Category: Blogger’s Digest

Hello! Happy new year. It feels like ages since one of these. I didn’t bother doing one for January 1st because 1) I was quite hungover, and 2) I’d just done a “Year in Review” post a day or two before, so it seemed like overkill.

January has been very long and very busy, with a lot happening in such a short space of time. Of course, all of this was preceded by an intense dejection and writer’s block…

Slug

I started 2022 sick and burnt out, with one week off work and another week spent just trying to recover and fix my sleeping pattern. I had some hefty deadlines to meet, made worse by ill health, and I couldn’t see beyond them after a while. So I wrote a pretty melancholic post about the state of all things.

— 2022 Slug [11/01/2022]

Five Years

This wasn’t helped by the fifth anniversary of Mark Fisher’s death, which always ends up being a difficult period for those who gathered together in the immediate aftermath. I didn’t feel like I had anything to say, as five years feels like a very long time and what more is there to add?

— Five Years [13/01/2022]

But Fisher’s persistence in our thoughts all the same shows how nothing has really been for same for a lot of us.

Because of this, there will always be something left to say, if only because of what Mark did. The real horror of suicide is how open the wound sits, never really being fully sutured. The hole he left is still there, pulsating and never really losing its intensity. I wrote Egress as a way to try and acknowledge it, think with it, and maybe do something with it rather than just stare at it, at the same time acknowledging the ruffled and unfinished nature of the attempt, questioning the infinite questioning… No surprises it didn’t bring the closure I thought was promised.

But there’s something about that worth holding onto. The worst thing you can do is try and make sense of it in some ways. It’s not really about what Mark would or wouldn’t have wanted, and more about just staying true to the errant trajectory his life took. Explaining it all away with his depression, though people inexplicably seem to think that’s the right thing to do — despite all he said about not individualising depression (and saying “capitalism killed Mark Fisher” is just another way of doing that, even if you think the onus is on the system) — is to trap him in what he himself believed was “a fate worse than death.”

— Disintensification-by-Canonisation: Thoughts on the Fisher-Function [20/01/2022]

But that’s a really difficulty thing to do. Perhaps the most difficult. Affirming it; affirming the fact his life and work can’t be neatly tied up with a bow, not like how it might have been, at least psychologically, if he’d died of natural causes.

A lot of us have been working through that at our own pace, taking multiple runs at it, thinking it through. There is a tendency for people to take strange pot shots at each other in the process — for lionizing him, making him a hero, a prophet, producing “hagiographies”. But everyone is nonetheless working through the same thing. Robin Mackay finally finished his attempt at working-through, By The North Sea, which we broadcast online as part of For k-punk 2022.

— For K-Punk 2022: Robin Mackay’s By The North Sea [21/01/2022]
— For K-Punk 2022 // By The North Sea [28/01/2022]

The originally planned event will hopefully to be restaged later in the year in person when the Covid situation makes things easy to plan in advance. (Omicron made things completely impossible in late 2021, with no one feeling able to commit to anything, except the venues desperate for something to happen in them.)

There are a bunch of other things planned for later in the year as well — not least our new Buddies Without Organs project, The K-Files, produced in collaboration with the new Zer0 Books team.

— The K-Files Teaser Trailer [15/01/2022]

You can find the first episode over at buddieswithout.org.

Alongside The K-Files, we’ve also started our new reading group into the essay that (I think) foreshadow his “acid communist” “turn” — which I don’t think was much of a turn at all. In fact, I think there’s a long continuity between what Fisher was exploring towards the end and what he was interested in back in his Ccru days. That he was a little more sympathetic towards the hippies is a bit of a red herring, considering he’d long been interested in a kind of revolutionary feminism, Burroughs and Ballard, and Spinozism — all of which are very much still present in the texts that foreshadow Acid Communism.

— XG Reading Group 4.0: Postcapitalist Desire [19/01/2022]

Part of the reason for exploring this is also to try and workshop a new edited collection of essays — the lesser-known stuff that I think is among the most importance but which has never garnered much attention from people. There are a lot of questions to ask about such a project — whether it’s needed, how to approach it, how to describe and made explicit that through-line to other people — all of which I’d like to explore collectively and tease out.

I can report that, after having through a great deal about the path our reading should take, I did gathered a lot of the essential texts together already, and I sent a bunch of them to Tariq Goddard at Repeater Books. Though initially very skeptical that another edited volume was needed, and very reticent about the cynical perception we all just want to capitalize rather than give people the best and most fully formed representation of Mark’s diverse and radical thought, he has agreed that this material is worth getting excited about. So this will be a book. But we’re going to take it slow, with a projected timeline of 18 months to work on the manuscript — a very generous amount of time to work on something like this. But it’s necessary.

The more work done, the more sensitively it has to be undertaken, I think. But a lot of what has been discussed this month has gone towards shaping it already, particularly the point on “disintensification”. This will be a project that seeks to re-intensify rather than settle all that has been left unfinished. And I’m excited about that prospect.

On a final note, I had one more post of Fisher’s work, in light of recent activity at Mattel Studios. Now is a good time to revisit that strange PhD thesis of his:

— It’s Mattel’s Hyperreality, We Just Live in It [31/012022]

Too Much Politics

I still think about “Brenda from Bristol” a lot, who was famously exasperated by the amount of politics happening in 2017. It doesn’t feel like things have let up much… This month, in particular, has been a furious 31 days of political events and scandals. And I’ve written about next-to-none of it. Here are the few responses to things that did emerge…

— Vile Venerations, Past and Present: Thoughts on Blair and Colston [07/01/2022]
— Everyday Authoritarianism [12/01/2022]
— Oedipal Israel: Notes on Oedipus Beyond Psychoanalysis [22/01/2022]

NFTs… Again…

Thanks to Wassim for mentioning the latest edition of Spike Art has loads of Web3 stuff in, including a brilliant essay he wrote recently. It’s a really interesting issue that sees a lot of people working or interested in that space reflecting on the recent flurry of activity and dreaded popular “discourse”. I wrote something else myself, reflecting on the apparent anti-communitarian ethos of it all, which seems to run counter to initial hopes and ideals.

— NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism [24/01/2022]

Though this essay proved really popular, it was a bit disappointing to see how promiscuously it was applied. I had co-signs from a lot of people into Web3 who I respected, and a lot of people with awful NFT Twitter avatars who seemed not to recognize that they were the people I was disparaging. But I might write a little addendum on that soon…

Anarchic Monarchy

I wanted Spencer over Christmas and wrote about it. A very different sort of Princess Diana biopic, it turned out to be one of the most interesting psychological horror films I think I’ve seen in a long time.

— Spencer [03/01/2022]

Acid Reflux

At the end of last year, I was invited to write and record a short essay for the launch of Márk Fridvalszki and Zsolt Miklósvölgyi’s Acid zine, held at Trafó House of Contemporary Art in Budapest. They’ve since taken the zine on tour, at the essay-reading I recorded has traveled with them, now appearing at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt, Austria.

— A World Without Any Future?: XG at Kunstraum Lakeside [31/01/2022]

Photography

— New Year’s Day [02/01/2022]
— Winscar [05/01/2022]
— Haworth [09/01/2022]
— The Royal George [16/01/2022]
— Top Withens [23/01/2022]

I was about to start off this post with general apologies for more quietude, but looking back, this has actually been a busy month with a fair amount of blogging activity.

I’ve nonetheless been away for almost two of the four weeks of November, trying to complete my next book. I got very close! I’ve got a little bit more reading to do so I can properly tie it up in a neat little bow, but I’m hoping I’ll have a first draft finished by the end of the year and in Tariq Goddard’s inbox.

I’ll tell you more about that below, but in the meantime, here’s what else has gone on this month…

Repeater Fights Zer0, Zer0 Fights Back

At the end of last month, it was announced that Repeater Books (or at least its parent company) had bought out Zer0 Books, bringing the imprint back under the control of its original owners and out from underneath Doug Lain’s self-centered tailism.

The outpouring of joy from the left (at least in the UK) was huge — perhaps even a little excessive, as it allowed those behind the reactionary content farm to feign victimhood. For weeks, the war of words did not relent. Now, with Doug having finally let go of all Zer0’s assets — he tried to rebrand various Zer0 media channels under his own name and keep them — it seems like the hard part of the transition is over.

Nevertheless, if you want to catch up on my various contributions to scuffle, you can find them below:

— Against Individualizing: Personal Beef or Group Critique?
— Perpetual Yawn: More from the Ex-Zer0 Set
— Spiked: Notes on Psychedelic Fascism in the UK Media Landscape
— Repeater Takes Over… Tariq Weighs In…

Narcissus in Bloom

Beyond the petulant back and forth, this month has also been a productive one for my next book. I’ve previously teased drafts, which I may have since taken down. I feel a bit more protective of this one than I did Egress. I want to present the whole package, as brief snatches of chapters or sections don’t really do justce to the overall argument I’m trying to construct.

I think this is largely because the overall argument is still gestating. I have it and know what it is, in elevator pitch format, but the structure has changed drastically this past month, and that’s all down to having the space to think about it and nothing else, which I enjoyed over a week and a half towards the end of this month.

First, I travelled to Newcastle, to give my first in-person talk in the UK in almost two years. (The first since the Egress book launch, I think.) It’s kinda funny that I’ve spoken IRL abroad before speaking IRL at home, but maybe that is an indicator of how fucked the UK still is.

— Narcissus in Bloom: Talk at Newcastle University

It was an excellent trip, and it made me fall in love with Newcastle a bit. The people within the philosophy department there were brilliant and I’ve been thinking quite seriously about doing a PhD there at the end of next year. We’ll see if that happens…

In the midst of all, I started reading some Foucault, in preparation for my penultimate chapter, which discusses him at length. And then he was used as a scapegoat for psotmodernism again, or something like that, so he was on my mind again when I wrote this:

— Discipline is a Double-Edged Sword: Notes on the Misuse and Abuse of Foucault

Then I went off to stay at Bidston Observatory. It came recommended by a friend but I did not realise that those who ran it had so many connections with weird theory world. Some readers may be familiar with PAF (or the Performing Arts Forum), a space that was run in France over a number of years, as a site of independent study as well as collaboration and experimentation. I know Amy Ireland went a bunch, and Ben Woodard as well. It was a safe haven for many an indie research and writer. It turns out that Bidston was formed with the PAF model very much in mind. If you need a place to stay and work with sound people and a good ethos, I can’t recommend it enough

— Observatory Crest: On Narcissus in Bloom

I knew I had some work to do when I got there, but over the course of a week I completely restructured the book, moving lots of things around, and finally found a natural way to get from point A to B to C. Right now, I have two chapters left to complete — one on Herve Guibert and Foucault, and another on Derek Jarman’s garden — and the conclusion to write. Considering I wrote three chapters whilst I was away for a week, that doesn’t feel like much left to do at all. But I do need to swat up on my Foucault and the Stoics…

The Blogosphere

Somewhat unexpectedly, there was a post written by Simon Obirek this month about the validity and vitality of the blogosphere. It was an interesting post, but it’s understanding of the original blogosphere was all wrong — not to mention Simon coming out in favour of Graham Harman. It was the sort of post that really did make it clear the blogosphere is dead, just not in all of the ways that it intended.

I wrote a response, but more interestingly, Terence Blake, perhaps my favourite current blogger, came out swinging for that original blogospheric movement as well.

— In Defense of Pop Philosophy: Notes on Philosophistry
— A Further Defence of Pop Philosophy: Comments from Terence Blake

A Brief History of the New

The talk I gave for the CTRL Network was finally uploaded to YouTube. I originally gave the talk back in spring, reading two draft chapters from my forthcoming book on accelerationism.

— A Brief History of the New: Recording Now Online

Limp Bizkit

Limp Bizkit had a new album out. It wasn’t great, but I kinda liked it for that.

— Still Sucks: Transitory Music in the 2020s

Accelerationism

I found a reference made to accelerationism in Robert Musil’s unfinished 1930 book, The Man Without Qualities. Having consulted with Ed Berger and Robin Mackay, it may be the earliest reference to the term yet found, and it is all the more interesting that its usage and contextual definition isn’t too far away from what we might describe accelerationism as today…

— “What was needed was accelerationism…”: A Note on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

Photography

A few more photography posts. I’m going to bump up the frequency of these in the coming weeks, because my backlog is getting a bit excessive.

— Untitled #36
— Untitled #37

Reading Group

Our penultimate session reading Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real. One session left to go — the recording of which will be up in a couple of days time.

— XG Reading Group 3.5: Positive Objectification

We will see what December brings but for now it is time to wind down and get ready for the new year. Lots coming in 2022, which I’m excited to tell you about, but until then, time to have a rest.

Merry Christmas and see you in the New Year.

Happy Hallowe’en for yesterday! I hope you all had a good time. I was, for the first time ever, not remotely in the festive mood. With a Christmas birthday that I never get to celebrate, I decided to spend the Hallowe’en weekend pretending I was 30 two months early and had a birthday party for myself at home. It was lovely and not remotely spooky and now I feel a little bit like I’ve missed the boat. But “the fear” I’m currently experiencing on day 2 of my hangover unreal.

Anyway, interesting month this month. So much drama?!

Repeater Buys Zer0

The biggest news this month is undoubtedly that Repeater Books has bought out Zer0 Books.

— Repeater Takes Over

No one knows what this entails yet — although changes have already started happening. Repeater had previously been producing audiobooks for some of their best-loved Zer0 1.0 titles and they have started to talk about this a lot more openly, suggesting more of that material will be brought in line with Repeater’s overall catalogue.

But I don’t know any more than anyone else at this point. Watch this space, though. It’s going to be a very interesting transition.

Reflexive Impotence

Of course, the generally reactionary Zer0 2.0 authors have seemingly found this to be quite an ordeal, if only because much of Twitter decided to tell it how it really is. Issues that many have discussed for years, that Zer0 has gone well to actively suppress, all came out of the woodwork with statements from Alex Niven and Aaron Leonard once again being circulated.

If this drama is interesting to me, it is not only because I’m a staunch Repeater loyalist but because I think it chimes with a number of related conversations around free speech and political agency in the cultural sphere — which, in turn, is related to last month’s discussion around AOC at the Met Gala.

Below are a few posts that extend this into other territories, and there may even be more to come in November as this train shows no signs of stopping.

— Reflexive Centrism
— Funko Pop (Modernism?)
— Toothless Critique: Free Speech in the Vampire Castle

NFTs

Against all better judgement, I also wrote about NFTs again… I still think there is a great deal to be said for this emerging use of technology. The most visible examples are gross — no arguing with that — but as Lukács said, we should always strive to raise our knowledge of the world above what is presented to us by the ruling class in immediacy… (That was an unsent tweet, can you tell?)

— Are NFTs Frigid Stars?

Still Searching for Sebald?

The best thing I read this month was probably Ryan Ruby’s essay on WG Sebald for the New Left Review. I loved it so much I heavily annotated it on the blog.

— Interiority (After Sebald)

Reading Group

In case you missed it, we were also back reading Bratton’s Revenge of the Real.

— XG Reading Group 3.4: The Sensing Layer 

We have another session this week on Wednesday — check the Discord — and then after that we’ll probably have just one session left. After that, we’ll be moving onto this 8-week Fisher course I’ve had planned for ages. More info on that soon.

Photography

— Untitled #34
— Untitled #35

As ever, this is a lesser number of posts for me because most of my energy is going into book writing at present. But momentum is building as I begin to make some of this work public. I’ll giving a talk in Newcastle later this month, presenting on my research to some undergrads, and then I’m going on a retreat for a week to try and finish the last half of the book. More updates on that soon!

See you next month!

Another late one. Sorry, things have just been crazy.

The blog reflects that somewhat this month. Little time for meandering posts, but some longer mediations of recent experiences, talks, etc.

Ljubljana

I flew to Ljubljana to give a talk on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, following its translation into Slovenian. I had a nightmare and I’m not sure it went very well because my brain was utterly airport-fucked. But I also loved it there and, even though I was scatterbrained, I learnt a lot and I can’t wait to go back.

I took my notes and merged them with some reflections, and you can read there here:

— Capitalist Realism and the Eviction of Culture: Notes from Ljubljana 

Recent Events

The rest of the month was given over to book-writing and the odd responsive post. There was one on Jean-Paul Belmondo, who sadly passed away; one on 9/11; and one that became quite infamous on the Met Gala and the tyranny of Mark Fisher memes…

— Pierrot le fou
— Actual/Virtual
— The Met Gala

Podcasts and Chats

— Buddies Without Organs — Episode #08: The War Machine
— In Conversation with Liara Roux: Live on Instagram 

Photography

— Untitled #32
— Untitled #33  

Hello!

This post is a retrospective one. September was so intense that the monthly digest totally passed me by and — I’m embarrassed to say — so did October 1st as well… 

This is all for good reason. Lots of book-writing going on, I flew to give a talk abroad for the first time in 2 years, and I went on holiday for the first time in about 4 years! It has been good to forget about the blog as real life starts up again, but I also know people appreciate these debriefs. 

So, my apologies. Better late than never!(?)

Ljubljana

September’s main event was flying over to Ljubljana, which was announced at the end of August here:

— Is there (Still) No Alternative?: XG in Ljubljana 

Capitalist Realism

In the lead up to the Ljubljana talk, Capitalist Realism was very much on my mind and it resulted in a bunch of related posts:

— Communism Within, Communism Without: The Paranoia of Capitalist Realism
— Parameters of Change: Notes on Queer Accelerationism and Libidinal Materialism

Nancy

We lost a philosophical giant in Jean-Luc Nancy in August. He was very influential on me when I was studying for my MA. I wrote a brief reflection on his work.

— RIP Jean-Luc Nancy 

Music

There were a few big late-summer music drops in August. I wrote a bit about Lorde and Kanye.

— They do not live nature as nature, but as a process of production: On Lenz and Lorde’s Desiring-Productions
— DONDA 

Narcissus in Bloom

The focus of my attention at the minute is the next book. I’ve mentioned it here before, although I’m trying to resist the temptation to tease it on the blog ahead of time. It’s going to be quite short (~40k words) and about something I’ve not written on before. I’m excited about doing something quick, contrarian and novel. 

Though I’m trying not to share any of it… Some things are still sneaking onto the blog, including this:

— Unconditional Love: A Note on Acid Narcissism 

Podcasts and Chats

I spoke with James ‘Meta-Nomad’ Ellis for the Hermitix podcast about my book Egress. This was quite a late interview, considering the book came out over a year ago, and it was interesting to talk about it having had that amount of time to reflect on it. 

You can listen to the episode below, and read a debrief post I wrote about some of my feelings, clarifying a few points that I didn’t think I made as well as I could have done.

— Egress: Livestream on the Hermitix Podcast
— Egress and Immanence: Hermitix De-Brief

We also kept discussing Ben Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real and Natasha Eves and I went on Acid Horizon to talk about our For k-punk events.

— XG Reading Group 3.1: Post-Pandemic Patchwork
— Solidarity at the Rave: For k-punk on Acid Horizon
— XG Reading Group 3.2: Trust is Key 

Photography

— Untitled #30
— Untitled #31 

Hello! We’re back for another month of blog digesting.

I’m still mostly working behind the scenes at the moment, but a few things broke free of various embargoes and became blog content. I actually had a meeting with Repeater this month about book details — I had been scheduled to deliver a new manuscript by September. In all honesty, the deadline made me shit myself, and I jumped around and felt very insecure about what I have been producing and whether it will be good enough. (Not a blog perfectionist in the slightest, but if it’s gonna go into print, neuroticism takes over.)

Thankfully, things are back on track. I’ve put yet another project on hold and returned to my book on accelerationism, which I think is in a lot better shape than I thought it was when I hit my last wall with it. A first draft may even be ready for the now-defunct September deadline. Fingers crossed!

I’ll keep you Patreons updated on that. In the meantime, here’s everything that went down this month.

K-Punk, Vol. 3

The third installment of the Spanish translation of K-Punk is out now, completing the set. I was invited to write a new introduction for it at the start of this year. Patreons have had access to it for a while, but now it’s available for everyone to read now that the book is out.

You can read the English language version on the blog via the link below, and you’ll also find a link to the Spanish translation there too, which is both in the book and on Caja Negra’s blog.

— Introduction to K-Punk, Vol. 3: English Language Version

That Grimes TikTok…

I wrote about the Grimes TikTok about communism in the context of Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence & Spirit, which gained way more traction that anticipated and ruined my mentions for at least a day. There was some good discussion that went on around it though, including a long comment from Hypnosifl, which I shared in a separate post.

— AI is Good Actually: Notes on Commie Grimes and Intelligence & Spirit
— AI is Good Actually: A Further Note from Hypnosifl

The Memeing of Everything

After the cover of Mike Watson’s forthcoming book for Zero launched a thousand subtweets, I wanted to try and write something that wasn’t entirely cunty but at least addressed one of the prevailing problems with how a new generation of content makers is engaging with Fisher’s legacy and the legacy of the Ccru and its affiliates more generally.

— Memeing History
— Memeing Politics

Cultural Critique

I wrote a lot about TV this month? It’s been ages. I feel like I haven’t really watched anything in months. So much of lockdown is spent sitting around, I tend not to like doing it by choice. It’s also hard to concentrate.

Despite all that, three posts about films or TV shows that feel zeitgeisty? I thought Mare of Easttown was good, precisely because it showed how counter-productive most policing is, and I thought Cruella was a weird anachronistic mess, and I thought Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock and the entire Conservative government starts to make total sense when you consider them in the context of “zany” TV characters from I Love Lucy, Parks & Rec, Veep and The Thick of It.

— Mare of Easttown: 2021’s One True Cop Show
— Cruella
— Our Zany Ministers: On Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, the Personal and the Political

That last one was basically half of a chapter that I wrote for the forthcoming book on narcissism, but I’m not sure I liked it for that context any longer. Still, a decent sneak peek if you want to know where I’m heading at the moment.

Poetry and Poetics

Speaking of “where I’m heading at the moment”, I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry recently. I’m reading a lot and still formulating thoughts, but these two posts contain a load of inchoate takes on stuff.

— Stronger Than Death: A Note on Poetry and Grief
— Blogging as Infinite Conversation: Preamble

Hull

This post was basically an excuse to share an article written for MAP Magazine about the experiences of Chilean refugees in Hull in the 1970s, who fled the violent rise of neoliberalism under Pinochet only to find a seemingly more innocuous version taking root in England. The fact this all took place in my hometown of Hull was also fascinating to me. It’s a short piece with some excellent photos and it stayed with me for weeks afterwards.

— Hull and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Photography

Just one photography post this month, but I took a lot of photos in the meantime. There are currently fortnightly photoblogs scheduled all the way up until September, so look out for those.

— Untitled #26

Podcasts and Appearances

There were quite a few events happening this month. Alongside the last two installment of our reading group, before we move onto Benjamin Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real, there was Repeater Radio’s mammoth K-Punk marathon, which I’m hoping will go online soon. I also spoke to our friend Bec for her Liminal Worlds website and roleplayed as spermatozoa for two episodes of After the Maestro.

— Repeater Radio presents: K-Punk Marathon
— XG Reading Group 2.8: Interlude
— XG Reading Group 2.9: The Social
— Literary Ley Lines: XG in the Liminal Lounge
— After the Maestro

That’s all for now. See you again next month!

What a garbage month May has been. Tragedy everywhere, at home and abroad, painfully distant and painfully close.

(((:):))(:)::::

We lost Nine this month. Ashlé will be missed both on the timeline and the various servers she hung out in, particularly my own server, which she so generously helped me set up. I wrote a few words about her here:

— Nine

I was especially struck by a post Lily wrote about Nine, which is an incredibly beautiful tribute and piece of writing in its own right.

Free Palestine

Grief at home was compounded by grief for Palestine. A lot of energy went into thinking about the horrific actions of Israel these past few weeks. I spent quite a few evening writing about and processing the latest Israeli aggressions, and the state’s attempts to smother dissent against apartheid, below:

— A Deleuzian View of Palestine (Contra Israel)
— Zionist Realism: What If We Had a Strike and Everyone Came?
— Zionist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Blood Moon

Things didn’t really get any better by the end of the month. A man collapsed outside our house. I’m not entirely sure why I felt the need to blog about it. Maybe a way to make it real. I’m determined that, if anything like that ever happens again, the next time I don’t feel so useless. After chatting to the guy who showed up after we called 999, I was left really wanting to get proper first aid training and starting as a volunteer Community First Responder.

— Under the Blood Moon

Narcissus in Bloom

A few notes siphoned off the current book project. I read Madame Bovary for the first time and was quite blown away by it. Simon Reynolds, in the comments, summed up the initial feeling perfectly:

“I read Madame Bovary for the first time last year and was stunned by how modern it felt. You still get a sense of breakthrough from it, even today, long after all its innovations have been assimilated and become the everyday stuff of fiction.”

— Long Live The New Flesh: Notes on Madame Bovary

Photography

— Untitled #24
— Untitled #25

Podcasts, Etc.

— Postcapitalist Desire: XG on Hermitix
— Buddies Without Organs — Episode #06
— XG Reading Group 2.7: Bad Actors

Hello! Another month gone. Time is really disappearing since we hit one year of lockdown.

I’m still in book writing mode at the moment, so blog activity is slowing down a bit. An agreed September deadline sort of put the fear in me. The accelerationism book I’ve been working on over the past year is nowhere near finished, and it is already quite lengthy, so I’ve sidestepped to another project to give myself a bit of breathing room.

I’ve had a book about selfies in the back of my mind for a few years now. My undergraduate dissertation was about photography and nihilism, and I’ve been keen to scratch that itch again. I got close in writing two further essays in recent years, “Points of View” and “The Will to Deform”, so there’s already a backbone in place for it. I think finishing it by September is very doable.

Anyway, I’m telling you this because, in case you missed it, I shared a draft chapter from the book for Patreons earlier this month. Hopefully there’ll be more sneak peeks in the coming months.

For now, here’s what else got posted over the last few weeks.

Narcissus in Bloom

That’s the working title of the new book. Subtitle: “Nihilism and the Selfie”. I’ve already broken this introduction up and rewritten it extensively, but since it was relevant to the XG reading group at the time, here’s a few take on the psychoanalytic understanding of narcissism and how it’s not necessarily a sign of our own impotence — quite the opposite.

— Narcissus in Bloom: A Work-in-Progress

An Introduction to the Late K-Punk

I was recently commissioned to write an introduction to K-Punk, Vol. 3, the final installment in Caja Negra’s three-part Spanish translation of Mark Fisher’s K-Punk anthology. It will be published simultaneously in Spanish (on the Caja Negra blog) and in English (right here) in June, as well as appearing in the book itself.

Ahead of time, I thought it’d be nice to share it with you Patreons early. This one is available only over on Patreon and not here on the blog since it will end up here eventually anyway. Enjoy!

— Introduction to the late K-Punk

Prince Philip

The old racist died and England lost its collective marbles. I wrote an essay about his environmental politics and how they’re weirdly relevant to the royal family’s own continued existence. A follow-up post considered how, even though the man is dead, his tactics for manufacturing consent were clearly on display at the funeral, as an imagine of a lonely queen supposedly defined our pandemic. I think not… I hope not…

— Ecologies of Class: Prince Philip’s Conservationist Politics
— Regarding the Pain of Royals

Bad Queer

A big, long overshare that generated a really wonderful response. I sought of exhausted everything I had to say in that post, and I’ve found it difficult to talk about since. Maybe there’ll be more on this in future.

— Bad Queer

Photography

The backlog of “Winter Walks” posts was finished, and then I went and bought a new camera. With a book on photography in tow, I think there’s a lot more photo posting on the horizon. There are a few essays on photography thrown in here too, for good measure.

— Winter Walks XIII
— Burning Heather
— Winter Walks XIV
— Encounters with Photography and Community: Alumni Talk at the University of South Wales
— Untitled #23 (With Notes on a Migrated Archive)

Reading Group

We’ve been reading Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory in the XG reading group these past few weeks. There’s two extra posts thrown in here — one related, one divergent — both inspired by our reading. (I’ve really enjoyed this book, despite it calling into question everything I hold dear?!)

— XG Reading Group 2.4: A Grift in Space-Time
— Knowing the Unknown Knower
— Communities of Loss: A Brief Reflection
— XG Reading Group 2.5: Narcissist Realism
— XG Reading Group 2.6: Capitalism’s Transcendental Mirror Factory

A Brief History of the New

I gave a guest lecture as part of the CTRL Network’s Postcapitalist Desire reading group earlier this month. It was a chance to share some of my research for the forthcoming accelerationism book… Just as I put it on hold… If you missed it, the video will be going live soon, I think. For now, a preliminary note on it that I posted ahead of time.

— Next Week’s New

Forthcoming

The last public talk I’ll probably do for the foreseeable, as I retreat into book mode: I’m speaking at the rA/Upture_2 conference, part of the OFF-Biennálé in Budapest on 8th May.

— Third Actors: XG at the rA/Upture_2 conference, OFF-Biennálé Budapest

See you next month!

Has it been quiet around here this month? My posts have slowed a bit lately and activity elsewhere has been limited as well (at least by my standards).

This may continue for a little while. We’ll still be hosting the fortnightly reading group for Discorders but I’m hoping to buckle down and get disciplined with book writing over the coming months.

Repeater recently asked for a deadline for my second book. I am 80,000 words deep into something that is presently working-titled Nowhere Fast: Accelerationism and the Future of the New. I’ve agreed to have a first draft in by September this year for publication sometime in 2022. Although that is a long way off, I’m like a dog with a bone when I’m given a writing deadline. I will assume I’m never going to make it, slave away at it, and then end up finished about two months earlier than I needed to. That was certainly the case with my two academic dissertations… Although the gestation of Egress was a little bit more fraught…

Later this month, I’ll be presenting a lecture on the CTRL Network. Like the last time I was on the CTRL Network, I’m hoping to kill two birds with one stone: I’ll be reading out a prologue I’ve been working on for Nowhere Fast. “A Brief History of the New” will be a whistle-stop tour across the history of philosophy, looking at over two millennia’s worth of philosophical “newness” and “difference” as a way to preface some of the central questions at the heart of accelerationism that are so often overlooked and which I’d like to recentre in this new project.

Anyway, if the blog dries up and starts to feel more like a notice board than my usual public notebook, know its because I’m finally putting a few years’ worth of notes to good use.

In other news, just for you Patreon subs, I’ve been invited to write an introduction to K-punk Vol. 3 — the third and final installment of Caja Negra‘s Spanish translation of the big K-punk brick Repeater put out a few years ago.

Having done the smart thing and split the book into three volumes — click here for vol. 1 and click here for vol. 2 — they feel the final installment could use some further grounding for Spanish readers, in order to better contextualise some of Mark’s most (in)famous essays, including “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, “Good For Nothing” and the unfinished introduction to “Acid Communism”. No easy task, but I’ve spent a lot of this month knocking something together that I’m pretty proud of, which has been written for that particular audience in mind, and tries to not just repeat talking points already gone over in Egress and Postcapitalist Desire. (This is for my own sanity and also because Caja Negra will be putting out the Spanish translation of Egress this year as well, with Postcapitalist Desire following next year maybe.)

If appropriate — I haven’t asked them yet — I’d like to share the English language version of that essay with Patreons only, so watch this space for that.

RIP Grandad

I suppose I should also add that another reason for a slowdown in blogging this month is because my mental health has taken a bit of a hit. The end of March was characterised by pretty horrendous anhedonia for me. There are no doubt various reasons for this, the death of my grandpa from coronavirus was a bit of a shock. It was accompanied by a certain numbness. He was very elderly, and I’ve already watched as numerous friends have lost loved ones over the last year to this damn virus. Regardless of all that, he said in his will that he didn’t want to have a funeral ceremony. So it is all very distant and surreal. I wrote something of my

— Richard Humble (1925-2021)

Kill The Bill

The recent protests in the UK over the death of Sarah Everard and the new crime and policing (aka anti-protest) bill have sent sparks flying nationwide. Spring is here, we’re thawing out, and now fire is catching. A few brief thoughts below. Expect this topic to keep coming back. We’re in for a lively summer.

— What is an Institution?: On the Thoughts of Police
— Kill the Bill: More on the Thoughts of the Police

Happy Birthday, Egress

My book Egress turned one-year-old this month, as did the UK’s coronavirus lockdown… What a fucking weird year it has been. It was also about a year ago that I decided it was time to get to grips with Badiou and, rather than it being a pivot into wholly new territory, it has been nice to affirm how the commitments hashed out in that book continue to resonate as I feel like I’m speeding away from it.

— Badiou’s Platonic Exit: Egress Turns One

Assorted Notes and Continued Conversations

I’ve written a few posts this month that are quite sporadic and are vaguely connected but also not quite… Offcuts from active research… Sometimes a thread that doesn’t fit anywhere ends up culled on the blog.

First up, a few frayed offshoots related to that thread pulled on last month, regarding “anti-hauntology” and the strange difficulty we have both recognising the new and remembering our own recent pasts…

— The End of History 2: Stagnant Boogaloo (Synder Cut)
— The Inertial Endogamy of Covid Capitalism

Related to this hauntological melancholy / cultural amnesia is an essay that grew out of recent research for my Caja Negra essay, following on from last month’s comments about the “post-Capitalist Realism” generation.

— The Post-Vampire Castle Generation: Notes on Neo-Anarchy in the UK

“Meta-terrorism” continues to be a conceptual hand grenade, first lopped by Alex Williams on his blog and recently passed around tentatively by myself and Ed Berger (see last month’s Badiou/Acc conversation).

— Notes on Lenin and Accelerationism Meta-Terrorism

Bring the Noys

A recent lecture by Benjamin Noys started doing the rounds on Twitter that, I must admit, really irked me. It was less the lecture itself than the reaction to it, that was uncritically positive only because — as far as I could tell — Noys was coming out against the accelerationists again. People don’t like accelerationism, we get it — but what Noys was arguing for instead seems so much worse than anything accelerationism offered up back when Noys was most actively engaged with that conversation.

I initially wrote something critiquing Noys’ abstract — not the more surefooted way to critique someone else’s work, but I was confident enough in the argument to run with it anyway. Once Noys’ lecture was made public, which I was expecting to happen any time soon — universities can be sluggish — there were a few concessions to make, but I found my argument actually gave Noys more of the benefit of the doubt than it should have done. He seemed to affirm a mid-00s post-Occupy impotence over any of the gains made by the left in recent years, and it seems like many present just swallowed it up. It beggars belief.

— The Slow Cancellation of… Sorry, What Were We Talking About?
— The Slow Cancellation of… Sorry, What Were We Talking About?: Some Concessions and Further Notes

Podcasts, Etc.

Podcasts and talks and interviews remain a fun way to come together with people during lockdown so here’s this month’s various appearances, including our Patreon reading group on postmodernism and the Situations.

— Extinction, Apocalypse and Desire: XG with Thomas Moynihan on the MIT Press Podcast
— XG Reading Group 2.3: Situationist NFTs and the Intensification of the Commodity Form
— Buddies Without Organs — Episode #05

Photography

The backlog of film scans continues…

— Winter Walks IX
— Winter (Acid) Walks X
— Winter Walks XI
— Winter Walks XII
— First Lambs

Reviews, Etc.

Two further reviews of recent projects emerged this month. A really amazing review of January’s For k-punk event in The Wire and a review of Postcapitalist Desire in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

— “The critical legacy of theorist Mark Fisher is a creative springboard for a new wave of musicians and thinkers”: For k-punk reviewed in The Wire
— “Giving Up the Ghost”: Postcapitalist Desire in the LA Review of Books

Misc.

The recent interview with Adam Curtis for Jacobin has produced an inadvertent but best definition of acid communism:

— The Spectre of Acid Communism

Go check out Time Is Away’s For k-punk commission, which they recently broadcast as the March edition of the NTS residency:

— “Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration”: Time is Away on NTS Radio

That’s All, Folks!

Back next month for the breakdown — same time, same places.

After a wild January, I decided to take February off, so not much to write home about this month…

Sike! I don’t know how to relax.

This month’s productivity can be put down to some very interesting conversations happening on the timeline and elsewhere. In fact, I’m feeling pretty excited about things as of late. We’ve seen reemerging points of contact between different groups and individuals and positions that have seemingly lain dormant for a couple of years now. This hellthread featuring Pete Wolfendale, Amy Ireland, Reza Negarestani and a couple of others was a particular highlight. Just as I feel we’ve been uncovering a few buried or interrupted lines of flight from the blogosphere’s 2000s peak, a bunch of adjacent arguments are starting up with a ferocity we haven’t seen in years. Exciting times ahead, I feel.

Badiou/Acc

On that note, we might as well start with a discussion that had me really excited recently, on Badiou’s influence on accelerationism, which started as an elongated shitpost after I saw someone put “Badiou/Acc” on a weird Twitter “iceberg” meme — thanks to Bob for sharing that in the Discord — and which ended up with Ed Berger, Vincent Garton and myself having a blog dialogue for the first time in years.

I also hope these posts might be clarifying for those taking part on the XG reading group, where we’ve been reading around Badiou, mostly unpacking Brassier’s use of his concepts in the initial discussions around accelerationism.

— A Moment of Renewal: Notes on Badiou/Acc
— Badiou/Acc: A Response to Ed Berger
— Badiou/Acc: Further Responses from Vince Garton and Ed Berger
— Badiou/Acc: Terror and Parody with Ed Berger

Anti-Hauntology

The other conversation to dominate the blogosphere came in the aftermath of SOPHIE’s death, with a discussion around what Matt Bluemink has taken to calling “anti-hauntology”. I think this conversation runs nicely in parallel with the discussion around “Badiou/Acc”.

In memorialising SOPHIE, there was a tendency to downplay her innovations from many more cynical music fans. As I see it, when we discuss what exactly makes something “new” — aesthetically but also politically speaking — the terms by which we judge something to be new are often wholly lacking. The point I hoped to make in this discussion was that we need to define our terms if we want to seriously have this debate. Because it is a worthy question, but it all too often falls back on lazy thinking.

In italics are Matt Bluemink’s original posts over at his website, Blue Labyrinths, with my posts in bold so that you can read the entire back-and-forth as it happened.

— Anti-Hauntology: Mark Fisher, SOPHIE, and the Music of the Future
— Un-Popping the Bubbles of Pop: A Brief History of Anti-Hauntology
— Anti-Hauntology: Arc, AI, and the Future of Innovation
— Anti-Hauntology: Where are the New Forms of New?
— Anti-Hauntology: SOPHIE, Stiegler, and the Ruins of Accelerationism
— Anti-Hauntology: Further Notes on Temporal Specificities
— Anti-Hauntology: Notes on Acid Horizon

Covid Libertarianism

This is becoming a recurring topic on the blog at the moment. Previous entries can be found here:

— Against Covid Libertarianism
— Covid Libertarianism and Molecular Freedom
— Covid Libertarianism and Capitalist Realism

The most recent edition was provoked by my first time reading Althusser, who I’d always kept away from after hearing suspect things about his reputation. (Mostly due to the fact he’s a difficult Marxist rather than the more shocking fact that, in the midst of a mental collapse towards the end of his life, he killed his wife. Must say I felt a bit torn about that after reading a biographical introduction to him.) In truth, I’ve found his thought to be very useful, and I turned once again to the useful idiots du jour to expound on his central thesis on ideology in On the Reproduction of Capital.

— Covid Libertarianism: Notes on Althusser and a Spanner in the Works of Ideological Reproduction

The Geology of Malls

I had a new essay out on Plaza Protocol this month — a new platform built by the folks at ŠUM Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory, who have been long-term supporters of the blogosphere and have put out some amazing editions of their journal in recent years. If you haven’t checked them out before, do so!

Plaza Protocol is a project based around an abandoned and unfinished shopping mall on the outskirts of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Having never been there, I wrote about some shopping malls that I do know and how, in my experience, a new shopping centre is always seen as a quick fix for deeper problems. An abandoned, unfinished shopping mall, by contrast, might leave some plot holes in the capitalist firmament open for further plundering.

I wrote this essay towards the end of 2020, so it’s nice to finally see it out. Whilst researching it, I found this peculiar pamphlet produced by Hull City Council at the end of the Cold War, detailing to residents of my hometown what the likely outcome would be if a nuclear device hit the city centre. (Spoilers: it would not be great.) They make for nice, if errant, companion pieces.

— The Geology of Malls: Architectural Dreamwork as Capitalist Cauterization
— Hull and the Bomb

Misfits

This post was an important one for me. I’ve written a couple of times on the strange reception Capitalist Realism gets in the present, especially when readers see how scathing Mark was about his students. But those who take umbrage at it, in my experience, are either to young to remember 2009 or, like so many people, they suffer from Noughties amnesia.

Noughties amnesia is real, and I’m very interested in it at the moment. I intend to write more on it this month. In fact, I almost wrote too much about it here — so much I had to stop and cut and paste my introduction to this post into a post of its own… More soon!

For now, revisit this starting point:

— The Post-Capitalist Realism Generation: Notes on Students, BreadTube and Digital Psychedelia

Wading thru the Hot Topics

There have been a couple of other topics that it feels like everyone has been talking about this past month — namely, (new) New Labour impotence, Adam Curtis, and non-fungible tokens. I waded into each of them, somewhat brashly, and was surprised to come out the other side unscathed.

I had fun writing these but they don’t really fit in anywhere else, so consider these February’s miscellaneous posts.

— National-Identity Politics: On the Contradictions of New New Labour
— Solidarity and Cryptocurrency: Notes on NFTs
— Framing Adam Curtis

For k-punk

The For k-punk commissions have now left the ICA. We’re already looking to broadcast them somewhere else so people can get a chance to experience them again. It was such an amazing night but the comedown from it was unreal. The start of the month was pretty grey and bleak in its aftermath. Nonetheless, it seems to have had a much bigger impact than we anticipated.

Natasha and I were interviewed together for The Art Newspaper. As is typical, we were cut down to just a few choice quotes for the sake of the article, but I regret not recording our conversation with Kabir Jhala for ourselves. We spoke to him for 90 minutes and it was such a wonderful opportunity to share our love of Mark together, rather than it just being me on my soapbox. Hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to talk about this project together again in a more public setting.

— “A teacher ‘who really gave a shit’”: For k-punk in The Art Newspaper

There are more write-ups on For k-punk due in March as well, or so I’ve heard. The next edition of The Wire magazine, which apparently went to print today, is going to have For k-punk as its lead review in the live events section. I’m not sure what’s said but apparently it’s positive! Watch out for that — I’ll no doubt blog about it when it’s out.

Podcasts and Videos

Fewer media and associated appearances on other channels this month. Probably for the best. Below are a few videos and podcasts that you can listen to nonetheless, including video upped from live events held last week, as well as back in October last year, and also a new episode of Buddies Without Organs.

— Postcapitalist Desire: XG in Conversation with James Butler — Now on YouTube!
— An Introduction to Eerie Aesthetics: Now on Mixcloud!
— Buddies Without Organs #04: The Geology of Morals

Winter Walks

I shot a lot of film in the last few months of 2020. I’ve tried to eek out each set of photographs by limiting photography posts to one a week. The problem with that is that we’re going to be having Winter Walks all the way to summer. Here’s this month’s lot.

— Brontë Country IV
— Winter Walks VI
— Winter Walks VII
— Winter Walks VIII

Patreon Reading Group

If you’re seeing this post, you’re also entitled to listen back to the XG reading group. For those who have subscribed to Discord perks, come and get involved! After our gruelling read through Cyclonopedia, I’m really enjoying our more relaxed approach to some nonetheless interesting questions circling the blogosphere. If you’ve followed the “Badiou/Acc” and “Anti-Hauntology” conversations with any interest, we’re going a few levels deeps in these sessions.

Catch up below and visit the #book-planning channel in the Discord for

— XG Reading Group 2.1: Much Badiou About Nothing
— XG Reading Group 2.2: Brassier’s Critique of Transcendental Materialism

Bye for now!

Not many plans for March right now. We will see where the conversations take us. I have been working on an utterly pointless task behind the scenes, migrating all my previous blogs (going back to 2008!) over to xenogothic dot com. I’m not sure what is to be gained from migrating all this material, going back to my late teens, onto this blog… But I had an epiphany the other day about how there is this continuous line from what I was interested in back then and what I’m interested in now.

In fact, it was reading Althusser and his “aleatory materialism” that made me feel like things had come full circle. Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter is very much related to our discussions around the new. However, applying this to aesthetics, via Jacques Rancière, takes me all the way back to my early blogging days and the DIY internet cultures when creating was itself like a dice throw with whatever materials were to hand.

We’ll see if I get that post gets finished this month. I’ll explain in there why I’ve bothered to undertake this pretty fruitless task, and I’ll probably share a few highlights in next month’s edition of the Blogger’s Digest as well.

Until then!