New Site

For whoever happens to stumble upon this, it should be made clear that I've migrated my posts here over to my new site, __underscore, which is where new posts will be (and have been) appearing.

Introducing LOCKDOWNTIME

BOOKS in Peckham - a book shop I've been meaning to actually go to for a while now, while admiring from afar via Instagram - has been sending out daily tv/film/music/reading recommendations for a couple of weeks now via Substack, and they've been little glimmers of joy to my otherwise quite drab lockdown days. Even if I don't follow-up every rec, each email serves as a personal reminder of the weird, rich countercultural milieu that exists beyond the confines of my girlfriend's flat, blocked from view due to lockdown.

Subsequently, I'm excited to announce my own version: LOCKDOWNTIME. LOCKDOWNTIME will send you a handful of the weird and wonderful things I've been enjoying during the lockdown period - music, TV, film, writing - alongside my garbled thoughts on them. Short, daily 8am emails of nourishment. Nothing basic, nothing everyone's already heard of, just a sharing of those strange overlooked corners of the world writhing with richness.

Above all, I want the focus to be on challenging art/lit/writing/music - let's be properly punk about this, and accept that an expansion of our capacities, an increase in our perfection, will require us to challenge ourselves and not conform to what we already know or are comfortable with. These recs aren't just palliatives, but chances to become new people in a locked-down world.

As I say in the Substack description, I really hope this can become a little collective, joyful virtual space where we all introduce one another to some wholesome new stuff. Please send me recs you'd like me to share! I also think Substack allows commenting, maybe, so comment, share the lists publicly if you find them particularly good, etc.

You can sign up here. 

A Theorist is an Intensifier: On Ian Nairn

As I mentioned over there, I have to thank the Twitter hivemind for turning me on to the excellent 1972 BBC series, Nairn Across Britain, which is on iPlayer here. 

I had never heard of Nairn before this, but he comes across as immediately magnetic, eccentric and above all convincing: a character of real passions, or, as Jonathan Meades puts it in his preface to the show from some time in the 80s, the "enfant terrible of architectural criticism". Meades continues:

No one has ever written about buildings with greater passion, and I suspect that no-one has ever written about buildings so eloquently. This was not least because he knew as much about writing as he did about buildings; he was not just a terrific architectural writer, he was a terrific writer full stop. His prose was, and indeed is, vivid, demotic, poetic, vital, and thankfully, the absolute obverse of that straightened English of Nancy Mitford. Nairn was defiantly non-U. He was, and it’s an expression you don’t hear much today, “redbrick”. That was usually a deprecation, but I don’t intend it thus, anything but, he was a genuine outsider. If he belonged to a type, it was to a type of one.

One's inclined to take this as a puffed up exaggeration thought up on the fly just to introduce the show - but Meades' characterisation of Nairn joyfully shines through within seconds of it beginning. Articulate yet down-earth, passionate yet analytically incisive, Nairn stands out as a shining beacon of the promise of criticism, whether architectural, aesthetic, literary, or political. Unlike the dominant subject of criticism today - the smug hipster - keen to distance themselves from their objects of critique through a sneering ironic detachment, Nairn is absolutely dedicated to getting as getting as close to the object of criticism as possible, to feel its fine textures in between his fingertips, up against his skin. The buildings and places Nairn visits in the show literally live and express themselves through him: Nairn as concrete's human avatar. (This is all made absolutely clear within minutes of the first episode, where Nairn caresses the brickwork of the Preston Guild Hall - screengrab of this below.)

Much like k-punk and the Ccru, Nairn evidently sees the role of the theorist or critic as being an intensifier. Nairn treats every building and place he visits as some vastly complex, intricate body that he is navigating; he makes every effort to be in the object he's critiquing, a part of it, letting it excite or dismay his body and his emotions. Far from seeing this as giving way to subjectivism or irrationalism and attempting to repress them, Nairn actively expresses and engages his emotions as absolutely rational, as absolutely indicative of some external cause: portals into the Outside. The result is joyful and energising, not dull and deadening like so much criticism*.

Start with how something makes you feel.

Then accept that has very little to do with "you", and start picking it apart, rationalising it, linking it to an external cause.

What's particularly refreshing is just how frankly and frequently Nairn trashes the places he visits: "it's all cacophony, it's a mess" is his judgement of Carlisle; councillors in Northampton with a scheme to  demolish large parts of the town square are bluntly told to "change the scheme"; and Stoney Stanton is said to give "the feeling of having laid down and died". But, again, this criticism is totally different from that of the joyless cynic, despite appearances. Instead, this matter-of-fact criticism is always driven by a desire for improvement, for the maximum fulfillment of places' potentials. Nairn frequently in the show points to lagging areas of the places he visits and imagines in their place public parks, cafés, and care homes: things that would help integrate the various disparate parts and help them express something beyond themselves - that effusive sense of place, of community. For example, at one point he visits an abandoned quarry in Stoney Stanton and bemoans its lack of use or even engagement by its surrounding milieu: the beach area is simply being used as a dumping ground, and the houses (seen below) generally face away or ignore it, despite its beauty.

And that's another thing: Nairn's criticism is always driven not just by a desire for improvement, but  an improvement that is absolutely public-minded - qualitative, rather than quantitative. Nairn's not pointing at empty spots and saying to build luxury flats (an imagining that can only be driven by purely quantitative concerns, e.g. for profit or for house numbers); he's imagining new, collective uses of spaces: new public facilities to be shared by all. (At numerous points in the show, he points at "Private Property: No Entry" signs and decries them with audible disgust.) Like Mark Fisher, Nairn marries the elitist Nietzschean/punk insistence on excellence and perfection in the face of mediocrity with the leftist commitment to collectively working together, democratically. He takes a common, shared space and intensifies it through his criticism, thereby hoping to drive it to a higher degree of perfection and complexity. (There's a common dynamic here with Pop and its 'verticality-in-horizontality', which I describe in this post.)

This is also evident in the composition and filming of the show as much as Nairn's commentaries: the viewer is frequently treated to minutes-long, slow, indulgent takes of various architectural and natural landscapes, with the show utterly committed to truthfully transmitting the textural feel of a place, as if one was actually there, in it. Here's some nice shots I grabbed from the show, but they're no substitute for actually watching and absorbing it:

-------

* Theory/Philosophy Appendix /// To understand why this engagement of the emotions and placing oneself within the object of criticism is valuable, it's useful to turn to something Deleuze covers in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Specifically, Deleuze discusses intensive quantities and extensive quantities, and notes how each are very different forms of quantity. Extensive quantities (such as length) are formed of parts that are always external from one another, outsider one another, extrinsically related (one can break up 1 metre into however infinitely small parts, but these parts are always external to one another, and thus can be put in whatever position, and still equal 1 metre). Intensive quantities, such as temperature, meanwhile, are formed of parts that are always in one another, nested within each other, within the quantity as a whole. The parts are related intrinsically, not extrinsically. (One cannot break 40 degrees C into smaller "blocks" of temperature - 20C + 20C doesn't equal 40C - instead one must continuously go through various degrees of temperature - 1, 2, ...., 39, 40C.) 

To see theory/criticism as intensive is thus to locate oneself as a part within the object at hand, not outside it like a detached hipster. It's to acknowledge that while an object is an extensive quantity, this extension is what allows the object's parallel intensity to become real. 

Hipsters see the world basically extensively: objects of criticism are simply seen as interchangeable parts of a larger extensive quantity. They glance at something and instantaneously declare it to be XYZ, a sign of ABC, without any singularity. This is, of course, a philosophical error with dire political and cultural consequences. Objects are also (part of) intensive quantities, singular irreducible degrees of a power, or potency. Consequently, engaging with this intensive dimension increases our capacity to act and pushes us further towards self-realisation and self-organisation: we become a part intrinsically related with every other part in the intensive quantity. As such, we are not externally determined, leading to passive feelings and servitude according to Spinoza, but instead discover our autonomy.

It also just makes critique more fun, joyful, and useful, quite frankly.

Rip it Up and Start Again: The Best Bits

Full on lockdown has finally given me the chance to finish Simon Reynold’s mammoth volume on post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again. I’ve already mentioned the book twice on this blog (#1, #2), and for good reason: it’s an extraordinarily fun and informative read.

Despite being journalistic in style, committed to and bound by the sheer actualities of what happened, Rip It Up and Start Again reads like a loosely-arranged novel, with recurrent characters, motifs, and themes perpetually cropping up, disappearing, and then re-appearing in other contexts. Indeed, it reminds me of anthology TV series such as Easy or High Maintenance: always grounded in one lifeworld – in this case, the post-punk milieu – but always entering (and exiting) it from different perspectives, different bands, different periods, thereby allowing the singular consistency alongside the sheer complexity and multiplicity of the lifeworld to be expressed. It’s precisely this mode of composition that makes Rip It Up such a joy to read: it faithfully expresses post-punk not as some historical artefact bound by chronology and stuck in the past, but as an almost timeless countercultural milieu, sensibility or organism that one can tap into and channel in the here and now. The stories and anecdotes regaled in the book aren’t just thrilling because they express something that, unbelievably, happened (see below for a list of just some of these), but also because they express a potentiality in the present, a set of resources and practices to be simulated and put in motion. In short, the book doesn’t just make you want to read more about bands: it makes you want to start a band yourself.

The book functions through its 26 chapters which simultaneously possess a singularity (each focuses on a particular “scene”, for example late 70s New York No Wave, the rise of British indie labels such as Rough Trade, or the antics of producer Malcom McLaren) while expressing a larger whole (the aforementioned post-punk milieu). Contained within these chapters are some remarkable anecdotes and stories that, as argued above, really fire up one’s imagination, jolt one into laughter, disgust, or disbelief (sometimes all at once). They’re wonderful little nuggets, charged with a countercultural libidinal energy.

At 537 pages*, though, the book is a hefty volume, and it’d be a shame for its countercultural libidinal potential to be blocked because of that. So, both as a tribute to the book and as a way of extending its countercultural archive, here I’m going to retell and recap my favourite anecdotes, characters, and themes from the book in digested form. Hopefully this imparts just a slither of the post-punk energy onto you, dear reader, or even better, it will get you to read the book yourself…

More via the 'Read More' button...

For a Pop Communism: Notes on the Labour Leadership Contest

What is Pop? Or equivalently, what is the popular? This is the question Simon Reynold’s book Rip It Up and Start Again forces us to confront, particularly towards the middle of the book, where the focus pivots from post-punk to early 80s New Pop: the moment many post-punk artists such as Scritti Politti and The Human League get tired of post-punk’s puritanical commitment to fringe experimentalism and turn their sights to the mainstream, the popular. What’s valuable about Reynolds account here is that it gives us the perspective of approaching Pop from the outside: we are introduced to a rag-tag clan of artistic misfits who are desperately trying to crack the code of the popular, to break into the Top 40 and become stars, as if it were some alien language beamed in from another galaxy. It is these people, those who consciously have to crack and break into it, who really understand Pop, rather than those who have unconsciously been interpellated or conditioned by it (such as the “popular” kids at school).

This is because the popular – Pop – has very little to do with what “is” popular, statistically and numerically. Pop is not simply a kind of molar statistical aggregate, a name for a thing lots of people know of or do. Commuting to work – to conjure up the most banal example I can – is something millions of people do, but one would really be stretching to call commuting “popular”, or “Pop”. It’s part of the grey background of everyday life: precisely the thing that Pop strives to stand out against and rupture. Pop needs to be a spectacle, a concentrated singularity, quite literally the centre of attention, in order to exist. Pop is a centralisation or it is nothing.

Of course, numbers matter. You can’t attach the concept of Pop to something that literally zero people have heard of. Pop clearly has a direct relation to, and orientation towards, what is statistically and numerically eminent. Indeed, it needs this eminence, this large numerical infrastructure, to effect the rupture it desires, because the rupture is in this infrastructure.

This is why so many attempts to be popular by unimaginatively mimicking what is already “popular” come off as desperate, and concomitantly fail. Desperate attempts to be “popular” misunderstand the verticality and hierarchy of Pop, the form of the popular. The desperate take Pop to basically be a statistical quantity above a certain numerical threshold, and thereby desperately appeal to those that are already “popular”, already above the threshold, to give them a leg up – as if Pop were some exclusive member’s club, that only let people in if they dressed and spoke according to fixed, established protocols. There is an implicit and unquestioned faith in this quantitative view of Pop in an underlying, continuous and coherent substance that necessarily forms the foundation for any quantification of popularity, for any quantity is a quantity of something, a stable quality or essence.

This fails because desperation isn’t contagious; it is an affect that cannot reproduce itself because it depends entirely on an external being, the superior Master, to whom it appeals from a distance. Desperation does not directly cause more desperation; instead, to become desperate, one must always make that indirect detour through the superior Master. Contagion by contrast requires a kind of horizontal similarity (not the vertical hierarchy and difference indexed by desperation) – that common substance or molar aggregate noted above, a common code or genetic makeup – that is parasitically fed on and infected (more on this below). There’s a reason the contemporary parlance for Pop is “going viral”.

In short, Pop’s verticality is a verticality-in-horizontality: a concentration, an increase in density or pressure. The superiority and centralisation of authority of Pop does not occur through a distancing from the hoi polloi, the common masses, but in and through it. Pop takes the “common”, that consistent shared substance, and rather than taking it for granted (as in the quantitative view of Pop above), ruptures it, cuts it apart, breaks apart the common logic of sense and ultimately reorganises it. It takes particular points in the “common” and intensifies them, puts pressure on them, until they break apart and are reorganised. For example, viruses such as Covid-19, perhaps the biggest Pop phenomenon of the past decade, work by breaking into a cell and inserting their genetic code into it, thereby instructing the host cell to reproduce more of the virus. It takes that common genetic code shared by all the host cells it infects and shamelessly cuts into and reorganises it, throwing the host cells and their related organism into crisis, demanding a heightened response from the immune system*. Thus, while the virus takes on a position of superiority or power, literally overcoming us, this superiority only occurs in and through – not at a distance from – a horizontal commonality and consistency, a shared code, genetic sequence or substance.

(One needn’t delve into microbiology to make this observation either: just read k-punk’s posts on Glam to see how this Pop mechanism works in the realm of music.)

Consequently, Pop isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about catering to or representing “the common” as some fixed substance: the result of this approach has been the vast majority of uninspired, retro-derivative music that is labelled “Pop” today. Instead, as charted above, we should dare to conceive of Pop as a concentration of pressure, a rupture, in “common sense”; or, as k-punk saw it, a nihilation that is the basis of all the best Pop:

What Pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists. One example, of many possible. Both the Birthday Party and New Pop nihilated one another: far from existing in a relation of mutual acceptance or of mutual ignorance each defined themselves in large part by not being the other. One shouldn’t rush to conceive of this in simple-minded dialectical terms as thesis-antithesis, since the relationships are not only oppositional – there is always more than one way to nihilate, and it is always possible for any individual thing to nihilate more than one Other. It seems at least plausible to suggest that the capacity for renewed nihilation is what has driven Pop.

He concludes:

So let's dare to conceive of Pop not as an archipelago of neighbouring but unconflicting options, not as a sequence of happy hybridities or pallid incommensurabilities, but as a spiral of nihilating vortices.

The statement is loud and clear: Pop opposes and nihilates what is “popular” or “common”. Postmodern consumerist PR, on the contrast, caters to and mollycoddles it.

*

All this discussion of Pop and the popular is, of course, directly related to politics. In particular, it sheds light on the miserable state of affairs that is the current Labour leadership contest.

Each of the contenders, Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, have sought to either distance themselves from or outright tarnish the legacy of outgoing leader Jeremy Corbyn, inflecting this distancing in their own terrible way. Starmer’s appeal is essentially that of politics as usual, another white professional man in a suit and thereby “electable”; Nandy’s campaign has basically been that Labour know nothing and should pander to the racist, nationalist, petty conservatism so many of us found on the doorstep in December; and Long-Bailey, the supposed left candidate, has been supremely lacklustre, making some promising policy announcements while at the same time desperately trying to make herself appear as “normal” as possible, contra Corbyn’s quasi-hippy eccentricities. (For example, take this interview where she stresses that her favourite leisure activity is having a Chinese takeaway and watching Netflix – which stands in stark contrast to Corbyn’s pastimes of tending his allotment, collecting manhole covers, and reading Ulysses while interrailing across Europe.)

Interestingly, the common enemy for all the candidates is precisely the thing that was so appealing and exciting about Corbyn: not so much a set of policies, but quite fundamentally the fact that he embodied a countercultural way of life. In their different ways, Starmer, Nandy and Long-Bailey’s pitches say the same thing: let’s keep (most of) the policies, but make it look different, more normal, more palatable. On the surface, this looks like a perfectly harmless and agreeable measure (it’s win-win: socialism, but “marketable” and without “baggage”), but with any sustained analysis it reveals itself to be a profoundly problematic argument – philosophically, politically, and practically. And it has everything to do with a misunderstanding of Pop, of the popular.

Starmer, Nandy and Long-Bailey will all point at policies like renationalisation and increased public spending and note their general “popularity” with British voters and the fact that they did not lose us the election. There is an element of truth here: policies like renationalisation are widely accepted. But – and this is the key point – their mode of acceptance is basically passive. Voters are probed by polling companies on these questions and essentially shrug and go “yeah, that sounds alright”. What becomes revealed through these polls, then, is not so much an articulated desire for socialism but a kind of mapping of the collective unconscious, a common set of auto-responses or servomechanisms. Consequently, while the policies possess a certain numerical eminence and passive consent, they lack the backing of any widespread and active drive or movement to achieve them. They’re “popular” or “common”, but not Pop.

For the three leadership contenders, this isn’t a problem, because they’re fully signed up to the reductive quantitative view of Pop. “Common sense” is worshipped and becomes the common, underlying, unconscious substance upon which we can quantify and measure “popularity”. Breaking with this “common sense” – as Corbyn did with his beige suits and eccentric past – breaks down this entire quantification and supposed accumulation of “popularity”, thereby threatening the party with “unelectability”. Faced with this self-imposed constriction, the only option left is the putrid strategy of constantly invoking and appealing to “common sense” socialism, typified by the depressing equation of: more common sense = more popularity = more electability = more power. (A strategy which, as the electoral results for many social democratic parties across the world demonstrate loud and clear, has a terrible track record in the current global climate.)

The result of this approach, of course, is boredom. Every single contender is a bore from head to toe: Starmer, steeped in white middle class professionalism and all its weak as shit banter; Nandy, happy to entertain your boring, racist relatives at Christmas; and Long-Bailey with her exaltation of mindless Netflix vegetation. This has everything to do with their former professions, all upper-middle class white collar: Starmer was obviously a senior lawyer and the former Director of Public Prosecutions; Nandy worked for an MP and then worked as a researcher for some NGOs/charities; and Long-Bailey was a solicitor whose husband is a marketing director. In every case, we have a catering to dominant and “common sense” bourgeois notions of “respectability” and how to live one’s life (go to uni, graduate and get on a grad scheme, become a manager, work your way up until you die…), and a complete desertion of any countercultural way of life, any embodiment or practice of a Pop-style nihilation.

“Popularity” is inherently boring, rousing no active desire but instead a pathetic and desperate appeal to be accepted. The very existence of “popularity” depends on an external stock of “common sense” or common protocols/trends that it must cater to as its foundation/base. “Popularity” has no mind of its own, it is entirely dependent and uncritical, constitutively conservative and reactionary. (Just think about how boring all the popular kids from school have turned out to be.) Pop, by contrast, nihilates the boring: it traces an active, nihilating movement across forms, always jumping from one to the other as one becomes boring and predictable and another emerges in an antagonistic reaction to it.

*

My argument here, though, isn’t just moaning that the three contenders are bad just because they’re boring. It’s instead something a bit more nuanced: socialist or communist politics literally cannot afford to be boring, because being boring and fetishizing “popularity” by definition express a dependence on and adherence to “common sense” or any of the other large molar aggregates that make up the world, which are precisely what communism is about breaking down. The moment socialism or communism becomes “common sense”, as many have been declaring reflecting on the Tory government’s reaction to the coronavirus crisis, is precisely the moment we know things are going wrong, or immediately need to change tack. It’s the moment for another Pop-style nihilation and antagonism. (This, indeed, is precisely what Marx and Engels make clear in The Communist Manifesto when they declare that communists “everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things”.)

This is all about the relation between the content and expression of communism: what form of expression is demanded by the form of content of communism. And this form of expression is, precisely, Pop**: communism as a series of nihilating vortices against the existing popular social and political order of things. Communism needs Pop. It needs that magnetic, captivating allure that all the best Pop stars have commanded.

Jeremy Corbyn is an apt (and in light of the events since December, tragic) example here: a soon-to-be-lost symbol of a fleeting moment when the British left was Pop.

Initially, at least, Corbyn was a leader who understood that socialist or communist principles necessitate not just a particular way of thinking and speaking but also a totally different way of living. In this sense, Corbyn embodied the promise of Pop: rather than living the usual life of a politician, faithfully following the Oxbridge-to-Parliament pipeline, he came to the Labour leadership race in 2015 with roughly 40 years of community organising, union activism and anti-imperialist solidarity under his belt. The “common” programme for being a politician or Leader of the Opposition was scrambled in every sense, in a Pop-style nihilation. Huge sequences of the code were deleted (the polished Oxbridge attire; the PR soundbites; the narrow nationalistic viewpoint and pandering to anti-immigration sentiments) and new sequences were inserted (a commitment to the grassroots; anti-austerity; genuine interest in literature and culture). Corbyn sceptics in Labour, usually on the liberal or soft left, frequently derided this scruffy scrambling of the accepted codes of politics as frustrating “baggage”, particularly in regards to his anti-imperialist solidarity work. But this “baggage” was precisely what made Corbyn a quasi “pop star”, a genuine cultural icon, that was at the centre of the 2017 almost-victory. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine something like Grime4Corbyn happening without Corbyn’s history in (or “baggage” of) anti-racist and anti-imperialist organising, as grime artist Akala’s support for him demonstrated. It was the “baggage” that made Corbyn Pop.

*

But for all this exaltation of Pop, content still – clearly and necessarily – matters. Pop is ultimately a kind of ambivalent form that can feed upon a whole range of common codes, substances, and molar aggregates. A Pop Communism*** still, therefore, depends on that set of common principles, theory and policies that all leftists are at least somewhat familiar with and advocate for. But the point nonetheless remains that good policies aren’t enough, and never will be enough. In honesty, I couldn’t care less that all of the leadership contenders are standing on a platform that has substantial bits of “Corbynism” in them. Instead I want a leadership candidate that will stand in front of everyone and say the unthinkable: that everything that was ostensibly bad about Corbyn, all his “baggage” that even the left took turns in complaining about, was precisely the most valuable thing about him. The beige suits, the history on the backbenches, the anti-imperialist solidarity, the eccentric anecdotes and hobbies, that’s what we wanted, and what we still want. It was what made Corbyn, and Labour, ever so briefly Pop, reaching its crescendo in the aftermath of the 2017 election.

2017 Corbyn “won”, for all intents and purposes. 2019 Corbyn lost.

We collectively gave up Pop and settled for “popularity” and “common sense”.

We can’t make the same mistake again.

-----------------------------

*I am not trained in biology, so this is massively generalised, and I welcome insights from virologists and epidemiologists on this matter.

** Pop, then, is a particular form of expression (as opposed to a form of content – this is why Pop music covers so many different genres and can hardly be labelled a genre in itself)

*** As I think about it, I think Pop Communism is basically the same as Acid Communism. Or at least very similar. So this neologism may be completely redundant.

Exiting The Academic: Thoughts On Objectivity and the Neurotic-Perfectionist Drive

It's always about getting past that barrier: the psychosocial barrier of embarrassment, the fear of nakedly putting something "out there", of exposing oneself.

I write, I try and cobble some things together. At the slightest hurdle I convince myself that this whole labour is pointless, that actually completing this and trying to publicise it would just be a deeply embarrassing thing to do, because no one actually cares, no one is going to read it, and I haven't done anything interesting.

All this represents is a desperate attempt to cling on to and control a piece of writing. This is why my mode of writing has historically so often been perfectionist and obsessed: no, I can't do this until I've read x y z and become an expert... no, I can't possibly write this sentence without considering a few other things from this author I just remembered... must populate sentences with parentheses in order to be as specific as possible, not leave any room for misinterpretation, not appear like some idiot who hasn't considered every dimension... Such a mode of writing leaves a stench. It lingers in the air of every university. It reeks of the academic obsession with "objectivity", the internalised boss-cop in the head that is always demanding order, always demanding more data, always demanding things are more clear, more visible, more controllable.

The ironic thing is that this neurotic mode of writing that seeks to "perfect" it more often than not makes it less perfect, transforming a more-often-than-not interesting conceptual core into a garbled verbose mess that's boring and unjoyful to read. In accepting the gamble that any argument can be "perfected" within language - all we need is to cram in the right words, and lots of them - the neurotic-perfectionist drive reduces writing to a dull, tepid representation; an inert painting on a wall that eyes are constantly glossing over. The focus is almost completely on words and sentences as simply representations/signifiers with an internal semiotic "content", missing in the process how words and sentences function as a-signifying forms, effecting little movements, intensities, dopamine rushes, which mobilise the libido. 

The neurotic-perfectionist drive underpins the Academic as a particular aesthetic or style, defined in part by the denial of any style or aesthetic altogether. The Academic, as an ideal aesthetic limit-point that all “intellectual” or “theoretical” writing is inclined to tend towards, is a style devoid of all style: no flourishes, no lyricism or stories, and only the most constrained and forced turns of phrase and neologisms. Through such arse clenching, the Academic thinks it gets to the Real, the “objectivity” it puts so much blood, sweat, and anxiety attacks into uncovering, by stripping back all style, all emotion, all traces of libidinal intensity: aesthetic austerity.

But it doesn’t. Rather than revealing the Real through this act, the Academic instead deadens it: what we get is an Academic Realism, rather than the Real – a weird, undead performance of the Real that claims to be it. An unsatisfying reheated meal of academia’s greatest hits and citations, microwaved so many times so as to become an unappetising, and above all unconvincing, mush.

Realism is not the Real. Remember k-punk: ‘Realism has nothing to do with the Real. On the contrary, the Real is what realism has continually to suppress.’

(This is all of course a simplified argument. Clearly the semiotic "content" of the words we write matter, for one, and clearly this content is immediately bound up with its form. The takeaway argument, if there is one, is the age old adage that radical content must be equalled by radical form; that form, aesthetics, style, matters. Any writing that pays no heed to its aesthetics, its written form, as academic writing tends to do by treating writing simply as an inert carrier of semiotic content, is not worth its salt. Or, put more forgivingly, is limiting itself massively, keeping theory caged within the (classed, racialised and gendered) academy it dreams to be free from.)

I write all this as an attempt to grapple with the actual practice of writing no longer under the watchful eyes of the academy. I’ve always been easily embarrassed about my own creative pursuits, owing to persistent low self-esteem and my extreme childhood shyness. So when I started university, it seemed like the place for timid, depressed, and socially anxious me: place where any notion of “I” would retreat, where writing would simply be about some subject matter that “I” could distance myself from. Knowledge was what mattered, not “me”.

Unconsciously, the “structural” and the “personal” were held in opposition, even if I professed to believe the opposite. I saw myself as writing about implicitly “distant” “structural” things as a way to distract attention from “me”. Writing was always placed at a firm distance from my everyday life and modes of living. While this distance began to decrease when I started getting involved in student activism, it continued to persist (and still does). A constant disavowal and pushing away of the body, of the human meat puppet and its unconscious: its drives, instincts and neuroses. A piece of sandpaper always at hand, constantly and willfully eroding any trace of the human OS behind the text, ignorant of the fact that this will/drive only further proved and consummated the existence of the human OS. “Objectivity”, for all its claims to dispassionate empiricism, is always driven by a libidinal, unconscious drive. This is the neurotic-perfectionist drive that I found myself channelling, a slave to.

You don’t have to look far to see this in action, beyond my personal experience. Why do you think there’s a mental health epidemic in universities today? Why do you think so many academics are depressed and anxious? It’s at least in part because the academy is animated by objectivity, and objectivity is predicated on a particular drive: the neurotic-perfectionist drive that self-flagellates, that tries with futility to rid academic work of any trace of the human meat puppet, the ostensibly “subjective” element constantly muddying our access to “the Real”, despite being fully in the Real itself. Objectivity is always trying to tame, contain, and control the human OS, the unconscious; and what is anxiety if not the attempt to regain control?

The result of this neurotic-perfectionist drive is a mode of subjectivity much akin to Nietzsche’s character of the “objective man” that he skewers in Beyond Good and Evil:

He is only a tool; let’s say that he is a mirror, not an ‘end unto himself’. The objective man is indeed a mirror: above all, we must admit, he is accustomed to subjugating himself, with no desire other than what knowledge, what ‘reflecting’ can offer him. He waits until something comes along and then spreads himself out gently so that even the light footsteps of spirit-like beings gliding by will not be lost upon his surface and skin. (p.97)

The academic as a smooth, spread-out surface, achieved only through routinised self-subjugation, self-flagellation, self-deprecation.

*

By the end of my undergraduate I was pretty bored of this approach (which is rampant in the social sciences and humanities even on ostensibly radical topics), but didn’t know where else to look. Then I did my Masters, properly read Mark Fisher and Deleuze and Guattari, and realised that what I thought was “theory” was in fact an incredibly narrow slice of it, a mere faction, held hostage by an academia that resists the osmosis of theory into the Outside. (Mediums such as sound and video are almost always out of bounds.) The academy’s obsession with secondary literature and journal articles, coupled with its dull literalism and “objectivity”, had completely muted the thrill, the feeling of moving through a portal into a different world, that accompanies reading a good philosophy/theory book first-hand.

Fisher and Deleuze-Guattari actively shunned academic convention: Fisher basically never wrote for academic journals (although he did take part in numerous academic conferences and organised a major one on accelerationism in 2010 - he was no stranger to the academy, for sure) and instead put his heart into the noughties underground blogosphere, his short Zer0 books works, and his writing on television, film and music in more mainstream outlets such as The Wire or New Humanist. From my viewpoint it seems Fisher always tried to live by his concept of “popular modernism”, constantly trying to bridge the gap between the mainstream and the marginal or avant-garde, plunging into liminal, in-between spaces to later emerge with new, critical, and accessible insights: TV reviews that cited Lacan and Nietzsche (e.g.), and his music writing that (most famously) reanimated Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” being two examples of this. By necessity, this demanded a certain critical distance from and engagement with the academy, which certainly would not usually judge the above work of sufficient academic rigour.

Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus meanwhile is written with an exuberant, militant flair that actively channels the post-68 spirit in France, which had not yet deflated by the time they published the book in 1972. Examples of this are numerous, with the book peppered with phrases like “fucked by the socius”, “Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass, A solar anus”, and “all writing is so much pig shit” (and that’s far from exhaustive). While such joyful and profane desecration is less present in A Thousand Plateaus or Deleuze’s solo work (to my knowledge), these works break with academic conventions in other ways: ATP famously is a non-linear book, where any chapter can and should be read in any order, and joyfully brings together a whole host of intellectual fields. Whereas AO’s theoretical foundations, which it departs from and sublimates over the course of the book, are largely psychoanalysis and Marxism (although the literary works of Artaud and Samuel Beckett are also formative, so this is reductive), ATP frequently falls back on the natural sciences, pulling concepts from fields like genetics, thermodynamics, cybernetics, and differential geometry and mashing them together to produce a joyfully weird – and difficult – text of philosophy.

What Fisher and Deleuze-Guattari give us hints of is what is intellectual practice can be like when unshackled from the Academic, and provoke us to further ask: How can intellectual practice look and feel different? I don’t have a total answer to that, but as this post argued, approaching an answer will involve (1) embracing and taking seriously style and aesthetics and (2) going through embarrassment (and fear, and denigration), making deviations and experiments that by their very nature will provoke and shock the collective unconscious into defence mode.

Theory freed from the Academic – freed from “in this paper I will argue that”, a mode of writing which mainly only appeals to other academics, and paper presentations that consist of a mild-mannered white man reading from a laptop in a stuffy lecture theatre – may not be theory in any form we currently recognise it. It may elicit shock, derision or laughter. So be it.

I am nothing but I should be everything

The Fisher-Function has routed itself so thoroughly in my neural circuitry that I am no longer just echoing and citing k-punk (at an almost embarrassingly high frequency) but anticipating its thoughts accurately. Upon reading some posts on Nietzsche in an attempt to help me get some bearings on the notorious philosopher, I came across this passage from a 2006 post that spectacularly wires together Nietzsche and Celebrity Big Brother:

[...] because Big Brother and reality TV have effaced those areas of popular culture in which a working class that aspired to more than 'wealth' or 'fame' once excelled. Its rise has meant a defeat for that over-reaching proletarian drive to be more, (I am nothing but should be everything), a drive which negated Social Facts by inventing Sonic Fictions, which despised 'ordinariness' in the name of the strange and the alien.

This "proletarian drive to be more" is the same drive I noted in my post on surpluses from a couple of months back, where I discussed "the craving for a more that is almost never satisfied" that exists amongst the working class (having not read any of these k-punk posts previously). Whereas I mentioned this craving in a kind of off-the-cuff way, Fisher adds an important political dimension to it; namely, by explicating how this drive has had to be explicitly quashed from capitalist realist popular culture, through a veneration of the "ordinary" and the "relatable". Fisher's then-contemporary point of reference for this is Celebrity Big Brother but the cultural impulse remains strong to this day, evidenced in the latest iteration of reality tee-vee (Love Island) and "everyday" sitcoms (see the hype that accompanied the Gavin and Stacey Christmas comeback special). Popular culture continually opts for the "ordinary", "relatable" and "comfortable", never inviting the working classes to desire anything more.

This desire and striving for working-class excellence and achievement, explicitly defined against its dominant bourgeois opponent (two kids, a nice piece of real estate in the home counties, and a managerial job on £70k+...), is not the phantasmatic invention of desperate leftists idealising the working class. At one point, at least in Britain, it was a significant social and cultural force. Simon Reynold's book on post-punk from 1978-84, Rip It Up and Start Again, which I've been reading lately, attests to this over and over again, detailing the background stories of numerous post-punk groups from the era and their position on post-punk as a genre, aesthetic and philosophy. Post-punk, of course, was the protest against the ossification of Punk, its solidification into a Punk™ that fetishised a kind of ordinary, "authentic", overtly macho, "common-sense" Punk that soon became the Oi! movement. In post-punk, therefore, one found swathes of working-class artists (John Lydon, Mark E. Smith, and the late Andy Gill of Gang of Four being just a few examples) resisting their mandatory reduction to the "ordinary" by virtue of them being poor or ostensibly "uneducated", doing so through a whole-hearted embrace of sonic experimentation and genre cross-contamination (dub and reggae were particularly big influences). And, most importantly of all, these post-punk artists weren't experimentalist fringe nobodies but people situated on the bleeding edge of popular (music) culture, hyped up by the then healthy music press (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, etc) with major label contracts and big record sales. Post-punk became the release valve for the "proletarian drive to be more" and then routed it back to the public, amplifying the proletarian drive. That kind of hyperstitional system is pretty much completely absent from the current social and cultural landscape, and its revivification should be a key long-term goal of contemporary cultural and political struggle.

The constant presence of class in Fisher's writings, both conceptually and above all else affectively (evident in the sharp wit and resentment of the ruling class that permeated all his work), is one of my favourite things about it. Because, and I know this is not a particularly original insight to make, but class, any discussion or even just acknowledgement of class, is just completely and utterly absent from (British) popular culture right now. Not even Corbyn did much to shift this, perpetually opting for the moral critique of austerity capitalism (as indicated by his favourite soundbite, "grotesque levels of inequality") rather than an advocacy for class conflict (he/Labour very rarely used the words "working-class" or identified them as their driving subject).

This is why watching Parasite at the Barbican yesterday was, above all else, so completely refreshing. I haven't seen a film that depicted class conflict so brilliantly perhaps ever (disclaimer: I do not watch many films), and key to this was the kind of casual, humorous spearing of the upper class family in the film by the poor under-employed family who are the protagonists. This wasn't even class resentment, it surpassed and transcended resentment by taking it for granted (yeah, of course rich people are useless parasites, that's why we're mocking them) and using it as the foundations for a dark and ironic humour that repeatedly put the audience in stitches. We need more fictions like that in the realm of popular culture.