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.  

 

 

Punk History is for Pissing On: Notes on PZ77 by Simon Parker

PZ77: A Town A Time A Tribe (Scryfa, 2022) 

by Simon Parker

 

'Ah, those days... for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. 

Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Conceived, designed, narrated, and edited by Simon Parker - and published by an independent co-operative he established in 1996 to celebrate and promote contemporary Cornish writing - PZ77 is "a unique story of time, place, friendship, community, and an almost obsessive passion for making music" [2]. 

 

The book features more than ninety personal accounts, across 392 pages, from old punks like himself who grew up in a place "others came for their holidays" (Penzance) [3].      

 

It's not the kind of book I would normally read (for reasons we'll come to shortly). 

 

However, as a 40 page extract from the work - the first five tracks - is the chosen text for discussion by the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) [4] this coming week - a group with which I'm associated - I thought I'd take this opportunity to assemble (and share) some thoughts in advance ...

 

 

II. 

There are, as Russ Bestley reminds us, now hundreds of books on punk in the mid-late 1970s, and it sometimes feels as if everyone and their dog who was in any way connected to the scene has now had their say on the subject or shared their memories of the time. 

 

For those over a certain age, punk nihilism has now given way to punk nostalgia; the chaos of a life lived blissfully in the moment (now/here) has been replaced with a comforting and conformist vision of the past. 

 

In other words, instead of going with the flow of events and strange becomings that carry them beyond the constraints of a fixed identity, many old punks now prefer to relive the past as best they can at the Rebellion Festival [5] and produce narratives which reinforce the mythology of punk by "re-articulating variations of the same story, often through a nostalgic lens centred on personal experience and memories" [6].  

 

 

III.   

To be fair to Parker, PZ77 might be read as an attempt to give a voice to many punk fans whose stories and memories of the time might otherwise have gone unrecorded, thereby expanding our understanding of punk (certainly as it unfolded in Corwall in 1977).  

 

As Bestley rightly points out, "punk's standard narrative has become so deeply embedded, its cultural and historical position so neatly summarized, that there is a desperate need for alternative perspectives that might sustain a sense of engagement and highlight new contributions to knowledge within a tired and over-familiar field of study" [7]. 

 

However, from what I've read of the work, I don't like it ... 

 

And the reason I don't like it is because, as a Deleuzian - and as a member of the extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars [8] - I don't like writing that attempts to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience and I don't like writing that is merely a form of personal overcoding; i.e., an opportunity for an author to give whatever it is they write about a familiar face that somehow resembles their own. 

 

Any form of writing that is heavily reliant upon the recounting of youthful memories is usually not only bad writing but dead writing; for as Deleuze says, literature dies from an excess of autobiography just as surely as from an overdose of emotion or imagination [9].   

 

Rather than transport us away from Oeidpal structures towards a zone of indiscernibility where we might lose ourselves, PZ77 attempts to take us back to a better time where we might rediscover our passions and dreams, renew old friendships, etc. 

 

Whereas I still believe in the ruins, Parker believes in building a sense of community. The interviews with participants in his project indicate a level of acceptance that punk has become part of mainstream culture; nice people, performing nice gestures, and leading nice lives, etc. 

 

 

IV. 

Ultimately, I was never going to like a book written by an obsessive Ramones fan: they may have been Sid's favourite band, but they were never my favourite band. 

 

And whereas Parker, a grammar school boy from a Methodist fishing village who likes to see the good in people is, by his own admission, "always thinking about music" [10], I don't care about the music; to paraphrase Malcolm, if punk had just been about the music it would have died a death long ago.   

  

It's his best mate, Grev Williams, however, who really irritates me. Thinking back to the Summer of Hate, he ponders just how important the period was to him: 

 

"Punk bursting into our lives was hugely invigorating and inspiring [...]  but I'd be lying if I said I found any expression of my inner self in it [... and] the idea that I was revolting against my background and community would be wholly false. I was blessed with the strength of knowing where I came from, I didn't want to smash it up - I loved it. Punk wasn't a spit-filled, nihilist cul-de-sac for me, it was a launch pad. As a budding musician it provided opportunities and informed my attitude, not my taste. [...] Anyway, long story short and truth be told, I didn't hate or revolt against much [...] [11]

 

Whilst aknowledging the benefit of his experiences in 1977, Williams has to ask himself whether he was ever really a 'punk': "As with so much, I'm really not sure." [12]

 

It's not, of course, my role to help him decide the matter. 

 

But I would say, given his confession above - every aspect of which (apart from his uncertainty) I find objectionable - that whilst he may or may not have been a punk, he was clearly not a Sex Pistol as I understand the term; i.e. in a manner largely shaped by McLaren's description in the Oliver Twist Manifesto (1977) - click here - and the ideas developed in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). 

 

I look forward to discussing this with other members of the SIG, including Russ Bestley [13]. 

 

However, I won't be buying a copy of Parker's PZ77. For those who like this sort of thing, as Miss Brodie would say, this is the sort of thing they like: but, for me, punk history is for pissing on ...    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] J. L. Carr, A Month In The Country (Harvester Press, 1980). 

      This quote was used as an epigraph to PZ77. It should be noted, however, that the narrator of the novel goes on to ask himself would he have always remained happy had he somehow been able to stay in the same time and place. And the answer is: "No, I suppose not."  

 

[2] I'm quoting here from the Scryfa website: click here. 

 

[3] Ibid. 

 

[4] The Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) is an informal collective operating out of the University of the Arts London (UAL), concerned with what we might briefly describe as the politics of style and offering resistance to temporal colonisation; i.e., the imposition of a perpetual present in which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a future (or remember a past) that is radically different. 

      I have published several SIG-themed posts here on Torpedo the Ark, which can be read by clicking here.    

      

[5] For those who don't know, Rebellion is the biggest independently run punk festival in the UK, that takes place each summer in the historic Winter Gardens, Blackpool. I haven't been and I don't want to go to this family-oriented event which celebrates Punk in all its forms with the blessing of the local council. For further information, click here. 

 

[6] Russ Bestley, 'Going Through the Motions: Punk Nostalgia and Conformity', in Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2. (Intellect Books, 2021), pp. 179-196. 

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

[8] This wonderful phrase was coined by Peter York to describe the denizens of 430 King's Road (i.e., the SEX people). It was used in his article 'Them' that appeared in Harpers & Queen (October 1976) and is cited by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329.

 

[9] See the post dated 30 August 2013 entitled 'A Deleuzean Approach to Literature' - click here. 

 

[10] Simon Parker, PZ77: A Town A Time A Tribe (Scryfa, 2022), p. 11.

 

[11] Grev Williams quoted by Simon Parker in PZ77 ... pp. 38-39.

 

[12] Ibid., p. 41.

 

[13] Russ Bestley's own review of Simon Parker's PZ77 can be found in Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Feb 2023), p. 131 - 134. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to gain free access to this text online, so couldn't discuss it here.    

 

 

Yellow Yellow Blue: Notes on an Exhibition by Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue (2025)

Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas

(200 x 152 cm / 78.5 x 60 in) 

Photo by Maria Thanassa

 

'You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to colour and then 

testing the limits of that relationship. It’s radical, it’s ever-changing - 

it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites.'  

                                                                                               - Megan Rooney

 

 

I. 

 

Sometimes you visit an exhibition because you know and admire the work of the artist and wish to be reassured of their genius and reconfirmed in the soundness of your past judgement and the continuity of one's aesthetic tastes.   

 

Sometimes, however, you visit an exhibition without any prior knowledge or formed opinion and in the hope that perhaps you'll discover something new not only about art, but about one's self ... 

 

And so to Thaddaeus Ropac, to see an exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Megan Rooney entitled Yellow Yellow Blue ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Probably it was the title of the show that first caught my interest: I like yellow and I like blue and in this body of work Rooney explores the chromatic territory that lies between yellow and blue (as well as the spectrum of green that emerges from mixing these two primary colours).   

 

Yellow I love for its emotional intensity (its joy, its vibrancy, its madness) [2]; blue for its profundity - for blue is the colour of the Greater Day and of the Void much loved by painters, poets, and philosophers; a colour which Christian Dior once described as the only one that can possibly compete with black, which remains the ne plus ultra of all colours [3]. 

 

But, having read the press release for the show, I was intrigued also to see how Rooney - said to be an enigmatic storyteller - manages to construct a dreamlike narrative indirectly referencing "some of the most urgent issues of our time" whilst also addressing "the myriad effects of politics and society that manifest in the home and on the female body" [4], simply by using colours, lines, shapes, and gestural marks on canvas in an almost entirely abstract manner.

 

For whilst I'm happy to accept that you can use purely visual elements to convey emotion or explore the formal qualities of painting as an art, I'm not entirely convinced (as a writer and philosopher) that you can adequately convey the kind of ideas mentioned above simply with such elements; ultimately, words - not colours - remain the primary tool for this. 

 

 

III. 

 

Located on the gallery's two floors, Yellow Yellow Blue presents pieces ranging from a dozen or so small works on paper (pretty enough, but not massively exciting) to large-scale (slightly overwhelming) canvases alongside a family of works in Rooney's signature wingspan format (i.e., equivalent to the full-reach of her outstretched arms). 

 

A bit like Goldilocks, I preferred these works; not too big, not too small, just right in size; for like D. H. Lawrence, I think it important that an artist acknowedge their limitations and the fact that they end at their finger-tips [5].

 

I liked the fact that Rooney clearly puts a LOT of work into what she does; constantly layering on paint, then sanding the works down and attempting to discover forms which might lie buried deep within the surface, before then slapping on more and more paint. 

 

By her own confession, Rooney often continues working on canvases right up until the opening; some seemed to be still wet in places and one could smell the canvases before even entering the room to view them - this was something else I also liked very much.   

 

Some works made one think of Monet and his water lilies and as I believe abstract impressionism is a thing, I don't think that's too crass or naive an observation [6]. Other works, because of their yellowness as an essential common feature, invariably made one think of Van Gogh. 

 

Still, as Rooney likes to talk of her paintings as having family connections - i.e., of being intimately connected to one another "as well as the lineage of paintings that precedes them" [7], I don't suppose she'll object to my seeing of similarities between her works and those of le dandy of impressionism and het gekke menneke of post-impressionism.  

 

 

IV. 

 

"Does anyone know, really, what a life is?" asks Emily LaBarge [8].    

 

As a reader of Deleuze, I suppose I could put my hand up and answer: Yes: a life is something inseparable from philosophy conceived in terms of pure immanence; something that has to be invented [9].   

But nobody likes a smart arse and I suppose it's essentially a rhetorical question - albeit one the answer to which just might lie in painting, according to LaBarge; an art form that captures something of temporal and spatial reality, even whilst painting does not quite belong to the same temporal and spatial reality of this world.  

Thus it is that: "As soon as we think we have identified something recognisable in [Rooney's paintings] - a copse of trees? a flurry of lilacs? a sunrise? a chimney? a rain-soaked evening? - it disappears ..."  

That's true - or at least, I think I know what Ms LaBarge means by this: All that is solid melts into light and colour, as Marx might have put it. 

 

The moment you grasp something concrete in Rooney's work, "it departs, skitters away, taking your heart with it, if only to throw it back to you [...] with the reminder that this image is also, first and formost, a painting: a made thing, worked and burnished [...] where luminous forms merge and fly like ghosts". 

 

And that's the beauty of abstract art; it doesn't just present on a plate like representational art - it gives, takes back, and gives once more - or, more precisely perhaps, it shows and hides and then shows some more in a provocative game of tease: It always seduces, always excites!

 

And if it fails to satisfy, that's arguably the point and it tells us something crucial not only about pleasure, but about the allure and withdrawal of objects in a way that a still life cannot.  

 

     

Megan Rooney photographed in her studio 

by Eva Herzog (2023)

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 12 June - 2 August 2025: click here for details. 

      See also Megan Rooney's page on ropac.net: click here, or visit her own website: megan-rooney.com   

 

[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here. 

 

[3] I have written several posts on the colour blue in art and literature; click here, for example, for a post dated 1 April 2017 on Rilke's blue delirium; or click here, for a post dated 2 April 2017 on the work of Yves Klein.  

 

[4] From the exhibition press release written by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press, Thaddaeus Ropac London).  

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985). pp.191-198. 

      Lawrence argues that every man or woman - artist, philosopher, poet, or scientist included - ends at their own finger-tips and that this is a simple, but profoundly vital, truth. We may draw sustenance and stimulation from outside ourselves - from sights and sounds and smells and ideas, etc. - and these may allow us to change, but it's the living body upon which these things act that remains the most important. 

      Rooney appears to share this view, which is why she (mostly) likes to keep her canvases roughly 200 x 152 cm in size; i.e., in relation to her own reach, her own body. Thus, as it says in the gallery's press release: "The body has a sustained presence in Rooney’s work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her [...] practice."   

 

[6] Abstract impressionism is an art movement that originated in New York City, in the 1940s, the term apparently being coined by the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning and then popularised by Louis Finkestein (initially to describe the works of Philip Guston). 

      I'm not sure Rooney would wish to be associated with the term, but there is something lyrical in her canvases and although resolutely abstract, her works "contain fleeting suggestions of recognisable forms [...] ladders, beehives, clouds, trees, skies and tombs weave through the exhibition, like fugitive glimpses of a half-dreamed world". Again, see the gallery press release by Nina Sandhaus available to download from the Thaddaeus Ropac website.

 

[7] Nina Sandhaus, press release for Yellow Yellow Blue.  

 

[8] Emily LaBarge, 'Like the Flap of a Wave', written for the catalogue to Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). All lines quoted in this section of the post are from this text unless stated otherwise. 

      The title of the piece refers us to the possibility that if you squint hard enough and long enough at Rooney's large canvases you might just imagine, as LeBarge did, "Virginia Woolf's London as described by her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, on a fresh morning in spring [...] when everything seems [...] to be happening all at once, the past and present kaleidoscoping in a work of art".      

[9] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Pure Immanence: A Life', in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, Intro. by John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2005). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - 'More Yellow, More Blue!' (29 June 2025), please click here.