Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 4: Tomorrow (Chapter 10: Ghosts of Futures Past)

Simon Reynolds: Author of Retromania (2011)
and an 'old modernist-minded post-punk'

I.

Technically, this is not really a review, so much as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Reynolds has generously opened up in his book Retromania and meet him there in and on his own terms.

But it is also the staging of a confrontation or reckoning [Auseinandersetzung]; an attempt not to find common ground - I clearly share with Mr Reynolds certain interests, ideas, and points of reference - but key areas of difference, so as to open up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators.

Readers who have worked their way through the first three parts of this post can decide how successful I've been in that aim so far ... 

II.

The title of chapter 10 suggests that the hauntological theme with which Reynolds closed chapter 9 is going to be developed. And obviously, that makes me happy, as I'm somewhat smitten by this spooky pop cultural concept developed by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2005, based on Derrida's philosophical work in this area [a]. 

 

I even like the punning neologisms that have been coined, such as ghost modernism and seance fiction - though maybe Reynolds might be challenged when he describes sampling as groove robbing (not because it's a pun too far, but because it implies intellectual property and the ownership of sounds) [b].  

Sampling isn't theft; it's a practice that reveals the musical equivalent of intertextuality (this is sometimes known as sonic resonance, or intersonority); i.e. the manner in which all recordings echo and refer to other recordings. To put it simply: there is no such thing as an original pop song or an original piece of music; everything's a cover version and the dead are always with us.   

Reynolds finds this uncanny - "because different studio auras and different eras were being placed in 'ghostly adjacence'" [c] - but then, as he goes on to point out, it's not unusual. For recording has "always had a spectral undercurrent" [312], not least because it separates "the human voice from a living body" [312]. 

 

He continues: "Records have certainly habituated us to living with phantoms [...] In a sense, a record really is a ghost: it's a trace of a musician's body, the after-imprint of breath [...]" [312]. That's true. At least that's true of analogue recordings, but not digital works, in which the direct physical relationship with the sound source is replaced by a reading of such in terms of binary data.    

Reynolds concludes: "Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it." [313]. Though the same can be said of photography, of course; "both are reality's death mask" [312]. Sampling simply intensifies this inherent supernaturalism, creating a "musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and seance" [313]. 

 

(Again, at this point I have to express my admiration for Reynolds's thinking here - I love all this stuff on the art of musical ghost arrangement, etc.)

 

But is sampling a form of exploitation? Reynolds seems to think so: 

 

"In a certain sense - neither literally true nor utterly metaphorical - sampling is enslavement: involuntary labour that's been alienated from its original environment and put into service in a completely other context, creating profit and prestige for another." [314]

 

Let's, for the sake of argument, say that's also true: one could just give a Warholesque shrug and say so what? 

 

Alternatively, as a Nietzschean, one might point out that slavery is a necessary precondition for the flourishing of higher culture and that artists have always exploited the work of untold others. Reynolds may find that a politically uncomfortable fact, but, as a cultural theorist he's obliged to acknowledge such an inconvenient truth. 

 

Art is not a form of liberal humanism; it's an aristocratic practice that requires a certain cruelty to impose new forms upon chaos and create new values, etc. For me, therefore, sampling can be defended from a philosophical perspective that is anything other than 'left-wing' [d].      

 

As for the argument that sampling shifts power to the producer and disempowers those "real musicians who think they're so cool and hip", that only holds up providing one wishes to deny the phonographic artistry of the former and see them as merely technicians, devoid of creative talent or skill, just because they wear less "complicated shoes" [e].  

 

Musicianship is, in my view - as a McLarenista - hugely overrated - so more power to the elbow of people like the Canadian composer and audio pirate John Oswald, who on Plunderphonic (1989) "turned sampling into a form of digital iconoclasm, literally smashing pop idols to smithereens" [317], as well as challenging notions of originality and identity [f].    

 

Rock musicians are often the most self-serious and pompous of all artists and so deserve to be "subjected to various degrees of insult, satire or travesty" [321]. 

 

But it should be noted that often digital-era artforms like hip-hop often display an almost reverential regard for the obscure analogue grooves they exploit; "they honour through recycling, in the process conferring a kind of immortality for the music, if not for its anonymous creators" [323]  

 

 

III. 

I was a bit surprised by Reynolds's admission that his sense of Britishness remains so acute after so-many years living in the United States with an American wife.  

 

Obviously, he doesn't define such in terms of blood and soil, but, rather, sees it in cultural terms; nationality is, he says, "a matrix of collective character that involves gesture and intonation, phrase and fable, and an immense array of common reference points [...] from the shape of post boxes to newspaper fonts" [337], which, I suppose is true enough.   

Interesting to consider hauntology as a specifically British thing, however; a mourning for a lost time, before the British were increasingly pressured to apologise themselves out of existence or make themselves either more American or more European (isn't this pretty much the same line that Morrissey takes - or does he veer a little too close to ethnonationalism as well as cultural pride?) [g]. 

1958-1978: this is the golden era that haunts hauntologists and ghost boxers alike; and, ironically, it's the era that "rock 'n' roll in some sense rebelled against by celebrating desire, pleasure, disruptive energy, individualism" [338]. The nanny state suddenly doesn't seem so "suffocating and oppressively intrusive" [338] from the perspective of the early 21st century ...

Everything was better, wasn't it, in the sixties and seventies; the music, the fashion, the films, the football, and, of course, the TV: "The memoradelic imprint left by vintage TV on the child's impressionable grey matter is central to hauntology." [h]  
 

The question is: is this just a British thing catering to a certain generation? Or does "every country, and each successive generation within that nationality [...] produce its own version of hauntology - a self-conscious, emotionally ambivalent form of nostalgia that sets in play the ghosts of childhood?" [343]  

 

 

IV. 

 

Unsurprisingly, some commentators are less than impressed with all this; seeing hauntology as postmodern retro by another name. And Reynolds admits: 

 

"It's true that hauntology emerged from the same matrix of baseline cultural conditions - the scrambling of pop time, the atrophy of any sense of futurity or forward propulsion - that generated many of the things I've castigated in this book." [355]

 

But, of course, he's not going to let go of the concept that he and Fisher worked so hard to develop and popularise: "What makes hauntology different, what gives it an edge, is that it contains an ache of longing - for history itself." [355-356] 

 

By this I think Reynolds means that hauntology is a profoundly serious desire for the real pain and actual horror of past events and not just the nice things which make us feel comfortable in the present; he's affirming history as is (or as was). 

 

And he does this because unless you affirm the past as a total economy, you'll never be able to recover the lost futures he and Fisher hope to find. In other words, tomorrow can be ours - but there's a price to pay and it will require courage (not just irony); the one thing that for Ursula Brangwen really matters at last [i]. 

 

 

V. 

 

If Reynolds is, shall we say, ambivalent about sampling, he clearly doesn't like the mash-up; "bootleg remixes that combined two or more pop hits" [356] to produce nostalgia without the ache. He explains that whilst mash-ups may briefly amuse due to their incongruous juxtaposing of elements, there is no "creation of surplus value, musically; even at their very best they only add up to the sum of their parts" [359].    

 

Mash-ups are thus a form of pseudo-creativity "based on a blend of mild irreverence and simple pop fandom" [359]. Worse: "Mash-ups mash the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data grey pulp [...] devoid of nutritional value" [360], by which I think he means they don't feed the soul.

 

And so, forget about mash-ups and retro. For even if it remains a "precarious and paradoxical strategy" [361], its hauntology which will resurrect the "eyes-on-the-horizon optimism" [361] of late modernism, by radically parodying heritage culture and uncovering "alternate pasts secreted inside the official narrative" [361], thereby turning the past into a foreign country.

 

As Heidegger might say: Nur noch ein Geist kann uns retten ... [j] 

 

 

Notes

[a] See the post 'Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism' (28 Sept 2023): click here.

      Whilst for Derrida hauntology is a framework for understanding that being is always haunted by what is not fully present (traces of both past and present; the no longer and the not yet), for Reynolds and Fisher hauntology is more about the way in which pop culture explores a zone of nostalgia in the hope of finding a way beyond the present (so-called lost futures). It's a little amusing how, on the one hand, Reynolds expresses a certain anxiety about sampling and yet, on the other hand, cheerfully borrows (shall we say) Derrida's term simply because he liked the sound of it.  

[b] It turns out that Reynolds didn't invent this pun, but borrowed the idea of groove robbing from someone called DJ Shadow. See p. 323 of Retromania where he writes of the appropriately Gothic nature of the term. 

 

[c] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 312. Future page numbers will be given directly in the post and refer to this edition.

[d] Reynolds writes: 

      "It's curious that almost all the intellectual effort expended on the subject of sampling has been in its defence [...] nearly always focused on the legal aspect, framing the samplers in punk-like terms (as rebellious, iconoclastic). Academic studies of sampling have likewise generally sided with 'the streets' versus the multinational entertainment companies. This reflects the left-wing bias of academia and a tendency to see the whole area of property rights, including copyright, as intrinsically conservative, aligned with corporations and [...] the status quo. [...] A Marxist analysis of sampling might conceivably see it as the purest form of exploiting the labour of others. In a more general sense, you could see it as a form of cultural strip-mining, a ransacking of the rich seams of past musical productivity." [314-315] 

      Hopefully, my post-Nietzschean analysis provides an interesting alternative. 

[e] I'm quoting George Costanza here from an episode of Seinfeld, 'The Burning' (S9/E16), dir. Andy Ackerman (1998). 

 

[f] Plunderphonic (1989) was a 25-track CD in which Oswald reworked material by both popular musicians like The Beatles, and classical works such as Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. Whilst sources for all the samples used were scrupulously listed, Oswald was happy to acknowledge that authorisation for their use had neither been given nor sought. Although the work was not made available for sale, all undistributed copies were destroyed after a threat of legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients, including Michael Jackson, whose song "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as 'Dab': click here. 

      One suspects Jackson wasn't best pleased with the albums cover art either; a photo collage that transposed his head and leather jacket from the cover of his album Bad (1987) onto a naked female body - something that Reynolds compares with "the on-line porn practice of taking images of movie stars and other celebrities and Photoshopping their heads onto nude bodies engaged in hardcore sex acts" [317]. 

      Obviously, this practice has massively accelerated and become ever more widespread and sophisticated thanks to AI. I don't really have an issue with it, but Reynolds insists that, for him, its a "blatant infringement of an individual's rights in their own image" [317] and infringes their dignity, blah, blah, blah.  

      Reynolds does concede, however, that Oswald's 'Dab' is a masterpiece that injects alien DNA into an all-too-human pop song; "micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall of mirrors and a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field" [317]. 

 

[g] Reynolds discusses the case of Stephen Morrissey in terms of reflective nostalgia (good) and restorative nostalgia (bad) in a footnote on pp. xxvii-xxviii. 

      Describing him as the "supreme poet of reflective nostalgia", he neverthless fears that Morrissey has, at times, crossed over to the dark side and flirted with fascism, declaring England to no longer be recognisable to the country of his youth due to mass migration. 

 

[h] Where I differ from Reynolds here is that I never gave a shit about British shows like Doctor Who - it was American shows (and their theme tunes) I loved best; see the post 'Theme Tunes in a Man's Life' (2 Feb 2013): click here. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 270. When her uncle asks her "'Courage for what?'" Ursula replies "'For everything.'"

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing Heidegger's famous statement - 'Only a god can save us now' - from a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal saviour, anymore than by my use of the term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. 

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.   

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

 

To read part 2 of this post, click here. 

 

To read part 3 of this post, click here. 

 

The fifth and final part will be published shortly.  

Reflections on the Ghost of Vivienne Westwood

Walking down the King's Road, one encounters many ghosts but I was still rather taken aback by the spectral image of Vivienne Westwood rising up before me: 

 

 

Vivienne Westwood by Invader (2024)  

 

Known for his ceramic tile mosaics based on the pixelated art of early 8-bit video games, the French street artist Invader [1] has created a spooky posthumous portrait of the iconic British fashion designer wearing a version of the Destroy shirt created in collaboration with her partner Malcolm McLaren. 

 

Readers familiar with the photo taken at Seditionaries upon which the portrait is based, will note how an alien figure has replaced the swastika and inverted crucifix of the original design:

 

 

Vivienne Westwood by Norma Moriceau (1977)

 

 

On entering the tiny store based at 430 King's Road - forever preserved in its final incarnation as Worlds End - one can't help but remember the dead: not just Vivienne, but Malcolm, Jordan, Sid, Debbie Wilson, Tracie O'Keefe ... et al.  

 

And one can't help wondering if there are ways of being haunted by the past which are vital and allow for a critical nostalgia which troubles the present and enables us to live yesterday tomorrow. 

 

To paraphrase Heidegger, mayn't it be the case that only a ghost can save us now ...? [2]

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Invader is a pseudonymous French street artist whose work can be found in major cities in numerous countries around the world, often in culturally and/or historically significant sites, although Paris remains the primary location for his work. 

      Often deriving inspiration from the video games he loved to play when growing up in the 1970s and '80s - Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario, etc. - he often publishes books (and maps) to accompany his installations (or 'invasions' as he calls them). 

      As one might imagine, like Banksy his works have attracted the attention of wealthy collectors and have sometimes been stolen to order off of the walls upon which they were installed (something he has tried to counteract by selecting sites that are more difficult to reach and creating larger works with more delicate tiles that cannot be removed without damaging the piece). When legitimaely sold in galleries, his work can fetch six-figure sums. 

      Shepard Fairey, again as one might imagine, was an early admirer, writing: 

      "Invader's pop art may seem shallow, but by taking the risk of illegally re-contextualizing video game characters in an urban environment that provides more chaotic social interaction than a gamer's bedroom, he makes a statement about the desensitizing nature of video games and consumer culture. In a postmodern paradox, a game like Grand Theft Auto takes the danger of the streets and puts it in a safe video game, while Invader takes a safe video game icon and inserts it into the danger of the streets." See Shepard Fairy, 'Space Invader', Swindle magazine, No. 3, 2004.

 

[2] Heidegger's famous statement - Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten - appeared in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. 

      Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal savior, anymore than by my use of ther term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. Like Heidegger, I'm calling upon an event outside of human control that triggers a radical and transformative cultural shift that allows for a new revealing or mode of being; or, like Mark Fisher in his hauntological writings, I'm referring to a manifestation of a lost future or a potentiality that has not been actualised.  

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.  

      See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2022) - a work on which I published a three part post in November 2023: click here for part one on lost futures and here for part three on hauntology.   

 

Back of the Net mit Martin Heidegger

Back of the Net mit Martin Heidegger 

(SA/2026)

 

 

I.

 

Did Heidegger like TV? 

 

I very much doubt it ... 

 

One strongly suspects that he would view it not for amusement, but with extreme prejudice; just another example of technology which enframes human existence at an essential level and which abolishes distance by bringing far away events into the living room on the one hand and transporting the viewer to far away places on the other, so that they are never really at home even when they are physically slouched in their favourite armchair.  

 

The constant stream of news and entertainment communicates nothing and ultimately the medium alienates the viewer from their own life.   

However, despite his philosophical objections to television, Heidegger was prepared to place his principles to one side when it came to football: the question of being and the overcoming of metaphysics mattered a very great deal; but the beautiful game mattered more ...   

 

 

II.

 

Amusingly, because he refused to own a set of his own, Heidegger was obliged to visit his neighbour's house on match day and this he would frequently do if it was a major European Cup match or when the national team were playing and Germany's 2-1 victory over the Netherlands in the 1974 World Cup gave him a good deal of satisfaction and pride in his final years.  

 

Heidegger was a huge fan of the German captain Franz Beckenbauer - der Kaiser - in particular and would often express his admiration for the latter's skill on the ball and the way in which he could take control of a game in his role as a centre-back sweeper. Beckenbauer, he said, was an inspired player [1]. 

 

Now, for some readers this will simply reveal Heidegger as a hypocrite. 

 

Others, however, might defend his actions by referring to his concept of Gelassenheit; sometimes, in life, you just have to accept things as they are (let them be) and surrender to the world as it is (rather than as you would have it). And that means that, on occasion, even a committed Heideggerian can use mechanical devices whilst remaining troubled by the question concerning technology.     

As this is the more generous reading of Heidegger's football-loving, TV-watching actions, I think I prefer to accept this line of argument.  

 

 

III.

 

Heidegger, of course, was by no means the only philosopher to have loved - and played - Fußball. 

 

One immediately thinks, for example, of Camus and Derrida who were also enraptured by the beautiful game, the former famously declaring that what he knew for certain about ethics and our obligation to others he had learned from football [2] and the latter once confessed that he would "rather have been known as an international footballer than a philosopher" [3].   

 

Perhaps Simon Critchley is on to something when he suggests that football offers pitchside supporters and even TV spectators a shared and ecstatic experience that is at the same time authentic. It certainly provides a very different experience of time; 90 minutes in the world of football is strangely subjective and waiting for the final whistle can sometimes seem like an eternity, or an agony of extended duration, as Critchley writes [4].  

 

 

IV.

 

In sum: if the philosophical question concerning technology (and the legitimacy of watching TV) remained essential for Heidegger, in his later life he was evidently just as preoccupied by whether Geoff Hurst's controversial extra-time goal in the Wembley final had or had not crossed the line ...      

    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 428. 

 

[2] Camus originally made the remark in an article he wrote for a sports magazine produced by his former club, Racing Universitaire d'Alger (RUA), in April 1953. He repeated the claim in an interview after he won the Nobel Prize (1957), saying: 'What little I know about morality, I learned it on football pitches and theatre stages - these were my true universities'. 

      See 'The morality of football and the philosophy of Albert Camus', on the website Scottish Sport History (4 Jan 2020): click here.   

 

[3] See Michael Dillon writing on Derrida in Palgrave Advances in Continental Political Thought, ed. Terrell Carver and James Martin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 260. Cited by Matt Qvortrup in 'Philosophers on Football', in Philosophy Now, Issue 159 (Dec 2023 / Jan 2024): click here.   

 

[4] See Simon Critchley, What We Think About When We Think About Football (Profile Books, 2017). Critchley amusingly uses Heidegger's concepts from Being and Time to understand football's unique temporal flow, where objective time differs from subjective experience. 

      More widely, Critchley argues football is more than merely a game; that it is rather a vital cultural activity providing insights into memory, identity, class, and the human condition and I would recommend this work, even if Geoff Dyer was less than impressed; see his rather scathing review titled 'Dead Ball Situation', in Harper's Magazine (Dec. 2017): click here.

 

 

For a sister post to this one - 'Lost in Space mit Martin Heidegger' (12 Jan 2026) - click here.          

 

Lost in Space mit Martin Heidegger

Lost in Space mit Martin Heidgger 

(SA/2026)

 

'It is no longer the Earth on which human beings dwell today ...'  

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I have to remind myself of when reading Heidegger is that even if he was born in the year Nietzsche went mad and published Sein und Zeit a few months before The Jazz Singer premiered in New York, he lived for a significant number of years after 1945 and so witnessed (whether he wished to or not) a period of rapid global transformation marked by huge geopolitical events and socio-cultural shifts.

 

We know what he thought about the Cold War - that it was a battle for technological mastery of the Earth fought between two superpowers that, whilst ideologically opposed, were metaphysically identical - and yet we have no idea what Heidegger thought about the sexual revolution, the extension of civil rights, England winning the World Cup, or a thousand other things that he could have commented on had he wished to do so. 

 

However, thanks to a posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, we do know how he regarded the space race ... [1]

 

 

II.      

 

Whilst Heidegger did not comment directly on the 1969 Apollo moon landing, in the above interview he did express his horror at the idea of humanity venturing into space; one small step for a man, one giant leap further into the void for Dasein. 

 

Looking at photographs of the Earth taken from space by the robotic lunar orbiters launched by NASA in 1966-67, Heidegger said he was frightened, regarding the images as evidence that we no longer dwell (i.e., have our being) on Earth in any meaningful sense. Instead, our relationship with the world had become, he said, purely abstract, reducing the Earth to a planetary object to be surveyed and enframed (i.e. reduced to a mere resource for exploitation).  

 

For Heidegger, das Raketenzeitalter, as he called it, was perhaps even more disasterous than the Atomic Age; for whilst the latter threatened to blow us all to kingdom come, the Rocket Age essentially evicted humanity from its terrestrial home. He provocatively claimed that nuclear weapons were thus no longer needed as the technological revealing exemplified within the space race had already resulted in mankind's existential uprooting.   

 

For Heidegger, the idea of colonising the Moon (or other planets, such as Mars) was anathema; for the Moon was a physical environment that could never be a world in the true sense of the term, only a site for technical manipulation. Far from expanding the human horizon, space exploration would only reduce and narrow such by making everything distanceless. 

 

Heidegger also criticised the modern scientific jargon used to describe the heavens; what he called rocket language made words purely functional and thereby rendered authentic communication or poetic engagement with the world impossible. 

 

In sum: Heidegger wholeheartedly rejects the idea advanced by Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise that our destiny as a species is to "explore strange new worlds" and to "boldly go where no man has gone before" [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] This interview with Der Spiegel was conducted on 23 September, 1966, by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff. It had been granted by Heidegger only on the condition that it remain unpublished during his lifetime and so was not published until 31 May, 1976. 

      The interview is commonly known by the title 'Only a God Can Save Us' in the English translation by William J. Richardson, which can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive. 

 

[2] I'm quoting here, as I'm sure most readers will know, from the opening monologue spoken by William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk during the opening title sequence of the original Star Trek series (1966-69).

 

 

For a sister post to this one - 'Back of the Net mit Martin Heidegger' (13 Jan 2026) - click here.    

 

 

The Slop-ification of Literature: One Night at the UnHerd Club

Poster for 'The slop-ification of literature' with James Marriott, Ed West, 

and Kathleen Stock at the UnHerd Club (London, 8 Dec 2025)

 

 

I. 

 

Located along a 'beautiful side street in London's Westminster', the UnHerd Club is a place where 'intelligent people can come together to talk freely and without fear of retribution'. 

 

In other words, it's a members' club based in one of the wealthiest parts of Town, with a cosy bar and a large library where they hold discussions and debates, lectures, and seminars, or interview well-known authors keen to promote a new book.

 

My friend cynically described it as:  

 

A posh talking shop above a posh restaurant intended to attract the kind of conceited middle class individuals who, laughably, like to imagine themselves part of a persecuted minority for having dared to separate themselves from the semi-literate masses.     

 

Perhaps that's a bit unfair - but it's not far wide of the mark (the clue is in the very name of the club).  

 

II. 

 

Despite my friend's less than favourable impression of the UnHerd Club, he invited me along on Monday to a talk entitled 'The slop-ification of literature', featuring three speakers: 

 

(i) James Marriott, a Times columnist who writes on society, culture and ideas. Before joining the paper he worked in the rare book trade. He is also the author of a weekly newsletter published on Substack: Cultural Capital.

 

(ii) Ed West, an author, journalist and blogger, who has worked as the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He frequently posts work on his Substack, amusingly called Wrong Side of History.      

 

(iii) Kathleen Stock (OBE), is a British philosopher and writer, whose research interests include aesthetics, fiction, and sexual politics. Her trans critical views brought accusations of spreading harmful rhetoric and obliged her to resign from her post at Sussex University in October 2021. A contributing editor at UnHerd, her articles can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

III. 

Essentially, the argument put forward by all three of the above was that due to the rise of accessible AI and the total ubiquity of smartphones, we are now in a post-literate society and belong to a new dark age of endless scrolling.  

 

This, they said, is a very bad thing; because whilst reading books elevates the human spirit, watching videos on social media results in brain rot. We should, therefore, read more and scroll less.  

 

And, err, that was really about it ...

 

It's not that I don't - as a Lawrentian - in part agree with them, but what the speakers didn't seem to fully appreciate is that people are not the passive victims of the tech giants and social media companies; that they willingly yield to the network in which they are integrated; that they love their 24/7 virtual lives and the gadgets that facilitate it such as smartphones and i-Pads.  

 

And what the speakers call brain rot is what most people experience as happiness and they are grateful to YouTube and TikTok etc. for providing them with a world in which they can finally feel safe; a world which anticipates and addresses their needs. 

 

Thus, rather than wanting to spend less time online, most people wish to immerse themselves ever further into the digital realm and become one with their digital selves (their avatars), in much the same way that Narcissus once desired to become one with his own reflection. 

 

It is, ultimately, a kind of religious desire; a wishing to submit to something greater in order to find not freedom but fulfilment (or a kind of fatal satisfaction). People are exalted by belonging to the digital new order beyond feeling or reason; they may lose their minds and their hearts might perish within them, but it's what they want; to participate in a great and perfect network. 

 

 

IV.

 

What the trio of speakers needed to do (but didn't) was place the discussion within a broader philosophical discussion on the question concerning technology; someone mentioned Mark Fisher at some point, but it was Heidegger - not Fisher - who needed referencing. 

 

For Heidegger it is who recognised that the "threat to man does not come [...] from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology" [1], rather it's the essence of technology as a form of revealing that he terms enframing [Gestell] wherein the greater danger lies. 

 

To speak about removing smartphones from classrooms or restricting access to social media for those under the age of sixteen, is to entirely fail to understand that the problem has to do with 2,500 years of Western metaphysics and the fall into idealism. 

 

I would politely suggest, therefore, that Marriott, West, and Stock read less Jane Austen and more Heidegger. And more Baudrillard, too; for the latter is another author whose predictions about the world we now inhabit and his insights into digital culture have proved to be extremely prescient [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994), p. 333. 

      See the two-part post 'O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology', published on TTA on 26 May 2016: click here to access part one, or here for part two.    

 

[2] See the essay by Bran Nicol and Emmanuelle Fantin entitled 'How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today's AI 30 years before ChatGPT', in The Conversation (4 November, 2025): click here. Fantin and Nicol are the authors of a new Baudrillard biography published by Reaktion Books (2025), my thoughts on which are presently being published on TTA; click here to read part one of what will be a four-part post. 

      I think a good book to start with by Baudrillard might be The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), described by Fantin and Nicol as "one of Baudrillard's most prophetic texts, valuable even now, more than thirty years after its publication, as a key to understanding our 'permanently online, permanently connected world'" (Jean Baudrillard, 2025, p. 96); a world where the screen has replaced the mirror and each individual exists in their own kind of bubble, like an astronaut inside their spacesuit.    

 

 

This post is for Thom B. and Nick Cave. 

 

Heidegger's (Absent) Dog

 

Martin Heidegger and Rae based on an image 

created by Ruth Malone using ChatGTP

@goingalongwithheidegger 

 

I. 

 

According to Ruth Malone, whilst Heidegger's method of comparative analysis between the human, the animal and the stone can be defended against the charge of anthropocentrism - provided, that is, that one accepts his foundational ideas and the validity of his philosophical approach - he nevertheless didn't understand dogs, in her view, and she is certain, therefore, that he could not have had a canine companion. 

 

I'll return to that final point later. Firstly, however, let me try and summarise Miss Malone's position set out in a short piece on Substack entitled 'Heidegger's captivated animals' [1] ...  

 

 

II.  

 

Heidegger famously thought animals, including highly intelligent animals like dogs, were poor in world in comparison to world-forming humans; although they are much better off than inanimate objects, such as stones, which, in his view, are entirely without world; i.e., have no access to being [2].  

 

Animals - and again, this includes mutts - may not understand the world as we understand it, but they are, nevertheless, instinctively captivated by things; in fact, it is this term - captivation [Benommenheit] - which defines the animal's particular way of being and how they are essentially different from us and from rocks [3]. 

 

And for Malone this is sufficient to get Heidegger off the anthropocentric hook. Being poor in world is a consequence of captivation but does not describe the essence of the animal; our four-legged friends are neither intrinsically deprived nor inferior in any fundamental sense, it's just Heidegger has a penchant for thinking negatively and views lack as a key aspect of being (and not merely the absence of something). 

 

In fact, as Malone indicates - drawing on the recent work of Sean Kirkland - it's impossible to carry out the Destruktion of philosophy that Heidegger calls for unless one posits a concept of lack and adopts a privative method or approach [4].       

 

Having found that we have something in common with the animal - we both have worlds - Heidegger then destructively examines the notion of poverty "revealing the both having and not-having of world by the animal" [5], before then dipping into zoology in order to tie his idea of captivation to animal behaviour. 

 

"Importantly, at this stage, Heidegger's approach is no longer driven by comparison with the human but builds a positive account of the being of the animal using the findings of biology. As such, Heidegger develops an account of the animal way of Being which can no longer be described as privative but now [...] contains a 'wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare'." [6]

 

This suggests that not only is the animal other to us, but, in some ways, has an advantage over man; the fallen animal; the unhappy animal; the mad animal who has lost his healthy animal reason [7]. 

 

And yet, despite this - and despite Malone's valiant attempt to defend Heidegger from the accusation of anthropocentrism - I can't help still having the impression that Heidegger had little time for nonhuman creatures which, according to him, have no language, history, or hands and cannot even be said to dwell or die.   

 

And indeed, Malone herself kind of circles round in order to conclude that it's difficult "to maintain the view that the animal is poor in world once one sees its captivation and 'wealth of openness'" [8] - and perhaps it's mistaken to posit the notion of weltarm in the first place; or, at any rate, wrong to group all animals together. 

 

For whilst the lizard does not recognise the rock as a rock [9], it seems clear to Malone that dogs do recognise their ball or favourite chew toy. Therefore, she suggests, the latter can recognise beings as beings, even if they cannot reflect upon and understand the being of beings and if Heidegger had only enjoyed the companionship of a canine chum he'd have had to acknowledge this.

 

 

III. 

 

And so we return to the question of whether or not Heidegger ever had a dog ... 

 

And, to my suprise, it seems that Malone was right in her supposition: he did not, in fact, own a dog; nor is there any mention in the numerous critical and biographical studies of his ever having any other kind of pet animal either.  

 

Notes

 

[1] See Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', on Substack: @goingalongwithheidegger (16 Nov 2025): click here. 

 

[2] See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Indiana University Press, 1995), Pt. 2, Ch. 2, § 42, pp. 176-78.  

      It's unfortunate that Heidegger chose to use the terms weltbildend (to describe human being), weltarm (to describe animality), and weltlos (to describe stones), as they do appear to lend themselves to an anthropocentric and hierarchical philosophy, both in the original German and English translation (world-forming, poor in world, without world).   

 

[3] Malone rightly reminds us that Derrida sees a logical difficulty in Heidegger's insistence on the fact that the difference between the animal's poverty and the human's wealth is not one of degree, but, rather, a difference in essence: "if the animal is so very different to the human, then how can a comparison, which results in the idea of the animal as 'poor in world', be meaningful?"

      See Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals' (as cited above) and see also Derrida's discussion of this issue in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 49.   

 

[4] See Sean D. Kirkland, Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2023). It's an interesting new study of Heidegger's project of Destruktion (a project famously taken up and radically extended by Derrida, of course, as déconstruction).   

      Malone summarises the three steps of Heidegger's methodology, which Kirkland derives from Being and Time (1927), and which she argues structures his comparative analysis of humans and animals, as: 

      "1. Start by bringing something positively to light. 2. Reveal destructively what is beyond that which is successfully brought to light. In other words, reveal what had remained concealed in the first step. 3. Focus the destruction on the 'posing of the question', not the claims, conclusions positions or philosophical results." - Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', as cited above.

[5] Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', cited above in note 1.  

 

[6] Ibid. Malone is quoting Heidegger writing in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ... p. 255. 

 

[7] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche here; see The Gay Science, III. 224. 

 

[8] Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', cited above in note 1.  

 

[9] As someone who likes lizards more than dogs, I'm not entirely comfortable with this claim. For whilst a lizard may not know what a rock is in an abstract conceptual sense, it's smart enough to know that rocks are not just great places to sunbathe, but, in providing camouflage and shelter, are also crucial to its survival needs and studies have shown that they carefully select rocks and remember which ones offer most advantage. 

      Thus, even if their relationship with rocks is primarily based on instinct and learned association, they are not devoid of higher cognitive functions (they can solve problems, learn simple tasks, exhibit advanced social behaviours, etc.). 

      One recalls the following short poem by D. H. Lawrence, from his 1929 collection Pansies:

 

A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening 

no doubt to the sounding of the spheres. 

And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you 

And swirl of a tail! 

 

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards 

they’d be worth looking at. 

 

 

Enjoy This Post - Such as it Isn't

Polo: the mint with the hole

Photo by Conell on Flickr (9 April 2018)

 

 

I. 

 

As a child and natural born nihilist, absence always excited more than presence (not necessarily making the heart grow fonder, but the head spin faster); holes, slits, and cracks always fascinated more than wholeness and smooth impenetrability. Pulling the plug was always a much greater pleasure than filling the tub with water.   

 

And the philosophy of negativity still appeals to me today; I spend an inordinate amount of time watching shadows in the darkness and listening to the silence. Althought whether nothingness is an actual feature of ontological reality or one that we merely imagine due to the way we think and speak (i.e., a conceptual fiction rooted in language), I don't really know and, to be honest, don't really care [1].

 

 

II. 

 

Funnily enough, the idea that we can perceive absences is becoming increasingly popular in contemporary culture - and not just amongst philosophers. People seem to be waking up to the fact that whilst how things are matters, so too is it equally vital how things are not and that being rests upon non-being. 

 

In other words, people seem to be responding to the call of the void [2] in ever greater numbers and I have to admit I smiled when I came across an essay written in 2017 by Dan Cavedon-Taylor which argued that we can tactually perceive the absence of a tooth after the dentist has performed an extraction - for wasn't I saying much the same thing in the very first post published here on Torpedo the Ark five years ealier [3].

 

Namely, that the sense of loss is palpable and that a rotten tooth - even after removal - continues to function as a provocation and invisible presence. 

 

Thinkers in both the European and Anglo-American traditions of philosophy have accepted the truth of this. Even Bertrand Russell - about as far away from Heidegger in both philosophical methods and concerns as one can get - conceded that there must exist negative facts. 

 

However, there remain those who argue that "although we can experience absences, and although our absence experiences are often triggered by perceptual experiences, absence experiences are not themselves a perceptual phenomenon" [4] and warn we should not be seduced by those thinkers who suggest otherwise and commit themselves to "the reality of negative features in the world and our ability to perceive them" [5].   

      

Thinkers such as Roy Sorensen, for example ...

 

 

III.

 

Sorensen's work on negative reality [6] - things that are paradoxically present by their absence - tries a bit too hard to be quirky and fun and so quickly starts to irritate, but, nevertheless, he's got some interesting things to say on shadows and holes, for example, and I'm vaguely sympathetic with his attempt to persuade others that these things are entities in their own right (and not just mental constructs that result from human experience and expectation - which was Sartre's position). 

  

I'm not entirely convinced that the hole in a Polo mint can be perceived independently of the matter that surrounds it, but I would certainly agree that the hole cannot be defined purely in terms of the mint sweet; it's an objective feature in itself and to deny this just seems a little silly and a form of metaphysical prejudice that thinks presence is the be-all and end-all and absence of no positive importance or reality because seemingly less tangible.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This is clearly a question that continues to trouble many philosophers, however, including Stephen Mumford, who peddles a form of soft Parmenideanism in his recent book Absence and Nothing: the philosophy of what there is not, (Oxford University Press, 2021). 

      For Mumford, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides was largely correct to say that the division into Being and non-Being is a false rather than a fundamental division as what exists is everything whilst what does not exist is nothing. For Pamenides, to believe in the existence of both Being and non-Being is contradictory and makes knowledge impossible. He also insists that Being is eternal and indivisible.  

      Unlike Parmenides, however, Mumford does not think that being is essentially fixed and unchanging and he does not rule out the possibility of being able to think about what there is not and even that there might - under certain circumstances - be some form of negative entity that would have to be acknowledged (if only as a theoretical anomaly). 

      Thus, Mumford can, in this way, have his cake and eat it; maintaining his argument that absence and nothingness are not an ontological part of everyday reality, whilst still writing a 200 page monograph on the subject. That's not to dismiss his methodology, but simply point out the convenient nature of making a compromise of this kind.       

 

[2] I don't mean to suggest more and more people have the urge to jump from atop a tall building, but that more and more people are waking up the fact that the void is a space of forgotten possibility and future potential and so has vital existential reality. See my recently published post on this (22 October 2025): click here.  

 

[3] See Dan Cavedon-Taylor, 'Touching Voids: On the Varieties of Absence Perception', in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. 8, Issue 2, (2017), pp. 355–366. The post on TTA that I refer to is 'Reflections on the Loss of UR6' (24 Nov 2012): click here. 

      Cavedon-Taylor and myself are in agreement that after having a tooth pulled - and after the anaesthetic wears off - the first thing you do is run your tongue along your teeth until arriving at the gap where once a tooth was located: "The gap is experienced as unnerving, and not merely on its initial probing […] Something once experienced as present within your mouth is now experienced as lacking." 

 

[4] Laura Gow, 'A New Theory of Absence Experience', in the European Journal of Philosophy Vol. 29, Issue 1, (March 2021),  pp. 168-181. To read online, click here. 

      And see also Gow's paper entitled 'Empty Space, Silence, and Absence' in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 51, Issue 7, (October 2021), pp. 496-507. Published online by Cambridge University Press (March 2022): click here.  

      In this text, Gow examines two experiences which some philosophers have claimed (mistakenly, in her view) to be paradigmatic examples of absence experience: the experience of empty space and the experience of silence. For Gow, "even if we can see empty space and hear silence [...], such experiences cannot be used in support of the perceptual view of absence experience". 

 

[5] Stephen Mumford, Absence and Nothing: the philosophy of what there is not, p. 2. 

 

[6] See for example his book Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (Oxford University Press, 2008); or his more recent study, Nothing: A Philosophical History (Oxford University Press, 2022). 

Lest We Forget the Old Creature's Birthday

  The inside of this card reads:  

 

Sobald ein Mensch auf die Welt kommt, ist er schon alt genug zu sterben ... [1]

 

Tout ce qui existe naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par hasard ... [2]

 

 

This Wednesday, lest we forget, is Nietzsche's birthday: he was born in Röcken, Germany, on 15 October 1844 [3]. 

 

And whilst the village he was born in has now been absorbed into the expanding town of Lützen, a few miles southwest of Leipzig, the actual house he was born in still stands, next to the church where his father was a pastor, and is now part of a memorial site that includes his grave [4].  

 

Not that Nietzsche was one to make a huge fuss over his birthday; indeed, in 1880, he even forgot it entirely, explaining to his friend Franz Overbeck in a letter that his head was too full of other thoughts (thoughts that made him wonder why anything should matter to him). 

 

Having said that, however, there are Nietzsche scholars who argue that Nietzsche did very much like birthdays; not least because it was a time of gifts and of cake, but also because they signified the beginning of another year and the opportunity to make a fresh start. 

 

After his own mother apparently forgot his 44th birthday in 1888 - his last before his mental breakdown in January 1889 - he sent her a postcard humorously reprimanding her: The old mother has forgotten the old creature's birthday!  

 

This was that perfect day on which everything ripened and he told himself the story of his life ... [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Heidegger doesn't do birthday greetings, but if he did, I'm sure he'd say something like this; it's a line from the late medieval text Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (c. 1400), by Johannes von Tepl, quoted in Sein und Zeit (1927).   

 

[2] And this equally amusing existential birthday greeting is by Jean-Paul Sartre, taken from his 1938 novel La Nausée.

 

[3] The same date as King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was born in 1795; a Prussian monarch very much admired by Nietzsche's father and after whom he was named. As Nietzsche would later write in Ecce Homo, this had one main advantage; throughout his childhood it was a day of public rejoicing. See section 3 of  Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am So Wise'. 

      Lest we forget, Michel Foucault, was also born on 15 October (1926); a philosopher who, by his own admission, tried "as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche's texts ..." 

      See Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', trans John Johnston in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 465-73. The line quoted from is on p. 471. 

      And see also my post on being simply a Nietzschean à la Foucault, published on 14 August 2020: click here.

 

[4] The Nietzsche-Gedenkstätte: click here for details (in English).  

      This should not be confused with the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Nietzsche spent seven summers in the 1880s, and which is also now a museum (opened in 1960 and overseen by the Nietzsche House Sils-Maria Foundation): click here.

 

[5] Ecce Homo is the last original book written by Nietzsche before his death in 1900. It was written in late 1888, but not published until 1908. The book offers Nietzsche's own (self-mocking) interpretation of his work and his significance as a thinker.