates the innate limitations to ethics as a systematised “moral philosophy”. We can point to Nietzsche’s call for an unconditional ethics in The Gay Science as an example which may resonate around these parts. He writes: “Long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics, — our honesty!” Being in itself is ethical for Nietzsche in this sense — or rather, it is an ethical question — and whilst this appears impotently broad as a consideration it brings into play things of an ethical nature which fall outside the realm of moral philosophy’s rationalism.

Love, for instance, is a slippery example. We can identify and critique “bad” parents or partners but what is it to determine an otherwise supposedly innate protectiveness of parenthood to a code of ethics? Ethics, in this sense, can be understood as a straight jacket even with the best of intentions, and so anethics is a properly ethical praxis and way of being which does not allow itself to become rigid, which does not settle for “being” ethical but exists as a “becoming” ethical through the consistent interrogation of all ethics and that which falls outside of them.

My lecturer when I was studying ethics was Jean-Paul Martinon and this was broadly his own understanding, in particular ethics understood as a futurity. His lectures still remain central to a lot of my own thought on this. His functional definition of ethics for our class was “the other comes first” and so the question for us to carry forwards in our studies was “how can I make sure the other comes first, i.e. before me?” However, in considering the Other, we immediately fell upon a number of problematics which we approached via Levinas (which I found heavily resonating with my already well-established interest in Bataille and would later fuel my love of Blanchot.)

Whilst the “other” is a phrase considered to be outdated and uncomfortable for many, that doesn’t make the problematics of the Other just disappear. Ontologically, the Other is always central because you can never get rid of the Other, because I cannot die in your place. You die alone, I cannot die for you. There is an inherent Otherness to being, then, which is irreplaceable, unalienable and unrelated to issues of identity and identity politics. In this sense, for J-P, the word “Other” was necessarily replaceable with the idea of the future.

For our class, the Other was defined as “the destitute for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all”, quoting Levinas in his book, Ethics and Infinity. Here, the word “Destitute” does not refer to the poor or those who have nothing. It is not an economic term. Levinas is therefore radical in his terming of “for whom I owe all”. Destitution does not necessitate an indebtedness but rather it indicates someone for whom I owe all without an exchange; without the necessity of a return. Levinas is asking his reader to consider who the “destitute” is in their world. Returning to “love”, the strongest example of the destitute is the child — the child who always comes first.

This is only one approach but also ended up being the one I liked the best. We looked at Aristotle’s Ethics of the pursuit of happiness, of flourishing, living without excess or extremes, fine tuning your being through processes of habituation, a project seeking the transcendence of desire and pleasure.

If this sounds somewhat monastic, that is perhaps because this is the ethical backbone of Western philosophy. It was likewise Foucault’s starting point in his genealogy of ethics, his histories of sexuality, beginning with the Greeks before considering how Christianity would shape this aesthetic transcendence to be a restraint of the flesh and later, in modernity, becoming the regulation of bodies by the state. In Foucault’s argument, like Nietzsche’s own moral genealogy, there is a view to uncovering this ground again — removing the unethical ethics of state power and its grasp on our interiority and once again pursue a legitimately “aesthetic” life which cares and adapts and develops and is free.

We’ve seen many attempts at this. Heidegger talks of being-as-care in Being & Time. Spinoza is a particularly important instance too, interrogating the theocracy of his time when many were considering the discrepancies between Greek moral philosophy and the then-dominant ethical thinking of Christianity and Judaism, controversially taking the theism out of monotheism and instead building a monism. Kant’s attempt to define a moral law of pure reason would go against Spinoza with his Categorical Imperative but here we find various paradoxes of representation when trying to encapsulate that which resists wholesale rationalisation.

Now, an ethics which I personally try to live by — and which I like precisely because it is so difficult in our present moment — is that developed by Maurice Blanchot. I wrote about this for Alienist and it is something that I’m now researching a lot more again for the first time since I finished my Masters. I’m not in agreement with many of the other texts that appear in Alienist 5 for what it is worth but all the more reason why I am happy to be in there. There is a sense in which our conversations are suffering and it is this intrusion of capitalism into our ethics that seems to be ruining opportunities for the production of genuinely radical political practice that escape the present moment of “frenzied stasis”, as Mark used to call it.

With the ethics of Bataille-Levinas-Blanchot being so fixated on the necessity of communication to being, Jodi Dean’s writings on “communicative capitalism” become the central challenge for this ethics today — and again, I’ve written on this a lot before too. There is a sense in which Foucault’s genealogical and ethical project can be extended today to include this infiltration by capitalism into channels of communication. We move from the regulation of bodies to the regulation of thought and whilst this is, in many respects, a positive process whereby we are encouraged to account for and put the other first, it is nonetheless a regulation.

If this blog has an ethical project — and I think it does — it is this. How do we account for our ethics in ways that do not consolidate around the whims of capital? To what extent can we really put the other first, in their futurity, from within this system? How do we raise up an ethics of comradeship and friendship within a socioeconomic infrastructure that is so often antithetical to this?

Each person who throws accusations of a lack of ethics should particularly take more responsibility for this within themselves.

When a different ethics is seen as a lack of ethics, which in itself is only ever a moralism, we see the subtle end result of capitalist realism on our own interiority. There is no alternative ethics other than that which is absorbed by our brands. In this sense, the end game of Woke Capital is perhaps already in sight, demonstrated by the miserable Academic Marxists of Twitter who infect their own gospel with the moralism of the system they proclaim to stand against.

But that’s not to say I have all the answers. The complicity is pervasive and I remain haunted by the spectre of the slacker as perhaps the best anethical response to our age of communicative capitalism.

There is much more to say here and I’ll see when I can get round to saying it. Jumping off my Alienist essay, I’m thinking this might become something of a series.

Late Night; Not Depressed

on April 29, 2019May 8, 2019 By xenogothic 1 Comment

My mental health is in maybe the best place it’s been for years at the moment.

It’s a weird sensation: the irreality of wellness.

It has been two years and four months since I fell into the worst depression I’ve had for a decade and it’s been one year since that depression hit a new all-time low.

It feels like a long time ago now but that doesn’t mean very much. Time has not been playing ball throughout the last year. Memories and emotional responses have been wildly out of joint.

Guilt and grief can run away with your head, but nothing exacerbates them more than alcohol and cocaine. I was offered the latter for the first time at a friend’s flat this time last year and the buzz was good but I’ve regretted it every day since. I knew it had done something to me but I didn’t know what.

Last week I heard a radio report about the suicide of a former Love Island contestant who’d had a similar night according to her toxicology report. Medical advice argued that alcohol and cocaine, taken together, increase suicidal tendencies by up to sixteen times. I feel lucky to have clawed myself out of the hole that cocktail burned through me. It has taken me twelve whole months.

Usually I change locale between episodes like this — just because that’s life rather than by choice — so it’s extra strange to feel so happy in the same flat that I’ve previously felt so abyssally depressed in. It’s also unusual to still have the same blog, with websites often near the top of my self-destructive hit list after a depression plateaus.

I’ve shared a lot about my lows on this blog in particular over the past two years, alongside what I’ve been up to to try and rid myself of them, and it’s been important for me to be open about this, irrespective of my infrequent bouts of regretful oversharing on Twitter which are arguably a symptom of my inner uneasiness rather than an attempt to combat it.

That being said, though, tonight I’m left wanting to mention some highs for a change.

It’s not been easy to get to this point. It’s taken a mixture of strong(er) drugs, triple chronotherapy and falling in love with Cornwall, which together have fixed more than I could have ever imagined possible. This week I feel like I have Cornwall to thank for this the most because my sleeping pattern has been shit ever since I was made redundant three weeks ago and I’m generally bad at taking my meds, but still I feel like I’m on a new level of contentment.

More than anything, I think this is down to having the best person in my life I could ask for.

We’ve been together seven years, lived together for four and done long distance for ~two. It’s been a rollercoaster. She thinks all my internet drama is hilarious and dumb and my records and books spoil her minimalist style. She also wonders when I’ll ever get over my “new goth phase”, like I wasn’t wearing a Bathory T-shirt for most of our first summer together.

Suffice it to say, she puts up with a lot.

Despite the stress that often comes from having less than we’d like to have in common, I’m feeling very grateful to know that we’ll follow each other anywhere regardless, especially as we talk — only half-facetiously — about leaving this city for the seaside in the midst of my new financial precarity. (You can donate to my Ko-fi if you’d like to help me make rent next month — it’s currently looking extremely unlikely that I’ll manage it!)

It’s important for me to say this because she is so often separated from this blog world — although there were plenty of pictures posted of her here last week — but she is a constant presence and support, always on hand to make fun of Deleuze or proclaim her will to be taller than me a hyperstition.

Over the last year, despite but also because of all this, our prolonged entanglement has been a major part of my depression. When my self-esteem hits rock bottom I feel totally unworthy of her and guilty about not being as strong as her. It’s not as flattering as that may potentially sound. It’s horrific for us both. I have felt suicidal in the depths of this guilt which obsesses over all the ways that I’ve failed her.

This time last year I thought I might never climb out of that feeling. I told myself it would pass but it took a doubling of my SSRI intake to do it. I’m glad I did, no matter how, and I have her in part to thank for it. This present feeling of being the best team we can be is priceless and it is a feeling I have kept in my mind’s eye as I’ve tried to return to myself. I think it worked.

It’s so good to feel like the future is bright despite the fact so much has ended recently. It’s so good to realise just where exactly your joy in life is coming from, and be able to hold her tight and tell her so.

Post-Chronotherapy #1

on March 10, 2019March 10, 2019 By xenogothic 3 Comments

It’s been two weeks since Bedlam, and what a rollercoaster ride it has been.

In the immediate aftermath of the initial sleep phase shift, I felt horrendous. Generally, life has been defined by having no energy, sluggishness, old man aches before my time, but for the rest of that weekend I was truly miserable with it.

As a result, I found it difficult to stick with the sleep pattern provided. One major part of the study has been to measure the success of triple chronotherapy in outpatients. It’s been offered to inpatients on the NHS but it hasn’t been implemented as a regimen to follow at home. One piece of feedback I know I’ll be giving when the time comes is that those first couple of days felt impossible when I was in the comfort of your own home and didn’t have someone checking in on me every so often. The first morning, I slept for 90 minutes or so when I got home — something we’d been specifically told not to do — and I was mortified. I hadn’t meant to. I’d simply sat on the sofa and passed out.

I had wanted to take it very seriously and the fear that I’d fucked it up before it truly began did not help things initially. The process was exacerbating my anxiety. But then, after the initial hump, it has worked like a charm. I started going to sleep happily at all these odds times and I started to really enjoy the very early mornings. Waking up at 1am, 3am and 5am respectively over successive days felt like I was gaining back the hours to myself that I’d grown accustomed to — unhealthily — on a night. And immediately I seemed to be converted from a night owl to an early worm. This is undoubtedly down to sitting in front of my new giant wake lamp. It is an incredible thing. It’s better than any amount of sugar on a morning — what I’d usually relied on — and it lasts too. I have not felt this good in two years and it has transformed every part of my life almost immediately.

At home, I’m happier and so are those around me. I feel like I’ve gotten my mojo back. I’m calmer, less stressed, more productive in my day-to-day life (blogging really doesn’t count), better around the house, more willing to do chores and look after myself and cook. I care more about the world around me rather than feeling like a burden to it. I feel more present and more attentive. All in all, I feel significantly less depressed.

But then, today, I’m starting to see how my situation remains fragile. I’ve caught a glimpse of myself from outside myself. I felt that moment that often comes on the road to (or from) wellness, when a good mood stops feeling like a miracle. I’ve been depressed for so long this elation started to take on its own irreality, and then once I saw it as such I started to notice the behaviour I was letting slip through which wasn’t healthy. I started to feel guilty again, embarrassed. For the past two weeks I’ve been, for about 3/4 of the time, erring on the side of mania. Not a clinical “I’m invincible!” mania, but certainly a mania within my usually subdued parameters — a persistent hyperactivity at best. (I’m really fucking annoying when I’m hyper.) As a result, I’ve been oversharing and all too readily engaging with the kind of stuff I’d otherwise ignore. That recent Twitter argument was a long time coming but then it led to others. I let it lead to others. The enforced serenity of “weaponised inattention” lost its potency and I wanted to swat everyone who’d subtweeted me in recent weeks. I wanted to violently shove away all the haters. In that way, I did feel invincible. Twitter invincible. After telling Crane to suck on his incessant subtweets, I wanted to take on everyone else who’d tried to talk shit about me. I felt strong but looked pathetic regardless. The U/Acc Primer was a productive use of this irritation. Recent Twitter activity has not been productive at all.

This was a mistake. I’m left wanting to apologise for being a belligerent bull in a china shop, wading into anything and everything, being constantly on my phone. A weirdly viral tweet set the tone, then hellthreads, then drunk live-streaming, then foot injury overshares, then the paranoia surrounding that weird open letter, then more hellthreads. Individually, they’re par for the course on Twitter dot com, but today I feel exhausted and I think enough is enough. I don’t really know what has been up with me this week. Too much drama all too quickly. Everyone who’s been an arsehole is still an arsehole but I regret engaging with so much of it and I regret opening myself up to ridicule and bad tempers in the first place.

Why am I oversharing about oversharing? I don’t know. Blogger’s curse maybe. Maybe because I’m aware that all this stuff is connected; is a part of what I’m been going through at the moment, but taking half an hour to write this down and be attentive to it feels like a way to take back control.

Triple chronotherapy has been a miracle for me at this time in my life, following a year of increasing desperation. I cannot recommend it enough and I’d like to write a post that offers up something of a how-to. What’s so important to me right now is that the very minimal support given throughout this trial has been simply for the sake of the trial itself, so they can control the data. What feels so good about it is that this has been totally self-initiated, in many ways. I’ve been given the gear but I’ve done it for myself. And the positive effects have been so immediate, I’m left wanting to recommend it to everyone. But still, the truth lurks in the background. It’s not a cure. It works but if you want it to keep working, that takes discipline and self-awareness. That needs to extend to Twitter usage also, no matter how giddy and friendly (or giddy and combative) I’m feeling.

Filth Infatuated

on March 7, 2019March 14, 2019 By xenogothic

The early 90s was all about indie nights for me. I fucking loved ‘em too. Then one of the DJs at Silhouette in Hull played Hyperspeed. My initial reaction was one of revulsion, with a bit of indignation thrown in for good measure. “Where are the guitars?” The next week the DJ played Out of Space. My reaction was the same. Dance music was what people in Manchester listened to, and this was Hull.
But you couldn’t help but notice the dancefloor. People were going mental. It just looked like fun. A couple of weeks later, I joined them. Those early days of discovering the Prodigy and those who were to follow mostly in their wake were tremendous. Indie and dance together. This was bliss. It was also fucking good fun. Few albums mean as much to me as Experience, which I grew to love and appreciate in ways I never thought possible after hearing those first few songs. The Prodigy broadened my mind in ways that few others bands have ever really managed.

I enjoyed reading the readers’ comments on The Guardian following the sad news that Keith Flint of The Prodigy has taken his own life. This resonated with my own experiences in Hull, albeit 10 to 15 years later.

Out of Space is probably the first dance track I ever heard, I think. I used to listen to it all the time and in complete isolation, like it was the only song of its kind to ever exist, and that was likely from that very experience of hearing it at an indie night rather than a dance night.

Hull has never really been into its dance music. Not like in other cities. There were a few crossover acts around at that time that would drag people out of themselves and into something between worlds… But that was usually the weekly rendition of Pendulum’s “Blood Sugar” rather than anything halfway decent.

Keith Flint felt like a proper egresser, in that respect. The videos for “Firestarter” and “Breathe” had a “Come To Daddy” quality of not really caring if you dance to it or not. The main thing it wants to do is dragged you kicking and screaming out of yourself. As for many other people at that time, when the iconic image of Keith made it onto our TV screens, it became quite clear to a young me that dance music was going to be better vector through which to find this kind of experience than a lot of what my friends were listening to at the time which had the look but not the affect.

What’s extra special about The Prodigy in that respect is that they were perennial: a gateway drug for generations of kids.

RIP

No Sleep ’til Bedlam

on February 23, 2019February 23, 2019 By xenogothic 8 Comments

The idea of being back on (what I thought was) a mental health ward in the middle of the night was a prospect that filled me with an all too familiar kind of dread. My memories of being on a hospital ward or in A&E during a moment of mental health crisis as notably surreal, particularly during a manic episode, when you feel like there really isn’t anything wrong with you. You’re walking out in the same condition you walked in — or so you assume. I have a distinct memory of feeling invincible. It’s a time of total irreality to be in A&E for feelings of invincibility.

The last time this happened to me I was 19 and living in Newport, South Wales. I remember hanging out in the smoking area — they still had them then — with the drunks and the homeless feeling painfully sober but weirdly elated, like I was out for a night out down the pub with the old boys and the regulars.

This time, the déjà vu of taking yourself to hospital in the middle of the night was palpable but also had an unprecedented lucidity. This time, I felt the full gravity of the situation. I also felt a lot of uncertainty. I didn’t really know where I was going, for starters, and I had no idea what to expect when I got there either.

A few days before, I’d been given some strange equipment — a Fitbit, a pair of orange-tinted glasses and an enormous light therapy lamp. I was told to wear the Fitbit for 10 days and follow the instructions for when to use the other two.

What I was preparing for was a course of wake and light therapy — or “triple chronotherapy”, as I later learned was its official name. My understanding was that it was a new and faster acting treatment for depression based around resetting your sleeping pattern and introducing a new regularity to your daily routine.

The purpose of the trial itself was to build up a big enough data set so that the people in charge of big decisions might agree to start offering it on the NHS. Personally, I was just desperate for some alternative therapy or treatment. The meds were only doing so much and I didn’t give a shit about the CBT I was on some infinite waiting list for. So I jumped at the chance to take part in something new.

And yet this excitement was interchangeable from nervousness. I felt like I was going to go away, like saying goodbye to people, like I taking myself to be sectioned. I felt like it was the end of something.

I got the train out of New Cross and headed for Bethlem Hospital.

The name didn’t ring any bells at the time but, arriving as I did at 11pm and absorbing its somewhat ominous atmosphere in the thick darkness, the lights of the various buildings twinkling in the distance, shrouded in the silence of a distinct lack of activity (by any hospital’s standards, never mind a London one), I slowly and subconsciously realised where I was. This was nothing like King’s College Hospital where I’d been for my assessments. Then the penny finally dropped.

I walked through the gates of the country’s oldest psychiatric institution and found myself feeling suffocated by its calm and its history. Being that time of year, the vixen’s screams echoing on the air didn’t help matters either.

Thankfully, I was greeted by two very lovely therapists — a young woman and an older man. The man was there simply to introduce us to the proceedings and the young woman was our therapist for the night. It was her job to look out for us and make sure we were okay but also, most importantly, to make sure we stayed awake. We waited for a short while before the second attendee arrived and then we were filled in on the purpose of our visit.

Triple chronotherapy is, perhaps obviously, a strange name for a treatment. It’s downright cyberpunk. What are we talking about here? A triplicate time therapy? 33.3 rehabilitations a minute?

As the man explained, we have apparently known for quite some time that keeping someone up all night can have an immediate and noticeably positive effect on their mood. (I don’t know what kind of weird people they’re keeping up — it sounds torturous to me.) It has something to do with the body’s production of melatonin boosting mood significantly to compensate for the disruption to normal sleep patterns. So, whilst there’s a lot of talk about light involved, what is actually being shunted here is time — or, perhaps more accurately, the body clock. Hence, chronotherapy.

Unsurprisingly, however, this isn’t a very stable treatment to put people through. In fact, it might seem downright reckless to some. The suggestion that you should deprive a mentally ill person’s brain of something we typically think of brain’s needing to function doesn’t sound like such a great idea. And so, for a long time, researchers have wanted to know how they could stabilise and regulate the results of this quite unceremonious treatment. They believe they’ve found the best way to do this and this stabilisation process has three parts.

Firstly, they stagger the reintroduction of a normal sleep cycle. So, after staying up all night, I’m not allowed to go to bed until 5pm the following day. I then wake up at 1am and stay up all night again. Then I go to bed at 7pm the following day, waking up at 3am, and the whole process is moved forwards two hours at a time until I am going to bed at 11pm and waking up at 7am.

To make this process easier and to encourage melatonin production at certain times, I wear my very stylish ski goggles for four hours before I plan to go to bed. The orange tint of the glasses is meant to have the same affect as the orange screen setting on your phone. As our resident expert said, it simulated darkness whilst allowing you to get on with stuff during your day, further tricking the brain into producing melatonin and making you ready for sleep.

Last but not least is the light therapy, which has the opposite effect of the glasses. For half an hour every morning at 7am for the next 6 months, I’m meant to sit in front of this light box. I tried this for two days prior to having my sleep cycle reset and it was wonderful. Better than any morning cup of coffee I’ve ever had. I don’t remember the last time I had so much energy first thing on a morning.

Taken together, all these things are meant to act as a rapid treatment for depression. Personally, I think it sounds like a godsend. With SSRIs typically taking from 2 to 6 weeks before having their desired effect and with talking therapies on the NHS having waiting lists that are between 6 and 10 times as long as this, there is an urgent need for a treatment that is broadly effective and acts fast for people in need. And, all things considered, this treatment feels relatively noninvasive for something that promises quick results.

So, whilst I arrived at Bedlam feeling like a bag of nerves, I soon felt at ease. We weren’t on a ward — because, as the therapist humorously pointed out, it would be cruel to tease people who were staying awake all night with the prospect of a bed — and instead we were in a kind of day care centre.

It was a large facility, feeling a lot like a secondary school art department more than a hospital wing. We all started by sitting in the creative art studio and, for the first hour, we got to know each other and spoke about what we do when not depriving ourselves of a good night’s rest.

The young man who was with me on the trial was doing an MA in Manchester and he was doing fascinating research into how CAMHS wards can best support young and at risk children, particularly supporting their transition to and from care back into a school environment. (As I went on to rant about on Twitter, this is an issue very close to my heart.)

After about an hour of talking, the therapist made the first move and went to spend time in the textiles room. The young man and I talked for a little while longer and then he moved to another part of the building as well. In the end I was left alone in the art studio. It was cold and with horribly bright fluorescent lighting so I was happy — there was little chance of falling asleep in there.

This strange space, reminiscent of my old high school but on such well-trodden ground, meant that I spent much of the night reading about the hospital’s history online and did not miss the irony of my over-sharing whilst doing so.

I thought about staying on site until around 10am, if I could, and going to Bethlem’s Museum of the Mind to kill some time rather than heading straight home and being tempted to sleep. This didn’t happen. At present, I’ve never felt more tired in my life and the suggestion seems to be that we cannot nap to make it easier.

Staying up all night is not something that I anticipated feeling so melodramatic about but, now, 30 hours into my Friday, I feel like my entire body is rebelling against me. This is not a state in which to productively reflect on the nature of sleep…

I won’t forget this morning’s fog in a hurry though. The morning walk almost made the whole night worthwhile.

A dual thank you and apology to everyone who put up with / ignored me on Twitter last night as I decided to use it as a stimulant to stay awake for this (lack of) sleep trial.

I wrote something weird and rambling about why it is I’m doing this trial the other day, to finally get it off my chest. Feel free to check that out if you missed it.

My own nerves and internal dilemmas aside, this has been a really fascinating experience. It is also only the beginning of it. I hope I have more to say in the near future. Hopefully positive news and feedback about the impact of this chronotherapy.

Right now it’s 12pm and I’m back home, having struggled to stay awake on the train journey(s) back to the flat, maybe succumbing to a very short 15 minute nap which seemed to take the edge off. Now I am staring down the barrel of the next five hours and I feel miserable and shit. Here’s hoping it doesn’t last.

Thank you to Paul for the title inspiration and to Prat, forever, for continuing to capture my true essence even better than words can.

The Event of Depression: Notes on a Thought That Hides From Itself

on February 21, 2019February 21, 2019 By xenogothic 2 Comments

Cos I’m a clinically sad person, I’ve been invited to do a sleep study looking at how radical changes in sleep pattern can aid treatment of depression. I’m fascinated & said yes but I’m wondering if this isn’t like jury duty. Only interesting-sounding if you haven’t done it yet. [1]

As mentioned a few times recently — in a recent post and chronicled in the Twitter thread linked above — I’ve been getting ready to take part in a sleep study this weekend.

I’m planning on doing a separate blog which chronicles the whole experience and talks about why I’m seeking experimental treatment, but I also wanted to try and finish a post I’ve had lurking as a draft for almost a year now — something for myself which gives shape to my depression and which might give other people a new way into thinking about their own.

Originally, this thing was a monster. A 10,000-word post that I’d been working on since about April 2018, which I began shortly after posting “Fragment on the Event of ‘Unconditional Acceleration’” when I was really into Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.

Unfortunately — or, perhaps, fortunately — I never finished it. In fact, at some point between then and now, I lost it. I don’t remember deleting it but those 10,000 words are now nowhere to be found.

What I do have are about four or five attempts to restart it. That’s sort of what this post is made up of. But these various false starts seem to capture something else for me which is more truthful than some surgical and in depth analysis. So I thought I’d just post them anyway.

In the original post, I was trying to write about my depression from within the midst of it, trying to make it impersonal (as Mark urged us to do) and take a sort of objective view of my own emotional landscape: recognising a neuro-tic interiority as an outside folded in; attempting to understand how I was feeling in context — from within a structure of feeling — in case that helped me to let go of it; to maybe talk myself out of it.

It didn’t. It only made things worse.

I think I had something of a breakdown last year as a result of this. I didn’t try all that hard to keep it under wraps but I was in such a state of denial that I don’t think I realised how bad things were. I knew things weren’t right, however. Each time I tried to blog about it, it always just ended up triggering the worst panic attacks which would force me into submission and further repression.

Still, I tried persistently to excavate something; to drag it out of hiding. And this became a part of the whole sorry process.

Trying to explore the experience on the blog became a game of chicken played with my mental health. It was bad. I was drinking a lot at the time. Smoking too. I remember the last day I worked on this mammoth post I was in The Fat Walrus in New Cross, making use of their beer garden plug sockets at about 12pm, very soon after they’d opened. I’d had a pint already and I was starting my second, already halfway through a pack of cigarettes — this was the only way I thought I could write at the time — and then, out of nowhere, or somewhere, I wrote a sentence which seemed to clarify the sensation anew and my whole world suddenly started spinning.

It was like chasing my own personal Predator, inferring the blurred outline of its cloaking device in the jungle, or like drawing attention to the Thing in my midst. I already knew it was there, lurking, and I felt powerful and confident as I stood against it. When it revealed itself, however — its true form — the terror was incomprehensible, and it was always too late to retreat.

I ended up on the floor of the pub’s bathroom, overcome by abject panic and nausea, my whole nervous system ablaze. I managed to pull myself together enough to stagger home — fragile, mortified — at 1pm.

That was something of a turning point. I knew then that I needed to get some help.

The post I was working on at the time was centred around guilt, and an acknowledgment of this guilt tended to send it into overdrive. For at least six months of last year I struggled under the weight of it and, at its worst, it made me deeply suicidal. I’d been living in and amongst a load of high rise buildings in south-east London and things became so bad that I couldn’t walk to the shops without having to fight a very real urge to climb onto the roof of one. They leered over every street like a taunt that I found very hard to ignore.

But I never said anything to anyone. Not really. But not out of shame or fear or a lack of desire for help. The only person who knew was my girlfriend, who I’d tell my worries to repeatedly, but every time I let go and cried and ran to her I felt like it just came out as melodrama, like I was over-complaining, afflicted by Man Flu of the brain.

This was also unhelpful because the guilt that was stalking me had, seemingly by proxy, attached itself firmly to her. It became somewhat externalised. It was my parasite but she was hosting it. We have been together for many years and I found myself neurotically fixated on past mistakes — some recent, some ancient — in a way that was utterly compulsive and paranoid, exacerbating the fallout of words regretfully said or things done.

I had legitimate reasons to feel guilty. I have regrets, as we all do. The challenge became separating recently acknowledged mistakes from the intensity of the feeling they provoked. I hadn’t murdered anyone. I hadn’t committed any crime. I hadn’t done anything that untoward. I’d been selfish, maybe. Inconsiderate. A bit of a dick. That was true. But I struggled to convince myself that the consequence of my actions shouldn’t be the death penalty.

Ironically, traumatically, perhaps even understandably, many of these feelings were rooted in the nine months after Mark’s death when I spent 4 days a week drunk and consistently neglected what was then a long-distance relationship. My “Second a Day” video chronicles a lot of the fun had but leaves out the horrors for the most part. When I watch it, however, they are inferred.

Left to my own devices, lonely and depressed, I become an endorphin junkie. Self-centred hedonism as self-medication. A year later, I find I can’t escape the memories of this previous depression and so find myself within a meta-depression, where intrusive thoughts about selfish behaviour whilst depressed became the foundation for a new low.

These thoughts only served to legitimate the delusion. I deserve to feel like this, I’d tell myself, obsessing over a moment from a year ago or three years ago or six years ago — sometimes even longer ago. There came a number of breaking points, where I felt I couldn’t live under anymore guilt unless I went to some sort of confessional, but talking about it didn’t help either. I would release my tensions and worries, having meaningful and constructive pillow talk, talking of love and forgiveness, only to wake up the next day with the beast there again, stalking me, sitting on my chest, like an emotive Groundhog Day where any sense of emotional progress was violently neutered.

Only now, in hindsight, having doubled by dosage of antidepressants and feeling much more serene, can I tell the difference between these irrealities. Nothing about how I have been feeling for most of last year was normal, I can now say to myself with confidence. But guilt remains the most ruthless symptom of my depression. It’s more painful than any numb sadness or self-hatred because, though its source is internal, it manifests externally — or at least, that is part of the illusion. It feels like it can only be remedied by apologies and repentance and self-flagellation; a kind of neurocatholicism wherein friends and family become benevolent gods with the power and right to smite me. I am adrift and at their mercy. There is nothing left for me within — only an impotence through which suicidal ideation is curtailed only by the prospective guilt of what more misery it would bring to those around me. Because then the guilt might be eternal. Salvation, instead, comes from the outside; but, despite following through on my repentance, the outside hides.

There was no amount of philosophy that helped to alleviate these paranoid delusions, but medication has helped a great deal, even if my confidence in treatment is still pretty low. If I forget to take my meds for a day or two, the feelings return. Did they ever go away? Am I just masking them chemically? Realities eat each other, much in the same way my sense of self does. Mental health deteriorates physical health deteriorates mental health. Wellness distrusts illness distrusts wellness.

However, from within this elongated moment of distress, something hit me, both depressing and liberating in equal measure. How could I ever hope to consider my own mental illness impersonally from within the electrified cage of my own inferiority? As I attempted (and often succeeded) to reach the very edges of my sense of self, I was always met with a persistent jolt that knocked me back, violently, making me feel innately claustrophobic and encouraging a desire for complete social isolation. But then it made sense. Thinking from a perspective of relative wellness, Fisher’s call for impersonality no longer felt like a riddle to unlock.

The worst thing I could have done — which I, of course, had repeatedly attempted — was to give an archaeology of my own depression, doing as the “Cognitive Behavioural Therapists” do, generating endless narratives, different versions of each traumatic twist and turn that made it so uniquely and generically mine. At the limit, I find only a hall of mirrors — the last defence against my arrival on the shore of my own outsideness.

An impersonal view of depression is all well and good a goal when you’re not in its jaws. When you are, the challenge of lacerating the ego without the body filling in as a go-between become impossible. How to view depression depressively without letting it win?

I ended up revisiting Nick Land’s essay for the first issue of Parasol: Journal for the Centre for Experimental Ontology, and found “Neurosys” — the essay’s titular concept — resonating profoundly.

I realised, coming to terms with the delusions of the past year, on the side of a relative, if medicated, “wellness”, that this new found clarity did not afford me a privileged position of outsideness, it simply exacerbated the mirrored irreality of wellness itself.

Do you ever get that sensation, within the midst of a really bad cold, where you forget what it’s like not to be full of snot and aching all over? You forget, for a time, how it feels to not be sick? The danger of mental illness is that, in its longevity and subtlety, this sensation can arrive without knocking.

Because the guilt I felt real. It felt deserved. It felt like my truth. Now, I pop a pill every night and my truth has changed. My reality has changed.

Do I side with the new perspective because it hurts less? Do I long for the authenticity of intolerable feeling? Which one is the illusion? Does it matter? The inside becomes a folding of the outside with reality scuttling way into the shadows of its creases. Land writes:

Realism begins as a subtraction of attachment to illusion — as disillusionment. To determine it positively, from the beginning, would be already unrealistic (in exactly the same way that naive realism is unrealistic). Reality hides.

I found this resonating with the half-remembered thought that spawned my lost 10,000 words. It triggered a memory of something sketched out from reading of Logic of Sense in a not-drunk-not-sober mania which, in turn, triggered the melting of reality on the piss-stained floor of a grubby New Cross pub bathroom.

Depression is an event; “a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present.”

“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” said Alice to herself, rather sharply; “I advise you to leave off this minute.” She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself at a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people! “Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

The expression of trying to consciously give shape to a depression from within the midst of it is like the flawed rationalising of Alice in Wonderland. The difficulty of writing about depression is that it is never in time. The vast jumps across time that guilt demonstrates in its ultimate depressive mode only serve to exacerbate this. What hides, in those moments, is a present. When you glimpse it, it terrifies, revealing itself to be a mesh of fragmented flows and rushed stitching which hold together the illusion.

In this way, to talk about a “present” depression feels like an impossibility to me. Time resists it as a measurement. Unable to measure emotion through slithers of time, the self takes slices off itself and throws them on the scales. It feels worthwhile but soon enough there’s nothing left to read the outcome. Again reality hides.

Deleuze writes:

Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and present. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once…

His book, Logic of Sense, has felt like a Bible for understanding depression over the last year but, true to itself, I’m not sure I could ever do its teaching for this depressive mode of being justice. In my reading of the book, “becoming” is interchangeably swapped out for depression in my mind’s eye. The book’s lucid tensions between sense and nonsense start to feel like an exemplary description of this most difficult and unruly of psychological processes, but they are fundamentally philosophical processes also. Attempts to grasp reality as it happens are inevitably always irreal.

This is also one of the implication explored by Land in his Crypto-Current book, carrying forth the shadow of Neurosys:

Glimpsed at its distant pole of unbounded abstraction, the cryptic is the ultimate philosophical enticement. At this point of origination, two-and-a-half millennia behind us, philosophy was nothing other than abstract cryptography. Its concern was hiding.

To see it for what it truly is is not a moment to wish on anyone, least of all yourself. Nevertheless, the hunt goes on.

I don’t know what to do with any of this.

Update: A response from Axxon N. Horror on Twitter which I found very resonant:

Coincidentally I re-read Wolfendale’s ‘Transcendental Blues’ earlier this week and especially its Neuropunk section (with the swathe of links, particularly SSC) was the closest experience of a textual ‘viewing depression impersonally’ I had so far tbf. [1]
An ever-recurring figure there is that of complex vicious loops, cyclical traps, catch-22s, so maybe ‘eluding the present’/reality hiding, as you describe it, is a good demarcation of the transcendental horizon of these loops, how impossible it is to break out of them, egress. [2]
As you’ve often mentioned before, writing itself is in some ways the sought momentary impersonal relief, becoming a stream of consciousness, an other, an automatic practice (also see 4.1 in TB). [3]
It’s always interesting to get back to the question of getting it out there, blogging it to others, producing. It’s different for everyone I’m sure, but in the long run most would probably affirm it’s better than heaping things up inside. [4]

A Few More Angry Notes on Class Consciousness

on February 19, 2019February 19, 2019 By xenogothic 5 Comments

For class consciousness is never a mere matter of identifying a state of affairs that already exists; the making visible of the structures that produce subordination immediately de-naturalises those structures, and changes the way in which subjugation is experienced. When that learned sense of inferiority is rejected, who knows what can happen?
K-Punk, “Going Overground”

The discussion around Jodi Dean’s memorial lecture rears its ugly head again, with the “Cautiously Pessimistic” blog (from now on “CP”) writing a longer follow-up response to Mark’s essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle“.

A few weeks back, we had a disagreement about the importance of Mark’s text in the comments of one of my posts about Dean’s lecture. Having said in my post that I’ve never read a decent critique of Mark’s essay — just a lot of hot air and bitterness — CP responded by pointing to their own post, written around the time that the article was originally published.

Unfortunately, I had already read this post before and didn’t think much of it. It is guilty of doing the very thing that Mark critiques in “Exiting the Vampire Castle” — it disarticulates his class position. And, as Mark wrote, “the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.”

First of all, in this original post, CP claims that, throughout the essay, Mark’s “(lack of) understanding of class rears its confused head” — confused because Mark’s definition of class apparently has “nothing to do with your position in society or what your material interests are, or whether you work for a living or live off other people’s labour: it’s just, like, a thing, you know, it just is?”

Is this insinuating that Mark is some sort of oppressive millionaire? Or hadn’t written at length on what constitutes class and our experiences of it elsewhere?

What should be clear, for any reader of Mark’s work, is that he knew experiences of class were not so easily contained by reductively academic definitions. This is not to double down on Mark’s apparent vagueness but to acknowledge that British class politics is a very complex topic, and that is perhaps more true for people who actually are working class than those who theorise about such definitions which fail to contain lived experience.

As a result, I have very little time for people who argue that you can somehow graduate (perhaps literally) from your class position, as CP argues in their comments and new reply.

Economic situations can change, yes, but there is far more to class than this, necessarily so. Presumably CP wants to guard against the self-made men of this world, who loved to talk about starting from nothing and blowing hot air up the rear end of their own biographies. But these are the same people who disarticulate class from experience. They’re not saying “class is important”, they’re dismissing it on grounds of individualised success and personal luck. CP simply inverts the argument rather than challenging it, insisting, just as they do, on the deconstruction of platforms for solidarity.

So, personally, I agree with Mark, broadly speaking. I agree with his call for more working class voices in our media, in our culture, in our politics, in our schools and universities — and I don’t just mean “entrepreneurs”: I want better voices too — but the paradox is that, if you somehow get there, your working class identity is void — at least according to CP. If you publicly fight for working class issues, on a larger platform than most, you’re a sellout and a hypocrite… It’s a facile and reductive argument and one which Mark himself derided.

The specific suggestion made by CP is that all people from working class backgrounds who make it into academia are somehow ignorant of the positions they hold. To disavow this knowledge, which Mark shared his thoughts on repeatedly and very publicly, is incredibly disingenuous. It also demonstrates the precise function of the vampire, sucking agency and options and histories, disavowing experiences for the sake of some quasi-fascist purity of position that is, in reality, completely nonexistent.

I said all this — with far more brevity — in the original comments, dismissing the post as trash and suggesting that if CP really wants to offer up a good critique, they’ve got to try a lot harder.

Well, they’ve gone away and come back. There is less evidence of trying harder here though, just elongating the same bogus and self-righteous argument.

Inevitably, this post is an elongation as well, although I intend to back up this one with the proper references.

CP’s argument is essentially unchanged from the one posted five years ago, although this time it’s been articulated less polemically, as if written solely because they feel guilty about the fact that the person they previously criticised is dead now, not wanting to be lumped in with the other idiots who simply proved Mark right in the aftermath of his death by gloating about it.

I’m sorry to say the attempt is bullshit — the tone was never offensive, the ignorance was, and all that’s happened here is the tone has been replaced, in a weak attempt to save face, whilst the ignorance remains.

As a result, I’m not going to address a lot of the later comments in this new post. Most of them are weird, given the context. Whilst CP continues to disarticulate Mark’s writing on class, they actually end up parroting the argument he himself makes in “Exiting the Vampire Castle” and elsewhere, choosing a supposedly nicer way of articulating the same call for solidarity using “non-cancelled” references. It reveals many of the issues taken with Mark’s original essay to be straw men or misdirected grunges. If CP read something else by Mark other than Capitalist Realism they might realise just how pointless much of what they’re critiquing is.

The main offence persists, however, with CP demanding that Mark should have made some clear-cut definition as to what “class” exactly is. They offer up two definitions of their own but, ironically, it’s difficult to follow what exactly these definitions are. They’re ultimately vague and elastic — such is the central problematic of class today.

To agree with Mark’s essay is not to gloss over these problematics but to answer his call and acknowledge that the building of solidarity is something to be pursued despite them.

In another previous comment, critiquing Dean’s lecture, an anon proclaimed with scorn that it was as if Dean — and, perhaps, by extension, Mark himself — had never heard the term “intersectionality” before, and yet here we have another response which does far more to deflate such a concept than Mark ever did. “Intersectionality” is not a term for overdetermined and individuated identity pockets, as it’s so often deployed in the naive “identity politics” milieu: it’s a word that demands transcultural understanding as a foundation for consciousness and solidarity. It’s the opposite of an individualised politics.

When CP gets bogged down in over-defining class — insufficiently — and just ending up being cynical and bitter about the existence of academics, this is, again, the point that is missed. (At least until later, but we’ll come back to that.) They betray their main disagreements to be personal bugbears and semantic preferences. There is little understanding here. Just the griping of an individual.

At one point, for instance, CP seems to conflate the figure of the working-class academic with the likes of Sajid Javid, the current Home Secretary often tokenised by the Conservative party for the fact he’s the son of a bus driver and of Pakistani heritage. Javid may very well be those things but they do not cancel out the fact that he is a Member of Parliament for a sitting government that has enacted countless racist and classist policies since being in office, some of which he has personally presided over. The suggestion seems to be that being a “working class academic” is the careerist equivalent of saying “I’m not racist, I’ve got black friends.”

Are these things really equatable? In some respects, yes, I think they are. In fact, this is precisely the blurred line which Mark’s essay contends with. Of course there are innumerable academics who preach the gospel of Marx whilst doing nothing to alleviate class struggle. They are the gatekeepers repeatedly criticised by Mark all over K-Punk. These are precisely the people that the Vampire’s Castle attempts to skewer: the people who covet class politics as something for them and them alone; for their careers and their own self-interest.

Despite what CP seems to think, Mark was not one of these people. To suggest that he was is yet more ignorance. He was aware of the predicament of being working class and in an institutionally bourgeois position, and he wrote about these tensions on numerous occasions. This came through most vividly in his writing on culture, where his post-punk and pulp sensibilities informed a class politics that refused to relegate class consciousness to a form of academic posturing.

This is why Mark loved The Hunger Games, for instance, once writing that what author Suzanne Collins achieves is “an intersectional analysis and decoding of the way that class, gender, race and colonial power work together — not in the pious academic register of the Vampires’ Castle, but in the mythographic core of popular culture — functioning not as a delibidinizing demand for more thinking, more guilt, but as an inciting call to build new collectivities.”

Now, CP obviously prides themselves on not being an academic — and academia at large emerges as the primary straw man here, with Mark propped up as some imaginary representative of all its bourgeois functions — but they are certainly mind-numbingly pious. Worse than this, however, is the sheer ignorance behind their piety. CP isn’t only guilty of disarticulating Mark’s class position but so much of his other writing and political activity as well.

At one point, for example, CP points to Nick Cohen’s appropriation of Mark’s essay as a sign of how bad it must be but, in truth, CP is more reminiscent of Cohen than Mark is — conveniently ignoring the scorn Cohen received and the k-punk clippings sent to Cohen in the aftermath of the article’s publication that insulted him in vitriolic terms.

Mark repeatedly challenged “Cohen’s manifold fallacies of reasoning, grotesquely inapt analogies and factual errors” regarding his op-eds about the Iraq war, but these are likewise the things CP is guilty of as well.

The worst offence for me is that, in proclaiming “working-class academic” to be something of an oxymoron, they deny Mark’s inspiring and unparalleled political activity on campus, creating political groups with students and contributing to campus politics, raising more awareness about class consciousness than anyone else in his department was perhaps able to — precisely because of his background.

A more concrete example: here — starting at 15:12 — is a statement Mark prerecorded for the People’s Tribunal which saw the active building of solidarity between students, academic and non-academic staff — activity ironically cited by CP in a comment and deemed as good on-campus class-conscious worker-supporting activity, without acknowledging just how involved Mark was in this and how he directly inspired the atmosphere that allowed such activity to happen in the first place.

I think these experiences were so important to Mark because he knew what it was like on both sides of the divide. He knew what it was like to have your class experience disavowed as a student and he related to and directly supported students who expressed an affinity with him on this issue. He strove to help them channel it into activity inside and outside of the classroom. He wanted to be a good influence in this regard and to give hope to kids who were like he once was. He even writes somewhere that this was the explicit goal of Capitalist Realism: to write a politically engaged book that his 16 year old students would enjoy.

This is why he wrote so enthusiastically — because he knew the power of seeing and hearing people like yourself; how that affinity and consciousness raising is, first and foremost, validating. He wrote about the term “popular modernism” to discuss just that — the importance and sad loss of that experimental form of class-conscious expression which did not tokenise itself and understood the value of its own voice beyond the tropes of a neoliberal authenticity, just like the voices which inspired him in his youth but which were, today, something of a rarity.

Rightly or wrongly, Mark saw Russell Brand as one of these people. Maybe he was wrong there — I can’t say I’ve ever found Brand to be that inspiring — but also, in 2013, it was very slim pickings… He was overly protective of the few examples we had. There are more now, but not enough.

Regardless, I admired the way Mark openly struggled with this ideal he set for himself. In fact, the resonance of this with his writing on depression is not coincidental. In “Good For Nothing” he wrote:

Writing about one’s own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together — and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition. Of course, this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all — it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.

This resonates with his desire to talk about class experience and Mark’s essay goes on to insinuate as much — he likewise points to this sentiment in “Vampire Castle” — noting how this internal voice would disarticulate his class position long before the outside world did. It also makes CP’s comment from their original post all the more distasteful.

… perhaps if Fisher fucked off out of academia and got a real job somewhere, preferably doing manual labour but really just any job where you have a supervisor constantly breathing down your neck to make sure you’re working and not pissing about on the internet, he might find it considerably easier to escape “the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.

The offensiveness of this comment, expressed again in the new post (if unpolemically), is that it betrays an ignorance regarding Mark’s openly discussed job history when articulating his experiences of depression.

(CP ends their post with an acknowledgement of this bad taste and expresses regret for it, but the same ignorance is still present behind every other argument made, even if it’s not expressed so cheaply. Again, all that’s regretted is the tone, with no attempt made to educate themselves on Mark’s various positions outside of a single article.)

This, again from “Good For Nothing”, is worth quoting in full:

My depression was always tied up with the conviction that I was literally good for nothing. I spent most of my life up to the age of thirty believing that I would never work. In my twenties I drifted between postgraduate study, periods of unemployment and temporary jobs. In each of these roles, I felt that I didn’t really belong — in postgraduate study, because I was a dilettante who had somehow faked his way through, not a proper scholar; in unemployment, because I wasn’t really unemployed, like those who were honestly seeking work, but a shirker; and in temporary jobs, because I felt I was performing incompetently, and in any case I didn’t really belong in these office or factory jobs, not because I was ‘too good’ for them, but — very much to the contrary — because I was over-educated and useless, taking the job of someone who needed and deserved it more than I did. Even when I was on a psychiatric ward, I felt I was not really depressed — I was only simulating the condition in order to avoid work, or in the infernally paradoxical logic of depression, I was simulating it in order to conceal the fact that I was not capable of working, and that there was no place at all for me in society.
When I eventually got a job as lecturer in a Further Education college, I was for a while elated — yet by its very nature this elation showed that I had not shaken off the feelings of worthlessness that would soon lead to further periods of depression. I lacked the calm confidence of one born to the role. At some not very submerged level, I evidently still didn’t believe that I was the kind of person who could do a job like teaching. But where did this belief come from? […] The form of social power that had most effect on me was class power, although of course gender, race and other forms of oppression work by producing the same sense of ontological inferiority, which is best expressed in exactly the thought I articulated above: that one is not the kind of person who can fulfill roles which are earmarked for the dominant group.

In disavowing Mark’s class position, CP simply echoes the depressive voice in Mark’s own head. “That’s not the right job for you.” Well, what is?

Just as infuriating, in light of this, is CP’s passive advocation for “joyful militancy”, as if this too is alien to Mark’s own writings. (It’s not.) But similarities between these positions elsewhere does not undermine the tone of “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. It’s okay — good even — to get sad; to get angry. It’s a question of why you feel that way and what you do with it. Again, Mark wrote of the goal for himself: “From anger and sadness to collective joy…”

“Exiting the Vampire Castle” was just that — an exit — but Mark went on to do far more valuable things elsewhere and in other contexts. Exiting was his first step on the road to collective joy — an affect that is very rare on Twitter these days and just as rare in meatspace — but he did a great deal to try and find it. All he found on Twitter was anger and bitterness, misdirected, turned inwards, with no one to make contact with it.

Resonantly, Mark wrote about this kind of contact when reviewing Sleaford Mods’ album Divide & Exit for The Wire:

It isn’t always the role of political music to come up with solutions. But nothing could be more urgent than the questions which Sleaford Mods pose: who will make contact with the anger and frustration that Williamson articulates? Who can convert this bad affect into a new political project?

Not CP, that’s for sure.

Patchwork Epistemologies (Part 4): Warped by Language

on January 30, 2019February 2, 2019 By xenogothic 2 Comments

? Part Three

The disconnection between these approaches to patchwork theory, in many people’s minds, may mirror the similarly contentious fault line between “continental” and “analytic” philosophies.

Each approaches a series of central problems from opposing directions, equipped with different tools for the job. However, despite their various disagreements, there is much to be said for a cross-pollination between the two approaches.

This came to mind explicitly whilst reading a book Reza recommended to me during the course of our conversation, after I explained that Intelligence & Spirit had pushed me down a deep dark well with Wilfred Sellars and Rudolf Carnap (that I found myself nonetheless enjoying, having never read either before).

The book he recommended was A. W. Carus’s Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought. In the preface, Carus writes:

[F]rom at latest 1687 or so, knowledge became irrevocably theoretical. A gap opened up between knowledge and the shaping of individual human lives, a gap that has grown steadily wider over the centuries since then. The old philosophical ideal of applying knowledge to the shaping of practical life seemed doomed to irrelevance. Its vigorous revival by the Enlightenment led only to the Romantic reaction, whose most persuasive argument was the obvious gap between the desiccated world portrayed in our increasingly technical knowledge and the rich intuitive awareness in which we live our actual lives (the Lebenswelt, as philosophers like to call it when dwelling on this contrast).
This gap between knowledge and life split the thinking world into two warring camps, which have gone by many names; ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’ were among the early examples. Each side tried to bridge the gap between knowledge and life, to bring them back together, but from different ends, in different directions. One side insisted on life, and sought either to disqualify the new kind of knowledge from serious relevance for life, or to tame it somehow, to bring it within the ambit of practical and intuitive life, in the manner of Goethe and Schelling. The other side insisted on the new knowledge, rather, and required life to adjust; this was the stance of Diderot, the Encyclopédiste Enlightenment, and the positivist tradition. In various ways, nineteenth- and twentieth-century western intellectual life hinged on the conflict between these two stances.

This reflects the previously discussed bipolarisation of thought, it seems, likewise echoing Reza’s criticisms of the pathologisation of education and political intelligences. However, the response to this is not to argue for the sealing of an apparent cracked divide. To pursue this, as Carus suggests has been previously attempted, is a misstep.

Instead, I would argue, in the language of this blog, that the project of consolidating thought into a unitary project remains doomed to reductive failure. There is no desire here for a new philosophical universalism. The suggestion is rather to place the “analytic” and “continental” traditions in a particle accelerator — much like the “state” and the “subject” themselves in patchwork theory — so that we might smash them together and expand upon the fragments, in turn giving us a more accurate view of the universe as a multiplicitous whole.

Put another way, the message is: Affirm the differences and modulate accordingly.

With this in mind, we might think of Carus’s discussion of life and knowledge as similar to those things at stake in the context of the patchwork debate. For example, might we frame the state as an imposed (Enlightenment) “given” to which there are no just alternatives whilst also testing the bounds of the (Romantic) subject in much the same way?

The latter exercise is arguably an already common practice. We could list countless ways in which “life”, in this context, has been theorised and manipulated. I’m thinking of Mark Fisher’s Gothic Materialism here, for instance, and his rethinking of “life” through the tinkered-with vectors of mechanism and vitalism. Is Reza’s project similar, then? Albeit dragging knowledge into the ring as an amorphous “intelligence”, having previously been more of a focus for the analytic side of the Great Divide?

Communication and education reemerge here as near-universal topics of interest to various epistemologies which can nevertheless be explored through disparate avenues. Perhaps what best conjoins the two is “language” as that most fundamental marker of intelligibility, and the malleability of language in various contexts becomes a repetitive point of intrigue for me throughout Intelligence & Spirit, particularly when Reza deploys a Carnapian thinking — or, rather, invokes “Carnap on Acid“.

Reza’s Acid Carnapianism emphases “the unbinding of language and logic from concerns about representation and even meaning”, which, in Intelligence & Spirit, is seen as “the very recipe by which reality can be structured differently.”

Carnap’s most famous contribution to philosophies of language and logic was his demonstration of the very insufficiency of language to convey meaning unless the context of the system in which a concept is deployed is over-defined. This is useful for science and computational languages, most explicitly, wherein languages can be constructed anew for certain purposes within closed systems, but out in the world as we know it, this thinking throws the very idea of veritable meaning into abject (but nonetheless productive) chaos.

(Don’t hate me, Nyx, but) I think the Contrapoints video “Pronouns” might be a good pop cultural example for us to use in order to demonstrate how this kind of thinking is already being played out across the boundaries of contemporaneous left-right political debate.

(The segment of the video from 04:41 to 12:10 is the key bit.)

In the video, YouTuber Natalie Wynn takes on US conservative alt media pundit Ben Shapiro’s demonstrations of superior logic and factual warfare by framing his pet “debate” around the illegitimacy of transgender pronouns as an analytic question of language rather than biology, arguing that Shapiro’s conceptual crutch of biology is the only way in which his argument can stand up and is far more influenced by his feelings than the facts he holds so dearly. (Reza’s previously discussed comments on the fact-value distinction echo in my ears.) However, functionally, Shapiro’s argument crumbles when carried over into the social sphere. His terms are, therefore, insufficiently defined to make any claim to a socially functional use of language.

So, when Shapiro claims that “facts don’t care about your feelings”, what he means is the “neutral” but astute and trustworthy world of knowledge is irrelevant to your parochial life concerns. However, Wynn goes on to demonstrate how her logical structure for language — which we might call “gendered English” — is a socially constructed and functionally “intelligent” — in Reza’s sense — process which inherently adapts to the world around it and challenges how someone like Shapiro insufficiently structures our understanding of the human subject in the 21st century. (Can we see Shapiro get DESTROYED and NEGARESTANI’D brickwise in 2019?)

Wynn goes on to demonstrate how calling a transgender woman “she” is the logically correct response in the majority of social situations — rather than it just being an appeal to feelings. What’s even more interesting about this video and its exploration of the issue of transgender pronouns in particular, however, is that this display of a socialised logic doesn’t take away from the fact that her argument is a challenge to how most people have previously conceived of themselves as subjects, which is what so troubles Shapiro and his ilk.

The root of transphobia for many is a fear about the consequences of the deconstruction of sociolinguistic signifiers for male and female genders. What these consequences are, for most people, are moot but it is nonetheless true that this deconstruction is, in many ways, taking place — and has been going on for decades prior to our present moment too: it’s just now reached the mainstream.

The real questions in orbit of this issue become: “What are you so afraid of?” “Why are you clinging onto the raft of a rigidly gendered subject?” “How does this benefit you and/or the world at large?”

The answers, to many on the left at least, are perhaps obvious. Those who don’t want the world challenged are those that have the most to lose from the pecking order changing or being dismantled all together — middle class white men. But that is not to dismiss this demographic outright. They are, in fact, a very useful weather vane.

For instance, the transphobic response to such questions is recognisably something along the lines of “an increase in clinical cases of gender dysmorphia is just the spreading of mental illness.” Whilst that is an argument offensive to so many, again we might argue that this is also not, in itself, incorrect — if we are to understand mental illness clinically as a “disturbance” in thought which disrupts an individual’s ability to handle “life’s ordinary demands”.

The voice of Mark Fisher echoes through here, necessitating the interrogation of what “life’s ordinary demands” are exactly in a life under capitalism. The message of much of Mark’s thought was rather to recognise why we might be feeling this way, why it is so distressing, and how such feelings might be indicative of a shift in how we conceive of ourselves as subjects. We mustn’t individualise mental illness but consider the ways in which society encourages and sustains the production of such fraught existences.

Here, then, I may go so far as to argue that the Acid Carnapianism approach to mind is downright Ballardian. To quote my favourite passage from JG Ballard’s The Drowned World:

Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.

Shapiro’s perfectly rigid hair alone is enough of signifier for the fact he has no interest in pursuing a Kurtz-gradient — or should I say “Kerans-gradient”, in this Ballardian context.

Whilst this may seem like a major tangent away from the topic at hand, I think it helps to demonstrate how these issues of mind, intelligence and AGI are connected to a persist thread on the politics of emancipation which runs throughout the text.

Very early on Reza highlights how the “desacralisation of the mind as something ineffable and given coincides with the project of historical emancipation”. Mind, in this sense, starts to resemble that overarching essence of such questions as those considered above. A mind aimed towards emancipation is a mind that is self-conscious and self-critical about what it is, but this is not to individualise such a process. To consider this process at the level of the social, as Reza does, makes the move towards artificial intelligence (and artificial general intelligence) seem almost obvious.

Although it is perhaps not so obvious from the rudimentary level of pop culture, where AI is constantly framed as an externalised self-critical self-consciousness. It is arguably the unfortunate myopia of the capitalist realist subjectivity which leads to such representations of intelligence being consistently sociopathic — a dull self-hatred in the narrative mirror. Intelligence & Spirit does well to challenge such a cliche, however, demonstrating how philosophy (of mind but also in general) has always been a project for the development of an AGI. The history of philosophy itself is an AGI production process through which we strive for an outside view of ourselves.

To Be Continued…