I Have Nothing To Say

Jiggs the Chimp as Ollie's evolutionary predecessor in  

the Laurel and Hardy film Dirty Work, (dir. Lloyd French 1933) 

 

 

Sometimes, people tell me they would like to begin writing a blog. But when I ask what's stopping them from doing so, they reply:  I have nothing to say.

 

Having nothing to say, however, didn't prevent some truly great artists from producing some very interesting work; one thinks, for example, of Cage and Beckett, both of whom illustrate the crucial function of silence and how you can build upon or radically foreground nothingness: click here. 

 

One thinks also of Seinfeld - a show famous for being about nothing: click here.   

 

And one remembers also Oliver Hardy's refusal to be fazed by or comment upon events in the classic short film Dirty Work (1933). Even when he is devolved into a chimpanzee after falling into a vat containing Prof. Noodle's rejuvination solution, Ollie still has nothing to say: click here. 

 

If, after explaining all this, any would-be blogger still feels at a loss for words, then I advise them to stick with posting pictures of their cat on Instagram. 

 

 

Happy Birthday Julien Temple (and in Memory of Malcolm McLaren)

Film director Julien Temple

(the punk generation's Jean Vigo)

 

 

Born on this day, in 1953, the British filmmaker Julien Temple is - without ever really being part of the gang - crucial to the story of the Sex Pistols, which he began to document from the very early days, having come across the band rehearsing in an abandoned warehouse in Bermondsey, South London, whilst drifting around the area admiring the rusting hulks of ships and the general decay of what had once been a thriving centre of industry and trade. 

 

This chance encounter was before the band had played their first gig at St Martin's School of Art on 6 November 1975 (supporting Bazooka Joe), so Temple can effectively claim to have been involved with the band from day one and was certainly not some Johnny-come-lately on what would become known as the punk scene, even if he never quite escaped being thought of as a middle class cunt - his words, not mine [1].    

 

Be that as it may, he was young and clearly talented enough to capture Malcolm's attention, and so Temple was eventually given permission to become the Sex Pistols' in-house filmmaker. 

 

Initially, however, McLaren, had opposed such an idea. It was only when the band began to hit the headlines that he was persuaded it would be a good idea after all to document what was going on - particularly when Temple offered to do so for free, although Malcolm eventually put him on a retainer of £12 a week.       

 

When the idea of making a full-length feature film arose - originally to be called Who Killed Bambi? and directed by Russ Meyer - Temple was appointed as the latter's assistant. For one reason or another - actually, for many, many reasons - this film was never going to be made and the project eventually morphed into The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), which is credited to Temple as director, although I'll always think of Malcolm as the film's auteur. 

Twenty years later, Temple then made The Filth and the Fury (2000) with the band's full cooperation, which is to say Rotten was on board and ready to put the record straight and tell the true story of the Sex Pistols (with tears of emotional sincerity welling up in his eyes). 

 

Whilst the latter rockumentary - not a term that Temple likes or uses - was critically acclaimed, I hate it for its attempt not only to give a more balanced account of events, but to humanise the band and perpetuate the ridiculous idea that poor Johnny was somehow a victim - even though he was also, apparently, the real reason for the band's success: A true star, honest!  

Temple claims he wanted to make The Filth and the Fury because he was annoyed with McLaren saying that the band members were essentially of no great import and that he was the artistic visionary who created everything. But, whilst that's not quite the case, neither is it entirely the fantasy of an egomaniac and, ironically, I think Malcolm's contribution to British popular culture is still hugely underrated [2].

 

Still, I don't wish to debate this here and now, nor say anything negative about Temple as a filmmaker. I simply want to take this opportunity to wish him happy birthday and thank him for the role he has played in recording an important period in British social and cultural history.     

 

 

Jamie Reid badge design 

vam.ac.uk

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Speaking with John Robb in 2022, Temple recalls the reaction of the band when he proposed they provide a soundtrack to a five minute film he was then working on as a student: "'Fuck off!' Middle class cunt basically being the subtext." Click here to watch the full interview on YouTube. The line I quote begins at 2:38.  

[2] Not by Temple, who, despite his issues with McLaren, had this to say in an obituary in The Observer (11 April 2010): 

 

"Malcolm was an incredible catalyst for my generation. To be in the same room as him in 1976 was to be bombarded with energy and swept up in a rush of ideas and emotions. [....] But his impact was not limited to music alone. Right across the creative spectrum Malcolm made young people - artists, designers, writers, film-makers - aware that they had a distinctive voice and encouraged them to use it right there and then." 

      

Temple concludes: 

 

"On a personal note, although I worked intensely with Malcolm for only a short period of time and managed to fall out with him pretty spectacularly too, the creative ideas he instilled in me have lasted a lifetime." 

 

 

Silence is Violence (Or How Wokeism Restricts Freedom by Compelling Speech)

 

 

I. 

 

I don't know who came up with the slogan Silence is Violence, but it's certainly pithy - as an effective slogan should be.

 

In effect, it's a radical extension of the old idea qui tacet consentire videtur and powerfully conveys the contentious arguement that refusing to speak up against racism, for example, is tantamount not merely to lending one's support to discrimination and oppression, but is an act of violence in and of itself.

 

However, as a reader of Roland Barthes, I have long subscribed to the idea that fascism compels speech [1] and therefore have real concerns with the slogan silence is violence - and with the people who chant it in all seriousness (often having failed to think the idea through).

 

In brief: my worry is that the same kind of people who censor or restrict certain forms of speech on the one hand, now also wish to disallow the right to silence on the other hand; insisting that we must speak - although only in an approved manner [2].

 

 

II.

 

Of course, compelled speech has long troubled civil-liberties campaigners and not just Barthesians like me who would wish to keep the option of strategic non-discourse on the table. 

 

The fact that woke activists fail to recognise the inherent authoritarianism of forcing people to identify themselves, express their views, and confess their feelings - so long as they conform to what now passes for moral and political orthodoxy - is certainly ironic (to say the least).

 

And writers including George Orwell and Michel Foucalt must be spinning in their graves ...  

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Roland Barthes, 'Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977', trans. Richard Howard, October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 3-16. Published by the MIT Press. This text can be accessed via JSTOR: click here. 

      I am referring to the paragraph in which Barthes says: "But language - the performance of a language system - is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech." The reason for this, of course, is that speech acts don't take place in a vacuum; they unfold within the bounds of power (and very often enter into the service of power).       

 

[2] Mick Hume summarises all this as follows:

      "The slogan 'Silence is Violence' does not only mean that you must speak out, but that you must follow the correct script. You are free to say exactly what everybody else is saying, and say it loud. Free speech must always involve the right to offend, to speak what you believe to be true regardless of what others think. The flip side of free speech is that you must have the right to be silent when you choose - particularly when somebody is trying to compel you to speak as instructed."

      See his article 'No, silence is not violence', Spiked (16th June 2020): click here.   

On Oblivion

 

I. 

 

I was interested to hear the Chairman of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Mr Alan Wilson, claim in a recent sermon streamed live from St. Mary's Church, Greasley, on the theme of (so-called) Lawrencian Spirituality [1], that Lawrence was searching for something "beyond ultimate oblivion".

 

For although he was right to identify the importance of the term oblivion in Lawrence’s late poetry [2] - and whilst I would agree with Mark Fisher that "awareness of our own Nothingness is [...] a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [3] - there is no beyond oblivion; that's the tremendous challenge of the concept and why it is incompatible with the fundamental Christian belief of eternal life.  

 

In other words, if you subscribe to the idea of oblivion, you must accept the final sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom and the total erasure of self. To hope for life beyond oblivion, is as absurd as wishing to be remembered after one has been completely forgotten.     

 

 

II.

 

Whilst there may be some religious adherents who subscribe to the idea of oblivion [4], I tend to think of it more as a philosophical (and neuroscientific) concept, associated with those for whom death means what it says on the tin: the cessation of all consciousness (or subjective experience) and complete non-existence in any personal sense of the term. 

 

Socrates famously considered the question of oblivion when he was sentenced to death. Addressing the court, he first considers the possibility that his soul will migrate from this life and this world to the next life and next world. 

 

Although this idea appeals to him - because then he'll be able to discuss philosophy with all the great thinkers of the past - Socrates is nevertheless prepared to accept that death might, in fact, be terminal. This prospect doesn't frighten him, however, as oblivion essentially means to his mind a dreamless and uninterrupted sleep [5].  

 

Later thinkers, including the great Roman philosophers Cicero and Lucretius, basically came to a similar conclusion; i.e., that death was either a continuation of consciousness or cessation of it, and that if the former, then there is no reason to fear death; while if the latter is true, then there's also no good reason to be deeply troubled (for one will know nothing, feel nothing, be nothing).

 

As Epicurus famously put it in his Letter to Meneoceus: 'When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not.'

 

 

III.

 

Ultimately, oblivion is really just a term for a mind-independent reality; i.e., a reality which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, "is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable" [6].   

 

I don't know if saying that makes me a nihilist, a naturalist, or an extinctionist. But it certainly makes it difficult to subscribe to Lawrence's vitalism which makes oblivion strangely inviting; like a relaxing bath that we pop in and out of, feeling refreshed and reborn into a new body.

 

What such a cosy idea ignores is the fact that, as Ray Brassier reminds us, ultimately there will be no cosmos to be reborn into; that one day - roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now - "the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment" [7]. 

 

Brassier continues: 

 

"Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience - irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call 'asymptopia', the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called 'dark energy', which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness." [8]

 

In other words: oblivion über alles ...

 

I'm sure some believers will mumble about this universal annihilation all being part of God's plan, but, of course, we know that's bullshit - this is the disintegration of God's plan and the return to formless and empty chaos marks the triumph of evil.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Those with an hour and twenty minutes to spare and who are interested, can watch Wilson and two other speakers, Anthony Rice and John Patemen, discuss their understanding of Lawrentian Spirituality on the D. H. Lawrence Society YouTube channel by clicking here. The event took place on Saturday 18 November, 2023, at Greasley Church (Nottinghamshire).

 

[2] See the poems beginning with 'The Ship of Death' and ending with 'Phoenix', in 'The Last Poems Notebook', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 630-641. Almost every poem in this sequence contains the word oblivion. The amusing thing is that Lawrence explicitly warns that any one who attempts to ascribe attributes to oblivion is guilty of blasphemy - but that, of course, is precisely what he's doing.   

 

[3] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p.157. 

 

[4] In Christian theology, for example, there is a notion of annihilationism which opens up the idea of oblivion. In sum, it's the belief that after the Last Judgment, all damned human souls and fallen angels - including Lucifer - will be totally destroyed and their consciousness extinguished. 

      Annihilationism thus stands in contrast to both the belief in eternal torment and the belief that everyone will ultimately be saved and given eternal life. Although the idea has come in and out of vogue throughout the history of the Church, annihilationism has tended to be a minority view. In 1995, the Church of England's Doctrine Commission declared that Hell may, in fact, be a state of total non-being (i.e., oblivion), rather than a place of eternal suffering.

 

[5] One could, if one was tempted to do so, challenge Socrates on this idea of death as a kind of sleep - just as one might challenge Lawrence's poetic descriptions of death as a plunge into darkness, or the idea that we are merely dipped in oblivion so as to be reborn on the other side. 

      In his paper 'Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity', the naturalist philosopher Thomas W. Clark critiqued such flawed descriptions and the temptation (even amongst some atheists) to imagine that we might still - in some miraculous manner - experience or know death. By using the language of darkness, silence, and peaceful oblivion we effectively reify nothingness; i.e., make it into a positive condition or quality, into which the deceased individual can then be conveniently lodged.

      Clark's paper was originally published in 1994 as a lead article for the Humanist. It was reprinted in The Experience of Philosophy, ed. Daniel Kolak and Ray Martin, (Oxford University Press, 2005) and in The Philosophy of Death Reader, ed. Markar Melkonian, (Bloomsbury, 2019). It is also available to read on Clark's website Naturalism.Org: click here.

[6] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 228.

[8] Ibid.

 

 

This post is in memory of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), whose final collection of short stories was published under the title Oblivion (Little, Brown and Company, 2004). The image at the top of this post is based on artwork by Mario J. Pulice for the cover of the first edition of this work.  

Give Me the Madness of My Ladybird

The Ladybird - from the Pink Series 

by Stephen Alexander (2023)

 

 

I'm hoping that the visit of a ladybird - perhaps looking for a warm place to stay over winter - will bring something good my way. 

 

Because although there are those who say it's vulgar to wish for luck - even when carried on the wings of a such a noble insect - I really feel in the need of a change of fortune, as 2023 has neither been a very happy nor a very healthy year. 

 

And one gets tired - and bored - of being miserable and feeling unwell.     

 

So, little ladybird, with your scarlet wings and black spots, work your healing magic. I've had my fill of the seven sorrows, so let me now know one or two of the seven joys. 

 

Or as Count Dionys would say: Gib mir den Wahnsinn meines Marienkäfers!  

 

 

No Matter What the Future Brings ...

"You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss ..." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The kiss between Kirk (played by William Shatner) and Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) in an episode of Star Trek entitled 'Plato's Stepchildren' [2] - which was first broadcast 55 years ago this month - is often cited - incorrectly - as the first example of an interracial kiss on television [3].

 

Even if not actually true - and even if their lips do not actually touch [4] - it was a nice moment and (in a time of heightened racial tension) a significant one. Indeed, it is often ranked as one of the greatest romantic moments in Star Trek and one of the most culturally impactful. 

 

For me, however, as the author of a series of papers on zoophilia [5], there is another on-screen kiss in 1968 which interests more; and that is the kiss shared between Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) and Zira (played by Kim Hunter) in the movie Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin J. Shaffner) ...

 

 

II.

 

The original - and the best - Planet of the Apes movie (written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, loosely based on the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle), is fondly remembered by many people for many scenes and many lines of dialogue. 

 

That includes, obviously, the still-shocking end scene when Taylor realises where he is and what has happened: 'Oh, my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time ... We finally, really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!' [Click here.]

But my favourite scene comes shortly before this, when Taylor is about to ride off, accompanied by Nova, in search of what Dr Zaius terms his destiny. 

 

Wishing to express his gratitude to Cornelius and Zira for the help they have given him, he informs the latter he'd like to give her a kiss. She gives her consent and seems to enjoy the touch of his lips on hers, even if she finds Taylor so damned ugly. [Click here.]

Again, it's  a very touching scene and, arguably, far more transgressive than the kiss in Star Trek, hinting as it does at the possibility of interspecies romantic relations - particularly human-chimp sexuality, something that I have previously discussed on Torpedo the Ark: click here.   

 

 

III.

 

Amusingly, in her 1994 autobiography Beyond Uhura Nichelle Nichols recalls that one person describing himself as a proud white Southerner wrote the following in a letter to the studio after her kiss with Shatner was broadcast: 

 

"'I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it.'" [6]

 

One can't help wondering if a similar letter was received by the producers of Planet of the Apes, that might possibly have read:

 

I am totally opposed to the mixing of species. However, any time an all-American hero like George Taylor gets rescued by a beautiful chimp scientist like Zira, he may as well take advantage of the fact. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] These lines (and the line used in the title of this post) are from the jazz song "As Time Goes By" written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. It became famous when it featured in the 1942 film Casablanca, performed by Dooley Wilson as the piano player Sam. Click here.

 

[2] Star Trek, 'Plato's Stepchildren' [S3/E10], directed by David Alexander, written by Gene Roddenberry, Meyer Dolinsky, and Arthur H. Singer, was first broadcast on 22 November 1968. The scene in which Kirk kisses Uhura can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here. 

 

[3] Although widely believed to be the first interracial kiss on TV, there are, in fact, several earlier incidents of such. For example, Shatner himself exchanged a kiss with France Nuyen - a French-American actress of Asian heritage - on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1958 (they were performing a scene from the Broadway production of The World of Suzie Wong in which they starred).

      Shatner, in his role as Captain Kirk, also kissed Lt. Marlena Moreau, played by BarBara Luna, an actress of Filipino-European ancestry, on the lips in the second season episode of Star Trek entitled 'Mirrror, Mirror' (1967).

 

[4] Shatner would later reveal that concerned NBC executives had insisted their lips never touch, using the technique of turning their heads away from the camera to conceal what was (or was not) going on. However, writing in her 1994 autobiography, Beyond Uhura, Nichols insists that in the take of the scene that was eventually broadcast the kiss was genuine. Despite the concerns expressed, the episode received no complaints - in fact the response from fans of the show was hugely positive. 

 

[5] See The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. III, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). The six papers in the Zoophilia series (also known as the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures) were first presented at Treadwell's Bookshop in Feb-March 2007. 

 

[6] Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, (G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1994), pp. 196-197. 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 4: The Stain of Place

Laura Oldfield Ford Ferrier Estate (2010)

 

 

I.

 

Many years before Laura Oldfield Ford published her Savage Messiah [a], the Specials had already famously declared that London - like many other cities across the UK - was coming like a ghost town [b]. And I'm surprised, as a matter of fact, that Mark Fisher didn't mention this in his introduction to Ford's work. 

 

But then, having said that, I suppose it could be argued that whereas the Specials were bemoaning the state of the country - the poverty, unemployment, crime, and shut-up shops they witnessed in city after city as they toured the UK - Ford was more concerned by the loss of character and the displacement of long-time residents as working-class areas were redeveloped. 

 

In a nutshell: the Specials hated to see neighbourhoods run down and Ford hated to see them done up. Who really has the best interests of the poor and dispossessed at heart is debatable. But, according to Fisher, it is Ford who is a kind of medium through whom ghostly voices speak:

 

"The [...] voices she speaks in - and which speak through her - are those of the officially defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of its finance-friendly SimCity." [184] [c] 

 

If these are the people that Ford and Fisher choose to romanticise on the one hand, on the other are those they deem the enemy: young professionals who sit outside Starbucks sipping coffee and "'gently conversing in sympathetic tones'" [185]; those who advocate neoliberal modernisation, which, in practice makes London "safe for the super-rich" [185]. 

 

At the risk of being accused of being a middle-class wanker or a class-traitor, I have to say that this reading of things in such stark terms strikes me as a little simplistic. I don't particularly like the way in which East London is being gentrified, but don't really see the aesthetic appeal of abandoned factories and slums. 

 

Nor, as a matter of fact, do I very much care for brutalist architecture and "'a virulent black ecomomy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters'" [185] - i.e., the kind of people who "could not be regenerated, even if they wanted to be" [189].

 

 

II. 

 

Ford studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and did her Masters at the Royal College of Art. For her graduation show at the latter in 2007, she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel against a scene of urban chaos and one wonders if she regrets the passing of old London primarily because it deprives her of an aesthetic backdrop.

I suspect she's precisely the kind of bourgeois anarchist that Rotten railed against; friends with and celebrated by all the usual suspects, including Fisher, who, like Ford, also fantasises (in a quasi-erotic manner) about a punk London full of "spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted" [186] in which one could drift and daydream; "a labyrinth of side streets and spaces resistant to the process of gentrification" [187].  

And she is precisely the kind of figure whom Jarvis Cocker so brilliantly skewers as a class tourist i.e., one who wants to live like common people and do whatever common people do; one who thinks that poor is cool, but who will never fail like common people or understand how it feels to live a life with no meaning or control [d].

 

For when not drifting round city streets mapping the psychic contours of the city or taking part in a protest - for she's an activist as well as an artist - the author of Savage Messiah is arranging her latest exhibition at a posh gallery or lecturing across the UK and internationally on issues surrounding urbanism, architecture, and memory. 

 

Her life, in other words, is full of meaning and purpose and she's very much in complete control of her own professional destiny (even if she tells us her existence is precarious).  

 

III.

Ironically, if you take Fisher's word for it, then Savage Messiah was written precisely for someone like me; "born too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary afterglow" [189]. 

 

But, for much the same reason I hated Crass [e], Ford's work is really not my cup of tea ... 

 

Certainly not in its radical politics, although I am rather drawn to the hauntological aspects; to the fact that it is imbued with a sense of mourning and that it stains London "with particularly intense moments of time" [191] [f].   

 

At it's best - when it "invites us to see the contours of another world in the gaps and cracks" [192] of an urban landscape - then Savage Messiah is inspiring. 

 

But, at its worst - when Ford keeps banging on about the need to forge collective resistance to the occupying powers of neoliberalism and suggests that the truth is to be found "'in the burnt out shopping arcades [and] the boarded up precincts'" [192] - then Savage Messiah bores us to tears.   

 

 

IV.

 

In a k-punk post date 4 March 2006, Fisher tries to foist another neologism on us: nomadalgia ... i.e., the sense of unease induced by anonymous environments that are more or less the same the world over. These spaces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness.

 

In other words, nomadalgia is a form of travel sickness born of what Byung-Chul Han terms hyperculture [g].

The problem is, nomadalgia is such a clumsy-sounding term and I really can't imagine anyone ever using it other, perhaps, than hardcore members of the Fisherati [h]. 

V.

We've almost reached the end of Fisher's book. 

 

In fact, I've nothing to say about Chris Petit's Content (2010); or Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) (2011); or Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010); or John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986); or Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins (2010) ... 

 

I've not seen any of these films and, if I'm being completely honest, I don't particularly want to (although the inhuman eco-alien perspective of the latter sounds interesting and, if forced to watch one of the above films I'd choose Keiller's, as I'm all for a little biophilia and a "dark Deleuzean communion with Nature" [228]). 

 

Also, I'm getting a little tired of Fisher's lazy and predictable ideological take on everything: capitalism is evil and therefore anything which frustrates it - strikes, riots, financial crises - have to be for the good. In an Afterword, Simon Reynold's acknowledges that Fisher had allowed his political thinking to settle into "a compassionate and anguished Leftism" [246] - i.e. all too humanist for my tastes.

 

Thus, there are surely questions about hauntology's durability as an aesthetic and philosophy - as there are about the political importance of Fisher's (unfinished) book on Acid Communism, intended as a joyful - even vital - alternative to capitalist realism (i.e., a sort of fantasy philosophy inspired by hippie ideals of community and caring for one another). 

"We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he'd lived to pursue its ideas" [249], says Reynolds. 

 

But, unfortunately, I think we can. For "confronted by a world  run amok with the competing delusions and [...] fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition" [250-51], Fisher might have returned to an old idea of truth to provide him with a foundation; who knows, he may even have ended up at the foot of the Cross! [i].

Notes

[a] Laura Oldfield Ford (aka Laura Grace Ford) is a British artist and author (born in the magical year of 1973). Her work explores political themes in the context of British urban spaces. Her zine Savage Messiah (2005-09) examined the changing character of London during this period. It was later published in book form (Verso, 2011), with an introduction by Mark Fisher.

 

[b] The number one single 'Ghost Town' by the Specials was released in June 1981. To me, evoking as it did themes of urban decay and inner-city violence, it was the last great punk single. 

     Although the Specials were from Coventry and residents of the latter assumed that the group were referring to their home town - angrily rejecting the song's characterisation of the city as being in a state of terminal decline - the video for the song, directed by Barney Bubbles, was actually shot in East London and ends with the band standing on the banks of the River Thames at low tide: click here to play on YouTube.   

[c] Mark Fisher, '"Always Yearning for the Time that Just Eluded Us" - Introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011)', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (ZeroBooks, 2022), p. 184. 

      Future page references to this edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Jarvis Cocker is the lead vocalist and lyricist with the Britpop band Pulp. Their hit single 'Common People' was released from the album Different Class (Island Records) in May 1995. The song is a critique of those who ascribe authenticity to working-class culture (and I'm pretty sure Mark Fisher would also disdain such an idea - but may be wrong about that). 

      Click here to play on YouTube and watch the video directed by Pedro Romhanyi, featuring the actress Sadie Frost as the unnamed art student from Greece with "a thirst for knowledge" and a desire to experience real life. And click here to read a post dated 2 October 2018 in which I discuss 'Common People' (and it's brilliant interpretation by William Shatner).   

[e] Crass were an English art collective and punk band from Essex. Formed in 1977, they promoted anarchism as a political ideology, an aesthetic, and an alternative way of life. Dressed in black military-surplus style clothing, they were, for me, the anithesis of the Sex Pistols.

      Mark Fisher in his introduction to Savage Messiah notes how Ford's work is reminiscent of Gee Vaucher's work for Crass. 

 

[f] Fisher returns to this idea of staining in a later piece included in Ghosts of My Life on Mark Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) (2011). He writes of how Thomas Hardy stained the landscape of Wessex with his passions - just as the Brontë sisters stained Yorkshire. I can't help wishing Fisher had said rather more about this intriguing idea, one that reminds me of something D. H. Lawrence writes about the way in which the living souls of men and women subtly impregnate their material environment; see his essay on Edgar Allan Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). 

 

[g] See the post dated 30 Jan 2022 entitled 'Travels in Hyperculture with Byung-Chul Han', click here.

[h] Another neologism - this time coined by Fisher's pal and comrade-in-arms, Simon Reynolds; see 'Spectres of Mark: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Fisherati', Afterword to Ghosts of My Life ... pp. 233-252.

[i] Obviously, I'm just speculating here about Fisher's direction of travel. Although, in 2013, he did admit that, like many other thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx, he sometimes struggled with his atheism, saying: "It's all very well professing a lack of belief in God, but it's much harder to give up the habits of thought which assume providence, divine justice and a secure distinction between good and evil." It can be difficult to recall that such moral ideas "are not written into the universe, but exist only in ourselves, in relation to our desires and interests".  

      See Mark Fisher, 'Beyond good and evil: Breaking Bad' in the New Humanist magazine (18 Dec. 2013): click here to read online. 

 

Bonus: click here to enjoy a ten minute drift with Laura Oldfield Ford ... Part of the exhibition entitled There is a place, at the New Art Gallery Walsall (Jan- April 2012).

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 3: Hauntology

Le fantôme gris 

Mark Fisher (1968-2017)

 

 I.

 

"Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension." [a]

 

I suppose that's true; we're all familiar with a ghostly wail and the creaking sounds of a haunted house, for example. And it's amusing to realise that, as Fisher says, sometimes it's a question of hearing what's not there; "the voice no longer the guarantor of presence" [120]. 

 

Derrida's neologism thus "uncovers the space between Being and Nothingness" [120]; that spooky realm where objects that go bump in the night are real but not actual and Schrödinger's cat silently meows.    

 

Real ghosts - and ghosts of the Real: there's no need for a notion of the supernatural, which is what one of Fisher's favourite books and films [b] - The Shining - makes clear. Horror is already present within the world, within the everyday, within the family: home is where the haunt is ...  

And this word, haunt, is, says Fisher, one of the closest we have in English to the German term unheimlich. For just as the latter can switch from that which allows for the familiar (or homely) to the unfamiliar (unhomely) in the blink of an eye, so the former "signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it" [125].

 

 

II. 

 

When I was younger, I used to love Angela Carter and read nearly all of her books, be they novels, short stories, or works of non-fiction. One book I particulary loved was American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Vintage, 1994), which consists of nine tales, the first four of which are based on American folklore. 

I don't know if Fisher ever read or ever refers to Angela Carter in his work, but when I came across the following paragraph in Ghosts of My Life it reminded me of the above book by her:

 

"America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World ... but here they are ..." [128]

   

 

III.

As a child of the 1970s, I grew up watching a lot (and I really mean a lot) of television. 

 

So when Fisher writes of "uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube" [133] [c] - particularly in the children's programming of this decade - it was obviously going to pique my interest. 

 

And I have to admit, I love the idea of a TV set as a ghost box; that's certainly preferable to the idea of it being a device designed for the amusement of idiots - a boob tube as our American cousins used to call it.

 

I still watch a lot of television - and a lot of it is still British television from the 1970s. It's not just that it reminds me of my childhood, but that it has "a certain grain [...] that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss" [135] [d]. 

 

I like the voices and the faces (and the clothes) of the people in the 1970s. They may all be dead now - may just be ghosts in a machine - but they're my kind of people and make me feel at home. Nostalgia doubtless plays a part in this, but it's more than that - Fisher would say it's a longing for what he terms popular modernism and not so much a lost past as the promise of a lost future. 

 

Speaking of promises ...

 

 

IV.

I hate the promise of digital music: which, as Fisher says, is the promise of an "escape from materiality" [144] and the eradication of crackle - i.e., the sound of dust, dirt, and damage; the sound of static build-up; the sound of joy. 

 

The loss of crackle spells the death of pop. 

 

No wonder then that many artists still release tracks on vinyl and invoke the sound of the past and a "whole disappeared regime of [tactile] materiality [...] lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension" [144].      

 

I don't care about keeping music live - but I do want to keep it analogue. For in an enchanted sound-world, crackle should not be excluded and the pleasure of placing a needle into the outermost groove should not be denied.     

 

 

V.

 

Is this true: 

"What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental [...]" [155]

 

I mean, it might be true - but I don't think it is. And where's the evidence for this claim, which, like so many of Fisher's other claims, is made without any real attempt to back it up.

 

I do tend to agree, however, that encounters with angels might prove to be "as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons" [155] [e], though I'm not sure that's because nothing could be "more shattering [...] and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy" [155].    

 

Actually, such angelic tranquility - an experience of what Rudolf Otto terms the numinous - might actually be very welcome in the world right now, even if it is "associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness" [157].

For contrary to the idea that we should feel good about ourselves and always be positive, "the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [157]. As Fisher goes on to note: "There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us" - i.e., our own egos. 

As D. H. Lawrence would say, grace is the sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom, the glory of darkness; a willingness to be erased and made nothing; to be dipped into oblivion in order that we might be renewed [f].

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 120. Future page references to this work will be given in the text.

      Of course, as Fisher later notes, hauntology doesn't just have a sonic dimension, there is also an important visual dimension; "the eerie calmness and stillness of photography" [152], for example, which is so good at capturing lost moments and presenting absences. Photography - the art of painting with light - also allows one a glimpse of a world that is radiant and not weighed down with darkness (although this is arguably a Gnostic quality rather than hauntological).      

[b] The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was adapted into a 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as the writer Jack Torance. King hated the movie because of its deviations from his book (and the fact that Kubrick had rejected his screenplay, preferring to co-write his own with novelist Diane Johnson). 

      In his piece on The Shining (adapted from a k-punk post dated 23 Jan 2006), Fisher chooses to side-step "the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians" and treats the novel and the film "as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences". See Ghosts of My Life, p. 120. 

      I don't dislike the film, but can't say it's one of my favourites. And as I've never read the novel, I don't intend to say very much here about Fisher's interpretation of The Shining.

 

[c] One obviously thinks of the famous scene in Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982) when five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O'Rourke) presses her hands to a TV screen displaying post-broadcast static and declares: "They're here" (referring to the spirits of the dead). 

 

[d] As Fisher writes elsewhere when analysing why it is programmes made today fail to capture this '70s grain: 

      "There must be some technical reason - maybe its the film stock they use - that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video." - Ghosts in My Life, p. 76. 

 

[e] Fisher is making this claim on the basis of work by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his 1917 text (translated into English as) The Idea of the Holy.

 

[f] See the poems 'The State of Grace', 'Glory of Darkness', and 'Phoenix', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 591 and 641. 

To read part one of this post on Lost Futures, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on the Return of the 70s, click here. 

 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 2: The Return of the 70s

Joy Division (L-R: Peter Hook / Ian Curtis / Bernard Sumner / Stephen Morris) 

 

 "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?"

 

 

Any piece of writing entitled 'The Return of the 70s' is guaranteed to excite my interest; particularly one that understands 1979-80 to be a threshold moment when one world gave way to another. 

 

But, as is so often the case, expectations are rarely met and part of my frustration with Mr Fisher's work comes out of disappointment. It's not that he fails to deliver insightful commentary (and retrospective judgement) on the decade, more that his points of reference are so very different from mine; the books of John le Carré and David Peace, for example, are almost entirely unfamiliar to me [a]. 

 

Thus, here, I shall discuss only what Fisher says about post-punk favourites Joy Division and the grotesque figure of Jimmy Savile [b].  

 

 

I. 

Fisher opens his exploration of the 70s with the following statement: "If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times." [c] 

 

Fisher wants (and probably expects) his readers to agree that: 

 

(i) pop groups in general have (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) significance ...

 

(ii) Joy Division in particular have growing (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) import ...

 

(iii) a state of despondent melancholia defines the Geist der Zeiten in which he was writing [d] ...

 

(iv) this depressed spirit can magically be captured (embodied and expressed) by a group of musicians (which essentially returns us to the first point).    

 

The problem is, I'm not sure I do agree with all (or even any) of these points. 

 

But let's say, for arguments sake, that, like Hegel, we accept the notion that there's a virtual agency determining the ideas and beliefs of a given epoch and that art reflects the culture of the era in which it is created (not least because artists are themselves a product of their time). 

 

That might be an argument for why art matters, but it still doesn't mean Joy Division are - or ever were - as important as Fisher insists; "more than a pop group, more than entertainment" [53].

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Joy Division and even have a well-worn copy of their debut studio album Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979) in my record collection. But they're not the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, when it comes to capturing (and transforming) the spirit of the times or channelling the future. 

 

These two groups - and perhaps only these two - were (to adopt and extend a term coined by Foucault) founders of discursivity (changing forever the way we think, speak, act, dress, etc.).

 

 

II. 

 

Fisher continues his piece on Joy Division by declaring them to be "the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups" [59]. 

 

By which one might assume he was simply referring to the fact that although they failed to have much success during their time as a band (1976-1980), they have exerted a wide-reaching influence ever since. But actually, Fisher means something much more interesting:

 

"What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between [Ian] Curtis's detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will [...] not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror ..." [60]

 

Fisher expands on this:

 

"Joy Division followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya [...] and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW [...] will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to do." [60] 

 

Joy Division see through things; they know - far more radically than the Rolling Stones - that there's never any satisfaction; that the true Schopenhaurien moments are those "in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart's desire - and feel cheated, empty [...] voided [61].

 

This existential revelation - that we don't really want or need what we thought we most desperately wanted or needed and that even our most urgent desires "are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road" [61] - is central to what Fisher calls depressive ontology.

 

 

III. 

The great debate over Joy Division, says Fisher, is this: "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?" [63]

 

Alert to the blackmail of the either/or, Fisher doesn't take the Deleuzian option of neither/nor, but nor, like Bartleby, does he simply prefer not to say. Rather, he suggests we should hold on to both options; "the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff'" [63]. 

 

In other words, we should be a little bit of a romantic aesthete and a little bit of a lumpen empiricist, insisting like the latter on the need to root the band's songs "back in the quotidian at its least elevated and [...] least serious" [63]. 

 

Fisher's reason for wanting to hold on to both versions of Joy Division is surprising (and moving): 

 

"For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males." [63] [e]

 

 

IV. 

 

We'll never know what Mark Fisher would have made of Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Savile in the four-part TV drama The Reckoning (2023), though I suspect he would have found it as problematic as Michael Sheen's portrayal of Brian Clough in The Damned United (2009) and for pretty much the same reasons:

 

"The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality - everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost." [87]

 

An actor with "more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth [...] not accessible via the TV footage" [87]. 

 

As I say - and without wanting to put words into Fisher's dead mouth -  I suspect he would also condemn Coogan for simply offering an impression of Savile; perfectly competant as far as "mannerisms and verbal tics" [87] go, but "devoid of any of the tortured inner life" [87] that might have made Savile a more complex and more interesting character (although, arguably, what was so terrifying about Savile was his emptiness; the fact that there was a complete moral vacuum where one might have expected to find at least the remnants of a soul).

 

 

V.       

 

Fisher makes the intriguing suggestion that Jimmy Savile may have struck a deal with the Devil:

 

"You'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact [...], but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil." [88]

 

Although he was a professed Catholic, I think Savile would have happily struck such a bargain. 

 

In fact, one suspects that the thought of the truth finally being revealed after his death would have delighted him. For it confirms the fact that he got away with everything and made fools of everyone, including politicians, members of the royal family, and even Pope John Paul II, who awarded him a knighthood in 1990.   

 

People say Savile was hiding in plain sight, but, actually, it was more a case of no one really daring to look, or, if they did look, then they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. It was only in 2012 that the obscene truth began to leak out, "like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained" [88] - first seeping, then surging.  

By the end of that year, says Fisher, "the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as trauma" [89] as  the world of light (entertainment) transformed into "the darkest horror" [90]. Not only did we have to accept the truth about Savile, we also had to reconsider our affection for Gary Glitter and even, in 2014, Rolf Harris [f]. 

Parents used to think they had to lock up their children when the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols came to town, but it was actually Jake the Peg (diddle-iddle-iddle-um) and uncle Jimmy they really should've kept an eye on (as it 'appens).   

But they didn't. And so Savile went on abusing his victims; young and old, male and female, dead or alive. Fisher provides a political explanation why this was so:

"At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile, Knight Commader of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. [...] But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable - this can't possibly be happening." [94-95] 

 

Fisher (brilliantly) concludes his piece on Savile:

 

"The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover-up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now ..." [95]

Notes

 

[a] I have watched the film adaptation of Peace's 2006 novel The Damned Utd (2006) and I enjoyed it. Fisher, on the other hand, hates it; arguing that the film lacks all the bite and Gnostic mythography of the book and that in the hands of the film's director (Tom Hooper) and writer (Peter Morgan) the story is reduced into just another off-the-shelf cliché-ridden narrative. 

      Fisher also criticises Michael Sheen's performance (as Brian Clough) as campy and based on a popular image and pre-existing idea of the character, lacking depth or inner life. I will pick up on this in section IV of this post, when discussing Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Saville in the TV drama The Reckoning (2023). 

      See Fisher's piece '"Can the World Be as Sad as It Seems?": David Peace and His Adapters', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), pp. 80-87. His remarks on The Damned Utd are on pp. 85-87.  

 

[b] British readers will of course know who Jimmy Savile was (and what he was). But for anyone who is unfamiliar with the name ... 

      Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (1926-2011) was an English media personality and DJ. He hosted the long-running BBC TV shows Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. During his lifetime, Savile was well known (and much-loved, although Fisher denies this) for his eccentric image and charitable work. After his death, however, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse made against him were investigated, leading the police to conclude that he had been a predatory and prolific sex offender (such allegations made during his lifetime were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved). 

      As a result of the ensuing scandal, some of the honours that Savile was awarded during his career were posthumously revoked and his television appearances - including episodes of Top of the Pops that he presented - are no longer repeated. As Fisher notes: "Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed [...] as if he were some medieval devil [...]" Ghosts of My Life, p. 94. 

 

[c] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life ... p. 50. Future page references to this second edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the text.   

[d] Fisher's piece on Joy Division was adapted from a post on his k-punk blog dated 9 Jan 2005. It was published in its final form in Ghosts of My Life in 2014. 

[e] Joy Division's vocalist and lyricist Ian Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, committed suicide, aged 23, in May 1980. Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who also suffered from depression, committed suicide, aged 48, in January 2017. As a friend of mine remarked upon hearing of the latter's death (perhaps a little cruelly): K-punk is kaput.  

[f] Glitter's status as a glam rock idol was irredeemably tarnished after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, convicted of child sexual abuse in 2006, and found guilty of a series of sexual offences (including attempted rape) in 2015. All round entertainer Rolf Harris, popular throughout the '60s, '70s, and 1980s, was convicted in 2014 of having sexually assaulted four underage girls. 

 

Part 1 of this post on Lost Futures can be read by clicking here.   

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