Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit More Politics (Sections VII - XIII)

Марк Фишер: Кислотный коммунист

(SA/2026)

 

Note: All page references in this post are to Mark Fisher's k-punk: 

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), 

ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). 

 

 

VII. 

 

Fisher may have hated D. H. Lawrence, but perhaps he might have appreciated Lawrence's idea of a democracy of touch [a], as one of his criticisms of the smartphone and other forms of touchscreen technology is that they involve touch devoid of any sensuality: 

 

"When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain - an eye and brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace." (487) 

 

Fisher thinks it astonishing that this line of thought was anticipated by Baudrillard in the 1980s - but even more remarkable is the fact that Lawrence foresaw all this in the 1920s. 

 

And like Tanizaki, Lawrence also wrote in praise of shadows, which, rather surprisingly, Fisher calls for the cultivation of in addition to the carving out of spaces "beyond the hyper-bright instant" (487). I so much prefer this poetic-philosophical Mark Fisher to the one who bangs on about politics and the financial crisis of 2008. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

The phrase that best sums up Fisher's utopian phase - his acid communism - is red plenty (a phrase he borrows from Francis Spufford's 2010 book of that title). It refers to the collective capacity of the People to "produce, care and enjoy" (510) and is the thing which, he says, capitalism is set up to block: 

 

"The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about 'wealth creation', capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth." (510) 

 

In a post-capitalist future, technological advancements and the communist re-ordering of society will provide abundance for all: "Everything for everyone" (510), including bread and roses. Gone forever will be the days of artificial scarcity. 

 

Further, everyone will feel a sense of red belonging - a sense of belonging that has nothing to do with faith, flag, or family and cannot be "reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever" (510-511). 

 

It is, rather, a "special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance" (511). 

 

The great promise of red plenty and red belonging is that it doesn't matter "where you come from or who you are" (511), you will be cared for unconditionally. 

 

It's clear how this line of thinking might feed into the open borders movement. What's not quite so clear is how such thinking relates to Fisher's own mental health; frankly, I can't see how anyone can promote such ideas without being in some sort of delirium (similar to the mystical state experienced by those who suddenly find God) [b]. 

 

I know some of his more ardent supporters believe that Fisher's speculative nostalgia and hallucinogenic politics is the best way to confront capitalist realism, but for those looking for a rather more practical strategy for transitioning from neoliberalism to a democracy to come, Fisher's work is essentially worthless. It also seems somewhat at odds with his own more pessimistic views and criticism of the moralising left. 

 

In sum: whilst I'm all for the creation of new narratives and conceptual frameworks - and maybe even a little bit of libidinal engineering - Fisher's acid communism fails to convince and red plenty leaves me hungry for something more. 

 

 

IX. 

 

And back to the topic of consciousness-raising ... A practice (or range of practices) that Fisher believes to be of crucial importance to molecular revolution: 

 

"Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective experience. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently [...]" (514) 

 

For Fisher: 

 

"The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures [...] mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing" (514). 

 

These figures would include, for example, landlords and entrepreneurs, whom Fisher brands as parasites. We might, I would suggest, see this as a succinct definition of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and which is central to slave morality. 

 

Fisher claims that the aim of consciousness-raising is to produce more compassion "for others and for ourselves" (514), but I worry that his proposed method of consciousness-raising will only generate class hate and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves too; has knowing that others feel as desperate as you do ever really helped? [c] 

 

 

X.

 

Fisher is grateful to Francis Spufford for reminding us all that "when communism was defeated, it wasn't just a particular ideology that disappeared" (518). 

 

No, the demise of communism - and he's thinking here of the USSR - was also "the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society" (518). 

 

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that's a good thing. For this dream became a dystopian nightmare, did it not? Surely Fisher knows the history of the Soviet Union - and, indeed, he might also be expected to know what happened to Prometheus (for those who don't recall their Ancient Greek mythology, it ended even worse for him than for Trotsky).    

 

Is Fisher really falling back into what Nick Land would call a sentimental indulgence - i.e., the hope that a political revolution will lead to "new productive, perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities" (518). 

 

I don't want to be a postmodern killjoy who radically lowers expectations and crushes dreams, etc. But, really, c'mon! Knowing, Mark, that there's no way back to old school communism [d], why pin your hopes on renewing (and resuming) class solidarity and the building of radical machineries of desire? 

 

 

XI. 

 

I mentioned above how, for Fisher, "the roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings" (514). 

 

And yet, in another text from 2015, titled 'Anti-Therapy', Fisher acknowledges that the idea that "talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive" (521) and that this new emotionalism seems closely linked to capitalist realism - born of Tony Blair's "manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" (521). 

 

Fisher rightly says that the new emo-politics enforced by New Labour "went far beyond mere mood-setting" (522) - now we all had to possess the right feelings and share them in the approved manner. Blair "led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain" (522) - a phase that Fisher amusingly calls spincerity (the public performance of an emotion you may or may not genuinely feel). 

 

It's enough to make one wish for the return of traditional British restraint and resolve; of stiff upper-lips and stoical detachment. However, Fisher sees this as reactionary and posits in contrast a third way (if I can use such a phrase); one based on his reading of Spinoza. 

 

For Spinoza's philosophy "makes the management of emotions central to its project" (524) and aims not to repress feelings, but engineer joy via the use of reason. This, for Fisher, makes Spinoza "a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project" (524) - a view that is not uncommon amongst neo-Marxist thinkers (particularly those influenced by Deleuze and Badiou) [e].  

 

Get Spinoza on board, says Fisher, and talking about our feelings can become a radical political act; "part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us" (530).  

 

  

XII.  

 

This seems at first a rather disingenuous thing to write: 

 

"It's somewhat ironic that theories of the 'Event' have come to the fore [...] at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don't change anything." (531)

 

For Fisher surely knows that the Event (as conceptualised by philosophers) is extremely rare and has little to do with the events covered by the news media, such as Live Aid, for example, or the G20 protests. The Event - at least as I understand it (inspired by Lawrence) - is a rent in the Great Umbrella; something that allows a glimpse of chaos and the discovery of a new world via the destruction of fixed forms [f].  

 

But perhaps Fisher was thinking of something said by Zarathustra to the effect that what matters more than noisy, violent events are those changes that take place in us in our stillest hours: "'The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values: it revolves inaudibly.'" [g] 

 

Heidegger picked up on this idea after the War, when he attempted to purge his notion of Transzendenz - Dasein's ability to start over and transform the world - not only from its conventional ties to metaphysics but to the idea of action. What was required, Heidegger argued, was not some great event, but a form of silent waiting. 

 

What seems most to worry Fisher is that events often result in euphoric outbursts of feeling "followed by depressive collapse" (531) - but the same could be said of love, no? 

 

Still, if events are the be-all and end-all - if change doesn't happen through them alone - "there are nevertheless moments which function as thresholds, opening up a new terrain of struggle, and allowing different collective emotions to propagate" (532). 

 

Which is basically saying things can still happen out of the blue ...   

 

 

XIII.  

 

Finally, we come to the two short texts, both from 2016, with which part four of k-punk closes; firstly, 'Cybergothic vs Steampunk' and, secondly, 'Mannequin Challenge' ...

 

In the former, Fisher argues that the global terrorist network ISIS "holds up a mirror to twenty-first century capitalist nihilism" (544). A form of nihilism that is essentially a type of existential poverty. We might not like to admit it, but ISIS offer a solution to this (albeit a horrifically false solution). For like criminal gangs and religious cults, ISIS offer those who join fellowship and meaning.    

 

Perhaps more interestingly, Fisher describes ISIS in relation to his concept of the cybergothic:

 

"There are no 'pure' archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)." (546)

 

And whilst he is obviously not a supporter of ISIS, Fisher - a bit like Foucault, who greeted the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with warm enthusiasm [h] - is excited by "the rising tide of experimental political forms in so many areas of the world at the moment" (546). 

 

And that's because, for him, this shows that "people are rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective" (546).     

 

I can't help wondering whether, if he were alive today, Fisher (like Foucault in his late work) would find it necessary to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. To concede, for example, that whilst the individual is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful one which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism. 

 

In the latter piece, Fisher comments on Donald Trump and his successful campaign in 2016 to become President of the United States. 

 

In contrast to Clinton and her team of "political robots playing out an exhausted programme" (547), Trump's campaign "was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement" (547). 

 

Fisher understands how Trump caught the mood of popular dissatisfaction with capitalist realism and performed with a certain libidinal freedom that was attractive not only to his supporters, but to many who wouldn't vote for him in a million years and were appalled by his rhetoric and immoderation. His campaign may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't boring. 

 

In brief, like many other commentators of a certain generation, Fisher recognised that Trump was the punk candidate (what this tells us about the latter is an interesting question we might discuss one day).   

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written several posts referencing this Lawrentian idea; see, for example, the post dated 14 May 2014 - 'Towards a Democracy of Touch' - click here. 

      Note that the word 'hated' is used deliberately here; Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) Fisher's visceral hostility toward Lawrence.

 

[b] Normally, I would not comment on someone's mental health. However, since Fisher and his followers make such a point of politicising depression - arguing that it is a social phenomenon heavily influenced by capitalism rather than a purely chemical or biological issue - I feel justified in doing so.

      Note, however, that my use of the term delirium is not simply intended in the narrow clinical sense, but more in the philo-political sense deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom delirium is a way the unconscious invests in the social field, sometimes opening up revolutionary lines of flight. I suggest that Fisher's vision of acid communism operates as this precise kind of political delirium; an elaborate, idealised alternative reality constructed to escape the immense psychological claustrophobia of capitalist realism. Such a vision of utopia functions as a temporary, internal flight mechanism from profound depression. Suddenly, the world feels meaningful and loving once more. 

      However, as a political strategy, this hallucinogenic clarity borders on a mystical state rather than practical materialist organising. And, unfortunately, such states seldom last; when the speculative fantasy dissolves, the individual comes back down to earth with a bump, resulting in renewed depression. Fisher, as most readers will know, tragically committed suicide less than two years after writing the text discussed here.

 

[c] Historically, of course, it has. In the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, sharing personal experiences of isolation, shame, and subjugation was precisely what allowed women to see that their private misery was structural and political. This collective realisation was a vital catalyst for solidarity and agency. 

      However, my contention with Fisher is that his specific formula for consciousness-raising risks short-circuiting this therapeutic transformation. Rather than moving from shared misery to structural agency, Fisher's explicit demand for populist loathing targeted at parasites paves a direct line toward Nietzschean ressentiment. It risks trapping the participants in a permanent state of reactive anger and class hate, which ultimately toxicifies the self and breeds a new form of psychological misery. 

      Of course, Fisher himself is aware of this danger, which is why he later refers readers to Wendy Brown's essay 'Wounded Attachments' (1993) - an essay in which she diagnoses the psycho-libidinal origins of an identity politics and what those on the right call wokism. 

      Fisher writes: "Drawing on Nietzsche's account of resentment [...] Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which 'becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuge the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such'" (526-527). And Fisher concludes that today "the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment" (527).

      Brown's essay can be found in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410. It can be accessed via JSTOR by clicking here.  

 

[d] Fisher says as much: "I don't believe that the old signifier 'communism' can be revived [...] It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the twentieth century" (520). Funnily enough, however, a few months later he names his new politics of desire emerging from the future ... acid communism.  

 

[e] As a Lawrentian, I have my reservations about Spinoza and his rationalism. Nevertheless, his work is useful in exposing the myth of the autonomous individual at the heart of the liberal tradition which drags with it notions of free will and responsibility.   

 

[f] See the post titled 'on Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.  

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 153-154.  

 

[h] Writing in an Italian daily newspaper (Corriere della Sera), Foucault praised the Iranian Revolution as an authentic anti-imperialist movement and a spiritual revolt against Western-imposed modernity, rather than just a religious coup. See my post dated 14 August 2014, in which I discuss this: click here. 

 

 

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Fisher's political writings in the book k-punk (2018): click here. 

 

And for earlier thoughts on Fisher's political writings in the above work, please click here.

 

  

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 3: Then (Chapters 6-9)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania  - cover of the US edition

(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011)

 

 

I.

 

So, here we are at page 183 and still not half-way through a book which can be summarised in one short sentence: We live in a culture that prefers to curate the recent past rather than create the future. And whilst he doesn't use the phrase, Reynolds seems to suggest that the solution to this is: torpedo the archive! 

 

It amazes me that there are still another 7 chapters and another 250 pages or so to get through; Reynolds is like a spider that has already caught the fly, but can't resist weaving an ever-expanding web, delighted with its own ingenuity.  

 

Anyway, let's explore the four chapters that make up part two of Retromania - and let me remind readers that the page numbers refer to the 2012 Faber edition of the book.  

 

 

II. 

 

Because I like fashion, I do like chapter 6; one which opens with Reynolds expressing his excitement at discovering just how fabulous the futuristic looks designed by the likes of André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne in the early 1960s were - before everything turned psychedelic and full-on hippie and "youth style started to revel in anything and everything that was neither modern nor from the industrialised West" [185] [a]. 

 

I don't quite agree with this: "From a distance [...] retro and historicism blend into each other and look rather like inspiration-starved designers, rifling through the past's wardrobe" [190] - but it's not far from being the case. At some point, even Vivienne Westwood - for all her attempts to justify her historicism - ends up frantically pillaging the past just like everyone else.     

 

The footnote provided by Reynolds on vintage and class is excellent; "vintage is a largely middle-class game [...] The further down the class ladder you go, the more value is set on things being brand new [...] the UK's white working class [...] would not be seen dead in anything that even looked old, let alone actually was second-hand" [194]. Chavs, says Reynolds, are - in some ways - "Britain's last bastion of futurist taste" [194] [b] - heaven help us if that's true!   

 

 

III. 

 

Here's a claim that would make for an interesting discussion: "Pop music exists somewhere between fashion and art, but leans far more to the art side." [196] 

 

I'm not sure that's the case. And it's certainly not always the case. Indeed, one could make a strong counterargument; that music is, as Malcolm McLaren never tired of saying, the sound of fashion, just as fashion is often the look of music. 

 

And it's absolutely false to claim: "People are moved by music in a way that is different to the feelings they might have for a pair of shoes or a jacket. They become attached to music in a more enduring and deeply felt way." [196] 

 

I would remind Mr Reynolds that the king of rock 'n' roll himself valued getting dressed up to mess up above money or performing on stage and that whilst you can burn his house, steal his car, or smash his record collection, under no circumstances would he accept anyone criticising or stepping on his blue suede shoes [c].     

 

Ultimately, trying to defend a hard and fast distinction between music and fashion in terms of emotional value is not only in vain, but a little ridiculous. For the record, I remember the excitement of pulling on a pair of tight black PVC trousers for the first time just as vividly (perhaps more) than hearing the first Clash album. The fresh and bold aspect of punk lay in the fashions created by McLaren and Westwood, not in the records produced by bands strumming and banging away on traditional instruments to a 4/4 beat.   

  

 

IV. 

 

There are somethings I'd rather not know; including the fact that, when a student at Oxford, Reynolds chose to associate with a group of "out-of-time hippies" [202], despite the fact that his "musical leanings [...] were incompatible with theirs" [202] - and despite the fact that Malcolm had explicitly warned to never trust them.  

 

Revivalists and those living in a time warp (whether wilfully remaining there or trapped like insects in amber), have never particularly interested me. It's not that I encourage people to move on; but I don't like the idea of standing still and remaining the same either. The knack is to reverse the past into the present so that one might live yesterday tomorrow and ensure that what returns is difference itself, the engine of newness and becoming [d].    

 

Pleased to see Reynolds write this: "Time-warp cultists [...] seem unable to recognise that the same energies they prize about the music of the remote past can be found in the present [...]" [206], which is both true and important, but one suspects they want more than these 'energies' - though what it is they're after I'm never quite certain. 

 

If it's authenticity then there's a problem, for there's an "inherent contradiction to musical cults of authenticity: fixating on a style that is remote either in time or space [...] inevitably condemns the devotee to inauthenticity" [211]. Reynolds spells out this contradiction:

 

"Either he strives to be a faithful copyist, reproducing the music's surface features as closely as possible, risking hollowness and redundancy; or he can attempt to bring something expressive and personal to it, or to work in contemporary influences and local musical favours, which then risks bastardising the style." [211]

 

That is a dilemma. 

 

Were I to advise, I'd say to the faithful copyists, don't worry about hollowness; be a bit more Buddhist about how one views the idea and worry a bit less about what T. S. Eliot might say [e]. And to those who wish to jazz or punk things up a little even at the risk of bastardising the original, I'd say knock yourselves out; what is corruption and debasement to one man is the laughter of genius to another.     

 

 

V.  

 

"I've never totally understood the appeal of Northern Soul" [214]; no, me neither - so let's skip this section and abandon the faith ... If Reynolds is right to say that the logic of redemption is what defines this subculture, then let me just remind readers that, actually, you can never buy back the past. 

 

As for the post-punk mod revival of the late 1970s - wasn't impressed then, and I'm not interested now. Admittedly, The Jam made some great singles, but Paul Weller's a prick and the band essentially appealed, as Reynolds says, "to British kids who liked punk's high-energy sound but didn't care for either the yobbish element or the art-school theory-and-politics contingent" [224]. 

 

Ultimately, the new mods only contributed to the cultural stagnation; a "betrayal of the original principles of modernism, which involved being into the latest, coolest thing" [229] and not dressing up "in the glad rags of a secondhand subculture" and listening to "copies of yesterday's sounds" [229].      

 

   

VI. 

 

Rave culture: NMCoT. At all. 

 

But I'm sure my old friend Kirk Field [f] would agree with this:

 

"In its early years, 1988 to 1993, rave was like a flash flood-engorged river bursting its banks and scattering off foaming side-streams in a dozen directions. The era's sense of runaway momentum was stoked by the energy flash of Ecstasy and amphetamine." [234]   

 

But would he, I'd be interested to know, also agree with this, now that he makes a living from rave nostalgia:

 

"By the mid-nineties, though, rave's engine of drug/music synergy was sputtering; the participants had hurtled down the road of excess at top speed only to crash into various aesthetic and spiritual dead ends. Once so future-focused, ravers began to look back wistfully. 

      Like everyone else who got swept up in the collective rush, I never dreamed that the culture would ever slow down, let alone succumb to retrospection." [234] 

       

Old skool: it's always been a slightly irritating term; "a shorthand for notions of origins and roots [...] used by epigones [...] who believe that the present is less distinguished than the illustrious past. [...] People who [...] often seem to believe that things could be righted if only the ignorant and insufficiently reverent new generation [...] would let itself be schooled by wiser elders." [235]

 

Well said, that man! Surely, the only thing worse than someone identifying as old skool is someone insisting that we keep it real ...

 

Of course, we're all prone to a touch of nostalgia; Reynolds admits to being "highly susceptible" [239] himself. Which is why, perhaps, he suddenly offers the mnemonic muse defence: "Nostalgia [...] can be creative, even subversive [...] the past can be used to critique what's absent in the present" [239] - an idea that takes us into chapter 8 ...

 

 

VII. 

 

"There is a paradox right at the heart of punk: this most revolutionary movement in rock history was actualy born from reactionary impulses. Punk opposed iself to progress. Musically, it rejected the sixties idea of progression and maturity that had led to prog rock and to other sophisticated seventies sounds. A concerted effort to turn back the clock to rock's teenage past [...] punk rock also rejected the notion of progress in a broader philosophical sense. Driven by an apocalyptic appetite for destruction and collapse, its vision was literally hope-less." [240]

 

I might phrase the above passage slightly differently at certain points, but I would basically agree that this provides an insightful reading of the slogan no future. The rejection of progress as an ideal is, of course, central to Torpedo the Ark as well: it's a secularised religious fantasy, born of what Nietzsche terms enfeebled optimism. Life is not getting better, humanity is not moving toward some predetermined higher goal, and Sgt. Pepper's is not superior to Elvis Presley.    

 

Was punk the "ultimate time-warp cult" [257]? Again, that's debatable. But let's agree that even if it started out as such it quickly escalated into a revolution: 

 

"Musical influences from outside rock 'n' roll, as well as non-musical catalysts from the worlds of politics, art theory and avant-garde fashion, entered the picture. Everything came together in a surge of energy, and then, Big Bang-like, exploded outwards into new galaxies of sound and subculture." [258] [g] 

 

That's the key: punk was never a unified musical movement; it was an Event or, as Reynolds metaphorically implies, a singularity. Although, strangely, the post-punk universe saw "revivals of every kind" [262] and a "retreat to established forms" [262]; it's hard living in the chaotic period immediately after a Big Bang - much safer to retreat to a prior time [h].   

 

 

VIII. 

 

Billy Childish and Stuckism: I'm not convinced and I'm certainly not on a quest for authenticity. 

 

But interesting that Reynolds should conceive of it as a form of love; fidelity to a golden past that one either remembers or imagines (albeit a form of love that can quickly become obsessive and turn rotten). 

 

 

IX. 

 

Chapter 9 - the never-ending fifties revival; not sure that's a topic that warrants a whole chapter (any more than Childish warranted an entire section at the end of chapter 8), but let's take a look ...

 

Nice idea that glam rock "musically harked back to the fifties without replicating it" [291] - perhaps that's why I loved it so as a ten-year-old (and later loved punk) [i]. 

 

And I'm pleased to see that, despite everything, Reynolds has the courage and integrity to admit that "the glam era's most creative reinventions of rock 'n' roll came from Gary Glitter [...] It was a genuinely new sound achieved by communing with the decade's lost spirit" [292].

 

I think Glitter's writing out of pop history is absurd, quite frankly - and hypocritical. And I agree entirely with what Reynold says here:

 

"Glitterbeat's atavistic-futuristic brutalism sounded totally seventies. If the singer had been a little less camp and a lot younger and scrawnier-looking, songs like 'I'm the Leader of the Gang' could have been a proto-punk sound for early-seventies juvenile delinquents [...]" [292] [j]   

 

And then there's The Cramps ... "a fusion of non-mainstream rock 'n' roll and pulp fiction [...] into a cult of adolescence" [297]. 

 

I can't say I was a big fan, but I know a girl who was and those psychobillies who "fixated on the moment when rock 'n' roll's jungle rhythm and voodoo frenzy was seen as ungodly and subversive" [298] are alright by me [k].   

 

Reynolds concludes the chapter on a hauntological note ...

 

"From the early eighties on, rock 'n' roll recurred only as a ghostly signifier detached from any real-world referents. Like a spook, it moved through the world without affecting it, lingered as a faintly disquieting trace of what-once-was." [307]

 

One might interrogate the above by asking what constitutes a non-ghostly signifier and a real-world referent for Reynolds and what is the nature of their relationship - but as this part of the post is already far longer than I would wish, probably best we leave such questions for another day. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] It amazes me that a young woman would choose to dress like a villager in Bangladesh when she could look as if she had just arrived from Moon Base Alpha. For my take on space age fashion, see my post on futuristic fashion with reference to the sci-fi mini-skirt: click here. 

      Interestingly, Reynolds also seems smitten with such designs invented for a world that hasn't yet arrived, though one might have imagined he'd approve of the authenticity of clothes made in Asia, but no, he prefers ultra-modernism to retro-shit and the Biba aesthetic.      

 

[b] Reynolds wrote this in defence of chavs earlier in Retromania: 

      "In the UK, almost the only people who remain immune to the romance of the antiquated are the 'chavs', a derogatory term for working-class whites who identify with black American style and music at its most flashy and materialistic. Although chav-haters complain about their lack of taste and vulgarity [...] the subtext of the animosity is the chav's un-English lack of interest in old stuff: antiques, heritage, costume drama." [24] 

 

[c] Obviously, I'm referencing Elvis's version of the Carl Perkins song 'Blue Suede Shoes', the opening track from Elvis Presley (RCA Victor, 1956) and later released as a single: click here.   

 

[d] According to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, the key thing is not the return of the Same or the identical, but rather the repetition of difference itself. It's false to think we remain the same person from one moment to the next or that the phrase 'same time, same place' is meaningful. The future, my friend, is not merely blowing in the wind, it actively ruptures the circularity of habit (the present) and the depths of memory (the past) allowing for newness to emerge.  

      See Deleuze writing in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), trans. Hugh Tomlinson (The Athlone Press, 1983) and/or Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994).  

 

[e] In Buddhism the idea of emptiness (Śūnyatā) is a central, liberating truth about the nature of reality and understanding the hollowness of self is an important practice. For the poet T. S. Eliot, of course, hollowness implies spiritual and emotional deadness; hollow individuals lack substance, purpose, authenticity, and the ability to act in a morally meaningful manner.    

 

[f] Kirk Field is a dance culture devotee, promoter, travel agent, and writer; see his best-selling book Rave New World (Nine Eight Books, 2023). I knew him in a previous life when he was a punk rocker (and still, to this day, greatly admire his work as vocalist and lyricist with Initial Vision).   

 

[g] As Reynolds concedes: "Arguably, the non-sonic aspects of punk were more crucial in terms of generating all these 'futures' than the music itself ..." [258] - that must slightly pain him to admit as a music lover and music critic first and foremost.  

 

[h] I understand that this may not make any conceptual sense to a scientist for whom there is no before the Big Bang - but we're discussing pop history here, not physics. 

 

[i] See the post 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' (24 July 2018): click here.  

  

[j] In fact, Glitter was later adopted by the punks as one of their own, many of whom, like me, remembered him fondly from their childhood.   

[k] Reynolds provides an excellent footnote on the punk/rockabilly connection on pp. 303-306, rightly arguing that rockabilly remained a "submerged but crucial component" [303] of punk, repeatedly rising to the surface. 

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read here. 

 

Part 2 of this post can be read here. 

 

Parts 4 and 5 of the post will be published shortly. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Queer Defamiliarisation of St. Mawr

 

Front cover of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 

Volume 7, Number 2 (2025) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

There are, of course, many ways of reading D. H. Lawrence. 

 

But it seems to me that the real battle now is between those who like to revere his writings from a mythopoetic perspective - i.e., an interpretive approach which looks for connections between his work and those archetypal narratives known as myths - and those who prefer to fuck Lawrence up the arse [2] and defamiliarise his texts in a queer and/or perverse manner. 

 

The first kind of reader - and they have traditionally been dominant within Lawrence scholarship - whilst conceding that there are closely observed realistic elements in his work, like to celebrate his ability to transfigure these elements via a mythopoetic imagination and thereby provide us with a glimpse into the fourth dimensional realm of Being.

 

The second kind of reader - and I'm one of a small but increasing number of such within the world of Lawrence studies - whilst conceding there is symbolic truth and metaphorical meaning in his work, prefer to celebrate his decision to climb down Pisgah and keep his feet firmly planted on the flat earth, providing us with his own form of what Bataille termed base materialism: formless, filthy, and heterogeneous.

 

For the first type of reader, Lawrence will always be a priest of love communing with ancient gods and channelling primal forces, so as to impose some kind of order and value on a secular modern world. For the second, he's more the king of kink [3], exploring the world of fluid sexuality and peculiar paraphilias, making the known world strange and always caught up in a process of becoming-other.  

 

 

II. 

 

Choosing between mythopoiesis and queer defamiliarization [4], ultimately depends on whether you think of Lawrence as a red-bearded visionary and defender of religious faith in a disenchanted world, or a radical opponent of moral rationalism and the metaphysical dualism that it rests upon; is he searching for wholeness, or is he a believer in the ruins? 

  

While traditionalists favour mythopoiesis in order to promote his prophetic genius, readers on the LGBTQI+ spectrum often find queer defamiliarization more useful for accompanying Lawrence on the thought adventures via which he tested the limits of selfhood (particularly in relation to questions of sex and gender). 

 

 

III.

 

In practice, what does all this mean? 

 

Well, it means, for example, that when distinguished Lawrence scholars still susbcribing to a mythpoeic approach read the short novel St. Mawr (1925), they immediately speak of sacred symbols and animal archetypes. 

 

John Turner, for example, although primarily wishing to discuss the sardonic aspects of the above tale, can't help insisting that what Lawrence sought beneath the mockery was "a myth that would marry the old and the new, in such a way as to [...] enrich the visionary power of the eye and re-establish religious connexion with the cosmos" [5] and that the female protagonist, Lou Witt, is on a savage pilgrimage to find "a holy place in which the self in its full depth may be known, experienced and integrated" [6].       

 

And Michael Bell, in a short piece titled 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', says that St. Mawr "belongs among those mythic tales [...] in which the balance of realism to mythopoeia shifts towards the latter" [7]. This, I suppose, is true enough. But surely we are not obliged as readers to shift accordingly and we can discuss the horse as a horse and not as a symbol with mythic significance; and surely we are entitled to claim that the new awareness that the red-golden stallion with his big, black, brilliant eyes provokes in Lou is zoosexual in nature, rather than onto-theological.

 

For although Paul Poplawski claims that there is a "relative lack of sexual content" [8] in St. Mawr, I would argue now - much as I did back in 2006, in a paper on the question of why girls love horses [9] - that St. Mawr is, in many respects, far more transgressive than Lady Chaterley's Lover (1928). 

 

For whilst in the latter book Lawrence wishes to radically challenge class divisions, in St. Mawr he challenges the distinction between human and animal by envisioning a love affair between a woman and a horse, which, whilst not explicit in its depiction - there are no sexual acts as such - is fully eroticised nonetheless. Here, for example, is a description of their very first encounter: 

 

"She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her […] So slippery with vivid, hot life! 

      She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse's sun-arched neck. Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in." [10]

 

What exactly is Lou thinking of here? 

 

Personally, I think it's clear that when Lawrence writes of an 'ancient understanding' flooding into her female soul this is a form of carnal knowledge. And I don't think this is a crassly reductive or obscene interpretation, as some critics would protest. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-animal sexual relationship in St. Mawr - as he does elsewhere in his work - and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of fantasy writing. 

 

Lou may not be Bodil Joensen [11], but she's the closest to such in Lawrence's queer fictional universe ...  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The JDHLS (2025) is published by the D. H. Lawrence Society (Eastwood, Notts.) and edited by Jane Costin. The cover shows an original artwork by Lewis Weber of Nottingham High School. For details on the DHL Society (and how to join), visit their website: click here. 

 

[2] Deleuze famously speaks of approaching an author from behind and buggering them in order to inseminate them with strange new ideas and in this way produce monstrous offspring. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 6.  

 

[3] See my post titled 'D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink' (19 July 2018), in which I list an A-Z of paraphilias, perversions, and fetishistic behaviours that can be found in his work: click here. 

 

[4] Defamiliarization - or, to use the original Russian term, остранение (ostranenie) - is an artistic technique of magically making ordinary objects in the everyday world appear new and as if seen for the first time. It was coined by the formalist Viktor Shklovsky in an essay of 1917. It has been utilised and adapted by many different artists and thinkers and has now become an important component of queer theory. 

      See, for example, Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), in which she explores how we might radically reimagine this concept in order to affirm deviant, errant, and alternative modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. 

 

[5] John Turner, 'Drift and Depth: the Sardonic in St. Mawr', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), p. 52. Note the dated - slightly affected - spelling of the word connection.  

 

[6] Ibid., p. 53.  

 

[7] Michael Bell, 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 140.  

 

[8] Paul Poplawski, 'Less is Mawr: Revisiting Lawrence's St. Mawr', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 80. 

 

[9] I'm referring to the essay 'Equus Eroticus: Why Do Girls Love Horses?', written in 2006, presented at Treadwell's Bookshop (London) in March 2007, and published in The Treadwell's Papers Vol. 3: Zoophilia (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 87-117. 

      Without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I would suggest that this text might be seen as seminal for those who are now discovering the notion of queer defamiliarisation and/or perverse forms of materialism.     

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Penguin Books, 1997), p. 30. 

 

[11] Bodil Joensen (1944-1985) was a Danish porn star who ran a small farm and animal husbandry business. She gained public notoriety for her many  films in which she engaged in sex acts with animals, including horses, although she warned in an interview that being fucked by a horse is always a dangerous affair, particularly for those inexperienced in the practice; for not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick, or suddenly thrust and flare when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse will swell considerably and this can cause serious (if not fatal) internal damage. In this same interview (1980), she explained how she had developed a special technique to allow penetration without the risk of vaginal tearing. 

 

 

On Spinoza's Four Great Disciples

Les quatre grands disciples de Spinoza

(Nietzsche - Lawrence - Kafka - Artaud)

 

I. 

 

Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have never read and about whom my knowledge is extremely limited: I know, for example, that he was a 17th-century Dutch thinker of Portuguese-Jewish origin and a founding figure of the Enlightenment who preferred to earn his living as a lens grinder, rather than accept an academic post that might compromise his intellectual independence. 

 

I also know that he rejected the idea of free will and divine judgement and argued for a kind of pantheistic monism (i.e., the belief that God and Nature are one and the same identical and infinite substance). Such thinking made him a controversial figure at the time and and a thorn in the side of the religious authorities. 

 

Finally, I know that Deleuze was a great admirer; that Spinoza was the thinker who provided him with the basis for his own work on immanence and encouraged a joyful affirmation of life free from belief in a world beyond, or tedious moral concepts that always terminate in judgement and punishment.  

 

For Deleuze, Spinoza was le prince de philosophes and he had four great heirs or disciples: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kakfa, and Artaud [1]. The question that interests me here, however, is not how or why Deleuze arrives at this conclusion, but what did each of these four think of the renegade Jew who gave us modernity ...? [2]

 

II.  

 

Let's work backwards and begin with Artaud, who, as far as I'm aware, never mentioned Spinoza in his writings, suggesting that the link between the two is something formed almost exclusively in Deleuze's philosophical imagination. 

 

Deleuze (and Guattari) may like to think of Spinoza's Ethics (1667) as anticipating Artaud's notion of the body without organs, but that's not something that ever occured to the French dramatist who introduced the world to the theatre of cruelty. 

 

Indeed, according to one scholar, Artaud's work is ultimately incompatible with Spinoza's rationalism [3]. For whereas Artaud aims to liberate libidinal energy and resist the body's rational organ-isation, Spinoza, in contrast, wished to perfect man via reason and an active form of knowledge. Both spoke about joy and passion, but each conceived such terms in radically different ways.    

 

 

III. 

 

Unlike Artaud, Franz Kafka apparently did acknowledge his indebtedness to Spinoza - even if he didn't do so in his published writings - considering him a spiritual mentor during his younger years when part of an intellectual circle in Prague which often discussed the Dutchman's work [4].

 

Kafka was particularly interested in Spinoza's notion of an indifferent deity; i.e., one who was blind to the suffering of humanity. This idea shaped Kafka's construction of an amoral fictional universe in which there is ultimately no justice, despite all the mechanisms of law and order put in place by mankind.      

 

 

IV.

 

Amusingly, one commentator has described Lawrence as a "sort of sexy Spinozist" [5], which I think is pushing things a bit too far, even if it's fair to say that Lawrence's own thinking does align in certain key aspects with Spinoza's philosophy. 

 

For example, Lawrence's model of pantheism which insists that God exists only in bodies; or his concept of blood-knowledge, which has echoes of Spinoza's intuitive science (a third way of knowing beyond imagination and reason which allows one to grasp the essence of things and experience a sense of blessedness or oneness with the universe).     

 

But again, as with Kafka and Artaud, there is hardly a mention of Spinoza in any of Lawrence's writings; the only one I can recall from memory is in the short prose piece 'Books' in which he dismisses him as another of those philosophers who, like Kant, only thought "with his head and his spirit" (and never with his blood) [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche  ... 

 

And finally we find actual written references to Spinoza that we are able to cite, such as the postcard sent to his friend Franz Overbeck in the summer of 1881, in which Nietzsche expresses his astonishment and delight at having found a precursor - i.e., someone in whose work he recognises himself, even if, due to differences in time and culture, there remained certain important points of divergence [7]. 

 

In the Genealogy (II.15), meanwhile, Nietzsche acknowledges Spinoza's insight into (and the need to overcome) traditional moral concepts. Material found in his notebooks from this period also show Nietzsche turning to Spinoza for ideas, particularly concerning the transformation of knowledge into a passion. 

 

Ultimately, Nietzsche saw in Spinoza someone who was able to think beyond good and evil - someone who scorned the teleological fantasy that the universe had some ultimate goal, or that man possessed free will.

 

Having said that, however, it's also true that Nietzsche viewed his own concept of will to power as superior and more radical than Spinoza's insistence that life strove above all for its own preservation. And in his mature (some might say mad) Dionysian phase, it's hard to believe that Nietzsche would have had much time for Spinoza's defence of reason as the essential human faculty leading to freedom.       

 

 

VI.

 

In sum: whilst Deleuze isn't simply joking or trying to be provocative by grouping together Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as disciples of Spinoza, we need to take this idea with a pinch of salt and remember that none of the above saw themselves as such. 

 

Essentially, Deleuze was highlighting a number of conceptual connnections between them which might otherwise go unnoticed. He was probably also attempting to make Spinoza more relevant to a contemporary readership and, perhaps, inseminate Spinoza with his own ideas. 

 

Thus, it might be best to think of Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud, and Deleuze himself as a line of thinkers who share common ground with Spinoza, but are not followers per se (more like fellow travellers); artist-philosophers who above all else want to have done with judgement.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the essay 'To Have Done with Judgement', in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Sith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 126-135. 

      According to Deleuze, it was not Kant but Spinoza who, in breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, carried out a true critique of judgement and had "four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud" (126). 

 

[2] This description was coined by the American philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein and formed the subtitle of her biographical study Betraying Spinoza (Random House, 2006). 

 

[3] See Jon K. Shaw, 'Athleticism Is Not Joy: Extricating Artaud from Deleuze's Spinoza', in Deleuze Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Edinburgh University Press, May 2016), pp. 162-185. 

      As Shaw writes in the Abstract to this essay, "much of Artaud's metaphysics is incompatible with Deleuze's Spinozism, not least the relation between a body and its constitutive outside, and the questions of affect and expression": click here. 

 

[4] In the absence of direct references to Spinoza in Kafka's writings, we have to rely on biographical studies and scholarly analysis to confirm the latter's interest in (and sense of kinship with) the former. I'm not sure I'd speak of parallel destinies between the two, however, although that's the argument put forward by Carlos García Durazo in his essay on Medium (24 Oct 2024): click here. 

 

[5] See Mattie Colquhoun, 'Rainbows: From D. H. Lawrence to the NHS', on Xenogothic (23 Dec 2020): click here.  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Books', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 198. 

 

[7] Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck (30 July, 1881). It can be read (in English translation) on The Nietzsche Channel: click here. 

      It is interesting to note that Nietzsche doesn't simply identify with Spinoza because of certain shared ideas, but also because the latter was, due to his radicalism, very much a maligned and marginalised figure in his own day (much as Nietzsche felt himself to be in modern Germany). 

      It is also important to remember that Nietzsche's understanding of Spinoza was mostly based on his reading of secondary sources, such as Kuno Fischer's highly influential six-volume study Geschichte der neuern Philosophie ['History of Modern Philosophy'] (1854-1877). 

      See Andreas Urs Sommer, 'Nietzsche's Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer', in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn, 2012), pp. 156-184. This essay is available on JSTOR: click here. 

 

 

On Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Another Post in Response to Simon Solomon)

Image: Marian S. Carson Collection 

at the Library of Congress

 

 

I. 

A common form of corporal punishment for boys and junior officers in the British navy was being bent over the breech of a cannon in order to be caned or whipped on their exposed buttocks. This practice - painful, but not disabling - was euphemistically known as kissing (or marrying) the gunner's daughter and Adam Ant once wrote a song alluding to it [1].

 

II. 

I thought of this when Simon Solomon recently admonished me for providing an 'unsourced reference taken from the heavily doctored Will to Power and as such non-canonical' [2]. 

It wasn't so much that I felt I was about to receive a light beating, but I did feel I was being tied to Nietzsche's canon - i.e., those works which were written and published by him in his lifetime [3] - and forced to pledge love and loyalty only to his authorised books.

And I have to confess that, just like Captain Renault, I was shocked - shocked I tells ya! - to be reprimanded by Herr Solomon of all people; an independent scholar whose reading of Hölderlin in terms of schizopoetics and things that go bump in the night [4] is unorthodox to say the least. 

Indeed, some - including those of a more Swalesian mindset - might even describe it as heterodox, i.e., a work that not only deviates from older, more conventional readings, but wilfully perverts them. By his own confession, Solomon's passionate appreciation (and translation) of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin involved fucking the latter up the arse in order to produce some kind of monstrous offspring [5].      

 

So, for Simon to invoke the canon and insist that I play by the academic rules and show my obedience to (and conformity with) the law that governs what is and is not an acceptable text, is, I think, a bit rich.  

III. 

Having said that, I accept that there are seminal texts - i.e., works which are highly influential and possibly lay the foundation for future study - but I'd not even call these texts canonical (and what is seminal work for me - such as Sade's La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), is merely a white stain on the history of French literature for others).  

 

Ultimately, to invoke the canon and wish to uphold it, is to give support to those texts which, as Barthes would say, come from culture and do not break with it; texts which are linked to "a comfortable practice of reading" [6]; texts which have authority and have achieved the status of timeless classics; texts which are meant to contain eternal truths.

As a white European heterosexual male, I'm not obsessed with deconstructing, decolonising, expanding, or queering the canon; I simply don't wish to be strapped to it and thrashed by those who think I should show a little more respect to the Political Father.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adam Ant, 'Marrying the Gunner's Daughter', from the album Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (Blueblack Hussar Records, 2013). Not one of his best songs, but click here if you fancy giving it a listen.  

 

[2] See Solomon's comment dated 27 November 2025 and posted at 17:14:00 on Torpedo the Ark in response to a post titled 'On (Not) Taking a Stand' - click here. And see note 3 below for why Solomon is right to be wary of material extracted from The Will to Power.  

 

[3] Ecce Homo can also be included as part of Nietzsche's canon; for whilst it was published posthumously in 1908, he had completed writing it in 1888. 

      However, the book of notes assembled from Nietzsche's Nachlaß (i.e., literary remains) by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche working in editorial collaboration with his friend Peter Gast and titled Der Wille zur Macht (1901) is an entirely different kettle of fish and references to this work should be treated with a certain amount of caution. 

      His sister's claims that this was the magnum opus Nietzsche had hoped and planned to write can certainly be dismissed and some Nietzsche scholars have gone as far as to describe it as essentially a philosophical forgery. Nevertheless, the significantly expanded second edition containing 1,067 sections (1906) has been translated into English - most famously by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910 for the edition of Nietzsche's works edited by Oscar Levy and by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in 1968 - and the book remains one often consulted by readers of Nietzsche (albeit a non-canonical text as Solomon says).

      Readers who would like to know more about the publication history of Nietzsche's work might like to see William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 

 

[4] See Solomon's 2020 book Hölderlin's Poltergeists: A Drama for Voices, published under the Irish spelling of his name as Síomón Solomon (Peter Lang, 2020). I have written extensively on this book on Torpedo the Ark: click here.   

 

[5] In the book cited above, Solomon writes enthusiastically of what he describes as Deleuze's bum banditry, a reference to the way in which the latter liked to approach certain other thinkers from behind and below. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.  

[6] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 14.

      Like Barthes, I prefer texts that discomfort and impose a state of loss; texts which unsettle "the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories" and bring to a crisis our relation with language itself (texts a bit like Nietzsche's, in fact - including his non-canonical writings).   

 

 

On Answering the Call of the Void

Can You Resist the Call of the Void? (SA/2025)

Based on Ernst Stückelberg's painting of Sappho (1897) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Apparently, the urge to jump when atop a high building, such as the Eiffel Tower, is not limited to rock 'n' roll puppets in a band called Bow Wow Wow [2], but is a fairly common phenomenon known (rather poetically) as the call of the void ...

 

 

II.

 

Usually, it's a violently intrusive thought that passes as quickly as it comes and is not regarded as a sign of any underlying suicidal tendencies. In fact, it may be the brain's way of telling you not to jump; to recognise the danger of your situation and step back from the edge. 

 

 

III. 

 

Philosophers, of course - particularly those who have taken seriously Nietzsche's injunction to live dangerously - don't always care what their brain tells them. 

 

They know that "the secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment" [3] involves sending ships into unchartered seas, building cities on the slopes of a volcano, and daring to leap into the void when the moment to do so is right.

 

Empedocles knew this [4]. And Deleuze knew this [5] ...     

 

 

IV.

 

The void, of course, is another one of those ideas in philosophy that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. But it's probably in the modern sense that most people think it today; i.e., in relation to existential nihilism. 

 

The key thing, however, is not take it too negatively: the void might even be seen as a space of potential; not just of nothingness. It's absence that makes the heart grow fonder and which allows for the emergence of new thoughts and feelings, the creation of new values and concepts. 

 

The void is also the space of forgotten possibilities, where abandoned paths can be rediscovered, allowing for different interpretations of the past (interpretations that might then be projected into the future, so that we might in this way live yesterday tomorrow). 

 

Our artist friends often insist on the importance of what they call negative space - something that is crucial for giving form and structure to what exists. 

 

And scientists too are increasingly persuaded of the importance of the quantum vacuum - a void filled with fluctuating energy and mad particles, from which the universe itself may have emerged.   

 

So, whilst I'm not encouraging any one to jump off a tall building, I think it's worth acknowledging that the call of the void is more than what psychologists say it is, i.e., a slightly odd phenomenon not linked to actual intentions, so not worth paying too much attention to.

  

The call of the void - like the call of the wild - is, in fact, a vital experiential reality.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The Ancient Greek poet Sappho is perhaps best known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. That, and her sexuality - although her lesbianism is much disputed amongst scholars and there is no documentary evidence to conclusively indicate her preference when it came to lovers. 

      (In classical Athenian comedy, she was often portrayed as promiscuoulsy heterosexual; the earliest surviving sources to explicitly identify Sappho's homoeroticism come from the Hellenistic period, although such modern terms, of course, would have been meaningless to the ancient Greeks and one does wonder whether projecting lesbianism on to a figure like Sappho is anything other than an ideological move motivated by queer-feminist politics.) 

       According to legend, Sappho killed herself by leaping from the Leucadian cliffs due to her unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon; a story related to a myth about the goddess Aphrodite and one that is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars.

 

[2] I'm referring to Annabella Lwin, lead vocalist with Bow Wow Wow, and their track 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' on Your Cassette Pet (EMI, 1980), an eroticised tale of teen suicide involving a leap from the sexiest building left: click here to play. 

      

[3] Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 283, p. 228.

      

[4] The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles famously threw himself into the lava and flames of Mount Etna and his death has been mythologised by writers and artists ever-since. Whether he believed that this would guarantee his immortality or not, the fact is that his name lives on to this day. The Roman poet Horace refers to the death of Empedocles in his work Ars Poetica and suggests that great thinkers have not only the right, but almost a duty, to destroy themselves. 

 

[5] Deleuze committed suicide on 4 November 1995 by jumping from the window of his apartment in Paris. He was suffering from increasingly severe respiratory problems that made even simple tasks difficult (including writing, though I'm not sure we can describe that as a simple task). 

      Whether his surrendering to the call of the void marked a loss of desire on his part, however, is debatable; it could be that his decision to terminate his own individual existence was a way of affirming life and thus indicates a final resurgence of vitality. In other words, his suicide might be seen as a logical way for Deleuze to show fidelity to his own philosophy, rather than merely a wish to end his suffering. 

      See the post entitled 'Three French Suicides' (31 Jan 2024) in which I discuss Deleuze's death in relation to the deaths of Olga-Georges Picot and Christina Pascal (both of whom also answered the call of the void): click here.  

 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.