Category: Blogger’s Digest

Hello Patreons!

Thank you so much for your patience this month. It has been quiet around here — although we did have one meeting of the reading group — but the content has been overflowing just about everywhere else.

Below, I’ll be summarising everything that has gone on this month but I’d also like to thank you for sticking with me. I would not have been able to organise these events — none of which I have been paid for, I might add — without your support.

Patreon is keeping me afloat at the moment and it means I can give time to projects like Mark Fisher’s final lectures, which I think are important but for which I’m not actually remunerated. (I did receive an editorial fee back in March 2020, but all the royalties rightly go to Mark’s family.) It is true that the response and the opportunity to build on Mark’s legacy is its own reward — we out here doing it for the culture — but I still have to eat, and your support makes my Dad bod possible.

First things first, we’ll start with the text posts and then get into the silly amount of videos and podcasts:

DOOMscrolling

The year started off on a real low, with the death of MF doom announced.

— DOOMscrolling

FarmVille

Yes, the annoying Facebook game from yore was shut down, but a short article in the New York Times highlighted that it has influenced how the internet functions more than anything else over the last decade.

— Peak Boring Dystopia: On the Legacy of FarmVille

Junk Capital

A cut-off from the current accelerationist book project, I wrote about the influence of William Burroughs on Nick Land, and how Land actually subverts his project rather than retaining any fidelity towards it.

— Junk Capital: On the Anti-Burrovian Trajectory of Nick Land

Covid Libertarianism

This was a short series of posts that began back in December 2020 with “Against Covid Libertarianism”. There were a couple of responses written to it — one that was great, one that was not so great. Catch up on that drama here.

— Covid Libertarianism and Molecular Freedom

— Covid Libertarianism and Capitalist Realism

?????????Primer

The U/acc Primer was translated into Chinese?! Madness. Check it out here:

— ?????????Primer I: Chinese Translation of the U/Acc Primer

The End of Trump

The Capitol insurrection has dominated the headlines this month and I’ve unfortunately had very little time to comment on it. But I did write two posts on what I think his disavowal could mean for politics. (Emphasis on “could” — already the pressure placed upon him has slackened.) What I think is important is that Trump’s defeat isn’t allowed to ebb out into the liberal juice-cleanse. It isn’t good enough that he’s gone — the left has to re-emphasise its commitments and not be too easily sated by a new administration. They have to cut the knot of incompetence absolutely — not just its Trumpian iteration.

— The End of Trump or the End of History

— Cutting the Knot of Incompetence

Hauntology

I have been gradually refining a definition of hauntology over the last year or so. Or maybe not refining but re-complicating. If I might toot my own trumpet, I still think the distinction I make between hauntology and hauntography is an important one, but I’ve also noticed that contemporary writing on hauntology includes a historicising impulse that further undermines the point of its critique.

— Hauntology: Where Were You Before ’92?

Hyperstition and Unbelief

Towards the end of January, the internet was going wild of the subreddit WallStreetBets, which inflated the stock value of GameStop and tanked a load of hedge funds. A few people were going on about it being hyperstitional and accelerationist. I don’t think it was, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting. I wrote about how hyperstition and unbelief function in markey economies but also in the pandemic.

— Hype(rstition) and Unbelief: On GameStop and Coronavirus

Buddies Without Organs

Sean and I also released the third episode of our Buddies Without Organs podcast. We’d recorded an episode before Christmas on control-societies but were unfortunately plagued by technical issues. Rather than recreate the magic, we decided to move on and spoke about desiring-machines instead.

— Buddies Without Organs — Episode #03

Postcapitalist Desire

And then there’s all the video content… I’ve spent so much of this month reading and prepping for interviews and I hope that everyone has enjoyed all the conversations had. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, although I’ve been surfing close to burn-out trying to make sure everything went ahead as planned.

— Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher — Hardback Out Now

Of course, all of this was in aid of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, which I edited back in March and April 2020, but which only came out physically this month on January 12th.

The response to the book has been insane. It was invariably at the top of various Amazon best-sellers lists and it was the best-selling book across the whole Watkins Media publishing arm. This accompanied the news that Mark’s first book, Capitalist Realism, is anticipated to pass 100,000 English-language sales, which — in Tariq Goddard’s estimate — probably makes it one of the most widely-read works of political philosophy from the last fifty years.

To talk about numbers and sales is surreal to most, no doubt, when the book in question is ostensibly a critique of capitalism, but such is the dynamic that Mark often spoke to. Being able to seed an anti-capitalist message throughout capitalism’s own markets is not a contradiction that is going to bring it down upon us, but it is certainly something to marvel at.

To accompany the launch, I did a shit load of press and events. The first of these was a wonderful two-and-a-half hour conversation I had with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst on the Interdependence podcast, which we recorded before Christmas.

— Postcapitalist Desire, Melancholy, Psychedelia and Mark Fisher: XG on Interdependence with Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon

A few days later, I gave a talk at the Association for the Design of History. This was an attempt to bottle some of my recent research, coming out of the accelerationist book. I was joined in the Q&A by Pete Wolfendale, who I’d never encountered before and who I’d expected to receive a frosty response from (since u/acc is a critique of left- and right-accelerationism, and the blogosphere he was otherwise a part of).

However, Pete was very receptive to it — perhaps because, as I argue in the talk, the 2000s blogosphere has garnered an unnecessarily bad rap. Yes, it ended up being a be cringe and falling into a kind of “transcendental goodboiism”, which led the 2010s blogosphere to return to the Ccru and to Land, but in returning to that period, most commentators today have conveniently forgotten the important challenges to Land’s thought that the first blogosphere introduced.

— The Philosophy of Salvagepunk: XG at the Association for the Design of History [Announcement and Abstract]

— Hauntology, Accelerationism, Salvagepunk: XG with Pete Wolfendale at the Association for the Design of History [Full video and talk transcription]

Next came the series of conversations I spent most of December organising for Repeater Books. I distilled each of the final lectures into a theme and then set about finding people to elaborate that theme with me. [Full disclosure: I invited about a dozen people to discuss “the abolition of the family” with me, but every single one had prior commitments or just didn’t respond. We didn’t announce this, obviously, but if you’re wondering why there are four talks rather than the anticipated five — one for each lecture — that’s why.]

— Post-work with Will Stronge

— Psychedelia with Dan Taylor

— Consciousness Raising with Hari Kunzru

— Desire with Dr Isabel Millar

These same themes were used when Natasha Eves and I began inviting artists and musicians to respond to the lecture for the 2021 edition of For k-punk. This was an absolute headache to organise — as it is every year. (We launched a proper web archive of all the previous years here, if you’d like to bask in the chaos.) A true labour of love, we were bounced all over the place trying to secure commissions and funding and a platform, but in the end it all worked out.

The ICA in London agreed to both host and fund this year’s event, and we curated a mega line-up, consisting of Tim Lawrence, Time Is Away, Iceboy Violet, Oneohtrix Point Never (resurrecting his Chuck Person pseudonym) and INCURSIONS. Each of the responses were broadcast back-to-back on the ICA’s Cinema 3 platform for free between 10PM and 3AM GMT — the typical hours when we’d throw our IRL afterparties.

— For k-punk 2021

Natasha, along with Kitty and Archie of INCURSIONS, also wrote an essay for Huck Magazine on the communal torch carried by these events.

— “Why we started a club night for our teacher, Mark Fisher”: For k-punk in Huck Magazine

If you missed out on the For k-punk night, we’re planning to rebroadcast the commissions on another platform at a later date, to give more people the opportunity to hear the submissions, which were incredible.

Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that For k-punk is an afterparty to the Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. We tried to organise the night in keeping with that again — the fourth memorial lecture featured Test Dept and was livestreamed the day before.

— Test Dept: Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021

Back to our regular programming…

With all of that out the way, I’m expecting things will get back to normal very quickly. I’ve already got a few posts scheduled for early February and I will be continuing my series of ‘Winter Walks’ posts, probably well into Spring, as I got a load of film developed towards the end of January and there are far too many pictures to share in one big dump.

We’ll also get back to our Patreon activities. I’d like to continue with a few more one-off reading groups whilst I finish an “Acid Communism” reader of a bunch of Mark’s lesser-known essays that I think firmly ground his unfinished project. No plans to publish that anywhere — just something for Patreons.

Then, after I’ve got that finished and we’re up-and-running, maybe we can pick a bigger text to work our way through collectively.

Until then…!

Happy New Year!

I hope you’ve all had a happy holidays. Here at Camp XG, my girlfriend and I basically been locked down with her brother and his girlfriend. It has been a cosy, sleepy Christmas.

I also turned 29, although we didn’t really celebrate it this year. Post-adoption trauma always makes my birthday a time of year where I feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit so collectively deciding to pretend it simply wasn’t happening was an interesting and surreal break with tradition that I’m actually feeling pretty good about.

Now that’s all over with, onto the 2021!

But before we properly welcome in the New Year, here’s a quick breakdown of everything posted on the blog in December 2020.

Hauntology and Salvagepunk

This was originally meant to be the intro to the previously promised Oneohtrix Point Never megapost. That post got too bloated and exploded all over me but I still liked this as a way to set the scene. It might also be an interesting way to consider hauntology in relationship to its near-forgotten cousin, salvagepunk. More on that later…

— The Magic of Relics

Political Idiocy

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty fed up with right-wing idiocy lately. It has been ever-present during the Trump era but dumb arguments made throughout the coronavirus pandemic have been grating on me more and more. The more they grate, however, the more I feel like the cracks in their logic show. So here are a few grumpy posts on how the right has wasted its political ascendency and the sooner they collapse under their own overblown hype the better.

— Trust No-One

— The Right’s Meme Illiteracy

— The Double-Edged Sword of Postmodernity: On the Trussed-Up Ideology of Liz Truss

— Against Covid Libertarianism

Christmas Music

I didn’t do so well at getting into the Christmas spirit this year. I ignored it was happening for the most part, which I tend to do every year. But the phenomena of Christmas music interestingly lost its ubiquity. Since the run-up wasn’t spent in shops or with the TV on, the only Christmas music I heard was put on on purpose by my girlfriend. To each their own, but it only made the whole thing more surreal. I ended up finding some of the seaonal music I personally associate with this time of year that bit more endearing.

— The Christmas No. 1: A Hauntological Frontline?

— Winter Songs: Christmas with Lindisfarne

Cyberpunk 2077

Have you played Cyberpunk 2077 yet? Me neither. But the whole palaver did end up feeling like a particularly cynical black mirror… A fantastic depiction of the future that failed to live up to expectations, undermined by capitalist crunch time, that limply promises to embark on a heartfelt voyage of self-improvement? Are we still talking about a video game right now?

— Gaming in a Present Future-Past: Notes on the Polygon Review of Cyberpunk 2077

Photography

I spent a lot of December out on walks around West Yorkshire — better than staying in all day. Below are some choice cuts from our excursions.

— Brontë Country II

— Winter Walks III

— Winter Walks IV

— Brontë Country III

— Winter Walks V

Merch

In case you missed it, I teamed up with Craig from the Acid Horizon podcast and Crit Drip to make some new xenogothic merch. Not one to sell a load of hypothetical designs without trying them out myself, I ordered a few t-shirts and am happy to report they look and feel great. We got caught out on the Yorkshire moors in the snow when I was taking one for a spin. Cue impromptu photo shoot:

— “Look for an Exit”: T-Shirts in the Snow

Interviews and Podcasts

Whilst reflecting on the year just gone, I realised I’d been on over a dozen podcasts over the last twelve months. I must admit, I do really enjoy just chatting shit at people, not that I find myself to be particularly coherent and lucid. Still a better writer than I am speaker.Nevertheless, I went on The Archipelago, a show broadcast of Athens’ Movement Radio, in December for a two-parter on Mark Fisher, hauntology, Oneohtrix Point Never, and some other stuff.

— Mark Fisher & Lost Futures: XG on the Archipelago

I was also interviewed by Ege Çoban for the Turkish cultural magazine Terrabayt, which I really enjoyed. (Writing > speaking, sorry not sorry.) I really liked how this came out:

— “There is a world to be transformed”: Interview in Terrabayt

Sean and I also released the second episode of Buddies Without Organs on the plane of immanence. We’d hoped to have a third episode out before Christmas but, unfortunately, technical problems meant we had to scrap it and we’ll be taking another run at it once we’re over the grief our of pod loss in the New Year.

— Buddies Without Organs — Episode #02

Misc.

In the midst of all that, I had a couple miscellaneous posts. One post I wrote whilst struggling to sleep one night and feeling like I had vertigo.

— Closed-Eye Agoraphobia

Another about D.H. Lawrence and rainbows:

— Rainbows: From D.H. Lawrence to the NHS

I posted a Patreon exclusive: a draft preface for my new book. I actually made a lot of additional headway with this over the Christmas break and it has already changed a great deal from what was originally posted. That’s how editing yourself works, I reckon. It’s only when you know something has been exposed to the scrutiny of others that you really see the lingustic flaws in it.  

— Preface to a New Project: Accelerationism and the Future of the New

And, as is the annual tradition, I did an archival run-down of all the posts worth remembering that I wrote in 2020:

— 2020: The Year in Review

Postcapitalist Desire

The launch of the physical edition of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher is almost upon us. There have already been a few reviews of the ebook version, including this new on by Phil Christman for Commonweal Magazine. I really liked how Phil pulled out Fisher’s post-punk attitude from the heart of the project itself. A really nice write-up.

— “Turning Nothings Into Somethings”: Phil Christman on ‘Postcapitalist Desire’

Repeater also ran a competition, asking people to share their favourite Fisher quotes. I picked my favourites and, although perhaps a very easy little marketing gimmick to be cynical about, it turned out to be a really nice excuse to dive back into the k-punk blog.

— Postcapitalist Desire: Repeater Books Competition Winners

What’s to Come in 2021…

Very much related to the above, January 2021 is going to be a veritable k-punk fiesta. So far, all that has been announced is the book launch for the physical edition of Postcapitalist Desire, for which I will be in conversation with James Butler, erudite co-founder of Novara Media, hosted by Housmans Bookshop.

— Postcapitalist Desire — Book Launch at Housmans Bookshop

But this is just the first event in a series that feels to me like a pretty massive undertaking… I’m pretty stressed about things but I think there is a lot to be excited about.

Note: none of the below has been announced yet, so I’d appreciate it if Patreons could keep it amongst themselves for a little while. All of the below will be announce publicly in due course but, as ever, here’s a sneak peek just for you.

Firstly, I’ve got two only tangentially related events on the horizon for mid-January. I’m going to be talking to PhD students at Leuphana University Lüneburg, discussing Fisher’s fifth Postcapitalist Desire lecture on Lyotard as part of their Cultures of Critique programme.

A few days later, I’m going to be giving a talk at the Association for the Design of History. This is going to be about Evan Calder Williams’ concept of “salvagepunk” and why I think it is the missing link between hauntology and accelerationism.

Then, Repeater Books’ k-punk festival gets under way. Following the book launch at Housmans, I am going to be hosting a series of conversations with writers and theorists, exploring the themes of Mark’s final lectures and discussing how various individuals are continuing to explore similar topics. I’ll be talking to Will Stronge and Helen Hester about the future of work and domestic realism; JD Taylor about psychedelic Spinozism and Hari Kunzru about weird fiction and consciousness raising. There are one or two participants still TBC.

These talks will take place on alternating weeknights during the last two weeks of January, right before Goldsmiths launches its alternative approach to the Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture this year. I’m not entirely sure what that is going to entail at the moment, but the details I have heard do sound very exciting…

As ever, my friend Natasha Eves and I have been organising the “after party”. But since the Memorial Lecture is happening online this year, so is our party. For this, we’ve teamed up with the London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, who are generously funding five mixes, each one again responding to a different theme from Mark’s final lectures. The participants for this include Incursions, Iceboy Violet, Tim Lawrence, Time Is Away and Oneohtrix Point Never. I am so excited for that.

It is going to be premiered on the ICA’s Cinema 3 platform first, on Saturday 30th January between 10PM and 3AM GMT. Access to this is likely to be behind a paywall but we will be broadcasting it elsewhere, for free, at a later date. (Maybe even the next day…)

Watch this space for all that!

Once that’s done with, 2021 will begin properly for me from February onwards, when I have no plans or commitments left over from 2020 to deal with. We’ll get back to the Patreon reading group and I’m hoping to also buckle down with the two books I have on the go. It’d be nice to get one of the finished for release in 2022…

Until then!

Hello! Welcome to the third XG blogger’s digest, covering the month of November.

It’s been a very busy month this month, and the blog has started to hit its stride again after the disruption of the Big Move. Though it may sound backwards, the more writing that ends up on the blog, the more stuff I have going on behind the scenes. XG is the perfect warm-up space when there’s a lot of things to think through before carving something into stone in another context.

A few IRL events don’t hurt either. For instance, there’s nothing quite like the chaos of a US election to sharpen the mind… That is probably the best place to start for this month’s blogger’s digest.

---

Political Ups and Downs

Things have settled down (somewhat) at the time of writing but the start of this month was a whirlpool of emotions. The left — broadly speaking — is going into yet another election with a weak candidate and not a lot of hope. The Democrats seemed unlikely to win and, even if they did, they seemed just as unlikely to really change anything. The right — broadly speaking — was drunk on confidence. In fact, their self-assuredness and righteousness provided an opportunity to see what it’s like for them most years. I’d be mad as all hell too, most probably, if the media paraded smug opponents in front of me every election cycle.

Nevertheless, my girlfriend and I were pretty obsessed with it all. (She more than I, actually.) We’ve spent a lot of time lately going out for long walks over Yorkshire’s moors, but she couldn’t help but check the news every 15 minutes for updates on the unending uncertainty. I was torn between her contagious enthusiasm and the internet’s general malaise. It was a fittingly pathetic end to Trump’s presidency but, at a time when I am very conscious of a collective desire that our post-COVID world be nothing like our pre-COVID one, Biden was far from an exciting prospect.

The posts I wrote over the course of those few days probably demonstrate the rollercoaster far better than I could in hindsight. I tried, in various different ways, to emphasise different strands of a present nihilistic euphoria, but I no doubt ended up looking like I was in possession of a split personality. You can follow the journey via these posts below:

• On the Eve of the Election: Notes on Deleuze and the Reterritorialising Voyage of Punk Conservatism 
  
• Beckettian Election: Notes on the Afropurgatory of Afropessimism 
  
• Politics and Joy 
  
• Melancholy and Joy
  

---

Tory Maoism

Tangentially related to all this was a brief post on Tory Maoism (followed by a response from Ed Berger). 

Whereas “the end of history” was once championed by conservative thinkers as a sign of their ultimate success against Marxist progressivism and historical materialism, it is telling that some pundits, in 2020, are explaining Tory (and Republican) incompetence by borrowing from the left’s 2009 understanding of its own failures…

• Tory Maoism
  
• Tory Maoism (Part 2)
  

---

Jeremy Corbyn and Anti-Semitism

… But what lingered most over the left’s prospects this month, highlighting the great distance left to go before the left can have any hope of enacting real change, was the continuous attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from a media that only cares about accusations of racism and discrimination when they can adversely impact the left’s electoral prospects.

Slavoj Žižek was surprisingly lucid and insightful on this terse debate in his recent appearance on the Red Scare podcast. I wrote about that here:

• Anti-Semitism and Anti-Capitalism: A Note from Žižek
  

---

Keeping Up With Hauntology

My post at the end of October on the Robert Kardashian hologram had a decent response from various corners. One such respondent was Padraig, who runs the @k_punk_unlife account on Twitter and used to be very active in the comment boxes of the original blogosphere. His response produced another blogpost on the history of photography, considering how holography fits into this technological lineage.

Padraig later replied to this post in turn and part 3 of this series got down a little deeper into how hauntology is relevant to a load of my current research, drawing on the crisis of the new that the early blogosphere first fought over as well as Enrico Monacelli’s recent article on Oneohtrix Point Never, which has further clarified a bunch of this thinking.

• Keeping Up With Hauntology (Part 2)
  
• Keeping Up With Hauntology (Part 3) 
  
• Keeping Up With Hauntology (Part 4)
  

---

Oneohtrix Point Never

Speaking of 0PN…

Back in July, when he was finishing up his latest album, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, I received a DM on Twitter from Daniel Lopatin saying he very much enjoyed my book Egress and that it had helped keep him sane during lockdown. Having long been a fan of his music, I was embarrassingly starstruck but he suggested we should stay in touch.

Fast forward to earlier this month and the release of Lopatin’s new album has had my mind racing with ideas. It has become a sort of prism through which my recent thinking has been totally crystallised. I’m not entirely sure how he has achieved this but I’m not complaining.

I reached out to Lopatin with an eye towards getting him involved in a future project and we ended up talking briefly about psychedelia, Mark Fisher, Philip K. Dick, the Ccru, anachronism, and how to keep détournement relevant in the 21st century.

This wasn’t a formal chat or anything, but I warned him it was inspiring a chonky blogpost. At his request, I haven’t quoted him directly, but for much of this month I have been tearing my hair out over a mammoth post that attempts to articulate a lot of the concerns of 21st century philosophy — from Badiou and the speculative realisms to Mark Fisher and hauntology — and how these concerns have yet to be resolved, with his latest album as a prime example of the life left in these problematics.

At present, I think this mammoth post was a case of biting off more than I could chew; I soon went from inspired hyper-productivity to cognitive constipation. As a result, I also immediately regretted hyping up something that I would not be able to satisfactorily finish any time soon. That is not to say that all is lost, however. I have an idea of breaking up my huge collection of notes into a bunch of short posts, somewhat disarticulated and sporadic but providing some thoughts that I hope might further illuminate new research and 0PN fanboying.

So far, I have written a little prelude about when I first got into 0PN’s music as a university student, and also responded briefly to Enrico Monacelli’s essay on M0PN, Mark Fisher and hauntology for Nero. (As I understand it, an English language translation is forthcoming on the Urbanomic website.) A final post, cancelling the monstrosity, has nonetheless allowed me to think properly again rather than constipate my thinking. There’ll be more 0PN and 0PN-adjacent posts soon enough. (There’s one scheduled for tomorrow actually, so look out for new stuff on the blog.)

• Vague Memories of Oneohtrix Point Never: A Prelude
  
• Less Hauntography, More Salvagepunk
  
• Scared to Live, Scared to Dream: A Concessionary Note on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never
  

---

Pop Reflections

As I waited for the 0PN blockage to dissipate, I rediscovered that writing about music is a total joy. It has gotten the creative juices flowing in other areas as well and I’m really enjoying reflecting on culture at the moment.

A further development in the settling of principles that has defined 2020 for me is that I’m realising where I sit in this whole “pUbLiC iNtElLeCtUaL” arena. I have always taken a little bit too much pride in the fact that I never studied philosophy or critical theory formally prior to 2016, when I went back to university at the age of ~26. I think this is partly because, despite having major imposter syndrome as someone who was not as well-versed in the nomenclature as others who had studied philosophy already, I felt I was better at thinking creatively rather than ungracefully deploying abstruse concepts to look clever. There is only so far you can get on learning the right philosophy opinions. If you can’t have fun with them, then what’s the point?

That is why I love Deleuze — for him, philosophy is a creative act. You would not come away with that opinion after speaking to most theory-loving graduates, who see theory as a rebellion against other forms of creative practice. But this is why the Ccru were fans of diagrams. Representing philosophy pictorially is an underrated skill — so too is unearthing philosophical insight from pop culture. 

So, it’s deploying philosophy where it doesn’t belong that gives me the greatest creative thrill, whether that is in orbit of Mr Blobby or Limp Bizkit. I love the heresy of taking my own critically-maligned cultural touchstones far too seriously.

On that note, I have felt a new drive to write about pop culture. This month, the stage was set with a post on Billie Eilish and another on the discontent of disco.

• Billie Eilish’s Pop Cartesianism
  
• Putting the “Disco” Back into “Discontent”: Between Róisín Murphy and Dua Lipa
  

---

Photography

I have previously mentioned that I’ve fallen back in love with my film camera, sharing a few film scans embedded within some of my more meandering recent posts. This month I’ve been enjoying taking photographs for the sake of it rather than just to illustrate points.

I’ve run out of black and white film now, and I’ve spent far too much money on developing services since we moved up north, but I’ve currently got a new photography post scheduled for every Saturday until the New Year excluding those that fall within the Christmas period).

• Hallowe’en 
  
• Winter Walks I 
  
• Brontë Country I  
  
• Winter Walks II
  

---

Media Appearances

Following the digital release of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher, I’ve been doing quite a few media appearances, chatting about Mark’s work and my own. Below are links to various conversations had over the last month, with more on the way.

• The Weird and the Eerie Revisited (Acid Horizon)
  
• The Archipelago (Movement Radio, Athens — archive of recording forthcoming) 
  
• Mark Fisher Revisited (Kirjandusfestival Prima Vista, Estonia) 
  
• Kit Kat Communism (Mandatory Redistribution Party)
  

---

Buddies Without Organs

Sean Pearce and I have launched a new podcast together! 

I first met Sean when I was interview by him and Lucy for their Wyrd Signal podcast what feels like a lifetime ago. Wyrd Signal is on hiatus at the moment as Lucy has recently gone back to university. Sean, however, in wanting to keep his podcast juices flowing, has struck out on his own and started a new solo endeavour called The Reeves Report, about paranormal happenings around the world. It’s excellent.

Alongside The Reeves Report, Sean asked me if I wanted to start a Deleuze podcast with him. He confessed that he had only ever read Deleuze in passing but thought a podcast might be a good excuse to do some close reading and chat about those readings with a friend who is more familiar with his oeurve. 

Cue me. And with that Buddies Without Organs was born.

The first episode was a joy to record and I think it came out really great. We’ll be recording our next episode tomorrow, in fact, and fortnightly from there on out. More soon!

• Buddies Without Organs: Episode #01: Body Without Organs
  

---

XG x Crit Drip

Craig, host of the Acid Horizon podcast, has a side-project called Crit Drip. It’s an online clothing store featuring his original theory-inspired designs, and a lot of Craig’s designs are genius. 

I’ve been a fan of Craig’s designs for a while and, after he agreed to send me a Black Metal Guattari jumper in exchange for a signed copy of Postcapitalist Desire, I decided to ask him if he’d like to do a collaboration on some Xenogothic merch designs. The results are perfect. 

At the time of writing, I have a few samples forthcoming in the post, so I’ll be blogging about them again soon, but for now you can check out the initial announcement and all of the designs via the blog below or via the XG Teespring here.

• New Blog Merch: Xenogothic x Crit Drip
  

---

Bye for now!

I still plan to have one of these ready for January 1st… If I don’t manage it, blame a whiskey-doused New Year’s. Then again, who’s going to be reading blog posts on New Year’s Day… Someone no doubt… Apologies to whoever ended up potentially disappointed.

Hello and welcome to the second edition of the XG Blogger’s Digest! 

It feels like it has been another quiet month on the blog, at least for me personally. Posts have been written but I’ve mostly been trying to find my footing again after our move to Huddersfield slammed the brakes on my usual blog momentum. I’ve also been hard at work on a few things behind the scenes — more on that below — but first things first…

---

Happy Hallowe’en!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Hallowe’en this year. I’ll no doubt be blogging my exploits imminently (once I get another few rolls of film back from the developers). It was a particularly special one for me as, for many years, I have been toying with the idea of making Hallowe’en my unofficial birthday… 

My actual birthday is the 26th December. Anyone who knows anyone with a Christmas birthday probably knows it sucks. You can’t really celebrate it with anyone, as everyone’s embroiled in their own family affairs, and there’s always a weird push-and-pull with the gravity well that is the 25th anyway. For me, I’ve found it either gets forgotten about completely or my family overcompensates for it but that just makes me a bit uncomfortable. I’d be more content with just having a “normal” birthday and just having that one day a year I can do whatever I want guilt-free without the myriad restrictions that the holidays bring.

Many years ago, I remember someone suggesting I should do what the Queen does — apparently she has her actual birthday and also a “summer” birthday. After a quick Google, it turns out she was born in April, so I suppose she’s just being a greedy git, but the idea of moving my birthday to a day that I can actually enjoy has lingered over my head for many years. I’ve often shirked off the idea because I don’t really like my birthday anyway, regardless of when it is (see: post-adoption grief). However, Hallowe’en is a day I have always steamrolled family and friends into enjoying with me and it generally becomes “my day” anyway, so making October 31st my unofficial birthday just makes sense. 

This year, that’s what I did and, frankly, it was the best. The day started with pancakes, presents (I got a chair and a rug for my new office), a walk around a graveyard and some witchy woods, before we watched copious horror movies. I think I might write something up about Spiral and Host — two movies exclusive to Shudder that felt incredibly engaged with the present (a rarity with horror films these days) that I was very pleasantly surprised by. We also carved pumpkins and ordered pizza. Honestly, just my ideal day all round. Again, pictures will follow in a week or two.

Anyway, alongside these self-indulgent birthday celebrations, it was also the night of the Repeater Books x Neon Hospice Hallowe’en takeover. I made an audio-essay on the eerie for the occasion. I think an archive of this will be made available by Repeater at some point, possibly behind a paywall, but I’ll be sharing a transcript and tracklist with Patreons here in a few days. (It’s currently scheduled to go live on Wednesday, so look out for that.)

---

Blog Birthday

Alongside my new unofficial birthday, xenogothic.com also turned 3 this month! My first post went live on 11th October 2017. When I hit “publish” on what was a melodramatic introduction to an anonymised blog space, I did not think that a few years later I’d have my name attached to it, with a couple books under my belt, and that my life would basically revolve around it. 

This wouldn’t be the case were it not for having such interesting and engaged readers, so thanks for being here.

As is tradition, I livestreamed some videogames to celebrate. You can head to the blog if you want to relive 3 hours of me starting a new game on Bloodborne.

---

Class War or Culture War

A lot of time this month was spent thinking more about the “culture wars” — not so much within their own context but at more of a distance. That’s the only way anyone will be able to get a hold on this bastard thing, I think. 

One of the book projects I’m working on at the moment considers a fleeting moment immediately prior to now, when accelerationism fell into a seemingly fatal disrepute. I’m sure I don’t need to tell any of my readers that the popular conception of accelerationism today is a mind-numbing miscomprehension but I am increasingly of the opinion that this is the result of some conscious effort on the part of some internet folks. It is very easy to recruit an army of useful idiots to a cause today than it is actually combat something for what it is.

I am, of course, aware of how conspiratorial this sounds but, as times goes on, we see very similar tactics being deployed against other “radical” schools of left-wing thought. This month, it was the turn of “Critical Race Theory”, which has been turned into a reductionist moral panic that somehow made its way to the House of Commons.

The more examples of these attacks on left-wing ideas we see, the clearer the playbook becomes — the “culture war” is nothing other than an attempt to control the conversation by over-defining the battlefield. 

This is the background against which I wanted to consider a conversation recently had in the XG Discord. At the start of this month, a post was inspired by our very own Dylan Schenker, who wrote:

Every time the question of who the working class is comes up with certain left-leaning factions it just completely neglects that we live in an information economy now and thus the definition of “productive work” is incongruent with their conception of the working class. It’s never explicitly said, but their analysis never mentions its implications on the status of personal technology ownership. Mark Fisher critiquing Mensch’s invective about leftists owning iPhones is the only example I can think of that really put it’s in clear terms

This led to a really interesting discussion around how, once again, the right controls the battlefield and, with it, the narrative around who is and isn’t working class. 

My own brief response to this discussion inspired a bit of blogging about “the precariat” and how developments in how we think about work and class — particularly the coining of new categories for new subsections of the proletariat — do not always work in our favour by clarifying our current predicaments.

This inevitably led to thinking about how a new (if nonetheless superficial) awareness of “class” has been weaponised by the political establishment, as we see the same goading of a “reactionary working class” that we saw in the 1970s. The contradictions that abound go someway towards explaining our present predicament…

— Class War or Culture War: Notes on Social Media and the Precariat 
— Class War or Culture War: A Further Note on Consciousness Raising 

Later on, this thinking leaked outwards further still into some more general ruminations of how conversations are controlled on Twitter:

— Capitalist Realism & Cancel Culture: How Theory Eats Itself 
— TERF Tactics: On Reason and being Reasonable

---

Coronavirus

I think this blogged pushback against these sorts of controlling narratives is also fed by the recent return to lockdown. 

Moving from a relatively free London, where pubbing had returned as a normal part of our social lives, to an isolating lockdown in the North has re-established a sense of isolation and mental fatigue first experienced back in March. It has also revived my thinking about the weirdness of the present.

This has meant I’ve spent a lot of time watching TV. Cue various posts about weird corona feels, as processed through my televisual consumption. Below are posts on Fear the Walking Dead, The Haunting of Bly Manor, the Caretaker’s recent virality on TikTok, and the hauntological implications of a holographic Robert Kardashian.

— Twilight of the Living
— The Haunting of Blah Manor
— Take Care, Zoomers, It’s a Desert Out There
— Keeping Up with Hauntology

---

Regaining My Footing

Alongside new quarantine measures, I’m still suffering from the “emotional motion sickness” caused by our move north. This has continued to be a major preoccupation for me this month as I try and regain my footing and I have found myself writing a lot more deliberately on the blog in response.

Prior to starting this new blogger’s digest enterprise, I had imagined I could guide you through what I’ve been doing month to month, but what I’ve been doing has been so utterly disrupted by the move as to make this feel a little moot at present. Writing about it has helped, thankfully. At the time of writing, I’m feeling the return of my mojo, but it has taken the entire month to feel better about things. 

Nevertheless, here are a few diaristic reflections on moving house and leaving what had begun to feel like home during the coronavirus pandemic — including a post about #carrotgate, which I witnessed on my last afternoon in the Big Smoke.

— The Carrot Drop 
— Touching from a Distance: Notes on Lost Footing

---

Podcasts, etc.

A large part of getting settled has been building a new office for myself. Trawling the freebies section of Gumtree has turned up some amazing surprises and my room in the new house is finally starting to take shape. This has included a new recording set-up, which has thrown me into quite the podcasting mood. 

I am late to the party on this, as I’m sure a million podcasts have begun and then burnt out already since lockdown began, but I very much appreciate the sentiment involved in producing this kind of content. Listening to others chat is a godsend right now. It feels like being back down the pub with interesting people. 

Anyway, expect more audio content over the coming months, including original stuff from me where I get to do some interviewing instead of being the perpetual interviewee, as has been the case these last few months. I’m going to be co-hosting an as-yet-untitled Deleuze podcast soon and I’m hoping to be organising something weekly / monthly via Repeater Books too.

In the meantime, here’s more of just me…

I have had a few chats with people this month. First, I was invited to chat to the Exeter Socialist Society about the work of Mark Fisher and our present moment. This meeting of the club was recorded — I’m not sure if that was just for internal use or what, but I recorded it for myself too. If they make their recording public, I’ll share it on the blog but, in the meantime, I thought my recording might be of interest to Patreons. You can listen back to the one-hour session here.

I also joined @thejaymo on his deeply wholesome web show, Come Internet With Me. Jay first invited me on last month but the move got in the way. A few episodes in, I ended up pushing him into recording it because I was so excited by the premise: surfing the internet with friends. I find the show to be so relaxing — a bit like mukbang but for very online people. We talked about tornadoes — you can watch that here.

At the time of writing, I’m waiting on two further conversations to make a public appearance. I had an excellent chat with Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou for a Greek radio station about Mark Fisher’s continued relevance to contemporary politics and I also chatted about The Weird and the Eerie with the lovely folks at Acid Horizon as well. More on those when they appear…

---

Postcapitalist Desire

Last month saw the release of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher as an eBook. This collection, which I edited and wrote an introduction for at the start of lockdown, is also scheduled for a physical release in January 2021. I received by editor’s copies ahead of that release and couldn’t help showing them off online. They’re really beautiful books — Repeater’s foray into hardback editions was something I thought might be a bit weird given the more irreverent nature of their catalogue, but they have really outdone themselves here. The design is lush and it makes this project feel really special.

You can see a few sneak peek photos I took after my initial unboxing here.

---

Behind the Scenes

Blogging has been slow(er than usual) this month but there have been a number of project I’ve been working on behind the scenes. 

First of all, January 2021 is almost upon us and, under normal circumstances, that would mean the fourth annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Visual Cultures department is already working on doing something a little different this year and I have been working with my collaborator Natasha Eves on an alternative iteration of the for k-punk after-parties. It’s early days and we’ll be keeping it under wraps for the time being but we’re both very excited about it and can’t wait to share it with everyone. Previously, we have made every effort to make the parties accessible and welcoming to all but that is, of course, limited to those in our immediate vicinity. We’re excited that, this year, we will be leaving dark clubs behind and connecting with the wider world beyond London.

I’ve also been hard at work on the Mark Fisher reading group previously announced. I am putting together a reader of Mark’s lesser known essays, all of which reflect or expand upon the arguments teased in the “Acid Communism” introduction and the recently published Postcapitalist Desire lectures. As with our main XG reading group, this will be a series of Discord discussions of Mark’s texts, providing an introduction to his thought and how it had developed since his best-selling debut Capitalist Realism. I’m hoping that this reader will have something of a double life, however. Whilst we discuss these texts together, I will also be recording some one-on-one discussions with various interlocutors over the coming months. These will later be broadcast in the new year to coincide with the launch of the physical release of the lectures and also a new multimedia venture by Repeater Books which will be launching around the same time. Again, more on that at a later date!

I was hoping we could have started this by now but it seems like others have had very similar ideas and I’m taking part in a few public reading groups over the coming months — the folks at Bristol Transformed, for instance, are holding one next week (more info here). I’m curious to see how these go first and what I can learn from them to make our own XG edition a bit more special. I’d like to be able to offer something that goes beyond these more public ventures, so we’ll wait and see what that might look like.

In other behind the scenes news, I have also been working on a couple of commissions: for ŠUM Journal on the geology of shopping malls and an introduction to Postcapitalist Desire for Culture Matters. 

---

A Final Note on Housekeeping…

The blog has a new look! The old one, which has seen me well for a couple of years now, was starting to feel a bit busy and overcrowded… Hopefully the new paired-back look is pleasing and easier to navigate, but I may still continue to tweak it over the coming weeks. If there’s anything you’d like to see or which would improve your own experience of the thing, let me know!

Also, Patreon has recently made it possible to change its tiers to your home currency rather than the default of USD$. I have changed the tiers to GBP£ for my own ease — I don’t understand what a $ is. This has technically led to a slight increase of about 30% in the cost of each tier but this will not affect anyone who was already subscribed before this change came into place in October. This will only apply to new subscribers from here on out.

---

Bye!

Thanks for reading, y’all! See you next month for another one of these.