xenogothic

My recent reflection of Mark Fisher, nine years on from his death, has (already!) been translated into Russian over at Insolarance. It comes with the following translator’s preface:

Today marks the ninth anniversary of the death of philosopher, theorist, critic, and future-seeker Mark Fisher. Mark struggled with depression throughout his life and died tragically in 2017, leaving behind a controversial and extensive body of work, which is gradually being published in Russian (Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life, K-Punk, Postcapitalist Desire). This text by fellow researcher and Mark Fisher scholar (and author of the foreword to the Russian edition of Postcapitalist Desire) Mattie Colquhoun sums up nine years without Fisher, arguing that the only way out of a cultural depression like the current one is to act as if things could have been different.

Colquhoun cites Fisher’s “Abandon Hope,” in which he argues that constructing the future, the courage to strive for it, involves a sober and pragmatic assessment of the resources available to us here and now, alongside a reflection on how we can best utilize and increase these resources. It’s about moving — perhaps slowly, but certainly purposefully — from where we are now to something entirely different. “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,” Deleuze writes in ‘Postscript to Societies of Control.’ Hope, passivity, must recede from the political imagination, giving way to confidence, the joy that arises from the idea of a future or past thing, the cause of doubt in which has been removed. Media and cyberangelism scholar Bogna Konior also writes about something similar, about navigating a world of possibility that develops into courage in the face of present circumstances. And although Mark Fisher suffered from severe depression in his final days, whether in his office or at political events, as Colquhoun writes, Mark’s confidence in a world that could be — that would be — free was more palpable than ever.

The text is further relished by Colquhoun’s personal tragedy: her partner, Hana, was arrested by British police on August 26, 2025, for allegedly participating in a pro-Palestinian protest in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. Communicating across the prison system, Colquhoun and Hana establish a new form of life alongside each other.

The translation is provided in an abridged version, safe for publication under existing legal conditions.

Elsewhere, over on the Fotograf Zone, an excerpt from my last book Narcissus in Bloom has been translated into Czech.

My thanks to the translators for their diligence and solidarity <3

The number nine is the last numeral of the decimal system, and its associations with death and fatality are primarily based on this purely numerical (modular) function of termination. There are nine rivers of the underworld, and the mortuary aspect of the cat is indicated by her nine lives. Charles Manson’s adoption of the Beatles’ Revolution-9 (or Revelation IX) as an apocalyptic ‘family anthem’ was fully in keeping with this aspect of the number.

Alternatively, nine is acknowledged as the highest numeral, and associated with celestial inspiration (the nine muses) and bliss (Cloud-9). Nine solar planets are recognized by modern astronomy (as also by the ancient Lemurian Planetwork).

The duplicate reiteration of nine is remarkable for its theo-mystical resonances. Islam (= 99) lists ninety-nine ‘incomparable attributes’ of Allah. The Anglossic value of YHVH = 99. According to the cryptic Black Atlantean cargo-cult Hyper-C, the number ninety-nine — as dramatized by the Y2K panic — designates the cyclic completion of time.

— Ccru, “Zone Nine”

In a few days’ time, on Tuesday 13th January 2026, it will have been nine years since we lost Mark Fisher. It is hard to believe.

As I tend to do every New Year, I was revisiting some of Mark’s blogposts over the first week of January. In particular, I was reading his May 2015 post, “Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)”.

“Abandon Hope” was one of the last substantial posts Mark put on his k-punk blog. He’d stop posting two months later, roughly 15 months before his death.

There are two likely reasons why Mark stopped blogging; both may be true at once:

1. Mark was spending more time organising politically in meatspace, having already recognised that the internet he once called home was a sinking ship;
   
2. Mark was increasingly struggling with his depression.

Given his eventual death on 13th January 2017, Mark was evidently depressed towards the end of 2016, but between 2014 to 2016, he also appeared to be doing more to publicly fight back against his depression than he’d ever done before.

This fightback was felt most powerfully in Mark’s writing when depression had every reason to overwhelm him and us. The context for the May 2015 post, of course, was that month’s general election in the UK. The Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, had just lost to David Cameron’s Conservatives, who had somehow converted their disastrously austere coalition government with the Liberal Democrats into a (very narrow) Conservative majority.

It is an election I remember well (and I may have recollected it on this blog before).

I was working at Ffotogallery in Cardiff at the time — my first job after graduating from university. On showing up to work at Chapter Arts Centre on 8th May, where our offices were located, the morning mood was thick with misery. Everyone knew what was coming. Funding cuts at the community arts centre were presumed inevitable and did eventually come to pass. In January 2016, I felt them personally when I was let go from my job.

Citing precarious future funding, I remember my boss took a moment to soften the blow by reminding me that I’d already expressed plans to leave later in the year. I had been accepted onto a Master’s degree at Goldsmiths, and so, at the end of the summer of 2016, I was going to move to London to start my studies, which I hoped would be under the tutelage of Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun.

I was sad to leave the gallery and I was very worried about money — nothing much has changed there — but my future overall was looking bright. I was chasing a dream. Whether I’d read Mark’s latest post at the time or not, I can’t remember, but I do remember the hope I was clinging onto then, with no way of knowing what further pains were to come.

Ten years on from that concentrated sequence of political disappointments and real grief, hope once again feels like a fragile affect of late. But in the midst of a particularly blue January, when my mental health has once again felt fragile, I am trying my best to convert hope into confidence, in order to assuage the anxiety of another personal limbo.

Although the anniversary of Mark’s death is always a painful moment of reflection for me, I am also long overdue a return to his work. It may look like I write about little else, but it has actually been a while… And I have not been disappointed. Especially right now, what we might call Mark’s late ‘confident’ writings offer a powerful vision of the future, enmeshed in the real potentialities of what was then the present. These writings are no less pertinent, even if the world feels very different, because Mark’s struggle is timeless. What he was wrestling with was an attempt to overcome various “passive affects”, which might be felt even more sharply now than back then.

These affects are named across Mark’s last two months of k-punk posts. Alongside the confidence of “Abandon Hope”, which we’ll return to shortly, we find him trying to express more ambivalent feelings through a couple of mixes on his blog.

The first, “Look What Fear Has Done To My Body”, takes its title from the lyrics to Magazine’s “Because You’re Frightened”. The mix was shared as a tribute to Mark’s students on his ‘Popular Modernism’ module, which he taught as part of the BA(hons) Fine Art & History of Art degree at Goldsmiths (if I’m not mistaken).

Two months later, “No More Miserable Monday Mornings” was shared as a less explicit tribute, but a worthy one nonetheless. “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism” is here an adage turned inside out. In private, Mark had expressed how he came to treasure Mondays as one of his postgraduate teaching days, and so he turned this personal joy into a new mantra of post-capitalist desire.

Both mixes are sonic excursions that place the feelings to be counteracted — fear and misery — at the forefront, like two curated séances for exposing and then exorcising sad affects. But what is most sobering about these exorcisms is how clearly Mark was attempting to reaffirm some sort of emotional-engineering project for himself, in order to forestall a familiar depression.

The electoral defeat of the Labour Party in 2015 — although who can say what amount of good they would have actually done, had they won — could have devastated Mark. Maybe it did. When his essay “Good for Nothing” was published a year earlier in 2014, he was clearly gearing himself up for overdue change and an end to a politics of austerity that had followed the financial crash in 2008.

There, Mark begins by diagnosing the depression that had long stalked him. Returning to the materialist psychiatry of David Smail — who was a major influence on his 2009 book, Capitalism Realism — Mark wrote about the source of his feeling that he is “good for nothing”, and his attempts to silence the “sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together”; the voice that “isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all”, but “the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.”

Mark wanted to re-emphasise this connection, not to wallow in it, but in order to more forcefully cut the knot; depression is political, but Mark did not want to advance a depressive politics. He concludes:

We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’. The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?

What eventually came to pass in 2015 was a disappointment for all of us, even if the improvements dangled before the electorate now seem minimal in hindsight, when compared to the drastic change we so desperately need today. But it is further heartening that Mark did not (publicly) give into the sort of depression he was prone to. The negativity of his intellect intensified, but so too did his capacity for confident action.

Ever the Deleuzo-Guattarian, this intellect/action dialectic was ever-present on Mark’s k-punk blog, continuing to intensify over time, as he persistently attempted to short-circuit the alienation felt between self and society. As in “Good for Nothing”, he persistently described and critiqued the manner in which the privatisation of mental-health issues is a consequence of neoliberalism’s penchant for privatisation in general. It is certainly misleading to transform the personal effects of social conditions into nebulous folk-pathologies that let governments off the hook for the misery they cause, but the tension within Mark’s work as a whole is that thinking about the human condition in terms of health and illness is not, in itself, a bad thing to do. Neoliberalism has only perverted such an outlook, which might otherwise be agreeable to us, for its own ends. Indeed, to think more emphatically in terms of socialised health and illness is a key site of (re)new(ed) possibility in privatised times.

If there is a sharp contradiction present in this argument, it is a contradiction acutely British in nature, since our National Health Service is held up as both a bastion of socialised medicine at the same time as it is a political football and gravity well of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Since Mark was Britain’s most perceptive guide for navigating the contradictions of British culture, he had first wandered into the fray of this contradiction a decade or two earlier than most. For example, in a 2004 post about Spinoza titled “Emotional Engineering”, he writes:

In place of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ a vulgarized Kantianism and vestigial Christianity has inculcated into us, Spinoza urges us to think in terms of health and illness. There are no “categorical” duties applying to all organisms, since what counts as “good” or “evil” is relative to the interests of each entity. In tune with popular wisdom, Spinoza is clear that what brings wellbeing to one entity will poison to another. The first and most overriding drive of any entity, Spinoza says, is its will to persist in its own being. When an entity starts to act against its own best interests, to destroy itself – as, sadly, Spinoza observes, humans are wont to do – it has been taken over by external forces. To be free and happy entails exorcising these invaders and acting in accordance with reason.

One looming problem at the heart of the capitalist-human condition is that we are so riddled with invaders, we have never been more assured of our various sicknesses and ailments. We know this because we seek to name them constantly, albeit too often without investigating their root cause. Without the more granular work necessary to meaningfully diagnose our contemporary condition, all we end up doing is neoliberalism’s work for it. We do this by buying into every new social-media symptomatology presented to us like a monthly horoscope — the sort found in the back of glossy magazines that enlarge our insecurities only to sell us new snake oils to treat them.

Intervening more thoughtfully within this perverted economy of affects, we can uncover grounds for newly honed critiques. But an awareness of what fear is doing to our bodies can just as easily devastate us, trapping us in reflexivity. It is a situation that can result in the most pernicious condition of capitalist realism, which Mark termed “reflexive impotence” — “yes, [we] know things are bad, but more than that, [we] know [we] can’t do anything about it.”

Mark never took this depression for granted, even whilst he too was affected by it. Clearly he felt it too, but he refused to languish in it, all the while acknowledging just how difficult it can be to overcome. This is important, because it made Mark’s optimism hard won; it was never a whimsical flight into fantasy or delusion. He stayed with the trouble precisely because he so often felt in trouble. This is how he was able to intervene in these very British paradoxes so astutely, albeit with difficulty.

Initially, when writing Capitalist Realism, Mark tried to ‘denaturalise’ this depression with public theory. As he argued in 2010:

There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity).

But Mark’s forceful negativity was never the be-all-end-all. He insisted that we must also reaffirm our capacity to act alongside every armchair critique of what stands in our way. As such, Mark updated Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”; his version was subtly but powerfully different, and can perhaps be formulated as “negativity of the intellect, confidence of the act“.

This formula was most often put to work in Mark’s challenges to a toothless twenty-first-century ‘poptimism’. He always insisted that optimism counts for nothing on its own and must always include a negativity that is honest about the material conditions that seek to deflate us. Refusing to be deflated is not enough, because we do in fact have every reason to be so! Therefore, without an intellectual negativity, our observations all too easily align themselves with a “spontaneous unreflective … compulsory positivity” that helps no-one.

I have made this point many times before: Mark’s critics typically only see his negativity and nothing else. But contrary to this, Mark’s coupling of a “negativity of the intellect” and an “confidence of the act” is forthright and persistent. Together, they generate friction, yes, but that is better than the two poles cancelling each other out.

By way of an example, in a post from 2006 entitled “Optimism of the Act”, Mark explicates an early version of the above formula with a clarity often ignored by his more uncharitable readers. Here, Mark critiques the very mode of cultural critique he remains associated with, and also challenges the utility of theory in addressing the “cultural depression” his critics also diagnose him with:

In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless. But ‘going through the motions’ of the act is an essential pre-requisite to the growth of belief ‘in the heart’. Much as Pascal famously argued in his Wager, belief follows from behaviour rather than the reverse. Similarly, the only way out of cultural depression like now is to act as if things can be different.

This was an inversion of capitalism realism: not the reflexive impotence of ‘there is no alternative’, but an active insistence that there are alternatives right here, right now, and we can live (in) them. It is a new realism; a communist realism:

We need a new, communist, realism, which says that businesses are only viable if they can pay workers a living wage. This communist realism would reverse the capitalist realist demonisation of those on benefits, and target the real parasites: “entrepreneurs” whose enterprises depend on hyper-precarious labour; landlords living it large off housing benefit; bankers getting bonuses effectively or actually out of public money, etc.

But the concept of communist realism also suggests a particular kind of orientation. This isn’t an eventalism, which will wager all its hopes on a sudden and final transformation. It isn’t a utopianism, which concedes anything “realistic” to the enemy. It is about soberly and pragmatically assessing the resources that are available to us here and now, and thinking about how we can best use and increase those resources. It is about moving – perhaps slowly, but certainly purposively – from where we are now to somewhere very different.

So far, so Fisher. But all of this comes together with a new profundity in mid-May 2015 for Mark. His post on abandoning hope, published a few days after his argument for a “communist realism”, feels like the culmination of the k-punk dialectic, at a time when its essentiality was more obvious than ever (and it is surely even more so now). Indeed, Mark’s prior wager in 2006 that “belief follows from behaviour” returns here as a powerful new motor for political organising, which he ponders on but refuses to restrict to a rapidly waning blogosphere.

Where Mark’s legacy suffers — although it seems clear that the depths of his k-punk blog remain uncharted territory for many — is that he did not document this move into meatspace as diligently as he might have done a decade earlier. He seemed to see little value in a paper trail beyond the material interventions and improvements he now wanted to make in the lives of others.

This is what I found most moving, when I stumbled unexpectedly into Mark’s orbit at the time of his death. Having forsaken the internet on which he made his name, most seemed to think he disappeared. But to speak to those who knew him IRL, Mark may have had even more of an impact than ever before, although this was initially restricted to his family, friends and students, as well as the people he met whilst out organising.

It is what made Mark’s death so shocking. We knew he was depressed — the last time I saw him, in the admin office of the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in December 2016 — he looked a hollow man. But in the classroom or his office or at political events, Mark’s confidence in a world that could be — that will be — free was more palpable than it had ever been.

Whenever I think about this rarified Mark, I think about “Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)”. This is the passage I think about most:

“There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,” Deleuze writes in ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’. He was no doubt thinking of Spinoza’s account of hope and fear in the Ethics. “There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope,” Spinoza claimed. He defines hope and fear as follows:

Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.

Fear is a sorrow not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.

Hope and fear are essentially interchangeable; they are passive affects, which arise from our incapacity to actually act. Like all superstitions, hope is something we call upon when we have nothing else. This is why Obama’s “politics of hope” ended up so deflating – not only because, inevitably, the Obama administration quickly became mired in capitalist realism, but also because the condition of hope is passivity. The Obama administration didn’t want to activate the population (except at election time).

We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act. “Confidence,” Spinoza argues, “is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.” Yet it is very difficult, even at the best of times, for subordinated groups to have confidence, because for them / us there are few if any “future objects from which cause for doubting is removed.”

To achieve this kind of confidence, we must dedicate ourselves to new forms of action that are wholly contrary to communicative capitalism’s dilution of the social realm. Mark went in search of these things offline, and later brought back a salvagepunk blueprint of what could be built from the wreckage of the present.

He ends “Abandon Hope” with a list of ten forms of action that are essential for changing the world, beyond his own negative interpretations of it. I won’t reproduce them all here, but I do want to pause on number seven, which struck me with a new significance:

7. Engage in forms of activism aimed at logistical disruption 

Capital has to be seriously inconvenienced and to fear before it yields any territory or resources. It can just wait out most protests, but it will take notice when its logistical operations are threatened. We must be prepared for them cutting up very rough once we start doing this – using anti-terrorist legislation to justify practically any form of repression. They won’t play fair, but it’s not a game of cricket – they know it’s class war, and we should never forget it either.

As I already mentioned in my last post, my partner Hana is currently in prison for engaging precisely in this form of activism. Just as Mark predicted, they are been targeted with (a misuse of) counter-terrorism legislation, in order to justify a deeply cruel and lengthy remand. A direct-action movement that has aimed for logistical disruption (during an ongoing genocide no less) has led to new repressions heaped on the sorts of activism that this country has otherwise championed historically. It is an incredibly painful and fearsome thing to experience up close, because no one is playing fair. But this has never been a game of cricket.

What is to be done? It has admittedly been a while since I’ve had this thought, but I really wish Mark was here writing about ‘the now’, doing something about it, inspiring and gathering others as he did so effortlessly.

‘Now’ encroaches on us. I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything here for a while that doesn’t mention what were going through. In truth, it feels difficult to write anything about what we’re doing. Suffice it to say that we’re doing all that we feasibly can, but it is a situation that continues to cause me a great deal of heartache, over four months in.

Without Mark, we are our own guides to the future, and we’re making the best we can of these new roles. It’s not easy. But just as I felt my knees begin to buckle under the weight of things at the very start of this year, in going back over Mark’s writings from a decade ago, I am grateful to be reminded of the negativity of his intellect and the confidence of his actions. It is what made me fall in love with his writing, with my partner, and it is what has led us to now.

With my partner’s confident act undertaken, resulting in an extended period of enforced passivity, negativity of the intellect dominates violently. To wit, some days it feels like wild oscillations between fear and hope are all that we are left with. But there are many more confident acts at our disposal in the here and now, even if they are dwarfed by the act that has led us to this situation. Regardless, they are not “good for nothing”. On the contrary, doing what we can to preserve our confident belief in a better world, in a better life on the horizon, is essential. We hold that confidence before us right now, actively, in the light of a future that will arrive, because we will have made it.

What remains devastating about the loss of Mark Fisher is that he succumbed to his own oscillations between hope and fear. These hopes and fears, as Tariq Goddard has always insisted, were far more personal than they were political. I feel that pressure myself some days. What frightens me the most is that the relationship I cherish and hold so dear to my heart is strained by the prison system’s anti-social impositions. This is a personal battle that feels distinct from the more political fight on our hands. Yes, the personal remains political, but in terms of the affects produced, it is painful to feel that the personal is at the mercy of the political nonetheless.

How to acknowledge the political source of this fear without espousing a fearful politics? As the locomotive of 2026 pulls sluggishly out of its station, my anxiety has at times gotten the better of me. Hope is transformed into fear at the slightest provocation — is that not a good definition of anxiety, or perhaps just neurosis? The question is how to borrow a confidence from the political that can buoy the personal in turn.

Thankfully, on January 7th — the day before I started writing this post — my partner and I achieved this on the phone, and not for the first time. The cultivation of confidence is a process that requires diligent upkeep. We found it again when we spent over an hour daydreaming about what our life together might look like when this is over. We talked mostly about caring for animals, keeping bees, and growing our own food in some countryside idyll far from the pressures of city life — all joys that Hana is extracting from their prison job and hopes to continue with new purpose on the outside. Hana credits this new passion to their more eco-conscious co-defendant, Frank, who has taught them a great deal, as well as the broader community of people who work alongside them in the prison gardens, with whom they share so much camaraderie. We also talked about doing more to organise in our communities, because nothing makes you more desperate for new integrations than prison does.

In making these connections between the present and the future, an anxiety that had weighed heavy for a few days was gently lifted. Confidence was reaffirmed as we plotted all the ways that we will live more intentionally, now and then, utilising all that we have learned and will learn from this experience to found a new form of life by each other’s side.

I recall a short poem, written on the back of a drawing I received in the post from Hana on 16th October 2025:

In future memory
the prison untouches us like shadows
and we are flesh before it.

Our best phone calls make that future already present, allowing us to feel like any long-distance couple talking into the night. The confidence I am determined to cultivate in 2026 is one fuelled by the knowledge that this future memory is not a fantasy, but one that will materialise…

“… and when it does, who knows what is possible?”

It’s my birthday today. I am 34 years old. As is tradition, I’ll be making the same lame observation I do every year. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26th December 1991, it is also 34 years since the end of history.

As the years tick by, each birthday becomes a measure of distance from another world. As an adoptee, it’s a distance made especially poignant. I think about this day 34 years ago as a day when so many things were set in motion, both personally and politically. It makes for a good “individual myth”, as Lacan might say; a readymade complex that

is the product of history, the result of stories lived by others. As Lévi-Strauss explains, myth is not thought by men but rather “thinks through men” and the same holds for the neurotic’s individual myth despite its personal form. The other pre-exists the individualized person and this co-determination of the group and individual expresses itself in the paradoxical formula ‘individual myth.’

What better ‘individual myth’ to acquire as a melancholic millennial communist than a reflection on one’s birth at a moment of closure? December 26th becomes a day of co-determination, where familial dissolutions mix with more global forms to predetermine a melancholic consciousness.

This year, everything is felt more acutely. The 26th day also happens to mark one more month that my partner Hana has spent in prison, after being arrested for alleged involvement in direct action at the end of August. Today we carve another notch into the wall, inscribing the four-month mark.

I have wanted to talk about this experience so desperately, but it is impossible to know what to say. I have a persistent urge to blog every development, and when I tell Hana this, they say “I’ll not contain you.” But I feel uneasy. Nothing I might say feels complete without their voice alongside mine, but they do not want to speak. They worry about the repercussions, as do I. We write to and call each other daily, but to speak beyond our bubble is too vulnerable to bear.

We remain co-determined. They are the one in prison, but my life is also on hold. They are looking at ten months on remand, which is four more than the statutory limit, for a single charge of criminal damage. It is an unprecedented move, made by government and judiciary, that can only be explained by an authoritarian desire to break the UK’s pro-Palestine movement. But on a personal level, the cruelty of a lengthy period of remand is that it makes life impossible to plan ahead for. We have no known release date, and life does not continue without one. We sit on our hands, saying nothing. For someone who has spent the last ~19 years of their life blogging openly through various personal and political crises, it has felt unnatural to keep so schtum.

Everything is put into letters instead. Rather than write publicly, I express myself to a new audience of one. It is surprising that I now feel more comfortable writing letters, which may well be intercepted and scrutinised by the state, than I am comfortable writing online. But I prefer to write letters because I wish to feel the co-determination of this moment more directly: the moment that is being lived not so much by us but through us.

So much is coursing through us, what has been written so far is a torrent. Even at the very start of our ordeal, the writing flowed. I felt like we were building something — some monumental future tome. Four months in, we have written over 250,000 words between us. Unfortunately, whilst documenting the minutiae of this experience is one thing, to read it all is another. There is nothing digestible to extract from this outpouring. There is nothing of great significance to anyone but us within it. And yet, we acknowledge that this labour of love remains significant to all.

Perhaps Hana will extract a short book of poetry from it one day. Poetry would be all because it is obscure, and because it does not require us to show our working. The impact of this writing project is felt within us and we take ourselves out into the world so that both are changed at the intersection of individual and myth. That is where poetry lies, and similarly, it is why writing poetry makes sense in prison.

On September 10th, we were discussing Mahmood Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, where he writes:

Prison deprives one of the sight of a tree and the sea. Freedom is the imagination capable of recalling them both in prison, making the invisible visible. No, that is what poetry does. Poetry, then, is an act of freedom. It makes what is visible invisible when facing danger.

Processing this experience through the bittersweetness of our presence/absence for each other, Hana wrote to me that same day:

Prison is a density of faults and glitches when you experience it in immediacy … From inside, I find in you [the] secret focal point Darwish refers to – emitting rays and words depriving darkness of the eternity of its attributes.

In that moment, “prison density” emerged as a shorthand for what we feel daily, for what we’re dealing with, combatting it by always vying for a grace that is alien to its gravity. All we can do, when up to our necks in this density, is take each other by the hand and walk onward through it. I think of Derrida in Glas, Derrida the militant, the ‘mile-goer’:

I shall say no more about procession or method. As Hegel would say, they will speak of (for) themselves while marching.

Months pass by. The marching continues. We talk about all that we write and don’t write once again on December 17th. That morning, I receive a letter from Hana penned four days previous in a funk:

What good are these words about those quiet moments alone, sombre, but with solace? What good without you? I don’t want to share this with just anyone… I am sorry I’ve been distant this past week and that I’ve written to you less… There has been so much more empty space, I’ve been afraid to give shape to it in words, that depressive voice in my head asking what good it is for. For loving you of course!

That evening, I wrote a response about noticing but not minding this shift in our procession, which I then read to Hana down the phone:

That feeling of not knowing how to fill a void, shrouded in a cloud, only to realise that time can be filled by loving you — I know it well. Why do you think I have written to you so much? [The writing has] slowed for me too, of course… I was reading back thru our earliest correspondence yesterday… It’s so strange to see that desperation in my written voice; the frantic grasping at philosophy, a crutch in hard times. I think I reach for Deleuze in a crisis like some people reach for the Bible… “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.” I needed that then. I needed it affirmed… I needed to remind myself and you of those core principles for weathering something — Groundhog Day, pulling difference out of repetition by way of a “selective principle”, making myself worthy of you and of this. In the midst of the panic, I needed to affirm the method. Since then, I feel like I’ve reached less frequently for theory. I’ve not talked about an approach to a crisis, I’ve simply gotten on with approaching you. And I feel you near.

For all that we write to each other, there is always so much left unsaid. History unfurls before us, fueled by fear and hope. It is all the more difficult to register because of that.

Our experience right now is significant — we will be talking about it for the rest of our lives. But it is impossible to comment on how we are coping because we are not coping with it alone. Some days we do not cope at all. There are others in our orbit who cope even less, and who do not have the support networks that we cling onto for dear life. Hana speaks of missing me desperately, but inside, the pain of our separation isn’t relatable to all. Others might think having someone to miss is a privilege.

Counting even our paltry blessings soon becomes uncouth. What use is affirming the beauty found in each other when prison sharpens the edges of all that cannot be shared, on the inside, on the outside, and through the concrete skin that exists between them?

On November 28th, we were discussing Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’, which they had read inside and felt deeply moved by. “We were never meant to survive”, Lorde writes, speaking — at least in my interpretation — to the softness that nourishes existence, set across from solid death.

What survives in the fossil record is that part of each being already tough. We dig up bones, shells, exoskeletons that are already hard in life and hardened further after it. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will be chicken bones and irradiated concrete. The soft parts disappear, whether in an instant or over time.

What enables our survival in the here and now is precisely all of that activity that will not be registered in the fossil record. What enables our survival will not itself survive. It’s how I feel looking at the archive of prison correspondence amassing around me. Our poems, letters, and drawings are inconsequential when viewed from the perspective of a much larger struggle. But aren’t they all the more beautiful for that? Isn’t this archive all the more precious in its fragility? Isn’t it a humble accrual of all that helps us to survive this?

It is precious, and in being so precious, we sometimes find ourselves wishing to share it. But we can’t. We cannot bring ourselves to share the softness of this experience. It is too precious to share, and to do so might even be cruel, since it has the potential to lead others astray from hard reality. There are no words for how inhumane prison is and how difficult life has become. There are no words to describe the efforts made to sustain some beauty within it all regardless. But more than that, there are no words because it is not yet history.

When I told Hana that I was plotting to write some reflection on our co-determination, on the individual myth, on poetry and prison, on the nightmare of British authoritarianism and complicity in genocide, they were eager to add their voice. They wrote me a letter — a celebration of my birthday and the ways in which we are weathering this moment, steadfast in love, humbled in strife — but the next day, they asked me not to share it as planned. It did not matter to me either way. The original version of this post scratched an itch, but most of what is expressed within this moment is just for us.

We’ll write each other poetry for as long as it takes, and we’ll write our history when the nightmare is over. Until then, the two shall not meet. Instead, Hana suggested their contribution should be curatorial. They read the following Mahmood Darwish poem to me. “Copy this down.” Enough said…

---

Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen
to the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
has no compassion that we can long for our
beginning, and no intention that we can know what’s ahead
and what’s behind… and it has no rest stops
by the railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
toward what time has done to us over there, and what
we’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is not logical or intuitive that we can break
what is left of our myth about happy times,
nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
of judgement day. It is in us and outside us… and a mad
repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us… Perhaps
history wasn’t born as we desired, because
the Human Being never existed?
Philosophers and artists passed through there…

and the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
then passed through there… and the poor believed
in sayings about paradise and waited there…
and gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
and passed through there. And history has no
time for contemplation, history has no mirror
and no bare face. It is unreal reality
or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it.
Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!

This talk was given at ‘Making and Breaking the Rules: On Operating and Other Systems‘, the third salon hosted by The Wire Magazine at London’s Cafe OTO. The presentation was preceded by a Fluxus performance by Loré Lixenberg and Elaine Mitchener, and followed by a talk from Vicki Bennett (People Like Us).

After a request from an attendee for the full text, I’m posting it below. A heavily edited TL;DR version was published in issue #500 of The Wire and can be found on their website here.

---

When thinking about the growing influence of artificial intelligence, not only on the music industry but on music production as such, it is interesting to see how arguments for and against its use echo those made around sampling at the end of the last century. In many respects, these similarities are obvious – there are questions around authenticity, originality, formal experimentation, property rights. But the way these questions are brought together are also disappointing, as an anxiety around our capacity to think for ourselves becomes embroiled with anxieties around property rights, with the two being made co-constitutive.

Personally, I am of the opinion that the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence is little more than a black mirror, utilised too often as a convenient scapegoat to distance ourselves from the problems we’ve already been facing. AI presents us with very real problems, but rather than address these material concerns, we fall into an AI idealism. We might worry, for example, about the capacity of automated systems like ChatGPT to spread misinformation, whilst research has shown this is only because our media landscape is saturated with misinformation already. Rather than address this, our conservations slide too readily into reactionary positions that blame generalised ideas about technology itself for our all problems, and what I personally find most frustrating, in the context of the arts in particular, is that the rise of AI has led us to engage in conversations about ‘property’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’ that quickly start to sound no different from a standard liberalism.

This is particularly apparent in conversations around electronic music. To give you an example, out of numerous to choose from, I recently read Liam Inscoe-Jones’ book Songs in the Key of MP3, which seeks to canonise some sonic pioneers of the 2010s like Oneohtrix Point Never and SOPHIE, but ends with a discussion of AI music that attempts to ward off a bleak future generated by algorithms. “If purely iterative music does one day become the norm,” Inscoe-Jones argues, “then originality will become an increasingly treasured characteristic, and there are few better things for a culture to hold dear.”

But how are we supposed to measure originality, exactly? What becomes of an aesthetic sense of originality that is now framed as a return to tradition, or a return to the ‘authentically’ human? Is it ever possible to demarcate an origin or a true original, and does this have any real significance outside of property law? How does this make sense in the context of musicians, like Oneohtrix Point Never and SOPHIE, who were so enthralled by questions of authenticity and artificiality, constructed identities and the uncertainty of memory, the ways in which we can become alienated from ourselves through all of these things, for better or for worse? Artists who precisely question whether any of us are really as original as we like to think, or who enjoy both the generative and degenerative effects of technology? Who might well understand themselves already as fleshy large-language models playing around in regimes of signs?

In order to suggest how we might rethink our contemporary moment more effectively, and better understand the not-so-dissenting arguments of so-called ‘poptimists’, what I’d like to do today is reflect on a few different ways in which various writers have sought to contextualize our fascination and discomfort with cultural appropriation and derivation, all within the context of what is still tentatively called ‘postmodernism’ or ‘postmodernity’.

Postmodernism is an all-too-familiar term, of course, used as a kind of shorthand for the contradictory character of our present, which can quickly (if appropriately) lose all of its meaning when invoked superficially. Nevertheless, I want to begin by defining it as simply as possible.

The late Fredric Jameson is our best source for this, and we can immediately relate his definition of postmodernism to sampling and music production. Jameson begins his 1991 book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, by offering a distinction between modernist and postmodernist understandings of history, and relatedly, the imperatives that have constituted their different understandings of cultural development and progress.

Modernism, for starters, “thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography)”. Postmodernism, in contrast, “looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the ‘When-it-all-changed,’ as [William] Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change.”

Now, what better indication of the arrival of postmodernism into music culture do we have than this? Yes, the postmodern looks for breaks, and in the context of dance music in particular, it has found plenty to play around with.

But it’s also in this context that the paradox of postmodernity arises, further scrambling cultural temporalities. For all our hunting for breaks of a political nature, what we are struck by is how difficult they are to concretise, or what’s more, the way in which breaks themselves become ubiquitous, even normalised.

When regarding sonic breaks, which we might make analogous to the political, we can take the ‘amen break’ as an obvious example. The track from which the ‘amen break’ was sourced, as is today well-known, was an obscure 1969 B-side by Washington, D.C. soul outfit The Winstons. But it wasn’t until almost twenty years later – in 1986, when the track was featured on the inaugural Ultimate Beats and Breaks compilation – that it began to be interpolated by just about everyone, starting with Salt-N-Pepa and NWA most significantly. Plucked from obscurity, the break was only felt, then, when it was not only repackaged but bootlegged as a DJ tool, readily accessible to anyone and everyone, and even becomes fixated on, despite being curated as one break among many.

This re-contextualisation and eventual ubiquity perhaps helps illuminate what is strange about the breaks sought in postmodernity. The breakbeat is so named, after all, for its interruption of a song. Most exuberant in the context of jazz performance, in the break the band stops playing and the drummer goes off-piste, before returning to a groove. This motif, in itself, isn’t necessarily new. But what then happens when we normalise the break that has been extracted from the song? What happens when the break, the interruption, becomes a foundation, even making it interminable? A further question of interest is: How is this new methodology of break-sampling, like the black mirror of AI, already reflected of certain structures of feeling that are at work within society?

This is how Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs approach sampling in a collaborative essay later included in Reynolds’ 1991 debut, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. Beyond sticking it to record company execs and beyond the apparent democratization of technologies for music production, the “‘real’ politics of sampling”, they suggest, “may lie in [its] effects on [a] consciousness of formal futurism”, even suggesting that sampling took off as a methodology precisely because of the ways in which it reflected certain structures of feeling already present in society.

Considering the work of the late Mark Stewart, Reynolds and Stubbs argue that the “cut-up”, as an aesthetic technique, already “signifies the psychic state of being cut-up”, that is, the “destabilizing of … values [and] common sense perceptions”, such that the cut-up “reflects … what’s already happening in popular culture” at that time: “the death of the Song, to be replaced by the decentred, unresolved, in-finite house track; the brain-rotting vortex of quick-cutting in video and TV; the supersession of narrative, characterization, and motivation by sensational effects.”

But by emphasising this reflection of pop culture at large, Reynolds and Stubbs also displace where the drive to sample comes from. If we are all already cut-up, then it is not music producers who are stripping culture for parts; they are rather reflecting a process already at work in our collective (un)consciousness and trying to make good on it, even attempting to put things back together, albeit in disjointed ways that further reflect contemporary modes of subjectivation. Sample culture is, then, like two mirrors facing each, with the first iteration of this cut-up process being hard to identify. We are but cut-ups making cut-ups of cut-ups, just as a rose is a rose is a rose. Thus, with music culture already long stripped of any semblance of linear historicity, sampling is innately deconstructive (if you’ll forgive me for the Derridean reference) – that is, not destructive, in the sense it destroys something whole, but rather plays with what is already cut-up to interrogate how a sense of wholeness is artificially generated. Deconstruction thus interminably perpetuates a break that has already occurred, if only to fully extract all of the possibilities that exist virtually with it.

This is something characteristic of modern music production in general. Reynolds and Stubbs note how, in the modern music studio, “[d]ifferent auras, different vibes, different studio atmospheres, different eras, are placed in ghostly adjacence, like some strange composite organism sewn together out of a variety of vivisected limbs, or a Cronenberg dance monster.” But since this is already a methodology common to music production as such, in the sense that most recordings are not documents of a single live take, but numerous takes spliced together, what sampling does is exaggerate a breaking already ubiquitous. Sampling takes “the fictitious nature of recording even further,” not only by splicing together recordings of events that have already occurred, but by “creating events that never could have happened”, achieving a strange sort of “‘balance’ between fusion/fission, between the organic/machinic, between seduction/alienation.” A ‘balance’, that is, within the break itself, such that the break is simultaneously a bridge, but between objects that are themselves without a clear origin, like a mutant jigsaw made up of pieces from many other puzzles, with what was ‘original’ being impossible to reconstruct.

It’s worth remembering that Reynolds and Stubbs are making this argument in 1991 or thereabouts, with Reynolds’ debut published the same year as Jameson’s Postmodernism, but also two years before the publication of the first English-language translation of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, where the ghostly nature of political breaks is considered so explicitly, giving the world the concept of ‘hauntology’, which Reynolds would notably sample from and repurpose to describe a new sonic sensibility around fifteen years later in the mid-2000s – another example of a break, like the ‘amen break’, only being felt at the level of popular consciousness once it has already been spliced and bootlegged from its point of origin.

This is significant, as we should also note that this argument is being made at the height of rave’s cultural power, rather than after its apparent demise. But rather than jumping the gun, Reynolds and Stubbs are in fact describing a situation that made rave itself possible, or at least already defined its quasi-existence. This is something forgotten today whenever hauntology is invoked. Although it’s a concept generally associated with the death of rave, rave itself was always-already hauntological, in being described as a spectral or otherwise hallucinatory heterotopia out of phase with dominant culture at large. Rave culture, then, was already another world existing within this one, destabilizing prevalent norms and common-sense ideas of what constituted culture as such (at least for capitalism).

When hauntology, in the context of music culture at least, was later popularised by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2006, with a surrounding discourse eventually reaching its saturation point with the publication of Fisher’s second book, Ghosts of my Life, in 2014, it is important to remember that this was hauntology’s second coming. It was arguably an attempt to preserve rave’s hauntological essence, once it had gone mainstream, albeit with its melancholia intensified. Fisher’s interest was thus in the effects of capitalism on music culture in this way, its depressive qualities, but also ways in which the ghosts lingering on the B-sides of ‘original’ recordings later became the A-sides themselves. Here again, the break, the fugitive background process of dubbing and queering, is now in the foreground, privileged over its now-discarded source material.

This is a process common to all of postmodern culture, with the tension identified by Fisher being the way in which certain forms of fugitive music are eventually recuperated by capitalism itself – a process that has only accelerated over the decades. Here, Fisher remains indebted to the critique of capitalism advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their first collaborative work, 1972’s Anti-Oedipus. For all that book’s difficulty, a more succinct version of their argument is supplied by Deleuze in a Paris seminar he held a year earlier, where he outlines

what we call the well-known power [puissance] of recuperation within capitalism – [and] when we say recuperate we mean: each time something seems to escape capitalism, seems to pass beneath its simili-codes; it reabsorbs all this, it adds one more axiom and the machine starts up again. 

Deleuze and Guattari identify this process in the very origins of our understanding of class struggle. It is the bourgeoisie, they argue, who are in the business of defining and categorising social life, taking their own position as normative. So the bourgeoisie, first of all, defines itself as a class. But then they ask: ‘what are we to make of this hoard of plebs who live beneath us and who swarm errantly underneath our social codes?’ They realise they must necessarily define them as a class in their own right: the proletariat.

Fisher takes this understanding and applies it to the music industry itself, and even to its critical armature, being critical – even self-critical – of the role of the critic, whose job is to codify the new and recuperate what is fugitive into a more stable understanding of any given cultural moment, to place ‘the new’ back into an already-existing order of things. This was Reynolds’ contention also, with Blissed Out being a ‘nihilistic’ work of criticism, asking “whether people really do have ordered desires that are expressed clearly through style or ‘passionate consumption’”, and answering that the role of music criticism in 1991 is to stay with the trouble, stay in the break, and assert that “the only way for rock to live again” is to allow “the rock discourse [to] somehow manage to end itself – again and again. Enter gladly into an endless end.”

This is the position that inspires and is engraved within Mark Fisher’s now infamous cultural negativity, often mistaken for a cultural pessimism, as he becomes a thinker who is primarily responsible for the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Cue, in response, a host of writers who have, over the decade since Fisher’s death, thrown polemical punches at him for failing to notice the new in his midst, and who make arguments, to the contrary, that there are breaks everywhere for those with ears to hear them.

Each critic of Fisher thus attempts to identify specific breaks within the recent past that we should all remain excited about. But as we’ve already pointed out, this defiance – no matter how enjoyable it is to read – is nonetheless a core symptom of postmodernity itself, which, as Jameson argues, is defined by its desperate attempts to identify and locate breaks in the midst of a resistant structure of feeling with regards to pop culture’s increasing homogeneity.

This is the tension that Fisher’s work investigates explicitly, asking repeatedly: what are we to make of the very real and identifiable breaks of the twenty-first century – for instance, grime, the financial crash, the rise of social media, even the pandemic – in the midst of a feeling that so much of what surrounds them remains the same? What is the significance of a break within our capitalist world – and note here again that these are breaks within the world, rather than escapes announcing a new world as such – that is, breaks in a world that already feels so broken?

Other attempts were made to nonetheless challenge the popularity of hauntology, including accelerationism and salvagepunk. Although each has its own particular emphases, they still share much in common. Accelerationism, for instance, to the contrary of a political enshittification it is not associated with, was, for Alex Williams in 2008, an attempt to rescue hauntology’s cultural psychedelia from its weighty melancholia. As Williams explains on his Splintering Bone Ashes blog:

Hauntology’s ghostly audio is seen as form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. Beached as it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning, deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories etc) it is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive.

But Williams takes issue with the fact that remaining within a never-ending break can ever make good on an otherwise melancholic position, in the sense that hauntology tries to sustain a tension within capitalism’s homogenising tendencies, but is so self-aware of this fight that it gets sad about this secondary position in relation to a process of recuperation more powerful than the process of creation itself. Williams instead suggests that “we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music” against this, “which in some senses would operate in a similar manner [to hauntology, but] would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning.”

Williams suggests two ways we might achieve this: on the one hand, “[r]ather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance,” we should seek “a deliberate and gleeful affirmation” of the ways in which capitalism is capable of scrambling its own codes; on the other, “we might consider … a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecidable.”

Although a confusing set of assertions out of its temporal context, Williams’ argument isn’t that different from Reynolds’ here. Both attempt to break with a prior generation of critics, through a kind of nihilism – understood as a questioning of all values – which must be reasserted once the last generation to make this call succumbs to melancholia. Rock critics, then, on both sides of the millennium, find themselves caught between each other’s breaks. It was the task of accelerationism to knot these two positions together, both understanding the historical development of capitalism’s power of recuperation, if only to better identify the moments of the recent past and unfolding present that remain fugitive to common sonic sense.

Fisher later came around to this position, providing the best summation of the accelerationist position for e-flux in 2013, writing:

A certain, perhaps now dominant, take on accelerationism has it that the position amounts to a cheerleading for the intensification of any capitalist process whatsoever, particularly the “worst,” in the hope that this will bring the system to a point of terminal crisis … This formulation, however, is question-begging in that it assumes what accelerationism rejects – the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.

Here again we have a preoccupation with errancy and fugitivity from capitalist recuperation, but this is not a blind lust towards some future ‘originality’. If Fisher retains a certain predilection for hauntology, it was in the sense that he did not see even the past as fully neutralised by capital. He saw the role of the nomadic cultural producer as one oscillating between a popular modernism and a postmodernism, capable of intervening in a paltry sense of novelty to extract the new from what is already in the process of being recuperated. He believed that:

The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over … We can only win if we reclaim modernization.

One way in which we might do this is via what Evan Calder Williams has called ‘salvagepunk’. The best summation of salvagepunk’s relationship to culture is again found in the writings of Mark Fisher, specifically a short column he wrote for issue 319 of The Wire magazine, published in September 2010, where he considers the ways in which a more attentive consideration of certain approaches to sampling can provide “a broader context for thinking about how these methodologies deviate from their banal twin, postmodernity.” Enter salvagepunk, which, for Calder Williams,

is opposed to the “inherent flatness and equivalency of postmodern cultural production” [by] draw[ing] together (and from) the 20th century’s chief arts of reappropriation: montage … collage … detournement … and farce.

By opposition to postmodern pastiche, in which any sign can be juxtaposed with any other in a friction-free space, salvagepunk retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages. That’s precisely because salvagepunk is dealing with objects rather than signs. While signs are interchangeable, objects have particular properties, textures and tendencies, and the art of salvage is about knowing which objects can be lashed together to form viable constructions.

All three of these positions – hauntology, accelerationism and salvagepunk – thus share something in common, which is an attempt to preserve the formal potentialities still latent in objects strewn throughout the scrapheap of our crashed present. And over the last few years, it has become my personal bugbear that none of these positions has been sufficiently understood in our popular discourses, which leaves us wanting as we attempt to make sense of the functioning of AI, which – at its worst – demonstrates a rapid recuperation of what was previously always in question for sample culture – that is, the tension held not between originality and derivation, as Inscoe-Jones frames our present moment, but rather between an artist’s capacity for making decisions about the bolting-together of particular cultural forms, and a latent indecision with regards to the production of the new.

The threat of AI is that it not only emphasises this indecision – such that we relegate the act of decision-making to a machine – but also the sense in which AI, in striving for ever greater fidelity and mimesis, neutralises its own capacity for true invention. AI is, in this sense, the ultimate postmodern technology that is desperately sought by those wanting to unburden themselves of their own autonomy.

AI was most interesting prior to this moment, when it seemed incapable of this unburdening; when its errors were so much more blatant, when its outputs were incomplete without human intervention and discretion, that is, when its productions were still dominated by the frictions of its infancy, when its own understanding of what was a viable construction was skewed and challenged our own preconceptions of formal viability. AI was most interesting, that is to say, when its interventions within culture at large came from a far more marginal and inchoate position.

Here we can emphasise the point at hand. AI is not a threat to originality. As we go about trying to correct its errors and make it a monolith to ‘truth’, we are threatened in the sense that AI will neutralise what is most human in culture – our excessiveness, our irrationality, our errancy. Take the example of the Fluxus performance we have just listened to. A Fluxus score is inherently incomplete. It is a set of inputs used to generate unpredictably human outputs. We might well consider how a Fluxus score is similar to the new ‘art’ of writing AI inputs, but this equivalence can only be made right now, and perhaps not in the future, as it is hoped by many that the outputs of AI systems will be entirely predictable and verifiable. Fluxus, to the contrary, has no interest in veracity.

Returning to the break, I want to end with a brief consideration of how Fred Moten understands the break, positioning him as an integral successor to the maligned discourses so far discussed.

Moten’s interest in the break focusses on its centrality within m black performance in particular. Blackness is itself a break, he writes, since blackness “continually erupts out of its own categorization”, which is to say that blackness is only in that which

exceeds itself; it bears the groundedness of an uncontainable outside. It’s an erotics of the cut, submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory, damaged love; freedom drive.

But what happens to this freedom drive, exactly, when the break never ends, or when the break is recuperated and normalised? How do you continue to identify a break as such when it is seamlessly conjoined with the perpetual crises that surround it? For Moten, it seems the only thing to do is stay in the break, stay with the trouble, but rather than regiment the break, we must continue to make it swing.

This, for Moten, is the heart of black art: breaking is the methodology of those he refers to as “my people”, whereby another paradox may well appear before us. Sampling, after all, has long been enveloped in a politics of ownership, of property rights, just as AI training models are today. But what is owned, in the break of blackness, is not an origin. For black people in particular, what is owned is a shared experience, itself broken and made to swing, of having been owned quite literally. What comes to swing is a tension between enslavement and self-possession, with freedom and unfreedom all too often discussed in the same terms – we can think of Grace Jones’ 1985 single ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ as an especially explicit example of this tension, in being a song about chain gangs turned into a disco anthem. We might say that what is owned, then, less pejoratively, is a movement; paradoxically, what is ‘mine’ is a displacement. The tension that remains is that the break is not so much placed in ‘common ownership’, but what Moten and Stefano Harney might instead call an ‘undercommon ownership’.

For this reason, at a certain point, the source of the ‘amen break’ – its originality; its origin – becomes irrelevant, or rather, it should do. This is only really a concern for capitalism, after all, and knowledge of the break’s origin has been recuperated primarily for the sake of profit for the Winstons – or rather, their label – who own it as a piece of property. But against sampling discourse’s preoccupation with property rights, what is more difficult to describe, because of its disturbing of an undercommons, are the broader, more “formal possibilities and aesthetic implications” of sampling as a practice, quickly cutting through all proprietary prevaricating to instead consider the impact of sampling, as a form of cut-up, on a collective and creative (un)consciousness that is itself already cut-up, as well as its ability to reflect upon affects already felt within us – thus producing another kind of swing.

In the foreword to Moten and Harney’s most recent work, 2021’s All Incomplete, Denise Ferreira de Silva brings this difficult position, as it pertains to the swing of decision-making, to bear on AI explicitly. She writes:

Every decision always includes a choice of one thing among others: a choice is always also of the lesser because no one thing can meet all demands of what is called desire … [T]he algorithm, the formal deciding tools of logistical capital fails where it has to work with more than what is adequate for it to do its thing, to choose, to decide. When the input does not match the data, the process stalls … Input is data, it has a form and a purpose. It is always ready to be in relation, to make a connection … [In order] for it to work, for the algorithm to do its thing, the input needs to fit as part in the structure and be able to facilitate the procedure it is submitted to, it needs to be processable. This is the way an input cannot be a thing. It is always an object.

Here we can think of Fisher’s summation of salvagepunk, which is similarly interested in the properties of a given object, which is not a sign. Signs are interchangeable; objects, however, are excessive.

The example I think of here is an attempt to play a game of chess. I take the chessboard down from the shelf, and in laying out the board, I find that a piece of missing – let’s say a bishop. In order to continue playing the game, I rummage around for a replacement. I go into the kitchen and take a pepper pot from the cupboard and place it where the bishop should be. The structure of the game itself makes this metonymic shift possible, as it is ultimately irrelevant that the pepper pot is a pepper pot, since it now takes on a new position in the symbolic order of the chessboard. I continue with the game as planned. However, the sign – in this case, the bishop-pot – always means more than it wants to. We are thus ‘forced’ to exclude an excess in order to maintain the meaning of the bishop-sign that the pot is standing in for. We recuperate the bishop, at the level of the sign. But the pepper pot remains an object, which exceeds the new regime of signs I place it into. For de Silva, this is what is significant: “That which in the thing exceeds the parameters of form and efficacy can never enter into the process [of recuperation], unless it is already deject, reject, or just as well as dead.”

The task of a near-future AI is to eradicate this excess, either through semiotic recuperation or through discard. This is how capitalism has long functioned in its attempts to eradicate the objects – the bodies – that confuse and frustrate and even reject the system. We need only look to Israeli’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, aided by AI systems, which fights to eradicate the excesses of its colonial endeavours – the Palestinian people. This is why the only two outcomes of the “conflict”, for the decaying liberal mind, are genocide or a two-state solution: discard or recuperation. Israel functions as a recuperation for the near-eradication of the Jewish people. But there is power and force in being the dejected, rejected, and the dead.

This is the point at which hauntology intervenes, and this example isn’t so distant from our present concerns today, as the Palestinian people also constitute a culture. How a culture remains fugitive to the powers of recuperation and annihilation, which are in many instances the same thing, is the question of our age. AI, at its most interesting, exacerbates the tensions found within this presently incomplete process. The fear is that it will one day be completed. Some artists find a certain fugitivity within AI’s infancy, and this is, to a certain extent, valid. But as AI matures, it will constitute more of a threat to what we hold dear than we presently realise. Not a threat to our originality, but a threat to the very fugitivity of all those objects – human and machine – that interest us precisely because of their excess and lack of origin.

Thank you.

Today I am hosting a statement written by Tristam Adams, friend of the blog and formerly Editor-in-Chief at Zer0 Books.

Both Zer0 Books and Repeater Books have continue to stagger on, in spite of the boycotts organised against them this year (see here and here). The internal goings-on that have led to a moment of fissure — which Watkins Media has sought to avoid any acknowledgement of, ignoring both the private and (later, necessarily) public concerns of its own authors and staff — have been shrouded in obscurity.

Tristam’s statement below sheds some much-needed light on what has been happening behind these beloved but beleaguered imprints. My thanks to Tristam for his trust in wishing to host this reflection here.

---

I started working for Watkins in 2021 as Editor-in-Chief of Zer0 Books. Tariq Goddard, the then founder, publisher and EiC of Repeater Books (and previously Zer0 Books) brought me in to oversee the imprint he founded and left (along with other Zer0 founders) to form Repeater Books. I am generally quite ‘British’ in my expression, nonetheless it is perhaps appropriate for me to say here how grateful I am for his trust and faith. Thank you, Tariq.

With both imprints under the same ownership, there was certainly a risk of the pair being in competition with each other, but in practice it was harmonious. Occasionally, submissions not quite right for Zer0 found their home in Repeater, and vice versa. At Zer0, my objective was quality control. Zer0 had, in the years before 2021, pursued a volume-first approach, to such a degree that it had damaged its own reputation and market standing. I worked through approximately 80 titles, contracted by the previous EiC, with quality as priority. During and after this ‘turning the ship’ period, I contracted authors and edited for both Repeater and Zer0.

Both imprints were gaining momentum and in good financial health when Goddard was dismissed. In my view, his treatment was beyond unfair. But there is something more notable and curious here. The episode that initiated Goddard’s ‘redundancy’ was the business owner’s disagreement about the signing of an open letter in support of Palestine. Parking the painful urgency of this for a moment, two questions from a flatly financial and business perspective are apposite:

Firstly, why remove a man that had largely built two successful imprints, against the odds of trends in publishing, when Repeater was doing well?

Secondly, and from the same gilet and pinstripe POV, was it an adroit business decision in terms of optics for the investor of ostensibly the UK’s largest radical-left imprint to veto the signing of this letter?

I am a dreamer. But my imagination for a business rationale behind these decisions fails me, leading to speculation that it was either personal or political or both. After Tariq’s departure, there were ‘no plans’ to cease publishing. Staff were told how financially viable the imprint was. Then there were plans to cease commissioning new Repeater titles. Then there were plans to mothball the imprint indefinitely. Watkins’ management of Repeater has been a pattern of disingenuous and subtle ‘mismanagement’ and ‘incompetence’ – an opaque and covert project of smothering and dismantling.

Since Goddard’s ostracism and the details of the business owner’s politics and financial connections to Israel, and the resulting boycott, I have worked in a state of torsion between supporting authors (many of whom are releasing their first books), and my own ethics and politics. During this time, I was informed more than once that there were no plans for any changes at Zer0 and that the imprint remained financially viable.

My thoughts were this: We are all complicit. One cannot be pure from genocide. Complicity is always a question of degrees. I was supporting authors on the just side of politics and publishing texts with urgent humanitarian arguments – some of which have pro-Palestine sentiments (not least my introduction to the new edition of Goddard’s The Picture of Contented New Wealth). Despite the discomfort of complicity, I felt on balance it was better to give voice to arguments and causes I support rather than no voice at all in a pyrrhic and doomed attempt towards purity.

This view shifted in October when my working arrangements were changed. I’d no longer be free to contract authors independently. Instead, I’d only contract titles subject to sign off from the business owner. Editor-in-Chief in name, not practice. This change fits the pattern of the unsaid and unacknowledged strangulation that characterised Repeater’s ‘pause’. It also meant that my agency to do good, to publish and promote the causes and arguments that matter, was gone. I worked for a single frantic month under the new terms, pushing as many authors as I could into production to ensure their books would be published, and resigned.

Much of the bravery and conviction of youth is no longer with me. I’ve grown cautious, perhaps reticent. I am wary of partisanship and dogma and latterly I increasingly hold that trust, empathy, commitment, and love are the routes to good without the former’s risks of violence. Yet the irk, the smart, of being subject to dishonesty, specious manipulation or deception has not waned – only my patience. As I type this, there remains the offensive managerial guise that these imprints may continue. In some comatose sense, they do – the back-catalogue rights continue to be sold around the globe, ensuring future profit. Yet any investment or conviction for new titles from authors with urgent arguments about today has gone.

I am very proud of the authors I contracted and had the pleasure of editing. Tom White’s Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster, Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism by Eugene Rabkin, and Trav: A Novel by Taylor Burns are just some I am particularly fond of.

I feel for those I have left behind. And I feel for those I did not join sooner. Torsion, but it feels right.

An underground is, by definition, one that exists outside the mainstream of popular culture. There may be no more potent underground of listeners in the UK than those who tune into National Prison Radio. The general population can listen to some past shows and podcasts online, if they so choose, catching up on highlights. But if you want to listen live, you’ll have to find yourself a prisoner first.

Things have been quiet around here the past few months. In late August, my partner was remanded to prison after being arrested for alleged involvement in direct action. Our separation has devastated me and all writerly energies have been going into exchanging love letters.

When I received an email from Chal Ravens — whilst waiting outside the prison walls for a visit, no less — inviting me to contribute to the second volume of No Tags: Conversations on underground music culture, I initially thought I’d have to turn down the opportunity. But a few days later, a short essay poured out of me.

Maintaining connection — maintaining our relationship — is a daily challenge. Prison is more inhumane than most are able to imagine. Nevertheless, we’re getting through it as gently and as gracefully as we can, taking one day at a time. The most effective way to feel grounded is to make time for a long phone call, during which they tell me about songs they want to hear and we listen to them together down the phone.

That’s what I ended up writing about. With my partner’s approval and Chal’s editorial insights, it became something I feel really proud of. It is a reflection on music listened to together and in isolation, revolving around a comment made by Oneohtrix Point Never in a 2023 interview with The New Yorker: “The goal isn’t to thrash against disconnection … but to somehow integrate it.” We have spent the past few months trying to do exactly that. I think it’s changed both of us profoundly.

You can buy a copy of No Tags, Vol. 2 here, and there are still tickets available for the launch at the ICA on December 11th.

This was a nice surprise to see this morning (thanks to Michael Nanopoulos for the heads up). Two worlds that I did not expect to see meet, but which first met for me alone a decade ago.

When Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine, was released in September 2013, I had just moved back home to Hull after three years at university in Wales. I listened to it a lot, finding something so dissonant and captivating in its reflections on life in a nowhere town, its teenage dreams of glamorous escape. Songs like Tennis Courts and Royals are like incantations, manifesting a self-fulfilling prophecy, where fantasies of alienating oneself from humble beginnings become the fuel for stepping outside of one’s comfort zone. If the album had been released a few years earlier, I imagine I would have heard it very differently, so excited to leave Hull for new pastures, feeling like adolescence was finally over and life was truly about to begin. Instead, I listened to Pure Heroine whilst rediscovering streets I thought I’d never haunt again. It hit different.

Things were brought sharper into focus when, in late 2013, my mum suffered a psychotic breakdown. Newly paranoid and prone to violence, not wanting anyone to leave the house in case we never came back, she too fulfilled her own prophecy when I left home again in 2014. I never did go back to my childhood home, not because the door wasn’t open, but because I knew what lay behind it, and I could never put myself in that position ever again. Lorde’s debut was a surprising soundtrack to that shift in me — less defiant youth finding its own path, more traumatised escape seeking self-orphaning.

Before I made my jailbreak from the family home, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life was published in May 2014. I’d read an excerpt on The Quietus and had it pre-ordered. When it arrived, his ‘lost futures’ were felt acutely as haunted hallucinations; let’s-see-what-you-could-have-won bittersweet oscillations between hope and resentment. I remember trying to channel Fisher’s wisdom, his honest appraisals of the present, his mourning of the past, his hope for the future; his insistence that things can be different amidst a cultural landscape that insists they absolutely cannot.

It was a difficult thing to ponder at that time. What is this relationship between hope and resentment? How to affirm the former without being crushed by the latter? How to balance idealist dreams alongside informed appraisals of material conditions? Fisher’s pop-modernist purview was always a Gramscian “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” at once loving and seeking to exorcise the angel of history. How to read Fisher and listen to Lorde? How to reckon with reality and dream of entries into new worlds?

Fisher was the person I wanted to follow on my way out of the nightmare. First, I bounced between Hull and Cardiff for two years, trying to break free of family ties, before finally ending up in London in September 2016, thinking this was where I wanted to be, needed to be, if I wanted to escape from suffocating domestic traumas and build the life I wanted. I’d read Ghosts of my Life and Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun; inspired by their tandem visions, I wanted to study under both of them. When Mark died in January 2017, however, it tripped me into all that I’d sought to escape from. I’d elevated him in my mind to a last hope, and then discovered he had none left for himself. I’d primarily found Mark’s death so difficult to reckon with for that reason, but in hindsight, the experience was compounded by everything I was trying to run away from, which bit down hard on my heels after falling head first into a new kind of grief.

Later that same year, I saw Lorde perform at Alexandra Palace on the Melodrama tour. It was a deeply cathartic moment, and the world started to open out a bit again. Hope and horror were still in each other’s orbit — both in my life and on the Melodrama album especially — spinning faster and faster around each other than they ever had before. But that is why we sought out joy wherever we could find it. Joy was so precious because despair was so heavy. It has long remained so.

Fast-forward to 2025, I’m living through another nightmare, trying to maintain a relationship with my fiancé, who is currently being held in prison on remand. One of the earliest earworms they caught inside was Lorde’s song ‘Team’, head on National Prison Radio. “Livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams / And you know, we’re on each other’s team” — a sentiment shared out loud down the phone, caught between lost futures and a love that endures through an enforced pause placed upon a time we hoped to share. We are still on each other’s team. It’s the only way to survive this.

The prison system’s insertion into our lives, like some Kafkaesque entity that has kidnapped the person I love, makes our relationship feel as vital for survival as it is fragile to behold. A few weeks ago, a blue tit found its way inside my flat, and as I tried to catch it and set it free, my knees trembled to the point of collapse as I felt reality mirror my emotional turmoil. “Let me grab you tight enough to set you free, but gently enough that I do not crush you with care in the process.” That is how it feels to love someone in prison.

We have spent the last nine weeks writing each other love letters every few days, trying to keep this relationship watered and tended to. Every time I write, I worry that the love I feel and choose to share is messy, desperate and unbecoming. Then I read Lorde’s fan journal / newsletter and find a sentiment that has long fueled not just my love of blogging, but also a new approach to a relationship that I am holding onto for dear life:

Skittish of my own mess, I keep waiting for chapters to deliver themselves all sewn up with a neat ending before I tell them to you, even though I know by now the real story’s always open heart and you can’t tell it without blood gushing everywhere. Better to treat this like I do my journal, I think, scuzzy tangle of images transcribed from the whitewash, not the shore. I miss you too much.

I copy this down in a handwritten letter to my partner, and then a few days later, there’s Lorde, holding a book I wrote the introduction for just a few years ago, on the verge of another crisis (always another crisis); a book that has influenced me so much and which I have wrestled with repeatedly over the eleven years since it was first released.

It’s just an Instagram story post, I know… And everyone should read Mark Fisher! But the serendipity of it all gives me pause. I quietly approach a brief instance where I see the melding of two worlds, perhaps alien to some but oddly synonymous for me, in a Proustian manner, where an album and a book first encountered during a pivotal point in my life leave their indelible marks on memory, only to return now again, reminding me of lessons learned, not forgotten, but in need of new affirmation.

This was not the personal profundity I anticipated this morning when I woke up in my lover’s bed without them, turning unhealthily towards my phone to fill the space where they should be. Life is riddled with ghosts, with absent presences, present absences… Lorde’s Pure Heroine is one for me. I cannot listen to it because the emotions it brings to the surface are overwhelming. It is one of the ghosts of my life. I wonder what she’ll make of Fisher’s ode to the ghosts of his.

In July 2024, I spoke with Maxim Velli for an episode of the Solarpunk Manifesto podcast, and it has just gone live. We talk about blogging, the work of Mark Fisher, and how hauntology and accelerationism still have lots to offer to those thinking about our post-capitalist futures.

You can listen via YouTube above or on other platforms listed here.

In this month’s issue of The Wire (#501), Robin James has written something of a response to my contribution to the Against the Grain column in last month’s issue (#500).

It’s a bit exasperating, honestly, because the position James adopts is precisely the sort of position I was trying to critique last time when I wrote how Mark Fisher has

been transformed into a thinker primarily responsible for the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Cue, in response, a host of writers who have, since his death in 2017, accused him of failing to notice the New in his midst, arguing on the contrary that there are breaks everywhere for those with ears to hear them.

It is unfortunate that James repeats this, seemingly unknowingly, tarring Fisher with an id-pol ignorance that he didn’t suffer under. It renders James’ argument an unnecessary knot that suggests Fisher had some unfortunate blind spots, only to then utilise the same examples Fisher did to back up his position on hauntology.

Hauntology “is the name Mark Fisher and his colleagues gave to their perception that ‘what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as the lost futures the 20th century taught us to anticipate'”, James argues. But then she uses the example of Grace Jones — an artist Fisher adored from the 20th century — to somehow contradict this, when in fact it was a lack of any clear pop-cultural successor to Jones’s advances that Fisher was disappointed by. The future Jones promised didn’t arrive — do we need any more evidence of that than the fact that James has to go back to Grace Jones herself to argue inexplicably against Fisher’s own position?

Beyond this, James seeks to put more distance between Fisher’s trajectory and her own, not identifing with the ‘us’ that Fisher often speaks to. This is partly because James is American, but also because she is a “pluralist”:

In grad school, as I realised I wanted to write about popular music, I thought it was important that I take advantage of the courses on the critical philosophy of race and Africana philosophy because I needed to understand something about Black aesthetics and racial politics if I wanted to have anything meaningful to say about 20th and 21st century American popular music … There is huge value in understanding continental philosophy, feminist philosophy and non-white/non-Western philosophies to be in the same boat, institutionally: if one of us sinks, we all do.

The insinuation here is that Mark Fisher did not share this same background, but I’m sorry, that’s woefully inaccurate. No one so indebted to Deleuze, as Fisher was, would describe themselves any other way either — Fisher was a pluralist too. James does not see him as such, for reasons I don’t understand. When she claims that “the problem hauntology was invented to name just didn’t seem like a problem, especially in the context of Black Atlantic popular musics”, this ignores the extent to which Fisher was utterly immersed in discussions around the Black Atlantic at the time that Paul Gilroy published his book of the same name.

Fisher’s network of hauntologists wasn’t simply those figures who became fixated on the output of the Ghost Box record label; it included the likes of Kodwo Eshun and Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman most notably. To assume that Fisher’s milieu was ostensibly white — and it may have been predominantly so — only perpetuates the erasure of black and brown people from the Ccru itself, like Jessica Edwards.

What’s more, one of the most significant outcomes of the Ccru’s dissolution was Hyperdub Records. Label head Goodman has written explicitly how “Hyperdub started as a kind of umbrella term to talk about the electronic music of the Black Atlantic that had converged into the 90s musical singularity of jungle” — something I wrote about when discussing the malignment of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic as a core influence on the Ccru back in March this year.

Goodman even wrote on the Ccru website at the time that a “redesign of sonic reality generates genetic destratification for subaquatic martial arts, for insurgency on the distributed pod network which the AOE was installing, constituting a carceral archipelago … under the Black Atlantic.” And after Fisher’s death, he also acknowledged that there would be no Hyperdub without Fisher himself — and that’s to say nothing of how closely Fisher is associated with Burial, who was for him a prime example of the black repetitions James is arguing for, albeit immersed in a post-rave melancholia that Fisher and others saw as indicative of a 2000s ‘hardcore continuum’ — a term complementary to ‘the Black Atlantic’ — in general.

But it is most telling that James talks about Grace Jones here, since Fisher also talks about her here, here, here, and here. Jones is a near-constant reference point on k-punk, in fact, mentioned in passing so many more times than this.

For all these reasons, if James is asserting a counter-argument to my own, I simply don’t understand it. A lack of any explicit mention of the Black Atlantic in my own Against the Grain contribution shouldn’t be taken as an ignorant omission. The essay sought to speak to a plurality, condensing the content of a talk I gave at The Wire‘s Cafe Oto salon a few months earlier, which discussed the Black Atlantic at length — in print, I am left a victim of word-count restrictions, reducing a 6000-word talk to a 1000-word essay.

So let me be clear, I fully support the rallying cry James ends on:

This circulation calls together a community that collectively looks after their common creative tradition(s). Jones is reheating her own nachos, but in a way that exceeds the calculus of both European theories of repetition and capitalist enclosure.

But I think it is disingenuous to presume that Fisher would not agree, or that his sense of hauntology did not include this kind of reflection. I’ve written plenty on this myself before as well, such as here when writing about Edward George’s The Strangeness of Dub in 2023.

It makes no sense to me that Fisher can be continually used as a scapegoat, indicative of where 00s/10s music criticism went wrong, falling into some kind of myopia — that was the overarching point of my column. To me, that myopia is a product of a lacklustre readership, who skim the surface of Fisher’s popular writings and associate him, the white British man, with an ostensibly white British patriarchal culture. It does him an unnecessary disservice and only perpetuates a laziness that is inappositely attributed to his writings as a whole rather than the reductionist gloss of his work that predominates in the popular culture he despised. Fisher was explicitly interested in all the same currents as James is.

I’ve been saying this for almost a decade — this blog turned eight years old on October 10th — and I’m clearly already blue in the face about it. When I end my contribution to last month’s Wire with the accusation that “contemporary debates that choose to joust with [Fisher] also end up stuck” in discourses of the 2000s he was seeking to advance, James’ response only proves my point, I fear. We return to a discourse, hinged on Grace Jones, that is really quite similar to what Fisher was arguing twenty years ago. He was way ahead of a contemporary academia only now trying to reckon with its own privileges and blind spots.

I contend that when James says that “Jones situates herself as the steward of an artistic tradition where creative ideas circulate as something other than private property that accumulates value”, Fisher would have wholeheartedly agreed — the receipts are all linked above. The problem was that he did not see a new steward of the same pop-cultural prominence as Jones ready to pick up the mantle this side of the 21st century.

That’s not to say he didn’t offer up examples of underground artists who might be primed to take her place. He saw Moloko as one such example, but Roisin Murphy’s descent into TERFdom (or Kanye West’s descent into fascism, to offer another example) only shows how his own attempts at optimism didn’t always bear the fruit he hoped to see.

Fisher was persistently optimistic, contrary to his reputation. The problem is that, since his death, many of the examples he hung his hopes on have only confirmed that his pessimism was more prescient to others. If we make those failures Fisher’s own responsibility, we continue to ignore the crux of his various critiques. Fisher continues to deserve a better readership than those who choose to strawman him.

New ruptures in culture can be found within the wreckage of the present, argues Mattie Colquhoun

The Wire Magazine is celebrating its 500th issue this month, and inside I am making my Wire debut with a contribution to their ‘Against the Grain’ column. It’s about poptimism and post-modernism, the search for breaks (within a broken world), and why everyone still gets Mark Fisher wrong (obviously).

You can buy a copy here, where you can also read it online if you’re a subscriber.