Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 1: Lost Futures

Zero Books (second edition, 2022)

 

 

For some reason, the spectral figure of Mark Fisher continues to haunt my imagination [a]. 

 

And, what's more, his name continues to crop up in conversation. Just the other night, for example, a young woman asked me if I had read his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life and I had to rather shamefully admit I hadn't. 

 

So, at Mariam's insistence that I really should do so - and despite certain reservations [b] - here goes. 

 

But, note at the outset, what follows is not an attempt at a review (still less an overview). 

 

Think of this more as an attempt to occupy the space of thinking that Fisher opens up and to engage with some of the ideas encountered, moving from text-to-text but not stopping where the material is outside my field of knowledge or experience, or simply void of any interest. I won't, for example, be saying much - if anything - about the various genres of dance music, such as Jungle, that seem to so excite Fisher's imagination [c].    

 

Note that all page references to (the second edition) of Fisher's book are given directly in the text.

 

 

I.

 

Many people talk about the cancellation of the future, but I admire Fisher for being the one who (like the Italian Marxist Franco Beradi) emphasises the slowness of this process. 

 

It's something that (gradually but relentlessly) creeps up on us (like old age): one day everything seems fine and there's plenty to look forward to, the next ... Suddenly, all we are left with is the past - or more precisely, our memory of the past and even this dims over time. 

 

Luckily, we have photographs and videos and thanks to YouTube it seems that everything we ever watched or listened to is made available: "In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost." [2]

 

 

II.

 

It's clever how Fisher (retrospectively) reads Sapphire & Steel in relation to the work of Harold Pinter and John Le Carré. But I remember how, at the time - the series ran from 1979 to 1982 - my friend and I would often laugh at it's absurdity and pretension. 

 

Now, however, I'd view this pair of interdimensional operatives whose job it is to repair breaks in time so as to ensure temporal continuity with a good deal of philosophical hostility. For what are they if not defenders of the myth of progress (i.e., linear development) and ideals of smoothness, purity, and temporal good order ...?

 

Personally, I quite like anachronisms and chronological inconsistencies. It's not these things which lead to stasis - on the contrary, things which puncture equilibrium also keep things moving. 

 

Without wishing to completely destabilise the Western concept of time, I'm happy to celebrate its periodic disturbance; to allow for a certain chaos (or openness); for untimely events that produce divergent becomings; for lines of flight which produce wild disruptions.

 

I say this as a reader of Deleuze, but also as a reader of Lawrence who writes in Apocalypse: "Our idea of time as a continuity, as an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly" [d].

 

Hopefully I've not misunderstood what Fisher is arguing, but I get the impression that, like Sapphire and Steel, he wants to straighten everything out and prevent cultural time folding back on itself, so that we might once again be able to make a clear distinction between past and present (and we'll all know what's what and when and where we are).

 

 

III.

 

Fisher likes to use a term borrowed from his pal Simon Reynolds - dyschronia - to describe the "current crisis of cultural temporality" [14] as he experiences it. 

 

And, to be fair, it's a nice term - one that can be added to all those other dys- terms which people seem to like using today (from dyslexia and dysmorphia to dysphoria and dystopia). I even referred to the concept myself in a recent post on the Beatles [click here].        

 

But I can't quite get as worked up about it as Mr Fisher, who at one point cries out: "Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?" [9] A passionate cri de coeur no doubt, but one that made me almost spit my tea. For this may be a question concerning the time in which we live, but it's hardly a question for the ages. 

 

Although, having said that, perhaps Fisher has a point when he asserts that the fate that has befallen popular music is "in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of [wider] culture under post-Fordist capitalism" [16].

 

 

IV.

Despite appropriating his term hauntology, Fisher claims to find Derrida a "frustrating thinker" [16] and he makes clear his hostility to deconstruction: 

 

"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which [...] made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives." [16-17]  

 

So what's not to love? 

 

Well, to be fair, I share some of Fisher's frustration when it comes to Derrida and I've never read his work with the same kind of pleasure or excitement as that of his contemporaries, such as Deleuze. 

 

Over the years, however, my appreciation of Derrida and Derridean concepts, such as différance and hauntology, has increased and I think his main point that nothing enjoys a purely positive existence - that presence requires absence; that being rests on non-being - is absolutely crucial. 

 

And I'm pretty certain that Fisher - indebted as he is to Derrida - would be more generous to him were it not for the fact that the latter's not quite lycanthropic enough for those influenced by Nick Land [e]. 

Anyway, Fisher asks the question that many readers have probably asked themselves: "Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is just a figure of speech?" [18]

 

He answers by saying: 

 

"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." [18]

 

That's a nice (easily understood) definition and I agree with Fisher that many of the great thinkers of modernity - not least of all Marx and Freud - "discovered different modes of this spectral causality" [19]. 

 

As did Nietzsche, of course, when he spoke of posthumous individuals ...

 

The key thing is that we can distinguish in hauntology between the no longer and the not yet:

 

"The first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic 'compulsion to repeat', a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." [19]

 

 

V.

 

Nodding to both Freud and Derrida, Fisher also provides an excellent definition of (and distinction between) mourning and melancholia:

 

"In Freud's terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawl of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Spectres of Marx, the dead must be conjured away [...]" [22]

 

I think that's true: which is why the dead must bury the dead and the living must live; remembering their loved ones, but also letting them go. The dead can't rest in peace if we won't allow them to do so: and haunting, then, "can be construed as a failed mourning" [22] - a refusal to give up the ghost (and thus the ghost's refusal to be quiet). 

 

For Fisher, what's at stake in 21st-century hauntology is not the loss of a loved one or the disappearance of a particular object, but the vanishing of a certain trajectory that he names popular modernism and which produced such things as public service broadcasting, Penguin paperbacks, and postpunk ... 

 

In a passage that makes clear the aim of his book, Fisher writes:

 

"In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the preset moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that [...] the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist." [22-23]  

 

Perhaps, in a sense, that's also one of the aims of Torpedo the Ark. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to a refusal to give up; "a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time ..." [24]

 

Of course, as Fisher recognises, this raises the question of nostalgia once more: "is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a [new] name for nostalgia?" [25]

 

Clearly, Fisher doesn't think so and I agree with him that "comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way" [25]. The fact is, the 1970s was a more creative decade - and people were happier - than today; this isn't falsely overestimating (or falsely remembering) the past and readers who weren't alive to experience the '70s will just have to take my word for it [f].  

 

The popular modern culture that was unfolding back then "was by no means a completed project" [26] and it was, admittedly, a time of "casual racism, sexism and homophobia" [26] - not to mention football hooliganism, strikes, blackouts, and flared jeans. But, nevertheless, the decade was, in many respects, "better than neoliberalism wants us to remember it" [25]. 

 

What is being longed for in Fisher's work (and perhaps also in mine) is not the return to a certain period, but the resumption of an abandoned project (which he calls popular modernism) and the summoning of a lost spirit, although Fisher and I obviously disagree as to the political guise of this spirit - I'm not an acid communist.  

Still, acid communist or not, I can agree with Fisher that the key thing is ultimately about dismantling identities which are for the most part poor fictions: "Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves." [28]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written recently about Mark Fisher and his work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark; see here and here, for example. 

 

[b] I am always a little wary of writers like Fisher who, via unrestrained enthusiasm for certain ideas (often brilliantly expressed) attract a cult following amongst readers who, like Fox Mulder, so want to believe in the existence of truth lying out there (beneath the falsifications of capitalist realism).    

 

[c] This isn't to say that Fisher's analysis of, for example, Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP (1993) isn't excellent, it's just that I know more (and care more) about the actress Goldie Hawn than I do about Goldie the music producer and DJ. 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 97. 

      Lawrence continues: "The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge."  

[e] I'm referring here to Nick Land's essay 'Spirit and Teeth', in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Sprit, ed. David Woods, (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.

     The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, (Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 175-201.

 

[f] Readers don't have to take my word for how shit things are in the 21st-century in comparison to the 1970s. Consider this statement from Fisher: "It's clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s." [Ghosts, 29] 

      Arguably, things have only got worse - much worse - in the ten years since this was written. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post - The Return of the 70s - can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here.   

Spectres of Marx and Derrida: A Post in Response to a 6/20 Paper by John Holroyd

 

The ghostly figures of Karl Marx (1818-1883) 

and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

'Deconstruction never had any meaning or interest 

other than as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism ...'

 

I couldn't help thinking that John Holroyd's paper on Marx presented last night at Christian Michel's 6/20 [1] was something of a missed opportunity. For rather than simply rake over over the ashes of historical Marxism, he might have invoked the spirit of that untimely Marxism which continues to haunt capitalist society and the imagination of those concerned not with communism per se, but the possibility of radical critique. 

 

And rather than argue in favour of positive freedom - i.e., a fulfilled and unalienated form of existence lived within a harmonious community established upon an ideal of justice - Holroyd could have developed the idea of what might be termed posthumous freedom, by which one refers to a model of freedom invested with elements from the past and overshadowed by futurity; a model that embraces uncanny otherness thereby disrupting the presence of what is present (including the self), and renders the question of alienation a non-issue. 

 

That's not to say Holroyd's talk was uninteresting or poorly presented: in fact, Holroyd is an accomplished speaker who clearly has an excellent grasp of his material. But, it was essentially just a reminder of Marx and the messianic or religious nature of his work - the aspect which clearly most excites Holroyd - rather than a daring philosophical attempt to reimagine Marx in spectral form à la Derrida [2].    

 

Of course, Holroyd doesn't pretend to be a Derridean and probably has little truck with différance and deconstruction. And some might argue it's a little unfair to criticise a speaker for what they don't say, rather than focus on the issues that were addressed.

 

Nevertheless, for a writer interested in the persistence of ideas from the cultural and social past and intrigued by those thinkers, like Marx, whom Nietzsche calls posthumous individuals, Holroyd might at least have indicated he was aware of Derrida's seminal text on atemporal Marxism - and if he isn't, then this, in my view, is a serious shortcoming and I would respectfully suggest he add it to his reading list ASAP.      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] John Holroyd has a background in theology and philosophy and has taught religious studies (and other subjects) in schools (and online) for many years and lectured at the London School of Philosophy.  He is the author of Judging Religion: A Dialogue for Our Times (Silverwood Books, 2019). 

      Christian Michel is a French polymath who has graciously hosted the twice-monthly 6/20 Club at his west London home for almost twenty years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics. 

 

[2] Jacques Derrida's Spectres de Marx (Éditions Galilée, 1993) was trans. by Peggy Kamuf and published in English by Routledge the following year. 

      The ideas that Derrida introduces here - such as hauntology - were first presented in a series of lectures during a conference on the future of Marxism held at the University of California, Riverside in 1993. For Derrida, the spirit of Marx contines to haunt the modern social imaginary even in a world that is post-Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (and this will continue to be the case so long as there is injustice, inequality, oppression, and exploitation). 

      For a critical reading of this text by Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, and others, see Ghostly Demarcations, ed. Michael Sprinkler, (Verso, 1999).

 

 

Express Yourself: On How Individualism Becomes Socially Corrosive

Madonna performing in the video for 

her 1989 single 'Express Yourself' [1]

"Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling 

and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realised." [2]

 

 

I. 

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that individualism as a moral and political philosophy is intimately connected to capitalism, which is why Marx spoke of it as a bourgeois form of abstraction, heaping scorn on liberal thinkers who conceived of men and women existing prior to, outside of, or free from social relations and insisted that these individuals had a fundamental right to express themselves and their desires.

 

Of course, one needn't be a Marxist to find such an idea problematic. Indeed, there are many on the right of the political spectrum who oppose such thinking, arguing that if you deny or dissolve the bonds that hold a people together by sanctioning individual rights and modes of conduct over and above their duty to (and kinship with) others, then you threaten social stability. 

 

Nietzsche, for example, brands liberal capitalism as political degeneracy; a form of anarcho-nihilism in disguise [3]. For Nietzsche, the sovereign individual is the supreme product of culture and society, like a beautiful (but quickly fading) flower. Without the latter providing nourishment and vital support, the former would never blossom.

 

Further, it's worth recalling that Nietzsche values the individual for their power of self-stylisation and self-mastery - i.e., not the fact they express an authentic, pre-supposed self, but, rather, that they create and shape out of chaos an identity via discipline and cruelty. This is what he designates as a great and rare art [4].    

 

II.

As one might suspect, individualism vs. collectivism is a common dichotomy in cross-cultural research. 

 

Comparative studies have found that the world's cultures vary in the degree to which they value personal freedom over conformity to social norms. Since, as we have indicated, individualism is strongly correlated with liberal capitalism, the cultures of more economically developed regions tend to be the most individualistic in the world. 

      

Despite this, there are still some on the radical left who insist - like Oscar Wilde - that only with the abolition of private property and the triumph of socialism, will we witness the emergence of a true, beautiful, and healthy individualism. 

      

In his famous essay, 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism', Wilde went on to equate individualism with art, arguing that the crucial value of such is that it disturbs the "monotony of type, slavery of custom, and tyranny of habit" and saves man from being reduced to the "level of a machine". 

 

Many other artists and philosophers have also argued in favour of individualism - indeed, as a youth, I was all for a punk form of anarchic individualism too. But that's a long time ago and now and I'm no longer quite so seduced by those who insist on their absolute right to lead an aberrant and unconventional lifestyle regardless of how this impacts on others.

 

Thus, for example, when presented with Joseph Brodsky's proposition that the "surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism" [5], I would now ask what protects us from the latter when it has itself become malevolent?    

 

And surely there is little doubt that we are now living in an age of what we might term toxic individualism; i.e., a form of individualism in which self-expression has given way to narcissistic (and solipsistic) self-obsession. 

 

I don't quite want to say that TikTok threatens the future of civil society, but it's undeniable that a culture's understanding of the notion of selfhood and individual rights has broad (ethical and political) implications and is at the heart of many of the issues being contested today. 

 

My concern is, if you raise a generation in which each individual is convinced of their own uniqueness and their absolute right to live how they like (in the name of authenticity and in accord with their feelings), then that's probably not going to end well (unless you think the atomisation of society a good thing). 

 

In sum: this is obviously a large and complex topic - one way beyond the scope of a post such as this. However, the all-pervasive spread of toxic individualism and the consequences of this (i.e., the dissolution of traditional institutions and structures) are increasingly obvious. As Marx predicted long ago, with the triumph of bourgeois modernity all that is solid melts into air ... [6]       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The music video was directed by David Fincher. The single was taken from the album Like a Prayer (Sire Records, 1989). 

      In an interview, Madonna explained what the ultimate message behind her song was; namely, that if you don't express yourself, you will remain "chained down by your inability to say what you feel or go after what you want". See Mick St. Michael, Madonna 'Talking': Madonna in Her Own Words, (Omnibus Press, 2004), p. 59.

      If interested in watching the video and listening to the song on YouTube, click here.   

 

[2] Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart, (University of California Press, 1996), pp. 333-334.

 

[3] See the post entitled 'Nietzsche and Capitalism' (4 Oct 2013): click here. 

 

[4] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §290. 

[5] Joseph Brodsky, speaking in his commencement address at Williams College (1984), quoted by Robert Inchausti in Thinking through Thomas Merton: Contemplation for Contemporary Times, (SUNY Press, 2014), p. 110.  

      To be fair to Brodsky, he came to this conclusion after living for thirty odd years in a regime in which individual rights were not exactly top of the agenda. In 1963, his poetry was denounced as pornographic and anti-Soviet. This resulted in continuous state harassment until he finally left Russia for the United States in 1972. Not only were his papers confiscated, but he was twice confined in a mental institution, and eventually charged with social parasitism. For this latter crime, Brodsky was sentenced to five years hard labour, although his sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by prominent cultural figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre. Little wonder then that he became such a strong advocate of individualism. 

[6] This is a famous line from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (1888). 

 

 

Marxist Musings on Being a Fish Out of Water

Wood carved fish (Raphael Park)

Photo by SA/2023 

 

 

I suppose many people have felt like a fish out of water at some time or other; that is to say, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, surrounded by the wrong people [1].

 

But for some, this is far more than just an occasional feeling of discomfort due to their being in an unfamiliar environment or awkward social situation. For some people, indeed, it's essentially a state of being; they are permanently estranged (or alienated) from others and perhaps even themselves and their own lives.

 

Marx certainly knew a thing or two about individuals not being in their element, although, as far as I'm aware, he never used the English expression [2]. 

 

However, in a collection of manuscripts written in collaboration with Friedrich Engels between the autumn of 1845 and the spring of 1846, and first published as Die deutsche Ideologie in 1932, Marx does say this:

 

"The 'essence' of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the 'essence' of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence." [3] 

 

In such circumstances, when existence no longer corresponds with 'essence', what's a poor fish to do? Quietly accept the fact that external conditions have irrevocably changed? See this in terms of an unalterable fate, or an unavoidable result of progress? 

Marx suggests otherwise: he suggests that the fish should - like the millions of proletarians in capitalist society - rise up and, by means of a revolution, bring their existence once more into harmony with their 'essence'.

 

At least, that's my understanding of Marx - which is admittedly limited and may even be mistaken - that via an active, practical alteration of material reality we can radically change the interior life of men (and fish) and end their self-estrangement. We can, in other words, not only make free but make happy and build a world in which everyone feels at home and is able to fit in (i.e., a communist society). 

 

Obviously, I have problems with this Marxist vision, as I do with every other form of utopianism. And as I looked at the above wood carving in my local park, I couldn't help but recall Michel Foucault's remark about Marxism as something out of place and unable to survive in the world today: 

 

"Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else." [4] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This expression was first used by Chaucer in The Cantebury Tales (1387-1400) to describe a seaman's awkwardness when obliged to ride a horse and a monk's discomfort when in the world at large rather than safely cloistered in the monastery. 

 

[2] Although German speakers, like Marx, cerainly refer to people not being in their element - nicht in seinem Element sein - I'm not sure they use the idiomatic expression fish out of water. However, I may be wrong about this and I'm happy to be corrected if so. 

 

[3] See Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, B: The Illusion of the Epoch. This can be read online by clicking here.  

 

[4] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (Tavistock Publications, 1970), p. 262.

 

 

Reflections on the Death of a Footballer

Dominic Snow: Saint Pelé (2007)

Oil on canvas (51 x 77 cm)

saatchiart.com

 

 

Have you heard the news? 

 

The great Brazilian footballer Pelé is dead ...!

 

Actually, it's hard not to be aware of his passing, as his face and name is everywhere at the moment, even though he hasn't kicked a ball for forty-five years and even though kicking a ball is essentially what he's known for - that, and for being the public face of erectile dysfunction [1].

 

Judging from the press and media coverage, however, you would think he was a veritable saint among men; a bit like Nelson Mandela, only with the number 10 on his back, rather than 46664.

 

White liberals in particular can hardly contain themselves when talking about him and one can't help thinking that it's not because they care about football or remember him playing, but because he's a sporting version one of those figures that film director Spike Lee called magical negroes ...

That is to say, a black man who is pure and noble of soul and in possession of great wisdom or insight; a reassuring figure who upholds the ideal of a universal humanity and teaches us how to be better people.  

 

It's basically an inverted (and romantic) racism and if, like Lee, I was black, it would make me mad as hell (indeed, even without being black it irritates me).  

 

So, I'm sorry that Pelé is dead; maybe he was a great man as well as a great footballer. I don't know and I don't care. What I do know is that I'll be glad when the world's media turns its attention elsewhere. 

 

And, just one final point ... 

 

I think it revealing that the media here in the UK are giving more attention to the death of an ex-footballer from a far away land than to the passing of a truly iconic national figure - Vivienne Westwood  - who also died yesterday.  

 

It shows that the world of fashion - and, indeed, the world of contemporary art - remains something the Great British Public are not only indifferent to, but suspicious, scornful, and fearful of [2], whilst football, on the other hand, is now supposed to be played, watched, and enjoyed by everyone, from rough girls to delicate boys the whole world over.

 

The so-called Beautiful Game has become an opiate of the masses [3].   

 

 

Notes 

[1] Hired by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in 2002, Pelé was the first celebrity ambassador for Viagra, although he insisted in 2011 that he had never needed to take the little blue pills himself. His main role was to raise awareness around erectile dysfunction and encourage men to openly discuss their problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this had some humorous consequences (see spoof image below).

 

[2] One recalls, for example, the shameful reaction of the Wogan audience - egged on by the ghastly Sue Lawley and fellow guest, the equally ghastly Russell Harty - to Westwood's Time Machine collection back in 1988: click here. Well done Janet Street-Porter for sticking up for Westwood, but what a pity Grace Jones wasn't on hand to give Harty and Lawley both a few hard slaps. 

 

[3] Marx, of course, originally used this dictum with reference to religion: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." See the Introduction to his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley, (Cambridge University Press, 1970). 

      The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar had an estimated 4 billion viewers for its 64 matches played over 29 days. 

Bliss it Was in that Dawn to be Alive: Reflections on the Event of May '68

For all its romantic idealism and revolutionary fanaticism, there's still something about May '68 that I can neither fully renounce nor denounce.

Indeed, fifty years on, and it seems to me that there's still something glowing red and magnificent, like a burning ember, at the heart of this irreducible and indeterminable event - albeit an event which, as Deleuze and Guattari say, failed to unfold on a collective level; something which deserves not merely nostalgic recollection, but active rekindling.

For as a punk-provocateur, reared in the politics of the Situationist International, I still think that offering creative (sometimes criminal) resistance to the status quo and challenging all forms of orthodoxy is the only ethical thing to do with one's life. In other words: It is right to rebel (a slogan originating in Marx, Mao or Marcuse, but which I learned from Malcolm McLaren).

But Johnny, what are you rebelling against?

Well, against all forms of reactionary stupidity for a start. And against that long list of words which begin with the letter C and induce boredom, including: capitalism, consumerism, cliché, conformity, convention, comfort and convenience. 

I was told recently that I would never make a very good philosopher, as I'm too impatient to read slowly and too shallow to care about fundamental ideas: "You're part blogger, part comedian - always looking for a catchy turn of phrase or an amusing punchline."

That's probably true: I certainly love those fabulous slogans that were sprayed on the walls of Paris: Il est interdit d'interdire! Soyez réalistes - demandez l'impossible! And, most famously, Sous les pavés, la plage! If this makes me a Marxist of the Groucho tendency, then so be it; as someone born in May '68 it's hardly surprising after all ...


Notes 

Deleuze and Guattari, 'May '68 Did Not take Place, Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2007, pp. 233-36. 

As I say above, for Deleuze and Guattari May '68 was (is) a pure event; i.e., an unstable condition without cause that opens up a new field of possibility or becoming. It might be quickly co-opted, but there's something in it that can never be outmoded; thus May '68 is, in a sense, still unfolding now/here. One is tempted to say something similar of punk - which is why the slogan punk's not dead is, technically correct (if not for the reasons that many adherents of the movement believe). And it's why even Joe Corré, despite his uniquely privileged (or accursed) position, cannot declare its passing; no matter how much shit he burns nor how many piles of ash he assembles in a Mayfair art gallery.  

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part II) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

A rare but recent photo of Thomas Tritchler

taken in Salzburg, Austria

The dreary utilitarianism of the English intellectual tradition is of course a historical given. But recently this Orwellian weakness for plain speaking has been reasserted by Elliot Murphy in his otherwise valuable study of anarchism and British literature.

In Unmaking Merlin (Zero Books, 2014), Murphy devotes an embarrassingly reactionary chapter to mocking obscurantist French poststructuralism - the decadent representatives of which he is clearly far too real and rational to care to understand. Against those sceptical writers who value irony and regard critical thinking as an indispensable inheritance of that hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by the great masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), Murphy oddly joins hands with pantomime moralist Roger Scruton, for whom Foucault's The Order of Things  is to be dismissed as: 

"An artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity ... [whose] goal is subversion, not truth [that perpetrates] the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies - that 'truth' requires inverted comas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation ..."

 

Since I would gladly affirm Scruton's scornful review as a ringing endorsement, we at least both know where we stand; he in his Anglican pulpit haranguing the heretics and frauds of aesthetic thought; I, presumably, whispering to demons with a forked tongue in a Parisian graveyard. At any rate, it feels good to know that as well as wearing Prada and having all the best tunes, the Devil is also a chic-y postmodernist!

In an instructive essay on British anti-intellectualism, Ed Rooksby has traced such inverted snobbery to the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, who, in his repudiation of the romantic idealism of the French Revolution, subsumed the horror of free thinking beneath the twin lenses of natural prejudice and common sense. The inductive methodologies of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton would now underpin an ontological realism whose homespun incarnation assumed an irremediably naive strain.

Not for nothing did Oscar Wilde lament England as the 'home of lost ideas'. At the very least, in a culturally and financially bankrupt nation in which Stephen Fry offers the closest approximation of a public intellectual, it can be safely assumed one is unlikely to be breathing the rarefied air of grand thoughts.

    

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.