A new project on the web, Two Bricks, is a sort of work-in-progress for sharing different people’s writings from across liberation movements.
There’s more to come, but for now you can read a letter of solidarity from Amu Gib to the Ulm 5. You can also read a short poem I wrote last October whilst waiting to go inside HMP Foston Hall for a prison visit.
I’m excited about this project. Go give it a follow wherever you plug yourself into the various circles of algorithmic hell.
One year ago today. It is strange to have said nothing at the time, on a site where almost every life event has been documented, in one way or another, for almost twenty years.
I kept a diary for the first four months or so, but every time I go back to it, I realise how raw everything was, and how vulnerable. Already, some of the first few thoughts written down by mid-afternoon on 26th August 2025 captured everything there was to say. It all started as it would tend to go on:
I am heartbroken, and for the first time in a very long time, I’m worried about what I might have to say, what I can say, what I should say. My immediate feeling, on hearing the news, is one of isolation. Perhaps it is a feeling also mirrored, or perhaps a camaraderie with their fellow action-takers is giving them strength – I hope the latter.
I wish I could be with them.
No longer willing to keep lying in bed refreshing my phone, I get up at midday and walk over to the local pub where I work a few nights a week, knowing my boss will be there. I want some company.
When I am halfway there, my phone rings, showing an unknown number. A man tells me he is calling from a custody suite in Staffordshire. He passes the phone over.
During the few short minutes we were allowed to speak, they say only that they were safe, and that they love everyone. All things considered, they sounded tired but in high spirits, like someone on TV who had just run a marathon, full of pride, providing a quick comment, but longing for rest.
They said they’d call whenever they were moved again, but I don’t know when that will be. I don’t know what they’ve been through or what they’re going through. But I know that I love them and I am proud of them.
Nothing else written down feels material. It is all raw scrambled eggs, sieved through the relentless onward march of time, grasping onto any passing sequence of words to see if they might bring about a lasting sense.
The sensation of looking back at the diaristic outpouring is like taking an old roll of film to the chemist, anticipating jogged memory, epiphany, revelation, clarity. Instead, you are presented with 35 sheets of light leaks and blur.
Back in December, there was a co-determination to say something. I went back to it today. It seems as true and worth saying now as it was then:
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.
The announcement of a new Phoebe Bridgers album arrived with dread for me. I knew I’d end up listening to it, but I didn’t know whether I’d really want to go back to the place I associate with her sound.
I enjoyed Bridgers’ 2017 debut well enough when I eventually heard it, although its second half begins to slump. Punisher, by contrast, took a while to grow on me. It was widely heralded as the pandemic album, but to my virgin ear, it was a collection of quiet and unassuming pop-rock songs that seemed to float passively on the surface of a shared malaise.
In 2020, I initially thought “Motion Sickness“, from 2017’s Strangers in the Alps, fit the zeitgeist far better than anything from the new record. It was an inescapable earworm during that year’s September — my last month in lockdown London before I fled back north. I didn’t know why I was moving away, but it felt inevitable. That inevitability was nauseating. It meant leaving all of my friends behind, and I soon came to regret it, retreating into self and writing a book about it. Appropriately, my ex and I broke up on the night I returned from a writers’ retreat, completed manuscript in tow.
The last selfie taken in the lift of my Deptford apartment block, London, 2020.
Prior to that rupture, I wrote about the hold Bridgers’ music had on me in a moment of transition. Along with Microphones in 2020, it had an autofictional quality that reflected the concerns of the first book I’d published as well. (“Autofictional” in the true sense of using the personal reflexively to question its veracity.) Everything was knowingly ingrown and twisted, but so was the world during the pandemic.
I later read that Phil Elverum (of the Microphones) heard a lineage between Bridgers and his own style of songwriting. “Poetry works better when you are grounded”, he told Pitchfork, citing Adrian Orange and Bridgers as examples of songwriters who use lyrical detail well. Grounding oneself was precisely the challenge of the pandemic years, and so the Microphones and Bridgers were perfectly aligned, both to my ears and to the times.
The more I came to appreciate this quality, the more Punisher came into view. As I assume was the case for many, the more time I spent with it, the more I felt pulled in by its subtleties. It warranted a level of attention that the pandemic had painfully delivered to all things. To this day, I am left with countless memories, achingly vivid, of listening to the album whilst driving around the West Yorkshire countryside, still adhering to social distancing. That was the situation Punisher came to soundtrack perfectly: a distanced sociality, all romantic mishaps and the dread of known endings; planting one’s own feet firmly on the ground was both necessary and nauseating when everything else felt wildly up in the air.
Two years later, in 2022, I was one-year single and living in Newcastle. Two tickets bought for a Bridgers concert in Manchester for my ex and I almost a year earlier were used by myself and a new friend, Sarah. It was a heat-fucked haze of fainting students, and the sight of one young woman wafting herself cool with a copy of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red struck me as the sort of hyper-specific detail saved from cliché by its own nicheness; the sort of detail that could show up on a Bridgers-esque song one day.
And then it was over. A year later, I pivoted out of the melancholy and never looked back. Bridgers fell out of regular rotation as the world opened up again and I found the energy to re-engage with it.
Phoebe Bridgers in Manchester, 2022.
When new single “Lost Boys” dropped in July 2026, I felt indifferent towards it. Like “Motion Sickness” and “Kyoto” before it, the song felt like the classic Bridgers lead single — a ballad given the rock treatment to break up the subdued monotony of its neighbours. I felt indifferent towards it as more of the same.
But this past weekend, when the rest of the album dropped, I stuck it on my phone right before a four-hour trip to and then across London. I had it on repeat the whole way. Like Punisher before it, Lost Weekend rewards close attention. But rather than her grounded lyricism being the primary pull, here it is the production that is so gorgeously ornate and delicate. It adds a panoramic depth that complements her songwriting. (The muffled, diegetic sounds of a New Years’ Eve party on “The Governor’s Waltz” are a highlight, for example: a detail once again jarring enough to add depth rather than strafe into cliché as it probably should.)
Initially resistant to the pre-release hype of the music press, it is hard to deny it. But it has surprised me nonetheless. With reluctant anticipation, I did not expect a new Phoebe Bridgers album to fit well into the present. At least for me, feeling that her music was fatally tied to the pandemic, the world is sp clearly different to the languor of six years ago. It is no longer Punisher‘s moment. As a result, it is not a record I still listen to. It remains stuck in the moment of its release. Thankfully, Bridgers is not in her Punisher moment any longer either.
Lost Weekend, then, resonates far more than expected. Or perhaps not. I used to think that my personal affinity with Bridgers’ music was largely an age thing — she is just two years younger than me. That’s not to say this proximity in age offers any more meaningful insight into her approach, but I do recognise Bridgers as someone of my own generation. In that, her development resonates profoundly. The “voice of generation” label is apt, and on Lost Weekend, she sings like the archetypical grief-riddled thirty-something.
But that grief — the defining emotion of her back catalogue — also comes into sharper focus here. She continues to decorate this universal emotion with personal details, but there is even more weight here. Previous reckonings — whether with her past naivety in relationships with older men (“Motion Sickness”), attending the funerals of acquaintances (“Funeral“), or random acts of violence viewed at a distance (“Halloween“) — captured that stomach-churning feeling of not fully understanding the world one is in. There is a morbid curiosity attached to this lack of understanding, of course, with Punisher‘s album cover depicting the alienating wonder of looking up at the heavens as an out-grown kid gone astray whilst trick-or-treating. It makes her earlier songs wonderfully adolescent. But they also carry the added weight of someone in their late 20s; not quite a teenager anymore, but no less shellshocked by early adulthood.
Lost Weekend hits different. It is record by someone older, more grounded, more discerning, but who has also seen a lot more of this nonsensical world. Whereas previously her songwriting wandered naturally into melodramatic fiction, now the details slip into a more affectionate hyperbole. For example, “Bobby” — a soaring love song, presumably written for partner Bo Burnham — bristles with private humour when she sings: “And if you didn’t like either one of my friends / I’d kill them, I’d kill them”.
These details are catnip to showbiz gossip columns, but they are integral for the moments of respite offered across Lost Weekend. Although her grief is still palpable when Bridgers sings about her dead father, and lingers when she slides into a more reflective resolve in referring to her cancelled engagement to Paul Mescal, what is most refreshing are those moments where Bridgers plants her feet more firmly in the present and recognises that she is happy.
These panoramic qualities of Lost Weekend — the full scope of human feeling is packed into its 50-minute length — are all wholly intentional in this regard; the track “Panorama” makes that clear enough. But the ways in which she delivers this is genuinely awe-inspiring. The album is undoubtedly her most “cohesive”, as many reviewers have been keen to note, but it is far from linear. Its fugue-like meandering through memories and emotional states has a kaleidoscopic quality I would more readily associate with a Virginia Woolf novel. The peaks and troughs are no longer simply a way to break the potential monotony of her persistently wistful tendencies; they are waves that feel more naturally tidal. “Water’s gonna flow in either way.“
I feel gratitude. A new Bridgers album resonating as deeply as it has with many was not on my cards for 2026. We have been living through a period of pop introspection that feels caged by its own interiority. I had suspected that her latest offering would compound a misery I’d much rather escape from. But Bridgers has instead shown that it is still possible to write a blockbusting record in 2026 that offers a panoramic view of an artist’s emotional landscape. Many might make an similar attempt, but given all there is to feel in the present, the results would most likely be a soup. If Lost Weekend feels no less soupy at times, it’s hard to deny its deliciousness.
Lost Weekend also arrived at another apt moment for me personally — again, the last thing I expected. I have returned to an old routine of travelling down to London every two weeks, enjoying short weekends away rather than living out of a suitcase as I have for much of the last year. It is jarring to return to a older, more relaxed but still familiar routine whilst nothing is or ever will be the same again. “The way it used to be is not the way that it is.” But there is still joy to be found in that as well. Sometimes, interruptions can be welcomed.
This weekend’s plans were scuppered by ill-health, and so the lost weekend was spent entwined in bed or on a sofa watching TV for hours on end. It was needed, and Bridgers’ panorama was projected over everything, circling my inner ear. It lent an unsuspecting clarity to everything.
The present is no less aflame with stress and grief, and the drought bedraggling the south of England compounds the sense of futility are exhausts all attempts at fighting fires. But it is heartening to ground oneself amidst all of it and land on that deceptively simple acknowledgement: despite it all, I’m happy.
That is not a reckoning I expected Bridgers’ typical melancholy to soundtrack. Nevertheless, it does so perfectly.
Crossing London by train, Amu’s parents and I chat merrily on the way to the quiet commuter town of Ashford.
The summer heatwave has not yet abated. Everywhere, grass has browned due to a “flash drought”. I am looking down at the dust kicked up by my feet, half wanting to apologise to the grass that’s been through enough, when Amu’s Mum points out the sign that reads HMP / YOI Bronzefield. We are already here.
Turning a corner, I recognise Bronzefield immediately from photographs and videos of protests during the hunger strike. My first thought was “Foucault was right” — a constant internal mantra when I was a frequent visitor to HMP Foston Hall. I have not had that thought in a while. All prisons are amorphous institutions – each one is different, with its own nuances, rules and regulations; each also echoes every other institution you can think of.
Bronzefield is “modern”, at least to my eyes — deceptively so. It reminds me of a library, a port, a hospital. It has all the generic fixtures of some sort of government building or public service. The irony, of course, is that Bronzefield is run by Sodexo, a private company, and has an entirely anti-social function. Like all prisons, it is an abomination.
For the next few hours, I will not be able to stop myself from comparing HMP Bronzefield to HMP Foston Hall. I became so familiar with the latter, visiting once a week (sometimes more) over a six-month period. That experience changed something within me drastically. I became accustomed to it, and then suddenly, I didn’t have to be there anymore.
The last time we were there was 27th February 2026. A bail hearing was held at the Old Bailey, throughout which I held my breath. When the judge proclaimed that bail was to be granted to the Moog 4, Nic – one of the four’s prison support buddies – and I went directly to Foston Hall, jumping on the first train to Derby from King’s Cross. We arrived in the evening – the first time I had been outside the prison after sunset – and stood in the rain for two hours, waiting for their release.
I recall this anecdote for Amu’s parents as we wait to enter the visit hall. The staff at the front desk are all smiles and far more personable than their northern counterparts. But we all know how much this system plays with the emotions of those doing whatever they can to support the incarcerated. I tell them about how the prison kept phoning me on that wet February night, repeatedly seeking confirmation that I was there to pick up Juno. Each time, they would offer to open up the family centre, so we weren’t stood out in the rain. They never did. After two hours, I was soaked through. It felt like one final ‘fuck you’, one final gaslight lit.
At Bronzefield, everything feels so much more relaxed. The waiting area is like that of a modern hospital (compared to Foston’s decrepit, underfunded atmosphere). But the sullen faces of other visitors are a familiar sight. The searches are also nowhere near as invasive as I was once used to, and the staff seem far less high on their own power. My photograph and finger prints are taken on entry, and perhaps it is for that reason that they pat everyone down more lightly, rather than stopping just shy of a cavity search, as they did in Derbyshire.
Bronzefield’s visit hall is enormous, like a sports hall at an inner-city school. The ceiling is high, the chairs are comfortable, the tables large. We are spaced out from other prisoners’ friends and families. Screws are not breathing down our necks. The staff are not heavily uniformed, with keys and handcuffs clattering on their waistbands. There is a café, which sells real food and serves real coffee. I can pay for it with a bank card, instead of a bag of loose pound coins.
There are first-timers, like myself, who muddle up the protocol. I arrive into the hall roughly five minutes after Amu’s parents. I suddenly realise that they don’t know what I look like. We’ve never met in person before and have only spoken a few times on the phone.
Clearly, I don’t look like many of the other visitors. Amu points at me immediately from 25 metres away and grins from ear to ear. When I arrive at their table, they give me a big hug, and flatter me: “I only realised before you arrived that I didn’t know what you looked like. I just said to myself I’ll look out for the person who looks really cool.”
It is an exchange that reminds me of the first time meeting Alan in Foston Hall’s pre-visit holding pen. Alan with the cool clothes and the amazing hair dyed three or four different colours. I think Alan was the first person to say hello that day – I felt shy – but we laughed at having already clocked each other with a look that said: “Eccentrically dressed queer person? You must be here to visit a direct actionist…”
The two-hour visit flies by, as they often do, with all four of us talking politics like we’re sitting in a pub on a Saturday afternoon. It’s a delightful visit, but I am caught off guard by how deflated I feel when it is over. Whereas visitors were the first to leave at Foston Hall, it is the prisoners who stand up first at Bronzefield. Amu is nonchalant about it all. We’re just friends, and new friends at that, but I feel an urge to linger and drag out the goodbye.
A range of emotions surge up in me like bile. It’s like there’s a wooden box in my stomach, which I haven’t opened in a while, and when the door opens to let the prisoners back out of the visit hall, the draught blows off a layer of dust and reminds me that the box is there.
My body had forgotten what it is like to have the journey in and out of prison be a part of its routine. Amu is not Juno, but my body does not know how else to respond. There was no hard goodbye, no lingering embrace, no stolen kisses, no tears, no heartfelt reassurances, no repeated I-love-yous. The only thing that remains the same is the deeply held wish that these rotten institutions would crumble. I wish they would free them all.
It is only on leaving Bronzefield that it really hits me. We talk about the prison system for some of the walk back to the train station. Prisons are not places that hold deviants; they are themselves deviant. We talk about the lack of any clarity on the rules, the arbitrary nature of its regulations, the way that you never end up talking to a staff member with any of the responsibility or authority you expect. Everything is always someone else’s job. Every problem is someone else’s problem.
I remember Deleuze’s essay on societies of control. Yes, Foucault was right, he says. But not only do enclosures echo each other’s modes of operation, they also echo each other’s crises:
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure — prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors — scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.
In light of these new forces, disciplinary structures have given way to more controlling structures. If Foucault was right about how all enclosures echo each other, then Deleuze was right when he emphasised that modern society is less about discipline than it is about control. After all, if British prisons were disciplinary institutions, you would expect the rules and regulations to be concrete and hard, demanding obedience. On the contrary, no one knows the rules, no one will tell you the rules, and the rules are always subject to change. That is control.
William S. Burroughs’ “The Limits of Control” is the key to Deleuze’s argument. I think about it often as well:
I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder — you use it … All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations.
When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will, motivation and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally.
It is telling that England so often remains the prime example for writers concerned with these sorts of contradiction, as the laboratory for imperialist control:
All modern control systems are riddled with contradictions. Look at England. “Never go too far in any direction” is the basic rule on which England is built, and there is some wisdom in that. However, avoiding one impasse they step into another. Anything that is not going forward is on the way out. Well, nothing lasts forever. Time is what which ends, and control needs time. England is simply stalling for time as it slowly founders.
The same contradictions of control, if unfettered, give rise to fascism always. Fascism, Burroughs notes, is similarly a kind of total control that may well undo itself, but also capitalism, which is more generally a measured system of control. “Force, once brought in, subverts the power of money”, he writes. Capitalism is expansionist, and when it can expand no longer in terms of its ideological advance, it turns to militaristic expansion and the cycle of warring over territories, where brinkmanship — another kind of controlling gesture — gives only the illusion of expansion. One step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back…
Burroughs argues that “no modern industrialized country has ever gone fascist without a program of military expansion. There is no longer any place to expand to — after hundreds of years, colonialism is a thing of the past.” This is only half true. The reality of colonialism’s end is felt in all attempts to newly colonise space as the final frontier. Here on earth, colonialism continues to flirt with its own impasses when concerned with the brinkmanship of markets. New technologies arise, which demand new space and new resources to be developed. Old territories are emptied and then reoccupied. Lines shift across maps in accordance with new demands.
Israel is an exception, perhaps — the final, truly colonial endeavour. Those who oppose it or expose it find themselves in control’s rotten core. It is not for nothing that these enclaves of apartheid and militarism are so often referred to as “laboratories”; techno-colonialism prefers to conduct its experiments out of sight, in far-flung places that lack scrutiny, covered over by layers of neoliberal propaganda. Soon enough, their new methods and technologies of control return to us. Those who would dare draw the public’s attention to this secretive system are tellingly locked away out of sight for years.
Burroughs concludes:
I don’t mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary. A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course. It is encouraging that some behaviour modification projects have been exposed and halted, and certainly such exposure and publicity should continue. In fact, I submit that we have a right to insist that all scientific research be subject to public scrutiny, and that there should be no such thing as “top-secret” research.
By the time we reach the station, we have all descended into silence. I reflect on how difficult it has been to regain control of my own life, not knowing what to do with it now that the pressures of supporting someone incarcerated are less demanding. But there are, of course, many others who need support — not only prisoners, but also those who continue to find themselves on the front lines of prison support.
So much has changed for us, although it is hard to see that change sometimes. This time next month, it will be one year since Juno was first arrested. That means it will have been six months since they were bailed. The time spent outside has passed far quicker than the time inside. Those first six months lasted forever. The six months after have been a blur.
For all that has changed, I realise that I still have so many feelings left unresolved. Proximity to prison is a trauma. It is very different to the experience of being inside. In fact, not knowing what the world is like on the other side of the heavy locked doors is part of the ordeal. I am not yet over it. The system’s disarray infects each person who comes into contact with it. On leaving Bronzefield, I realise just how disarrayed I remain.
Amu Gib is an amazing writer and thinker. Their incarceration has not stopped them from working. Hidden out of sight, they undertake their own research projects, exploring what they call a “material literacy”. They write in a manner that is post-structuralist without the explicitly philosophical baggage. They understand how structures intersect, and how objects are promiscuous. Indeed, matter becomes a vehicle for linking life- and death-machines, blurring all lines between nature and culture.
Amu is chlorophyll. “To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others”, Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus. Amu slides across processes of production and sifts through what is lifeforce and deathforce. Mechanisms of control and domination are made more visible in the process of writing photosynthetically.
Amu and I recently started working together on their materialist writings. I have been transcribing and editing some of what they write, in order to find a home for it on the outside. The first text we worked on has been published by the Landworkers’ Alliance. You can read it here.
Congratulations are in order for Matt Bluemink, who has recently published a new book, The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & the Creation of New Worlds. Thanks are in order too; Bluemink is kind enough to note how the book partly grew out of a conversation he and I had way back in 2021, and he engages with my work at length throughout.
Back in 2021, Bluemink and I came into contact after he suggested that an artist like SOPHIE, who had then recently passed away, was a representative of a kind of “anti-hauntology“, as a retort to Mark Fisher’s enduring writings on the slow cancellation of the future. But for me, “anti-hauntology” was just another word for “accelerationism”, and it allowed me to go back to my favourite bugbear about how most contemporary critics are still lagging behind where Fisher was at in the 2010s.
It was actually a nice disagreement to have; a cordial and productive one — a very rare thing online, even more so now than then. Frankly, it seems clear that neither of us has ever stopped thinking about all of the ideas that came out of that conversation. In fact, as I told Bluemink recently, when he offered to send me a copy of the book, our 2021 conversation was the unsuspecting catalyst that led me to meet my partner Juno, who wrote their own response to it in 2024, which first got us talking.
Suffice it to say, I owe a great deal to that conversation, but what’s most interesting right now, in reading Bluemink’s new exploration of some of these shared ideas, is that I can still see the same contradictions at work within it, which triggered our blogospheric back-and-forth last time. In fact, it is a contradiction that is all the more heightened in Bluemink’s new book. It has to do with the work of mourning.
What I never really understood about Bluemink’s argument is how an artist like SOPHIE could be held up as an antidote to “hauntology”, especially after her death. “In order to truly break free of the constraints of hauntology we must look at SOPHIE as changing the rules of the game from within”, he writes in the new book, referring to the ‘game’ of our retromanic pop-industrial complex perhaps. But if that is the aim, then how come Bluemink’s relationship to SOPHIE remains so achingly mournful?
“If it hadn’t been for her tragic death, who is to say that she may not have become the next Madonna?” Bluemink asks. (Perish the thought!) “Or rather something else entirely: a totally new kind of pop culture icon? In some ways, she already has.” And I’d agree, but this totemising of SOPHIE, to my mind, remains the most hauntological approach we could possibly take towards the pop she left behind. Far from signifying a shift away from Fisher’s sense of the hauntological, Bluemink’s deferrals to SOPHIE epitomise it for me.
That’s not to say that Bluemink is starting from a dead end, however. He’s not. The point is that neither was Fisher. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of this, but the lack of self-awareness is often telling. Fisher becomes a strawman and the distinctions that Bluemink attempts to make between Fisher’s thought and his own feel largely superficial to me.
What I think this highlights is the entanglement of hauntology and accelerationism that I tried to make the case for back in 2021. We’re five years on from that moment, of course, and my thinking has both changed and deepened since then. To be honest, I reckon I’ve got a book in me about all of this as well. This post is bordering on turning into one… It’s a proper ramble, of the sort I haven’t undertaken in quite a long time… So buckle the fuck up, I suppose.
Critics of Mark Fisher still don’t really understand the context that “hauntology” emerged from. I tried to rectify this in the introduction to the reissue of Ghosts of My Life from 2022. I wrote about this last year as well, after reading Liam Inscoe-Jones’ similarly poptimistic Songs in the Key of MP3, and again in issue #500 of The Wire.
I thought these essays were clear enough, but they were still misread, or perhaps they haven’t been read that widely at all. To be honest, I feel like people just can’t let go of the caricature of Fisher that haunts cultural criticism to this day. He’s too useful as a scapegoat and strawman. It’s regrettable.
Ultimately, to reduce Fisher’s argument to simply being the “pessimistic” idea that contemporary culture constantly reiterates the past is woefully inaccurate, but it is nonetheless the popular understanding that has stuck and is now trotted out constantly. It unfortunately makes an appearance in Bluemink’s new book as well.
What was Fisher’s position, which no one seems to acknowledge? He was fated to constantly repeat it, as am I. He insisted in 2010 that his work
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).
Fisher’s position is therefore more nuanced than he is given credit for. I have previously compared it to the “salvagepunk” modality of Evan Calder Williams and China Miéville, for example, which I think is a better way of framing the hauntology/accelerationism couplet. Fisher continues:
The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
This was Fisher’s position, and it is one reflected in the work of someone like SOPHIE. She too sought a (trans) reclamation of modernity. Fisher’s argument, then, wasn’t that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor did he think the past should be off limits to us. Rather, what he thought was that we have been largely subordinated to a spectacle that is reiterative. Not wholesale; not entirely. But this is a major component of contemporary capitalist hegemony. AI is obviously exacerbating this right now especially. But that’s not hauntology! On the contrary, that’s postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson referred to it. Against this, what we need to do is take the past and make it new!
Fisher’s infamous example of how not to ‘make it new’ was the Arctic Monkeys’ “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, where what was weird about the past — an episode of the Old Grey Whistle Test, in the Monkeys’ example — is made familiar through nostalgia and so exists within the present without producing any sort of tension with it.
That lack of tension between past and present was a core element of postmodernity for Jameson and Baudrillard. Hauntology, for Fisher, was something else. “Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts”, he wrote in 2008, “but one of its role[s] is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.” Hauntology was an antidote — we will return to this suggestion later.
More specifically, in the context of mid-00s music cultures, hauntology referred to a swell of invention and innovation that wasn’t simply the return of or a return to the past, but rather a name for a particular socio-technological moment that was inadvertently inventing new ways to inhabit the past and also inventing new pasts to inhabit. This wasn’t altogether intentional. It was a quality of a specific post-Y2K moment; a sort of cybergothic tendency (digital ghosts) noticed by a network of writers, who found that the Internet was changing our relationship to the past and thus unsettling a neoliberal sense of (end-of-)historicity.
Just as popular culture — particularly the terrible ‘indie’ cultures in orbit of 2005 — demonstrated a moribund postmodernism that lacked futureshock and innovation, this was coupled with the observation that new technologies were making our relationship to the past newly participative as well. What disappointed Fisher wasn’t that no one was engaging in new modes of cultural participation, undermining subordination to the Spectacle, but rather that it has been left only to an avant-garde that did not have the same sort of impact on popular culture that he had become accustomed to as a member of the post-punk generation.
There were exceptions — there always are. In fact, Burial was one! His 2007 album Untrue was nominated for the following year’s Mercury Prize, after all. My first contact with Burial was on 2008’s official Mercury Prize compilation, and it massively stood out alongside the likes of The Last Shadow Puppets, Laura Marling, Elbow, even Radiohead.
As a cross-section of the year’s “best” British music, a lot of the tracks are notably mournful. “These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you”, Laura Marling sings on “Ghosts”. “You can’t take it with you”, sings Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s “Reckoner”. “There’s a hole in my neighbourhood / Down which of late I cannot help but fall”, sings Guy Garvey on Elbow’s “Grounds for Divorce”, from their album The Seldom Seen Kid, which would ultimately win that year’s top prize.
There was something in the air; something in the water. But Burial’s “Ghost Hardware” hit different amongst this showcase of bittersweetness. An interesting choice to include — “Archangel” is the track from Untrue that has since become ubiquitous — it felt like a commentary on the compilation itself. It features a vocal sample from Andy C talking about the Metalheadz label: “That record, that record, this mix / You know, it all clicks together“. So did most of the tracks on the Mercury Prize comp, and Burial seemed to be the only one to see that coalescence, which he took a scalpel to.
The mournful qualities of “Ghost Hardware” thus functioned as a sort of black mirror set against all these other tracks, synthesising their collective atmosphere and turning it in on itself. It was the only track that actually connected to a past since eclipsed and thus shone a light on why these wistful songs were having such a moment. Indeed, “Ghost Hardware” took all these feelings and newly located them in a post-rave material context, whereas everyone else seemed oddly cleft from whatever had come before, showing instead how the ghosts and holes weren’t simply in hearts or down streets, but were built into the system’s hardware. This is what made Burial’s Untrue a kind of exorcism for the ghosts in the Y2K machine. It doesn’t have lyrics as explicit as the indie fodder, but for that reason it stirred up a structure of feeling far more effectively.
Things didn’t stay this way. The ‘hauntological moment’ can only really be contained to the years 2003-2008, before then have a revenant return from 2011-2014, when the Occupy movement failed to bear any fruit. (The release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica and The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, both in 2011, encapsulated this for me at the time; the publication of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life in 2014 was a bookend to all of it, not an origin point, as he had already fully embraced accelerationism by that time.)
Nevertheless, after the financial crash, something changed. The difficulty of naming that change isn’t hauntology’s fault, of course, but our constant deferral back to a moment that most of hauntology’s engineers moved on from suggests that, at the very least, we’re not totally cleft from the problems they first identified.
My position remains the same as it ever was in that regard. It’s not simply the case that “hauntology” named a condition we’ve yet to cure, but rather that we’ve woefully misunderstood what it meant and intended to do. We’ve failed hauntology; it hasn’t failed us. Indeed, the fact that we’ve reduced “hauntology” to the thing it first set out to critique, whilst continuing to reiterate the same arguments to the contrary that Fisher and others made twenty years ago, should be far more damning of contemporary critique’s impotence than many can bring themselves to accept.
For example, if Bluemink’s position differs from “hauntology”, it is in the way similar to that of Alex Williams, who first argued back in 2008 that:
Set against [hauntology] we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music, which whilst in some senses would operate in a similar manner, would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning.
This, it seems to me, is what Bluemink wants to pursue also — an aesthetics crucially bereft of the quality of mourning. But Bluemink isn’t nihilistic about anything — in the sense of trying to unsettle all contemporary values, as Ray Brassier did with regards to sonic culture in “Genre is Obsolete”. Instead, he proposes an explicitly positivistic aesthetics of pop music (which is why he defers to Bernard Stiegler over Derrida, more on whom later).
The problem as I see it is that, in still struggling against an inaccurate definition of hauntology, his work ends up being more mournful that it intends to be. But there’s nothing wrong with that. The work of mourning is essential. I just think we must face up to it rather than disavow it whilst doing it anyway.
In that sense, the grief that underlies hauntology — and most critiques of hauntology — is stuck in its own stage of denial. If we really want to overcome it, it’s necessary we expand on all this, so let’s once again return to the moment of hauntology’s emergence in order to better understand what it hoped to do and what it was up against. In particular, we need to better appreciate how “hauntology” wasn’t an impotent reflection on post-Y2K grief, but was rather a participative mode that engaged with this mid-00s structure of feeling far more productively than it is often given credit for.
It is not for nothing that “hauntology” was christened after the inauguration of the Ghost Box record label. Founded in 2005 by Julian House and Jim Jupp, the pair began releasing would-be soundtracks to lost media under their respective aliases, The Focus Group and Belbury Poly.
Much of their output looked like newly unearthed library records previously lost to time. For the unfamiliar, library records were albums and compilations of tracks created specifically for film and television studios, which developed in-house record libraries featuring all genres of music, which they then used to soundtrack their various productions. Although ubiquitous, this typically wasn’t music you could buy in shops.
Nevertheless, you’d hear it everywhere. You might not have been able to name song titles or artists, but you’d almost certainly heard plenty of library music regardless. And you knew it, because a lot of it was weird. Delia Derbyshire’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop remains the best example of how this kind of muzak was weird and experimental — and she also bucks the trend of anonymity that most library record producers operated under. As a result, Will Pritchard argues that library music “embodies something of a paradox: it is functional music, churned out to satisfy faceless briefs, yet still regarded as some of the most authentically creative and expressive sounds committed to record.” As such, library records later became collector’s items in their own right.
Since library records had been made redundant in the age of popular music licensing, Ghost Box became a multimedia project imagining an alternative universe where the tradition persisted, albeit inverting Pritchard’s paradox, such that what was once strictly functional was now functionless, and newly advertised not to film and TV studios but to the masses. The result was a library music capable of
conjuring another world (Britain of the sixties and seventies as imagined by Thomas Pynchon perhaps) where a socialist bureaucracy undertook a version of situationist psychogeography.
This was how Fisher described Ghost Box’s output in January 2006. In fact, Fisher had been one of the first to take an interest in the label, as he saw them as kindred spirits to the British blogosphere at that time.
The blogosphere was, of course, constituted by a loose network of writers all with their own personal websites, writing about whatever they pleased. Although this is arguably the most common use of the Internet today, since social media is nothing but a network of microblogs, early contributors to the blogosphere were among some of the first to use the Internet in this way. Prior to the homogenising ascendency of the big social-media platforms, these writers all shared a fascination with the Internet as a new space for DIY cultural production, and were particularly enamoured by the web’s potential utility as a vast archive, where all the ephemera of cultures past could be uploaded and afforded a radically new accessibility.
Case in point: DIY forms of cultural production — which were previously synonymous with the most basic materials and championed for requiring little skill to join in with, like zine-making — had been quietly revolutionised by the Internet. This wasn’t lost on anybody at that time. Speaking personally, I was doing an A Level in Media Studies in 2008, and I was already an active blogger. My “coursework” amounted to producing a “digital zine” — a PDF circulated on a blog, which reflexively looked at how the Internet was changing zine culture. As it became increasingly more likely that people would have access to a home computer rather than a home Xerox machine, this meant that the cyberpunk (or digipunk) world Fisher and Ccru dreamt of wasn’t an outlier or a hyperstitious future dream any longer, but a pervasive reality.
If I parenthetically quibble with the word “cyberpunk” here, it is to acknowledge Fisher’s attempts to distance himself from it also. Bluemink writes about cyberpunk as a dystopian literary genre that Fisher remains associated with from his Ccru days, and this is used to emphasise his pessimism, but he wasn’t so interested in its dystopic sensibilities. As he wrote in 2005:
The term k-punk came out of Ccru. ‘k’ was used as a libidinally preferable substitution for the California / Wired captured ‘cyber’ (the word cybernetics having its origins in the Greek, Kuber). Ccru understood cyberpunk not as a (once trendy) literary genre, but as a distributive cultural tendency facilitated by new technologies. In the same way, ‘punk’ doesn’t designate a particular musical genre, but a confluence outside legitimate(d) space: fanzines were more significant than the music in that they allowed and produced a whole other mode of contagious activity which destroyed the need for centralized control.
Ghost Box fit in well alongside these newly networked developments. Fisher recognised, for instance, “that Ghost Box is about a positive amateurism, where amateurism doesn’t designate a failure to be professional so much as a deliberate deviation from how things are supposed to be done.” It was this attitude in particular that the blogosphere naturally aligned with, not simply because its denizens were sentimental about aesthetic forms synonymous with the past, but because the Internet presented a new way of engaging with older modes of pop-cultural and subcultural production.
Fisher also noted how this was a quality previously associated with television (for his generation at least):
The classic serials of the seventies produced a world you felt a part of, a sense of inclusion to which ‘wobbly sets’ somehow contributed. The professionalism and glossiness of current TV, by contrast, locks you out, subordinates you to Spectacle.
Web 1.0 – ‘wobbly’ in its own right – rekindled an interest in this amateurism. The blogosphere recognised just how different a more contemporary technological landscape now was by comparison, but with forgotten pasts resurging to find new footing in the present, owing to the flourishing of an online ‘archive fever’, Ghost Box became a fitting vehicle through which their generation could interrogate the present’s various points of tension — its various continuities and discontinuities — with the recent past.
This focus on participation is important. It is a core aspect of deterritorialization, after all. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, they write that to ‘deterritorialize’ is
to participate in a movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold [into] a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.
This is what Ghost Box was doing with twentieth-century audio-visual culture. Their “library music” was deterritorialized from libraries and TV shows alike, allowing the form to come undone from its prior associations, whilst nonetheless continuing to evoke what made library records so special and weird. Even the label’s name was fascinating in this regard. It transformed a ubiquitous modern medium into something newly paranormal. As Fisher wrote in 2005: “At one level, the Ghost Box is television itself, or a television that has disappeared, itself become a ghost, a conduit to the Other Side, now only remembered by those of us of a certain age.”
Sure enough, in also recognising themselves as part of the Ghost Box generation, many of Fisher’s peers felt similarly about the aptly named label’s output. Simon Reynolds soon joined in with the adulation for the label as well, writing:
this is serious audio-madeleine bizniz, flashing back to a bygone England that was at once shabbier and seedier than the present one, but also more glamorous and strange.
Their relationship to memory was Proustian in this regard; not simply nostalgic. The Ghost Boxers — producers and listeners alike — were semiological apprentices, and the “deterritorialized flux” that arose as a result was effectuated by Ghost Box’s soundtracks to non-existent media, to screen memories. In undoing the library function, Ghost Box represented a deterritorialized approach to audio-visual culture.
Bluemink talks about this function of deterritorialization in his new book as well, using a definition from Manuel DeLanda that is very similar to Deleuze-Guattari’s own. This, Bluemink writes,
is what happens when cultural forms, especially in relation to music, are pushed to their limits. Perhaps that is exactly the point that certain commentators [*waves*] are making when comparing anti-hauntology to accelerationism. However, I wouldn’t consider the artists I’m discussing to be inherently accelerationist (although there are surely parallels). What producers like Arca are doing is taking, morphing, shifting, and reconnecting disparate aesthetic elements together in creative ways that escape the kind of hauntological spectres of the past that Fisher was wary of.
But again, if that isn’t hauntology — since the spectres have supposedly (and inexplicably) been exorcised — then that is accelerationism. But the question sidestepped is: which spectres being escaped here? Fisher and SOPHIE’s spectres certainly haven’t been circumvented. But spectres are not simply images of or from the past either; our futures can appear spectral as well. This was the tension at the heart of hauntology — a pseudo-scientific name for a sort of digital communion with so many ghosts. The hauntologists were all scientists of sound, tinkering with spectrograms to reveal that is otherwise hidden within the present. They rallied behind Ghost Box; they might as well have rallied behind the likes of Drexciya, as Kodwo Eshun did.
Point being, spectralization and speculation are perhaps two perspectives on the same issue here. Speculation is opposed to predication; ghosts are themselves images no longer predicated on a materiality. Ghost Box, then, was also speculative, precisely because its records were shorn of their predication upon an ultimate destination or utility. They were also “taking, morphing, shifting, and reconnecting disparate aesthetic elements together in creative ways”. In fact, that’s arguably the definition of speculation as well, at least as someone like Hegel would have it.
Let’s stick with this tension between spectralization and speculation a little longer, by considering how other ’00s sonic currents were dealing with their uneasy entanglement.
Consider, for example, how this unsettled “nostalgia” for past forms of media wasn’t a strictly English phenomenon; it had its American counterparts too. In 2006, Mike Powell highlighted Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti as an example, whose sound on his 2002 album House Arrest “is solely that of a degraded ideal”, or else “a mold, a footprint, a negative, a series of suggestions that function independent of the ideal.”
For decades, pop music had kept pace with the latest advances in recording technology. Undergoing its own industrial revolution, as the studio became a utopic enclave of future-sound cultivation from the 1960s onwards, pop was increasingly associated with a flawless sonic polish that always strove to epitomise the present, and as such, had come to increasingly homogenise it as a non-participative spectacle. The blogosphere had no issue with this in principle – at least in the sense that this perspective might be seen as old men grumbling reactionarily at clouds – but they took note of pop music’s newly deformed mode of the popular, which had shifted from the accessibility of its production to the accessibility of its consumption.
By contrast, Ariel Pink’s sound imagined a world where the accessibility of pop music’s production had continued; where the likes of Daniel Johnston or R. Stevie Moore, in thrall to the contradictory lo-fi maximalism of the Beach Boys or the Beatles, were not outsider artists but megastars, writing infectious pop hits in bedrooms, recorded to 4-track tape. In continuing this style of music into the twenty-first century, Ariel Pink highlighted in negative how this kind of lo-fi pop was even stranger now than it previously had been, retooling past potentials as another way to escape the capitalist present. (Enrico Monacelli’s book on lo-fi remains the best examination of this tendency for my money.)
This was, in Ariel Pink’s own words, “hardcore pop”. Alternatively, a few years later, David Keenan would dub this approach “hypnagogic pop” – a “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory”. Emerging in the 1990s and left somewhat shellshocked by the new millennium, it was a kind of garage pop that fetishized “the outmoded media of its infancy”, often being released on cassette tape in the age of CDs and digital downloads. It also demonstrated a “combination of innocence and experience”:
its drive is to restore the circumstances of early youthful epiphanies while reframing them as present realities, possible futures.
It is worth noting that Ariel Pink has since become associated with the more reactionary potentials of this mid-00s modernism. It is important to note because this more American current was also of a different order to its English cousin, so forgive the detour as we parcel this out a little further.
In passing, Powell later compares the affective degradation of Ariel Pink’s tape deck sound to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. Basinski’s album famously consists of short tape loops, set in motion for sometimes an hour or more, recorded in such a way that he was able to sonically capture the process of the tape’s own disintegration.
Passing through his reel-to-reel machine, the magnetic tape that encompassed each dusty and near-forgotten recording (as it was duplicated and presumably digitised) began to flake and fall apart. The music produced was thus a long meditation on short refrains decomposing in real time, like snippets of Satie’s “furniture music“, except this furniture had since sunk down into a new terrain, like The Backrooms.
Already deeply moving in its own right, Basinski’s project was further mythologised by the urban legend that he had first listened back to the results whilst watching the World Trade Centre collapse on 11th September 2001. A decade later, Basinski recalled that moment as follows:
This was the end of the world … and we were literally sitting up on the roof all day and into night watching without believing as NYC burned, and listening to the heartbreaking Disintegration Loops … I thought … it’s the soundtrack to the end of the world … I had been assigned the job without knowing the details, it was done, and here we are … The Greatest Show on Earth, Armageddon. We were all literally losing our minds in terror, each person looping onto what holds him or her together … clinging to that which could provide some kind of release or explanation … just as each of the individual melodies in the Disintegration Loops did … at their own pace, seeming to hold onto that which made the melody unique, while letting go of the unimportant sustains or gently adding rests incrementally before the downbeat … it really blew my mind.
Although Powell’s comparison is fleeting, it is nonetheless a telling one. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, America’s avant-garde was beset by a freak-folkish ‘return to innocence’. Basinski is an important corollary here; he captured the moment of disintegration from which this new innocence would emerge. Although Basinski and Ariel Pink are stylistically very different, it is important to note how other bands in their orbits emerged from America’s various noise scenes, each taking on a newly psychedelic approach to pop motifs in post-9/11 America. The likes of Grouper (an occasional tourmate of Basinski’s), Animal Collective, or Joanna Newsom even broke through to achieve relative mainstream success.
Other musicians, like Bradford Cox, known for his projects Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, were notably also bloggers, sharing bedroom demoes and studio notes on personal websites scattered across a democratised Internet. I was especially obsessed with Cox’s blog in the late 2000s, and his haunting track “Children’s Hospital”, whilst drawn from very real experiences, still resonates with America’s more generally disturbing relationship to its own sense of pop-cultural “childhood”.
The respective styles of all of these musicians differed greatly, but even what was shared – an aesthetic naiveite or innocence, in particular – was markedly different to what was shared by their British contemporaries. This was no doubt because, following 9/11, there was a very clear reason why white America especially was pining for an imagined and more idyllic past, which was nonetheless viewed through the geopolitical corruptions of the present.
Things were different, as they often are, for the black music of the mid-2000s. Consider J Dilla’s 2006 album Donuts: its similarly fetishistic relationship to the seven-inch “donuts” that Dilla sourced many of his samples from; his fascination with the library records of Raymond Scott. That record related to the past-futurism of corporate America in a way far more comparable to the approach of the Ghost Box label than anything made by America’s hypnagogic popists.
Nevertheless, the hypnagogic qualities of the ’00s freak-folk scene remain interesting. They represented the new sound of America’s ‘invisible republic’, albeit temporally disjointed. It was the sound of a ‘new, weird America’, which Greil Marcus had previously associated with Bob Dylan and his Basement Tapes – recordings made throughout the 1960s in a secluded basement studio in Woodstock with The Band, which were mythologised in a way that allowed this archive of demoes take on a similar sort of “library” quality.
Later (officially) released to the public, a decade after they were initially recorded, Marcus compared the sprawling collection of rehearsal and demo tapes to Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music: “an elaborate, dubiously legal bootleg, a compendium of recordings” unearthed from the 1920s and ’30s, “originally released on and generally long forgotten by” various major record labels.
Marcus notes how the Anthology “was the founding document of the American folk revival”, reconnecting artists of the 1950 and ’60s with their forgotten forebears. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes ended up having a similar function, albeit with all sense of the passage of time newly constricted, capturing a transitory moment out of sight, when Dylan was in the process of synthesising the past before subsequently “going electric”. The Basement Tapes, in this regard, capture some of the work of mourning, which we’ll turn to soon, I promise…
Poignantly, Marcus notably describes all of these recordings as “ghosts”, adding that, whilst their “presence is undeniable; to most [they were] also an abstraction, at best a vague tourism of specters from a foreign country.” To the contrary, he insists that, rather than being abstractions, these ghostly recordings allowed a generation of folksingers to reconnect with a past all but erased by whatever the major record labels had allowed their audiences to remember. It may have been a past that remained largely intangible, but these folk traditions also became recorded history rather than mere mythology.
Marcus continues that this mythology had previously been utilised to
cut Americans off from any need to measure themselves against the idealism – the utopianism, the Puritans’ errand into the wilderness or the pioneer’s demand for a new world with every wish for change – Americans have inherited.
The same can be said of contemporary poptimists, it must be said. I’d argue they rail against Fisher not because he was pessimistic, as they mistakenly claim, but because his negativity requires that same measuring of an idealism against our material reality. That’s what Burial and The Caretaker did, albeit in different modes. Their foregrounding of a superseded analogue materiality — the prevalence of digitised vinyl crackle, most obviously — was one way in which a new materialism poked holes in a twenty-first-century capitalist idealism.
SOPHIE did something similar, albeit inverting this tendency somewhat as well. By synthesising her sound palette to produce novel sounds that were without imaginable object, her immateriality further heightened and mutated a pop idealism. This isn’t a quality of perforation we should shy away from, no matter the modality used to elicit this sensation, precisely because these are all generative processes. Their ‘negativity’ defamiliarises signs (signifiers and signifieds). It makes both past and present weird again as well. For hauntology, this negativity was intentionally devoid of the pioneer’s demand for a superficial novelty; in SOPHIE’s case, the weird was reconjured through an exacerbation of a ’90s / ’00s bubble-pop superficiality taken it to its limits. One followed the other, but they are not as opposed as many make them out to be.
In all cases, what is disturbed and rejected in a sense of fixity. This is what Greil Marcus rejected also when discussing the new weird America. By “fixing” some notion of a “free America, the true America, in the past”, he argues that an American pop-cultural hegemony had since neutralised what made the past so “weird”. The resurgence of the past inside the present disrupted this. It was a form of disruption that might well be referred to as a “hauntological continuum”, naming a sensibility shared across the Anthology of American Folk Music, Dylan’s Basement Tapes, and — we might provocatively add — Dilla’s Donuts, Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Burial, and yes, even SOPHIE. In this sense, the references or aesthetic particulars shouldn’t be the focus; what mattered was their unmooring from any fixed origin point.
There is more to be said about why an American hypnagogic pop differs from a British hauntology. I think it is important that each engages with a distinct national unconscious. The differences are very subtle at times, but they are vital. Nevertheless, putting these geopolitical contexts to one side, what is shared across the Atlantic is the manner in which the British and American scenes of the 2000s began producing contemporary recordings that sounded like a New Anthology of Pop Music – an invented treasure trove of forgotten sensibilities; a treasure trove capable of reconnecting the present to the past.
To reiterate: what made these sounds so weird was the fact that they were simulacra sounds without origin, placing past and present newly in tension with one another. From Ghost Box to Ariel Pink, what was conjured was an invented past. Unlike the Arctic Monkeys, who made ‘new music’ that was retro without marketing itself as such, the hauntological sounds of the 2000s was consciously engaged with the past in a way that was paradoxically more inventive and generative.
I’m probably biased, but if British hauntology was more generative and has since (somewhat ironically) aged better than American freak folk and hypnagogic pop, it is because the British contingent was arguably more awake to the unsettling temporalities evoked by their plundering of a national unconscious. In this regard, Ghost Box’s output was especially Freudian in its approach. It took Freud’s Unheimliche impressions of childhood seriously – that is, childhood’s uncanniness, or more accurately, its unhomeliness.
As Jacqueline Rose once observed, we must always remember that Freud “was first brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves as a child.” This is because such memories are always partial and incomplete. Much like Fisher’s description of an amateurish television, the narratives we necessarily construct about our earliest years are an admixture of individual and collectives myths – our understanding of the world that surrounds us is inherently participative, before we come to internalise its various rules and regulations more passively. But as a result, any fidelity to ‘reality’ is impossible because our childhoods are riddled with gaps that the unconscious mind must fill with fantasies. It was for this reason that Freud insisted we are never truly ‘at home’ in such memories. What we more often refer to are only ‘screen memories’. As Fisher put it, these are “memories of childhood, not memories from childhood”.
Ghost Box’s output was explicitly framed as a set of soundtracks to ‘screen memories’ – in more ways than one – and this was no doubt the point, exacerbating their unsettling nature. In this way, the ‘new’ music coming out of the UK in 2005, exploring the sounds and sensibilities of decades previous, was not a historical antidote to a national mythology, as the Anthology of American Folk Music had been. There was no anthology to unearth, at least not at that time. As such, these were explicitly not memories; they were imaginings, perforating the thin filament between memory and hallucination. They were propositions for a kind of national narrative that, contrary to pop’s homogenisation, was left purposefully incomplete, leaving space for new histories and futures both.
This incompleteness also instigated an important function for the listener. Noting how Ghost Box’s output was, “by its nature, incomplete”, Fisher once again reiterated the label’s innately “participative” nature:
Incomplete, because each new contribution to the system … would produce new ‘holes’ which demanded to be filled (a process that is necessarily interminable)…; and participative, because the system is genuinely a system, a collective product rather than the work of a single author. (It occurs to me … that such ‘participation’ is the real alternative to the ‘interpassivity’ of so much digital culture.)
Things changed. The proliferation of rave and jungle compilations in the 2010s was a new sort of anthological tendency that overcame the gaps felt within the 2000s.
For me personally, the 2014 release of Suburban Base Record’s 3CD compilation “The History Of Hardcore, Jungle, Drum & Bass: 1991-1997“, which did not leave my car’s CD player for years, functioned as a new anthology explicitly. Perhaps it was the Burial phenomenon that led these old labels to revamp themselves and show a new generation just how weird the 1990s were and could still be.
But in the 2000s, things were different. Artists weren’t unearthing old records but filling in the gaps of memory, of history, with invented archives. A genre like vapourwave would exacerbate this. In this way, they recognised and affirmed the mythological function of their own generativity.
I am emphasising this sense of participation because it pulls one of Bluemink’s key philosophical reference points, Bernard Stiegler, back into dialogue with the hauntological moment. Without getting too lost in explication, I want to briefly draw on Felix Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein’s 2022 book, The Politics of Digital Pharmacology, in which they explore Stiegler’s use of the term pharmakon as something which is both (or neither) remedy and/or cure. They write:
we feel that the term “digital pharmacology”, and more generally the concept of the pharmakon, is extremely helpful in attempting to understand human interaction with digital media — and not only with digital media.
What’s interesting to me is that Steigler’s use of the term is explicitly drawn from Derrida himself, who writes in Dissemination:
This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison… This charm, this spellbinding virture, this power of fascination can be — alternatively or simultaneously — beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance — with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy — if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.
Operating through seduction, the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws.
The pharmakon does its work for better and/or for worse. Derrida describes writing as a pharmakon; for Stiegler, this concept can be extended to all of technology. Like Deleuze, who remains vigilant with regards to how a line of flight — an intoxicated escape beyond all habit — can be tripped up by all that it is fleeing, succumbing to an emboldened fascism (cf. Ezra Pound), the question for Stiegler becomes how we might best use technology’s new potentialities to keep ourselves moving, rather than effectuating new methods of enslavement. As Heidenreich and Weber-Stein write:
In Stiegler’s view a skillful way of applying pharmaka would counterbalance a tendency towards entropy: neg-entropy, the process of ‘bringing together’, of gathering, convening, assembling elements is the appropriate antidote against the destructive effects of the digital onslaught. This art of fighting entropy, of working for neg-entropy finds an esthetic expression in Richard Long’s work. When he creates a circle of stones … an archaic technique of ‘bringing together’ is displayed. Working for neg-entropy seems to connect us with the most ancient practices of structuring a life-world, of bringing order into chaos.
Now, again, when Bluemink makes use of Stiegler to evoke this “bringing together”, this inherently participative relationship that seeks to create and not only destroy, why is this core relationship between the ancient and modern — Stiegler’s modernism — left behind and denied its clear resonance with hauntology?
Truthfully, it is Derrida who preserves a gothic Marxist prose when writing about the occulted function of writing itself; Stiegler’s technic writings are very different, and in Bluemink’s hands, take on the bright glamour of the solarpunk. He emphasises a vitalism opposed to Derrida’s “rite of the pharmakos: evil and death, repetition and expulsion”, much like Stiegler does when he suggests:
Derrida argued that the general circumstances of writing set the conditions for critical writing, so there will never be a really critical form of writing, capable of criticizing from the outside. And there is a systematic problem: with Derrida you don’t have any positive discourse on the pharmakon. It is a philosophy of deficiency, if you like: there is no positive side to the pharmakon for Derrida, and this is a problem for me, because in my view the decisive question is how to transform a poison into a remedy.
I’m not a Stiegler expert, but I’m puzzled by this attempt to reinstate a sort of dichotomy into Derrida’s more general ambivalence towards binaries. I don’t think it is fair to say that he was disinterested in the “decisive question” above. Indeed, this is more precisely what is drawn out in Spectres of Marx.
Derrida may not have a clear answer as to how to transform a poison into a remedy, precisely because a pharmakon is both, as it is for Stiegler as well. But the solution is certainly not to ignore what is poisonous or somehow eject what destroys from our considerations of how to create. It is all a question of utility and context, and this is true enough of spectres or phantasms themselves, which are a core “ingredient” of any pharmacia for Derrida. Indeed, to eject what is occulted from an otherwise hauntological analysis seems to carry the same sentiment as Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the Republic.
Derrida:
Let us recall the famous indictment of pictorial mimetics in the Republic. First, it is a question of banning poetry from the city … for reasons linked essentially to its mimetic nature. The tragic poets, when they practice imitation, corrupt the minds of the listeners … if these do not posses an antidote (pharmakon). This counterpoison is “knowledge of the real nature of things” … If one considers that imitators and masters of illusion will later be presented as charlatans and thaumaturges — species of the genus pharmakeus — then once again ontological knowledge becomes a pharmaceutical force opposed to another pharmaceutical force. The order of knowledge is not the transparent order of forms and ideas, as one might be tempted retrospectively to interpret it; it is the antidote. Long before being divided up into occult violence and accurate knowledge, the element of the pharmakon is the combat zone between philosophy and its other. An element that is in itself, if one can still say so, undecidable.
What is undecidable is a phantasma; is a pharmakon. Alex Williams, in his rebuttal to hauntology, similarly proposed “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 undecideable.” I think it must be acknowledge that this can include the past: those historical situations that are spectrally present “within our current time”.
Vigilance remains essential. Notions of past, present, future — all can hamper us just as readily as they might empower us. Hauntology’s virtue, at the very least, was its vigilance in this regard; accelerationism was proposed as an antidote to hauntology, but in too readily rejecting the work of mourning, it far more disastrously fell victim to all that it was trying to critique. This is why I think hauntology and accelerationism must remain coupled. Each has a function of mitigating and accounting for the risks involved in the other’s undecidability.
Taking all of this together, Ghost Box and their disparate allies weren’t simply archivists looking to preserve the past or mime it. They addressed the analogue pasts inside the digital present as a pharmakon, trying to alchemically discover an antidote to a hegemonic retromania. As it was for Fisher, if “postmodernism” is the name of our sickness, then “hauntology” was itself an antidote — an element extracted as a surplus that could counteract the postmodern.
Making the case for this, contrary to Stiegler, let’s now consider how Derrida’s hauntology sought to address this decisive question, then, of turning a poison into a remedy.
As everyone now knows, ‘hauntology’ was a term borrowed from Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which dealt with a very different context to that of its new musical sibling, if nonetheless sharing certain mannerisms with it. But despite this source now being common knowledge, it doesn’t seem like anyone bothers to go back and read what Derrida had to say.
Similarly to Fisher, Reynolds and co., what Derrida sought to name was a condition — a “sickness” — afflicting a new post-Soviet world order, following the so-called ‘end of history’, after which capitalism began to conjure up spectral images of an enemy already vanquished. A “new ‘world order’ seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new disturbance [dérèglement] by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony”, Derrida writes. This disturbance was the fall of the Soviet Union, which left a hole in the world order that capitalism had to fill to assume its global dominance, since it was now without any major (systemic) socioeconomic competitor. But capitalism also arguably loses some of its purpose at this moment. Capitalism had long positioned itself as an “antidote” to the sickness of communism, after all — just as communism was the antidote to the sickness of capitalism. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, what becomes an antidote that no longer has anything to cure?
A paradox arose. In order to stabilize itself in this new context, or otherwise retain some sense of post-Cold War continuity, what was necessary was that capitalist culture conjure up the idea of communism anew, in order to have something to do battle against; something to preserve from its formerly dialectical sense of progress. This is to say that, even whilst capitalism was claiming total victory, a narrative was still needed – an altogether incomplete narrative – to fill the hole left by Soviet communism in the new world order, not so that communism could keep ‘living’ but so capitalism could preserve the illusion of its own ‘development’.
As a result, since this battle between political systems and ideologies was essentially one of competing images, competing imaginaries, it is also a battle fought within the media. Derrida argues that “the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, tele-communications, [etc.])” conjure political ideals as things “neither living nor dead, present nor absent”. (The idea of capitalism itself is necessarily a spectre as well in this regard; the lofty ideals by which it claims supremacy are hardly tangible to most.) It is for this reason that contemporary media “spectralizes.”
Derrida’s hauntology thus named a pervasive attempt “to ontologize remains, to make them present … by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead”. Put another way, if communism was ‘dead’, then capitalism had to set about erecting a tombstone for it – an abstracted ‘final resting place’; a symbolic presence attesting to its real absence; a monument that enabled the work of mourning; a site that we might pay a visit to, but which enables the spectre’s re-visitations upon us as well.
What I find so ironic about Bluemink’s argument — and the arguments of others who take a similarly poptimist path — is that hauntology itself is hauntologized by these writers. Hauntology itself becomes the vanquished spectre they must continue to do battle with, despite the fact that we have clearly long since moved on from that ‘hauntological moment’. This is why Bluemink’s argument struggles to make sense to me. He ontologizes hauntology’s remains, locating hauntology in a present that is not its own. This is another way in which his “anti-hauntology” remains predicated on the very thing it is set against.
It is difficult to parse out all of my contentions here, because Bluemink’s argument is broadly correct. I just take issue with its overstated Stieglerian vitalism. The issue is that, to secure this sense of vitality, he must constantly evoke Fisher as a figure simultaneously to be overcome and already overcome. He has to persistently ontologize his remains in order to ground his more contemporary perspective, but he often protests too much.
There is always a quibble about how things are now so different, which tries to force a break where there is instead a continuum — not a straight line, but a continuous percolation, a deterritorialized flux. This frames “anti-hauntology” to an idealistic and under-defined path to final victory, which neglects the manner in which Fisher and others adeptly kept pace with the present and ended up much further down that path than the poptimists do. In this way, their mode of hindsight does a lot of heavy lifting, instituting oppositions that really aren’t all that necessary.
What’s more, this is precisely the way Bluemink utilises SOPHIE as well — both in 2021 and in the new book. Even though she is held aloft as an antidote to Fisher’s theorising, she is sadly no longer with us, and so it is SOPHIE’s remains — her sonic remainders — that Bluemink ontologizes and spectralizes as well, in order to conjure a poptimistic vision of the future that is similarly hauntological. He erects a cult-critical tombstone for SOPHIE, which he repeatedly visits, laying flowers all around her, and enabling her revisitations upon us as well. But if his writing isn’t explicitly mournful, it is in the same way that people sometimes frame funerals as “celebrations of life”. The sentiment is comfy, but it’s still a funeral, an act of memorialization. Beneath the semantics, it remains hauntological.
To be clear, I take no issue with this. Bluemink’s book can be both mournful and future-oriented, and that’s fine. My first book Egress was similar. I remember one reviewer claiming that my own mournful prose meant I couldn’t break free from my own grief, despite trying to write myself out of it. But that’s also the function of mourning. The work of mourning may feel total in the book itself, but writing it really did help me. I was able to move on and overcome the depression that Fisher’s death tripped me into. It was great. It really is okay to cry! But that’s what I find strange in The Future is Not Lost: so much energy is given over to euthanising the elephant in the room — that is, the work of mourning.
My point in 2021 and my point now is that it was through this work that Fisher approached the past, present, and future as well, and the further irony is that Fisher himself is another spectralized figure that the present and future still has to deal with. We must arrive to meet Fisher and SOPHIE now precisely because their work is made newly strange. They are no longer of this world, just as rave, library records and tape cassettes weren’t of the mid-2000s. Although these things have all since made a comeback, owing to the power of corporate nostalgia to “spectralize”, the innovation of a ‘hauntological’ music was to repopulate these temporarily (or temporally) emptied territories with new revenants.
In this way, the new music of the 2000s exacerbated what made the prior cultural forms or moments their music referred to unique. Therefore, they also emphasised the ways in which these forms and moments were made newly unfamiliar — that is, again, no longer of this world. The likes of Burial and The Caretaker, whom Fisher is now synonymous with, may now be canonical, but they were doing something new with the past at that time!
This music thus localised and identified the culturally ‘dead’, enabling the work of a digital mourning whilst also allowing the specific aesthetic and material qualities of these mediums to haunt us. ‘Hauntology’ was clearly an apt descriptor for this paranormal phenomenon. As Reynolds later acknowledged in his book Retromania: “the ‘-ology’ suggested solemn laboratory researchers investigating the sonic paranormal”, echoing Fisher’s fondness for Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape.
Writing about the BBC serial in 2003, Fisher claimed:
All recordings are ghosts.
But are we really more substantial than they?
It’s a question that bears repeating. SOPHIE’s sonic syntheses might be less explicitly haunting or haunted — although they have become more so since her death — but as I wrote back in 2021, her debut album is nothing less than a record that questions the “substance” (or lack thereof) of postmodern identity, particularly as it pertains to gender identity. (The same can be said for Arca, also a transwoman.)
Any trans person will tell you that there are two temporal directions of travel involved in transition that are difficult to separate. For all of accelerationism’s association with trans women — that is, the gender-accelerationism of digitally exacerbating the disintegration of a prior identity — there is a concomitant experience of carrying your past around with you all the same, through buried “dead names” and old childhood photographs. Just because no one else sees this anymore doesn’t mean it’s not within you.
Transing your gender gives you a radically new (and queered) relationship to time in this way — to the past, the present, and the future. You repeat what most people never will – puberty – and find yourself reborn. To be trans is thus to be both radically future-oriented and also mournful. Transitioning necessarily involves putting in the work of mourning a past self. In truth, this is more generally a core component of getting older; all of us move through life facing both backwards and forwards. What is “accelerationist” about transness is how it exacerbates this universal experience to produce wild new possibilities from its scrambling of present conditions. What Bluemink’s book struggles to balance, I fear, is a productive awareness of the fact that these more mournful qualities aren’t anathema to the solarpunk bandwagon he jumps on, but rather essential to any process of transition. We can’t move on without first doing the work of mourning.
This is what it means, for Derrida, to ontologize remains:
all ontologization, all semanticization — philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical — finds itself caught up in this work of mourning but, as such, it does not yet think it; we are posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlet’s or Marx’s, on this near side of such thinking.
What is at issue, then, for me, in the present’s poptimism, is an assumption that we don’t need to speak to spectres, whether it be Fisher’s or SOPHIE’s. We disparage one and laud the other, but we don’t question the understandings of their work we have inherited, and in that regard, we’ve yet to properly think with or against them. We don’t yet have sufficient knowledge of what they effectuated beyond what has been absorbed by a pop hegemony.
As Derrida continues:
One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge… Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies — for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. Hamlet does not ask merely to whom the skull belonged (“Whose was it?” the question that Valéry quotes). He demands to know to whom the grave belongs (“Whose grave’s this, sir?”). Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where — and it is necessary (to know — to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more!
This is why most critics of Fisher fail (even if they do not recognise their own failures). They do not know where the bodies are buried. They misidentify the burial sites. They misattribute arguments to Fisher that he never made, or otherwise moved on from himself. They misplace SOPHIE as still being current, eliding her death.
On the contrary, when they were alive, Fisher and SOPHIE themselves knew where the bodies were buried, and having done the work of mourning, they moved into new modalities. We will continue to get nowhere if we don’t consider this essential process. We can’t just position ourselves in some imagined future and forget how we got here.
As a result, although Bluemink insists that the futures are not lost, as he proceeds through his argument, it is the past that becomes newly garbled. How can either past or future be (re)found(ed), if we’re looking for them in the wrong places? As a result, I’m not convinced he has successfully located past or future alike, which leaves his present less generatively unsettled than he otherwise wants his reader to believe.
Fisher’s spectres, his spirits, were multifaceted. Like Derrida, he knew that
the thing works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the “spirit of the spirit” is work. But what is work? What is its concept if it supposes the spirit of the spirit? Valéry underscores it: “By ‘Spirit’ here I mean a certain power of transformation … the spirit … works.”
Fisher’s spirit has not yet been exorcised because we’ve failed to face up to the futures he wrote about and also lived through — not simply his “lost futures”, his screen memories, but the more proximal ones he was equally fascinated by and actively helped midwife. He followed ghosts, yes, but why do we never ask what followed these ghosts in turn? What followed, that is, in a dual sense: what stalks us, and what comes after?
Derrida again:
What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading? Here again what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back.
This was the same paradox Fisher did the work to elucidate, and it’s that same future arriving from the (accelerationist) past that I have repeatedly tried to contend with as well. Without also doing this work for ourselves, we continue to be stalked by the very figures we hope to vanquish.
Here, in closing, I want to quote Fisher at length again, honing in on his renewed approach to hauntology at the very moment that accelerationism arose to supersede more hauntological discourses. Here, Fisher again defines hauntology is a way that is anathema to the more popular way it is understood today. In reading Fisher properly, we find that he already offered up revisions that Bluemink and others are trying to conjure less successfully elsewhere. Their attempts to bring the future into the light rise up more powerfully from a last where Fisher said far more than is appreciated.
As he wrote in 2008 (with what is bold being my emphasis relative to Fisher’s original italics):
For me, hauntology is best conceived of not as some political aspiration, but rather as a zeitgeist, something which is already in place and which demands critical commentary (and extrapolative extension). Hauntology is not something that is aimed towards, so much as where we are starting from (the End of History and its escape). Hauntological theory is an attempt, for instance, to account for why the Burial records have captured a mood, a malaise, this decade. The claim is not that hauntology is ultimately preferable to some accelerationist model of culture (although the Burial records are in many respects actually superior to the accelerationist Jungle they spectralise). On the contrary, one of the things that you can hear in hauntology is the spectres of accelerationism itself.
To turn Alex [Williams]’s question about the political correlate of hauntology around — what is the cultural equivalent of accelerationism now? It was precisely the lack of any cultural exemplars of accelerationism that led to spectrality in the first place. The paradoxes that Alex refers to are not a problem for hauntology; or rather, the problems they indicate are constitutive of a hauntological moment which makes the only resistance to the nostalgia mode look like a nostalgia for modernism. Hauntology is not, therefore, opposed to accelerationism; rather, it is the only way, at the moment, that culture makes any kind of contact with it.
Neither is there any opposition between “the return of modernism” that Alex decries and “the arrival of a new (perhaps, or at the very least) a currently properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme” which he calls for. What is modernism if not that which generates a “properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme”? Modernism (and Badiou’s theory of the event has been characterised as a late arriving philosophy of / for modernism) can return as a recirculated obsolete style, but it cannot ‘return’ as the unthinkably novel without puncturing a hole in postmodernity.
This is the paradox that stalks Bluemink’s book as well. Although he doesn’t like the term “accelerationism”, no doubt owning to its poor appropriations that distance it from its original concerns, it is only through his work of mourning SOPHIE that Bluemink is able to make contact with more contemporary (and still accelerationist) currents. He returns to a “new” that died or is dying. He fetishises a moment in the recent past that is meant to be indicative of how good the present is, whilst sidestepping all of its flaws.
Nevertheless, it is true that SOPHIE’s death isn’t the end of her relevance. Nor is Fisher’s death the end of his. Rather, I’d argue that their deaths must be allowed to more powerfully register within our collective psyches as the closures of two recent eras. That takes more work than a quick disavowal.
This moment arrived for me in 2021. I’m reminded, as ever, that SOPHIE’s death was announced on the same day we organised a For K-Punk edition at the ICA, held online and featuring Oneohtrix Point Never’s resurrection of his Chuck Person project, talking about how “the future is uncertain” at the height of the pandemic.
We were all hanging out on a Discord server that night, and I was sat in my basement kitchen in Huddersfield slowly drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels to myself. Owing to the general shock of SOPHIE’s death, and recognising that we were all already engaging in the work of mourning, we created a split, with one channel discussing Mark and the audio-visual commissions, and another discussing SOPHIE. Unsurprisingly, all present loved them both.
What has since happened, after their deaths, under the work of mourning, is that they have been increasingly distanced from each other. Fisher, who advocated for accelerationism more passionately than anyone, is frozen in the late 2000s. SOPHIE is frozen in the mid-2010s. Both of them were pioneers at one point, cultivating and articulating what was otherwise unformed, inchoate and unthinkable in their respective presents. We can’t go back to those moments. We can’t return to that moment when SOPHIE was unthinkable, confounding all contemporary sensibilities. Still, if she represents a paradigm now, it’s because her death and the subsequent work of mourning has allowed us to monumentalise the future-shock she stood for.
No matter whether a writer wishes to be poptimistic or negative, we’re all out here orchestrating exorcisms for the spectres we ourselves have conjured. It’s okay to own it. We might better understand our present moment if we did. But currently, I’m not sure anyone’s really got as good a handle on it as they think they do, because we’re still not over a twenty-year-old debate about recorded ghosts.
It was my partner Juno, writing in response to my conversation with Bluemink, who shook me from my own mournful stupor. Admittedly, it took me a long time to get over the pandemic. It led to a protracted period of hermitage that continued long past the pandemic’s “end”. The pandemic forced me to start working remotely — as it did for many us. Beyond a two-year stint in my local pub whilst working on my PhD, I am still working remotely to this day. I continue to struggle with it. But at the same time, I’m roughly three years into transing my gender, so it’s not all rubbish.
What Juno showed me was how a new generation had better dealt with and overcome that moment. As we were sitting on Discord servers mourning SOPHIE and Fisher in tandem, a second wave of hyperpop artists had transformed Discord into a supercollider. The result, Juno argued, was dariacore, which was the “robbing of hauntology’s grave”.
In particular, they write about how Leroy’s 2023 album Grave Robbing “evokes an image of death as a horizon for renewal.” It was an album they played me on one of their first visits to Newcastle in 2024, and it overwhelmed me so much that I literally had to take a break for a lie down. Once I’d gotten over the shock, I became obsessed with all the SoundCloud oddities they excavated (and continue to), feeling myself reconnect with contemporary music in a way that I thought the pandemic depressions had ruined forever.
Their essay also helped me to contextualise all these new sonic experiences alongside the blogospheric heritage I continue to carry around. Producing a new hauntological/accelerationist continuum, which foregrounds a shared methodology of sampling and deterritorialisation from plunderphonics and hiphop through to hauntology and hyperpop, they ultimately give credit to Jane Remover (AKA Leroy AKA venturing AKA et al.), whose trajectory to date oscillates between the destructively mournful and the hyperactively joyful much like Fisher’s writing did:
I want to credit Jane Remover’s Dariacore for … translating the lived experience of capitalist realism in the show Daria into music that transforms the mournfulness of nostalgic hauntology, to a regeneration of joy and new possibilities of being. I want to credit Jane Remover’s repurposing of neoliberal-market driven music used in the plunderphonics of Dariacore as an intervention in the neoliberal process through which this music is made in the major label, copyrighted system, which has been outlined in this essay as a historical function of colonial extraction and an exertion of the neoliberal claim to privatising cultural property.
What I loved about the essay was the way in which Juno openly wrestled with the contradictions of the present, especially the work of mourning involved in our pursuit of the new, and also a properly accelerationist modality that locates the dead in order to rob graves — SOPHIE’s included. That, to me, is the best encapsulation of where a properly contemporary music has moved onto since Bluemink and I had our conversation in 2021. I think it is a far more honest approach that remains material and avoids being seduced by newly vitalistic ideologies.
Attempts to circumvent nostalgia don’t exorcise these spectres; they produce new ones, utopic ones, that only displaces the work of mourning, which is essential if we are to truly avoid repeating all the same mistakes or arguments of the past. We don’t have to pick sides. We can do both. Much contemporary music is adept that doing both as well. Why isn’t contemporary music criticism…?
Having spent most of the last year in London, trying to navigate chaos, I returned to Newcastle for a three-week stint at the start of July in order to do a nervous-system reset and make some moves to jumpstart life’s momentum forwards.
One of the first things I wanted to do was renew my driver’s license, which expired two years ago. After doing so, a shiny new card in my possession, I proceeded to plan an anniversary trip for Juno and I, renting a car for the day so we could travel to Dungeness together. It felt like a way to bring us full circle after all that has happened since this time last year. It was an anniversary date, but also a second first date; a way to start over, whilst continuing to cherish all that has come before.
For two years, I have been promising this trip to Juno. When visiting me in Newcastle during the early days of our relationship, they had asked for a copy of my book Narcissus in Bloom. Before they boarded a coach back to London, I presented them with a copy, which had an affectionate message left inside the front cover, directing their attention to a page towards the end of the book.
The epilogue to Narcissus features an excerpt from John Donne’s poem The Sun Rising. It is about two lovers who shun the sun to stay in their bed, vowing to live in accordance with non-heliocentric temporalities. It may well be my favourite poem ever, taking on a personal resonance, but one nonetheless borrowed from Derek Jarman, who installed part of it on the outside of his home: Prospect Cottage in Dungeness.
The epilogue to Narcissus in Bloom sometimes feels like the last thing I wrote. I’ve written plenty since, but that concluding essay is more than just a line drawn under a book project; it was a line drawn under a period of life that had come before. I’ve said many times since how it was a veiled coming-out, but as a result, much of the writing that has come afterwards has felt like new juvenilia, as I figure out a new sense of self.
For that reason, I periodically return to the epilogue of Narcissus as a comforting piece of writing. It was written by someone casting off into a new world, as if it was in Dungeness in 2018 where I found a glimmer of something new, setting sail from its shores into a vast unknown. It may well be the one essay I do not cringe at when reading it back to myself. Years later, it encapsulates a transitory moment in my life, and in such a way that it truly feels like something written by someone else. A gesture of farewell that I continue to find heartening.
Returning to the barren shoreline at Dungeness so many years later was wonderful. It is three years since I last thought about Dungeness; seven years since I last set foot on its shingle. It was especially wonderful returning there with someone who means so much to me.
We change. We adapt. We are traumatised. We walk onwards. We overcome. The balancing act that Narcissus in Bloom left me contemplating was a desire for a sense of rhythm in an unstable world. Change is the only constant — that much is true. But I treasure the opportunity to engage in a dance amidst it all. Everything changes constantly, in the world and in ourselves, but that does not mean that journeys in parallel are impossible. I’ve found it is the only dance that makes the effort required to navigate the chaos feel worthwhile.
Dungeness is a sort of monument to that feeling in my mind. It is the edge of the world, where what matters come into focus anew.
The pictures below were taken on 19th July 2026. What follows them is the epilogue to Narcissus in Bloom, written in spring 2023. It contains various references to a few figures discussed earlier in the book, shorn of their context, but it still works on its own. As such, it also feels about time to jailbreak it from the covers of that book written under an old name and let it stand on its own somewhere new.
It is a piece of writing that enacted such a jailbreak for its author, after all…
On Thursday 23 February 1989, Derek Jarman walked out into his garden. Completely surrounding his home at Prospect House, he had spent years carefully coaxing a wide array of plants from the otherwise barren shingle beach that engulfs Dungeness, a small and declining fishing village jutting out from England’s most south-easterly point. “Brilliant sunshine”, he later wrote in his journal, recording the weather that day, with “skies so clear your vision is stretched to the horizon”. Spring was in full bloom, and so were Jarman’s daffodils.
Dungeness was a little-known wilderness until Jarman made his home there. The barren nature of the headland has popularised a myth, repeated by almost all tourist brochures and travel guides, that it is technically a desert — England’s only one.
This is not true, but even if it were, like so many deceptively barren landscapes, Dungeness is far from lifeless. It is instead an area of great ecological significance, with the beach home to a variety of shrubs, succulents and other forms of life that are seldom found elsewhere in the UK. It would prove to be a fitting home for Jarman, who was something of a rare creature himself: a queer punk and polymath of international renown.
Still, further surrounded by eerily flat plains, military installations, the rot of old industry and a decommissioned nuclear power station, the atmosphere at the hamlet today is nonetheless that of a world-without-us. It is a village that time forgot, a hamlet at the end of the world, where the regimens of normal life have run aground, leaving you to trip and fall over the tentacles of capitalism’s flailing grasp.
That being said, though it may feel like nowhere else within the British Isles, Dungeness is still prone to quintessential turns in the English weather. Jarman’s day may have started with brilliant sunshine, but this was later overshadowed by hail. “My poor daffodils”, Jarman lamented, “are now beaten to the ground”.
The battering of Jarman’s daffodils leaves him anxious. It feels like a bad omen. Struggling with declining health and an AIDS diagnosis, the fate of his flowers seems oddly tied to his own. Looking for something to soothe him, he calls his friend, the photographer Matthew Lewis, to
ask him if he would take a photo of a young man holding a daffodil. Last year he took a beautiful portrait of a handsome Italian, stripped to the waist, holding a lemon, the juice of which he used to dissolve heroin to fill his syringe. Narcissus, narcotics, self-absorption: benumbed retreat into self.
A few weeks earlier, Jarman had first noticed his daffodils beginning to appear. “I counted well over 50 buds on the daffodils I planted last year”, he writes on 7 February. He was enthralled by their seasonal nature. “Daffodils ‘come before the swallows dare and take the winds of March with beauty’”, he writes, quoting Shakespeare.
However, Jarman also mourns their artificial cultivation by some horticulturalists. “One of the joys our technological civilisation has lost is the excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now things of the past, along with the precious moment of their arrival”. Jarman was not some kind of anarcho-primitivist, however, bemoaning humanity’s agricultural development. He greatly appreciated the abundance brought by modernity. Mushrooms, for instance, “once a luxury, are ladled out by the pound … But the daffodil, if only the daffodil could come with spring again”.
What Jarman feared most, perhaps, was a silent spring, when the rhythms of life on this planet would be reduced to a consumerist homogeneity, like so much else today. He despised capitalism’s impact on the natural world and its biorhythms in this regard. In a journal entry from 1982, penned whilst visiting California, he writes with disgust of Los Angeles’ artificial sprawl, a city where the “sweet dream of capitalism curdles — where the seasons are scrambled”. There, time is out of joint, and different flora flourish incongruously alongside each other, regardless of the season. “Palm trees and daffodils”.
Many have argued, over the decades, that capitalism’s intrusion on nature’s circadian rhythms disturbs and corrupts the very thing necessary to our self-overcoming: time. Maurice Blanchot, for instance, in a defence of communism, which he enigmatically defines as our “material search for communication”, argues that a new sense of time is essential if we are to fully comprehend the enormity of the task at hand — a task that should now be familiar to us:
The immensity of the effort that must be made, the necessity of again putting into question all of the values to which we are attached, of returning to a new barbarity in order to break with the polite and camouflaged barbarity that serves as our civilisation, the unknown toward which we direct ourselves — for we absolutely do not know what man could be — the terrible violence that the inequality in the satisfaction of needs provokes, the enslavement to things, the governance of things, as well as the dialectic proper to technology, the inertia, finally, the fatigue: everything would contribute to putting off the realization of such a movement to the time of reckoning of a dream (or of blood), if the pressure of needs did not represent a force, a reserve of great duration. One could say that the speed of the movement’s progression is surprising, but in any case, time is required for it…
Though we might wonder what relevance communism has to all that we have discussed so far (besides being yet another term dogged by negative connotations for so many today), it is arguably only one more name for the event-horizon we have been striving towards. Indeed, it is a political theory relevant to everything discussed thus far, from our entrapment within a Protestant-capitalist individualism to our dreams of a new and unrestricted kind of social relation, which far exceeds the bounds of our communicative-capitalist enclosures.
For Blanchot specifically, his vision of communism is principally focused on a new communality, on a new collective subjectivity, on radical friendships and infinite conversations, on subjective relations that escape the bounds of capitalist utilitarianism, that escape an understanding of life now reduced to a source of energy to be plugged directly into the impersonal machinations of capitalist production. Communism, then, is a name for a political project that demands more of the luxuries and intimacies that capitalism insists we do not have time for. To deny ourselves these things — the activities we confine to our “free time” — is to limit our potentials most brutally.
This is the violence inherent to all capitalist capture, felt most palpably when a person accepts their thingness, their toolness, their usefulness for the system of which they are a part, when the individual “not only breaks off communication with one who is similar or dissimilar to him but breaks off communication with himself ”, having little sense of the self that they are, at least outside the restrictive context of economic relations. It is this interpersonal sense of alienation, most fundamentally, that communism, as the material search for communication, must first seek to remedy today.
It is for this reason that Blanchot is so hostile towards capitalist time. What interests him instead is time in itself, in its “metaphysical nudity” — the peculiarity of a life-time; “not only the time that shows itself to human consciousness but the time that is the basis of all consciousness, not time that is expressed in history but time in which history is made”. It is a sense of time that questions how much agency we have as capitalist subjects — that which, today, we all are by default. It is a sense of time that asks: what sorts of projects, which might produce a radically new subjectivity, do we really have time for?
Art and philosophy have produced myriad responses to this contemporary dilemma, but the popular understanding of our ordeal often leads to pessimistic appraisals of our various crises, as if the only response to this suggestion that we take time is to act slowly and see what happens, to be patient, when time is clearly running out. In fact, the reality is far more nuanced.
What Blanchot emphases is the innately tempo-ethical dimension of communism. He suggests that we must take time in the sense that we must seize time as that mechanism which capitalism reduces and uses to administrate the day-today, but also, in a more radical sense, time as the ground of all creation. We must seize anew the temporality — the speed, the time-signature — of our present moment.
But to what extent is our seizing of time even possible today? Put another way, how is a politics of time possible at all? At the very least, what we need most of all is an ethics of time, through which we might broaden the political scope of our philosophies and our self-images. Trapped within the enclosures of capitalist time — wherein time = money — we must reorient ourselves to understand time itself differently — that is, anti-capitalistically.
This is something that Jarman (just like Guibert) actualises through both his green-thumbed activities and a new awareness of what little time he has left. Indeed, after spending any amount of time with his journals, documenting life, death and gardening, it becomes clear that spring was the time of year he treasured most: it allowed him to once again commune with himself, his place in time, his hopes and dreams, his creative endeavours. The arrival of spring flowers, as a harsh coastal winter draws to a close, announces this time to him, with the presence of daffodils in particular being so ubiquitous throughout his life.
Not only were spring flowers Jarman’s “first memory”, daffodils also reminded him of his parents and their love for one another. A compulsive self-mythologiser, the story of his parents’ wedding is retold time and time again throughout his journals. Though stray details change here and there, their wedding photograph is always present, crisp and clear, like a flash of lightning through memory’s haze. On 30 March, 1989, he marks their wartime wedding anniversary:
On this day nearly 50 years ago my parents posed for their wedding photo under a daffodil bell hanging in the lych gate of Holy Trinity, Northwood. The photo, with my father in his RAF uniform and my mother holding a bouquet of carnations, her veil caught in the March breeze — captured the imagination of the press. It appeared in the national newspapers — hope at a time of encroaching darkness.
Year on year, daffodils bring hope to Jarman’s encroaching darkness too. His journals, though primarily about his art and garden, are haunted by his seropositivity. As the seasons repeat their cycle, his health deteriorates. But daffodils linger regardless, in vases, in childhood memories and in his garden. Their annual reappearance marks another year survived, but also encourages him to keep going too, if only to see the next year’s crop.
“The sun came out and I crept along the traffic-jammed streets to St Mary’s, glimpses of daffodils in parks and squares”, he writes one day. “For a moment I decided to fight back, push the exhausted depression that has clung like the February mist”. But on years when spring is late, his impatience is palpable. In 1993, a year before Jarman’s death, the entry from 30 February begins: “I’m holding my breath, like the weather, for the first daffodil”. Each and every year, they “flare into life to illuminate the spring”, as well as Jarman himself.
We would be remiss not to mention Jarman here before this book comes to a close. In many ways, he warrants far more attention than we are to give him here. But what Jarman’s example offers us, perhaps even more explicitly than those we have considered thus far, is a narcissism that understands itself not through a self-limiting insularity but rather as a form of eccentric speculation that takes place in a time beyond that restricted by capitalist life. It is a narcissism that emerges from within the depths of things, allowing us to see not just ourselves but all that flows through, with and around us, even as he grows more aware that the full actualisation of this narcissistic process takes a time that he is to be ultimately denied. It takes the time that writing and photography can only gesture towards, that capitalism can only administrate, but which the self can feel more intuitively, and in a manner prone to creative disorientation, given the right conditions.
Though we might assume Jarman only discovered an appreciation for narcissism at the moment he came face-to-face with his mortality, much like Guibert, it is in fact one of the defining concerns of his whole career. Prior to making his 1986 film Caravaggio, for instance, Jarman writes in his journal of his intentions:
The film will dig and excavate and make no attempt to hold the mirror up to reality. When Caravaggio paints the reflection of Narcissus it is no true reflection but a comment on all vanity and our film should treat his life in a similar way, penetrate the surface.
Here, narcissism once again becomes a tool of the self’s undoing. A few years earlier, writing about his plans for his 1981 film, In the Shadow of the Sun, we find a similar sentiment: “A third and final image of Narcissus, a mirror which flashes the sun into the camera so that the image explodes and reinvents itself in a most mysterious way”.
In a study of Jarman’s work, Steven Dillon emphasises further how Narcissus is a near-constant preoccupation in his life and films. He does not find, in the self ’s encounter with itself as other, the quicksand of self-love and its emotional molasses, but rather an apocalyptic explosion that destroys worlds. It is for this reason, Dillon writes, that “Jarman reproduces the image of Narcissus throughout his cinematic career, from Sebastiane to Edward II”, but Jarman is nonetheless “wary of the negative reading of Narcissus from the very beginning — that the desire for the same is flawed, egotistical, a kind of self-absorption”. Jarman, however, attacks any suggestion that same-sex love provides a stable and conservative homogeneity. He injects back into Paul Näcke’s initially homophobic narcissism a vibrant political volatility, emphasising the apparent dangers that queerness poses to the actually existing stasis of heteronormative society.
This is no more true than in Jarman’s love of his garden, where the return of his daffodils, those same flowers year on year, does not signify the return of the same but nature’s capacity for rebirth and self-renewal. Though they are so instantly recognisable, so familiar, these daffodils are not the same daffodils he has encountered before. They are always simply this year’s daffodils, which must eventually fade away, only to be reincarnated the following spring. The travesty of capitalism, in its capture of humanity and nature, is that it hopes to perpetuate a kind of “natural” stasis quite to the contrary. Capitalism wants daffodils all year round. It wants to exacerbate stasis by obscuring time’s advance. But we cannot live in a perpetual spring, caught in a short and oppressive loop. Flowers must die so that they can bloom again, just like our very selves.
Derek Jarman’s garden at the end of the world has thus become a beautiful site of pilgrimage to people everywhere. His former home remains, long after his death, a testament to another way of life, cultivated both in collaboration with and against the natural and capitalist worlds that surround it.
It is fitting, then, that on the outer walls of Jarman’s former home, which he shared with his partner Keith Collins, we find the final lines of a 1633 poem by John Donne. The poem, in an irregular meter, expresses two lovers’ defiance under the gaze of the rising sun, which hopes to coax them from their bed.
“Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us?” the poem begins. “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” The narcissism of “they look at each other” soon comes to override all other worldly expectations.
It is a strange poem for a gardener to immortalise in a space so dependent on the sun for life, but against the heliocentricity of our world, the poem insists that other lives are capable of being lived under its glare regardless. Here the sun’s gaze comes to signify more than the personification of nature, but the normative gazes of society at large, which love must always overcome. Why not orient oneself and one’s life to a bed shared with a lover, rather than the administrated rhythms of night and day? The poem ends as defiantly as it began:
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
Love, like time, is eternal. It far exceeds the bounds that capitalist time calcifies in order to contain us. The beauty of flowers, too, lies in their blooming and fading; as much in their promised return and transformation as in their first appearing.
Jarman died on 19 February 1994, likely less than a fortnight before his daffodils were scheduled to bloom once again. Though he may have passed away, missing the rebirth of spring, his flowers outlived him and continue to. His garden may have been one of the last “projects” he embarked on before his death, but his house and garden are still actively maintained today, still strewn with his plants and various sculptures. Long after his death, it is fitting that it has become a memorial so full of life. The narcissism of “they looked at each other” — of lovers, of nature itself — prevails over the singularity of one man’s gaze, of society’s heteronormativity and its increased hostility to other forms of life. The narcissism of Narcissus cannot be thwarted or moralised away, no matter how we may try to restrict its loving rhythms. Time is not abolished by its denouncement but rather inherited in its affirmation.
I first visited Jarman’s garden in 2018, then once again in 2019. The first time I was there, my girlfriend and her family in tow, I was embarrassed to be struck down by a panic attack, as the eerie landscape felt all the more barren and disconcerting then, relative to the constant activity against which we steeled ourselves in our south-east London home.
The silence of the place removed all habitual defences, shunted between world and self. I found it a disturbing place, to say the least. But once this momentary existential crisis had subsided, Jarman’s garden soon became one of my favourite places in the world.
Memories of the garden returned to me again and again as I began to write down my inchoate thoughts on narcissism a few years later, whilst living in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, during the spring of 2021. At that time, I had already written a book on community and grief, which was published just one week before the UK reluctantly implemented quarantine protocols to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. That, too, was a disorientating experience, which played havoc with my mental health. Having garnered some media attention, I felt overly sensitive to any and all criticisms that the book may have received, even in otherwise positive reviews. Stuck inside for months on end, to have this book on community appraised during a period of intense isolation was deeply troubling. Narcissus was in bloom that spring, in more ways than one.
This book was eventually finished at the start of spring in 2023, in Newcastle upon Tyne, one year after first moving to a new city after the end of that long-term relationship. As I moved further and further north, I often thought and felt sad about the fact that Jarman’s garden was increasingly out of reach to me. But his journals nonetheless encouraged a new enthusiasm, as I tracked the emergence of each year’s daffodils wherever I lay my head.
Though the writing of this book has been repeatedly delayed, coming out long after I thought it would, it feels nonetheless apt to write these final words, after a tumultuous year, when spring is on the cusp of coming again. Time was so necessary to its gestation, and for so much more besides. Indeed, when I first arrived in the north-east of England, I felt torn about my situation and the crossroads at which I found myself. I was as excited to start my life over as I was bereft following the failure of a love for another. I was quite unwell for a number of months that followed, suffering again through a far more acute mental health crisis than I had ever experienced previously, which was less a direct product of the end of my relationship than it was of the more general ways in which life felt totally detached from its habitual moorings.
Throughout it all, this book lingered on the desktop of my laptop, onto which I had uploaded a photograph of some daffodils taken at night, close to my new home, in nearby Iris Brickfield Park. The book changed a great deal then, and though I have done all I can, up until this point, to remove any reference to the self that I am, writing it has been a healing process, and I am left, at the final hurdle, wanting to acknowledge the ways in which it has given me permission to rebirth myself.
As we emerge from the pandemic, with the virus nonetheless still circulating as we return to our communities and a depressingly familiar sense of capitalist normality, I have found myself newly attuned to and reactivated by each new spring. It is only through an awareness of these seasonal transformations that I have been able to throw off the self I was and affirm something new — new modes of expression, new selves, new worlds.
A narcissistic self-concern persists here, nonetheless, but I am all the more aware now of how such a concern cannot rest upon itself. Narcissism does not and cannot stop at its own apparent impasses, but must necessarily push onwards into something greater than itself. And we will all, at one time or another, become overly preoccupied with ourselves in this regard, as we consider how best to move on with our lives, in good times and bad, building new ways of living that are less defined by the poor time of capitalist drudgery that bites persistently at our heels.
But narcissism is not an end in itself, as we so often think. It is only a means. It is a process, defined by the blooming and wilting of selves, which we should not mourn or moralise, just as any gardener, like Jarman himself, must learn that you should never mourn flowers or berate them for their fleeting lifespans. Though we may cut them, dry them, decorate our lives with them, hoping to hold onto the affectations of spring, anything cleft from its roots will surely fade. But we must remember that spring will always come again.
