On the Seven Noses of Soho

One of the Seven Noses of Soho by Rick Buckley (1997)

(Meard Street, London W1)

Photo by Stephen Alexander (Feb 2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Connecting Wardour Street in the West to Dean Street in the East, there are many reasons to love Meard Street in the centre of Soho. 

 

Firstly, there's the beautiful Georgian architecture to admire; Meard Street is one of the few surviving streets in London from the early 18th century (most of the houses were built by John Meard, between 1720 and 1732). 

 

Secondly, Meard Street was home to the great English artist Sebastian Horsley, who lived at (prostitute free) number 7. 

 

Thirdly, it's on Meard Street that one can find - should one wish to - one of the Seven Noses of Soho ...

 

 

II.   

 

The Seven Noses of Soho are the work of British artist Rick Buckley [1], dating to 1997. Plaster cast reproductions of his own nose, they protrude from the walls of buildings to which they are glued in a pleasingly surreal manner. 

 

Initially, there were over thirty noses, but now only a handful survive [2]. 

 

Intended as a political gesture, the noses are a protest against the introduction of CCTV cameras across London and the threat posed by a surveillance state (Buckley had been inspired by his reading of the Situationists).      

For Nietzsche, of course, the nose was the refined philosophical organ par excellence, not merely a political symbol. He used his nose to sniff out the corruption in modern morality and culture and thus saw it as an essential tool for the revaluation of all values: "My genius is in my nostrils", as he once informed his readers [3].

 

But, however we think of it, placing noses on buildings is no real countermeasure to the spread of CCTV cameras and since 1997 the increase in their number - not just in central London, but across the UK - has been truly frightening. 

 

If one includes private and commercial cameras as well as those operated by the authorities, it is now estimated by the British Security Industry Association that there are around twenty-one million of the fucking things snooping on us all [4].     

 

Whether we see this as the triumph of Mr Nosey Parker or of Big Brother, depends, I suppose, on how seriously one views this development.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For more information on Buckley, visit his website: rickbuckley.net

 

[2] The other six Soho noses are located at Admiralty Arch, Great Windmill Street, Bateman Street, Dean Street, Endell Street, and D'Arblay Street. 

 

[3] See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1), in Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 126.   

 

[4] See the recent report published on the Clearway website: click here. The UK may not be top of the list of most surveilled countries in the world - that spot is taken by China - but we're not far behind and on a short walk through London you can be expected to be filmed at least 300 times (entirely without your consent).   

 

 

Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 2)

Simon Critchley: Bald 

(Yale University Press, 2021)

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

All page numbers given below refer to the above edition of the book. 

Titles are Critchley's own. 

 

 

The Cycle of Revenge [a]

 

Critchley, somewhat surprisingly, takes a very Christian position on the question of revenge: turn the other cheek and forgive those who have sinned against you; at least on the first 490 occasions [b] and even if you have just witnessed the death of nearly 3000 of your citizens: 

 

"What if the grief and mourning that followed 9/11 were allowed to foster a nonviolent ethics of compassion rather than a violent politics of revenge and retribution? What if the crime of the September 11 attacks had led not to an unending war on terror, but to the cultivation of a practice of peace - a difficult, fraught and ever-compromised endeavour, but perhaps worth the attempt?" [111]    

 

As I say, that strikes me as very Christian - but almost inhuman in its idealism; as D. H. Lawrence says, man isn't a spiritually perfect being full of light, he is rooted in blood and soil and has natural instincts and vital passions and it's probably better in the long run to give these expression rather than deny them. 

 

Thus, although Lawrence acknowledges the madness of those who live solely for revenge - see his poem 'Erinnyes', for example [c] - he is not going to be meekly submissive before those who would devour him; nor is he going to love his enemies, bless those that curse him, or pray for his persecutors [d]. 

 

As for Nietzsche, well, he wasn't a big fan of revenge, describing it as a manifestation of ressentiment that often masquerades as justice. The noble individual, he says, knows not only how to forgive - for that is merely Christian - but also how to forget. Just like the spirit of gravity, the spirit of revenge must be overcome. 

 

On the other hand, however, Zarathustra teaches us that a small revenge is better than no revenge at all; that an action taken spontaneously and limited in scope prevents the malignant growth of resentment that will ultimately issue as a repulsion against time and earthly existence itself [e]. 

 

The Good Book ends, one might recall, not with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, but with John's call for the Apocalypse, the great book of revenge and world destruction that gives the death-kiss to the Gospels [f]. That tells us something important, I think. 

 

 

The Art of Memory

 

This is the first of a series of essays collected under the section heading 'Athens in Pieces' and written during the first four month of 2019, whilst Critchley was based in the Greek capital. 

 

Like him, I too have a fondness for the city - though for different reasons; Critchley thinks it "a magical city [...] where what we still recognise as philosophia really began" [124]; I think of it as the birthplace and hometown of My Little Greek. 

 

In other words, he has a more professional and I have a more personal reason for loving Athens and, whilst I'm not disputing it's ground zero for philosophy, my interest in the latter is really more Franco-German in character and located in the modern and postmodern period, rather than the Classical Age of Greece. 

 

Nevertheless, let's explore a city and a time whose ghosts "continue to haunt our present, often in unexpected and unimagined ways" [124] - ghosts whom we must find a way to make speak (or moan a bit at the very least); something which, says, Critchley, requires giving them "a little of our lifeblood" [124]. 

 

For only when we have transplanted a little of our blood into these ancient Athenian ghosts, will they communicate in a manner that will make sense to our modern ears and "tell us not just about themselves but also about us" [124] (and let's be honest, we moderns only really want to hear about ourselves):

 

"We always see antiquity in the image of ourselves and our age. But that image is not some Narcissus-like reflection; it is more an oblique refraction that allows us to see ourselves in a novel way and in a slightly alien manner." [124]

 

That's a positive spin and not one I'm sure I agree with. And I certainly have problems with the idea that the ancient past should be valued for providing "some kind of solace and escape" [125] from the present; "for a time", writes Critchley, "we can be transported elsewhere, where life was formed by different forces" [125].

 

He'll be telling us next we can even learn from the ancients, but I tend to agree with Foucault that we must exercise extreme caution here; our world and the world of ancient Greece are fundamentally distinct and we can't, for example, simply adopt their model of ethical behaviour, no matter how much we may admire aspects of it, and "you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people" [g].

 

The Stench of the Academy 

  

On my one and only trip to Athens, I crashed through a glass door - click here - and I took a look at the Acropolis. 

 

But I didn't visit Plato's Academy, although, from Critchley's description, it doesn't sound like I missed much: a run-down space smelling of piss calling itself a park in "a not particularly nice part of town" [128], where undesirable go to get high (and not on philosophy).   

 

Funnily enough, Critchley also does his best to put readers off the Academy even in its heyday and its founder:

 

"The Academy was a privately funded research and teaching facility, situated outside the city. Most of us have a rather whimsical idea of philosophy as a bunch of men in togas having a chat in the agora. And we think of Socrates as a gadfly philosophising in the street and somehow speaking truth to power. The idea is attractive. But it is a literary conceit of philosophy - one that is still in circulation today. It is the fiction that Plato wanted his readers to believe." [130-131]

 

Critchley continues - and I think these are my favourite paragraphs in Bald so far -

 

"Behind that fiction stands the library, the editing and copying rooms, and the entire research engine of the Academy, which was devoted to the careful production and dissemination of knowledge through texts and teaching. Much as we may flinch at the idea, philosophy has been academic and linked to the activity of schools since its inception." [131]

 

In other words, it's always been a business on the one hand and factional on the other and Plato - if that was even his name - was ultimately just a rich fantasist backed by wealthy patrons and fleecing wealthy students who led us all into an Ideal dead-end: 

 

"We are less attracted to the idea of a wealthy aristocratic philosopher sequestered in his research facility and making occasional trip to visit foreign tyrants than to the image of the poor, shoeless Socrates causing trouble in the marketplace, refusing to be paid and getting killed by the city for his trouble. But out captivation with this image, once again, is overwhelmingly Plato's invention." [131-132-   

 

It's the great philosophical swindle ...  

      

 

In Aristotle's Garden 

 

After visiting the Academy, Critchley obviously had to go next to the "beautifully maintained site" [137] of the Lyceum; Aristotle's answer to the former [h] - only bigger and better, transforming his new space into "the most powerful and well-endowed school in the world" [136]. 

 

And he was able to do this because if Plato had a few bob, Aristotle was one those individuals we now term the super-rich. Anyway, the Lyceum was the "aspirational school destination of choice" [137] for the elites to send their children and for ten years or so, Aristotle was top dog in the philosophical world (which is not to imply he was in any way a Cynic).  

 

For Critchley - and I agree with him here - it's important to point out that the Lyceum, like most ancient schools, had a lovely garden, and he ponders what it was for:

 

"Was it a space for leisure, strolling and quiet dialectical chitchat? Was it a mini-laboratory for botanical observation and experimentation?  Or was it [...] an image of paradise?" [138]

 

Critchley finds the latter possibility the most intriguing, but personally I prefer to think that his first suggestion concerning its use is the right answer. But whatever the answer, it's true that there's a close and vital relationship between gardens and philosophical thought. Indeed, I would suggest that those who lack green fingers and an appreciation for the beauty of flowers can never be a true lover of wisdom:

 

"At the end of the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle sees the promise of philosophy as the cultivation of the contemplative life, the bios theoretikos [...] What better place for this than a garden? Might not botany be the royal road to paradise, an activity at once empirical and deeply poetic." [138]

 

Is Critchley - someone who by is own admission was formerly insensitive to the pleasure to be found amongst plants and trees - becoming a floraphile at last ...? Will he end up like Rupert Birkin, rolling in the grass and ejaculating in the foliage in a state of delirium? [i]  

 

Perhaps not. But, then again, anything's possible ...  

 

 

We Know Socrates's Fate. What's Ours?

  

Interesting that Critchley should claim he was named after Simon the Cobbler; a good friend of Socrates and someone who "also pretended to be a philosopher of sorts" [154]. 

 

Apparently, whenever the latter called into his workshop, Simon made notes on their conversation; thus some claim that it was Simon - not Plato - who was the first author of a Socratic dialogue. 

 

Simon was also much admired by the Cynics, for refusing the patronage of Pericles in order to safeguard his freedom of speech (parrhesia): 

 

"For the Cynics, only those people who achieved self-sufficiency (autarkeia) or independence of mind could truly exercise their freedom speech. For a cobbler-philosopher like Simon to work for a powerful political figure like Pericles would have undermined that independence and compromised his freedom." [158]

 

One wonders if Critchley ever has doubts about his own relationship with powerful institutions like the New School for Social Research and the Onassis Foundation; ever wishes he were repairing old boots instead?     

 

 

The Happiest Man I Ever Met

 

From Simon the Cobbler's workshop to Mount Athos ... and three days, two nights at the monastery of Simonopetra, founded in the 13th century. Critchley wishes to know: "What is it like to be a monk? And what does it take to become one?" [161]

 

These are not questions I would ask and it's not somewhere I would go: anywhere that doesn't welcome the presence of women is a place I choose not to visit. I'm fine with the idea that monks choose to hide themselves from the world of Man, but not that the only female creatures tolerated on their Holy Mountain are cats and that this is justified on supposedly religious and spiritual grounds.

 

How, one wonders, does Critchley look his wife and daughter in the eye after going to a place from which they are barred on the grounds of maintaining a pure environment [j] ...?  Expensive four-wheel drive cars - no problem; they apparently don't pollute the place in the way that women would stink up the joint. 

 

At the end of his stay, Critchley takes off the little wooden cross he had been given to wear, and returns back into the profane world, resuming his "stupid philosophical distance and intellectual arrogance" [169].

 

I know it's a Latin phrase associated with the Jesuits, rather than a Greek phrase associated with the Orthodox monks of Athos, but, clearly, Critchley has found out what it takes to be a monk: sacrificium intellectus (i.e., the voluntary subordination of reason to faith; or what Nietzsche describes as moral self-mutilation).  

 

What shocks me is that Critchley seems to think this is something admirable and he ends this profoundly depressing piece by describing his time at Simonopetra as "the closest to a religious experience that I have ever come" [169] - as if such a psychotic episode were a good thing!

 

        

Adventures in the Dream Factory

  

This is the third of three pieces on the science fiction writer (and garage philosopher) Philip K. Dick - not someone I've ever read (or wish to read), although, yes, I know the film adaptations of his work. 

 

Dick was a kind of Gnostic on Critchley's reading and Dick's Gnosticism enables us to ditch the traditional Christian idea of original sin:

 

"Once we embrace Gnosticism, we can declare that wickedness does not have its source within the human heart but out there, with the corrupt archons of corporate capitalism or whomever. We are not wicked. It is the world that is wicked. This insight finds its modern voice in Rousseau before influencing a Heinz variety of Romanticisms that turn on the idea of natural human goodness and childhood innocence." [219]

 

Critchley continues in a paragraph that returns us to where we began this post, with a critique of authenticity:   

 

"On the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world or what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the diving spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. It is this very desire for purity and authenticity that drives the whole wretched industry of New Age obscurantism and its multiple techniques of spiritual and material detox [...] Against this toxic view of the world, I think we need to emphasize what spendidly impure and inauthentic creatures we are." [219]

 

Horray! Something I can agree with and get behind! Probably a good place to finish then. But let me first wish Mr Critchley a happy 66th birthday - that's not quite the number of the Beast [ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ], but it's two-thirds of the way there ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This essay should probably be read in conjunction with the following piece 'Theater of Violence', pp.112-120, though it's not absolutely necessary to do so and I do not, in fact, analyse this later essay here; not because I disagree with Critchley's view that we need to "understand the history of violence from which we emerge" [113], but because Greek theatre, Shakespeare, sport, and the work of American rapper Kendrick Lamar do not particularly interest me (and, to be honest, I'm increasingly sceptical that complex philosophical problems can best be addressed in terms of football and/or popular music).    

 

[b] Critchley quotes Jesus telling Peter that it is not enough to forgive someone seven times, you must, rather, forgive them seventy times seven, which Critchley interprets as meaning that the quality of forgiveness is infinite and unconditional. See Matthew 18:22 and see Bald p. 110. 

  

[c] The poem 'Erinnyes' (1915), can be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. III., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1526-1527. Or it can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[d] Whilst admitting that the Christian vision is one form of consummation for man, Lawrence makes his opposition to Luke 6:27-28 clear pretty much throughout his work. See, for example, 'The Lemon Gardens'; in Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119.

 

[e] See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Adder's Bite' (in Part 1) and 'Of Redemption' (in Part 2).

 

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

 

[g] Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 343. Developing this point, Foucault goes on to say: "I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period ..." [347]. To think otherwise, of course, sets one on a slippery path towards universal humanism. 

 

[h] Aristotle established the Lyceum after being snubbed by Plato, who chose Speusippus as his successor, rather than him. Critchley wonders whether Aristotle was angry and disappointed not to have become the main man at the Academy and I would imagine that he was; for, in fairness, although he was "reportedly a difficult character" and "not much loved by the Athenians" [134], he was undoubtedly the best qualified for the role.    

 

[i] I'm referring to the (in)famous scene in chapter VIII of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love (1920), to which I have referred numerous times here on Torpedo the Ark: see, for example, the post 'Floraphilia Redux' (17 Oct 2016) - click here.    

 

[j] Critchley explains, but doesn't challenge, the Athonite legend which has it that the Virgin Mary travelled to Athos and liked it so much that her son Jesus declared it her private garden, from which all other female creatures were banned. The 335 sq km peninsula that Mount Athos sits at the heart of is the largest area in the world that women cannot enter (they are not even allowed within 500m of the coast).

      What strikes me as a little hypocritical, to say the least, is that in an essay written earlier, Critchley says that the BBC Television series The Ascent of Man (1973) has an admittedly sexist title and wishes to point out that there are "a few great women too!" [190] who have played a key role in human history (not that any of them would be allowed to visit Athos).  

      In this same essay, Critchley also opposes monstrous certainty which, he says, leads "not just to fascism but to all the various faces of fundamentalism" [193] - though that apparently does not include the dogma of Greek Orthodoxy.   

Reflections on Simon Critchley's Philosophical Short Cuts (Part 1)

Simon Critchely: Bald (Yale University Press, 2021) 

Essays edited by Peter Catapano 

Cover design by R. Black

 

 

I don't know Simon Critchley: but he's one of the Simons that I can't help admiring and to whom I feel a vague connection, that is part philosophical in nature and part generational; we share many of the same ideas and points of reference and we were all born in the same decade [a]. 

 

Having said that, there are differences between me and the Simons, including Herr Professor Critchley, whose collection of essays Bald (2021) I'd like to discuss here in an amicable if still critical manner. Readers might best see this post then as less the staging of a confrontation or a reckoning [Auseinandersetzung] and more an attempt to offer an insightful commentary in the same kind of engaging, jargon-free - or bold and bald - style that Critchley adopts in this work.  

 

Note: whilst there are thirty-five essays in Bald - all originally published in the New York Times - I'll not be discussing each of them here; just the ones that really catch my interest or which I find particularly provocative [b]. The titles in bold are Critchley's own. And all page numbers refer to the 2021 edition shown above. If the post becomes overly-lengthy - as these posts often do - I'll publish it as two (or possibly even three) parts.   

 

 

Happy Like God  

What is happiness? 

 

In an attempt to answer this question Critchley calls on Rousseau, who provides him with the idea that happiness might simply be the feeling of existence; a feeling that fills the soul entirely. 

 

Perhaps in order to update the language slightly, Critchley reframes this feeling as one of "momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time" [5]. Happiness, in other words, is learning to enjoy the nowness of the present (no regrets and no longing for a better tomorrow). 

 

Achieve a state of joyful reverie and, says Rousseau, you become like God - and Critchley doesn't demur, which is slightly strange for an atheist, but indicates the direction his thinking often takes; i.e., towards secular mysticism (whether this makes him a crypto-theologian more than a critical theorist is a question we can return to later). 

 

And where and when is Critchley happiest? 

 

Sitting by the sea, or in his lover's bed; happiness can be a solitary state, but "one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love" [6]. Maybe: though I'm not sure that love is ever that blissfully straightforward and Critchley is honest enough to admit that even the most oceanic feeling of happiness is outrageously short lived: "Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades." [6].

 

Didn't Goethe once say that no one can enjoy looking at a beautiful sunset for more than a few seconds without getting bored; and I remember also Johnny Rotten once characterising love as less than three minutes of squelching noises. 

 

In other words, we are incapable of being permanently happy (or even happy for long) [c].  

 

 

How to Make It in the Afterlife 

 

As a thanatologist, what I like about Critchley is that, sooner or later and no matter what the topic - he's going to speak about mortality. And sure enough, we quickly pass from happiness to death and the relation between them, which he discusses in relation to ancient Greek philosophy (his other specialist subject). 

 

The key is: live a good life and die a noble death and happiness will be yours. Which means that "happiness does not consist in whatever you might be feeling [...] but in what others feel about you" [13]. 

 

In other words, happiness is something posthumously ascribed - a very unmodern view, but one worth considering; particularly if the adoption of such a view encourages us to live in a more beautiful manner so as to be remembered with smiling fondness.  

 

 

The Gospel According to Me

 

That's a nice title. And it's a crucial short essay attacking the search for individual authenticity, which Critchley rightly recognises is born of a "weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality [...] and a litugy of inwardness" [15]. 

 

This ideal of authenticity - which was central to existentialism before becoming central to New Age therapeutic culture - is basically a type of selfish conformism; something which "disguises acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion" [16]. 

  

Those who think the quest for authenticity is an ethical practice, might be surprised to find Critchley dismiss it as a form of passive nihilism. Passive nihilism and the zen fascism of the 21st century American workplace. For when the office is such a fun place to be and encourages you to be yourself and express yourself, then "there is no room for worker malaise" [17] or class war and in in this way authenticity becomes "an evacuation of history" [17] [d].    

 

I like it when Critchley nails his colours to the mast and pops his political hat on; exposing not just the fantasy of authenticity, but the evils of the workplace - even those that allow us to wear our favourite T-shirt "and listen to Radiohead" [17] on our i-Phones while at our desk. 

 

And I like it too when he relates his philosophical and political critique to literature; pointing out, for example, that Herman Melville, "writing on the cusp of modern capiatlism" [19] in the mid-19th century, had already twigged that "the search for authenticity was a white whale" [19]; i.e., an obsessive quest that is "futile at best and destructive at worst" [19] [e].   

 

 

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope

 

Having demolished the ideal of authenticity, Critchley now attacks the ideal of hope: is it, he asks, such a wonderful thing? 

 

Obviously, I don't think so and I've long been an vociferous opponent of this Christian virtue: see the post dated 6 Feb 2022, for example, on Shep Fairey's Obama poster: click here. Thus, I was pleased to see that Critchley is also hostile to the idea, regarding it from a Graeco-Nietzschean perspective as a form of moral cowardice that "allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering" [20].    

 

Hope, says Critchley - contra Obama - is not audacious; it is mendacious; something exploited by our religious teachers and political leaders alike. And what we need is not blind hope but clear-sighted courage in the face of reality (including the courage to abandon hope). 

 

Or, to put that another way, "skeptical realism, deeply informed by history" [25], that knows how to smile like Epictetus (the slave turned Stoic philosopher admired by Nietzsche).    

 

 

What Is a Philosopher? 

 

An idiot who falls down the well (like Thales); or one who takes their time ...? 

 

Probably a combination of both: 

 

"The philosopher [...] is free by virtue of his otherworldliness, by the capacity to fall into wells and appear silly" and this freedom "consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic" [71] [f].   

 

Critchley endorses this Socratic defnition further by agreeing that the philosopher is also one who is indifferent to convention; shows no respect for rank; never joins a political party or a private club. Of course, this kind of attitude and behaviour can get you in trouble - Socrates  was ultimately put on trial and condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens [g]. 

 

Thus, Critchley (amusingly) decides: "Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS" [72]. 

 

It is thus not only a perverse love of wisdom - a form of erōtomaniā (see below) - but a risking of one's own life; i.e., a practice of joy before death. 

 

Critchley concludes (in a slightly confessional, slightly self-dramatising manner):

 

"Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about philosophers, something either monstrous or godlike, or, indeed, both at once." [73]

 

 

Cynicism We Can Believe In

 

Ancient cynicism is "not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word" [83], writes Critchley. 

 

And that's certainly true; ancient cynicism was a rigorous philosophical way of life that involved self-debasement in order to make its case, whilst modern cynicism, on the other hand, is "an attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness" [83]; often no more than a fashionable pose.  

 

The modern cynic isn't expected to live like a dog, eat raw squid, or masturbate in the market place and his cynicism lacks the moral and political radicalism of the hardcore cynicism that Diogenes practiced. 

 

But in a world like ours - self-interested, lazy, corrupt, and greedy - "it is Diogenes's lamp that we need to light our path" [85]. Though I think we can do without the flash-wanking or pissing in public, thank you very much.    

 

 

Let Be - An Answer to Hamlet's Question

 

For Heidegger, letting be [Gelassenheit] is a fundamental granting of freedom, born not of indifference, but an active concern for otherness and a refusal to see the world as something to be manipulated and exploited. In other words, it's a form of care. 

 

Critchley - who certainly knows his Heidegger - prefers to think the idea of letting be in relation to Shakespeare's Hamlet, however. In response to the play's famous ontological question - 'To be, or not to be?' - he says 'Let be'. 

 

But in order to let be, requires, he says, the cultivation of "a disposition of skeptical openness that does not claim to know aught of what we truly know naught" [107]. 

 

He elucidates:  

 

"If we can cure ourselves of our longing for some sort of godlike conspectus of what it means to be human, or our longing for the construction of ourselves as some new prosphetic god through technology, bound by the self-satisfied myth of unlimited human progress, we might let be." [107] 

 

I think we can all agree this would be a good thing. But it's not going to happen, of course; man is the creature who just can't help interfering and organising and wanting to be master of the universe; Homo sapien is also Homo importunus.   

  

 

Notes

 

[a] The other Simons include Reynolds and Armitage - see the post dated 17 Jan 2026: click here - and also the monstrous figure of Síomón Solomon; see the post dated 19 Jan 2026: click here. 

 

[b] Readers will note that I don't, for example, refer to any of the five essays in the section entitled 'I Believe'. Essentially, that's because I don't know anything about (or have much interest in) Mormonism, Russian literature (Dostoevsky), or Danish philosophy (Kierkegaard). 

      Nor do I share the (quasi-religious) faith of a football fan and find Critchley's paean to Liverpool FC a bit cringe if I'm honest. Does he really believe that football teaches us something important about our humanity and that being a Red inculcates a set of purely noble values: "solidarity, compassion, internationalism, decency, honour, self-respect and respect for others" [63] -? (Opposing fans sometimes accuse Liverpool supporters of moralising sentimentality and hypocrisy, but we can leave this for another post, another day.) 

      The essay on money - 'Coin of Praise' - I did read and found myself nodding in agreement with the idea that our financial system essentially rests on faith; i.e., money is the most ideal of all material things and our one true God. But saying that didn't seem to justify an entire section in this post.      

 

[c] See the follow up piece entitled 'Beyond the Sea' (pp. 7-11), in which Critchley addresses some of the comments and criticisms he received from readers of 'Happy Like God'. Crucially, he recognises that happiness in the moment is often topped by happiness of the memory of our happiness in the moment; that the best kind of happiness isn't ecstatic, but melancholic.  

 

[d] Michel Foucault famously dismissed what he called the Californian cult of the self in comparison to the ethico-aesthetic stylisation of self as practiced by the ancient Greeks and modern dandies. See 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 359. 

      And see also what Foucault writes on the 'arts of existence' and 'techniques of self' in The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1992). 

 

[e] Critchley also refers to his hero Shakespeare, reminding readers that no one is more inauthentic than Hamlet and that the depiction of his radical inauthenticity "shatters our moral complacency" [19] as witnesses to the drama that unfolds.    

 

[f] I would suggest that just as there are two types of philosophical freedom, so too are there are two types of philosopher; I belong to the first type, who flit from topic to topic; my friend Síomón Solomon belongs to the latter type and enjoys the freedom to return and ruminate upon the same problems over and over. This naturally enough produces a different type of thinking and writing style.

 

[g] Critchley notes: "Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety" and philosophy has "repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods" [72]. Because their attitude is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as one of not giving a fuck, philosophers are often regarded as "politically suspicious, even dangerous" [72].

 

 

Part 2 of this post can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 5: Tomorrow (Chapters 11 and 12)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania
Cover of the German edition (Ventil Verlag, 2012)

I.

In chapter 11, Reynolds - a former sci-fi fanatic - indulges in nostalgia for the Space Age; a time of giant steps and final frontiers, as he describes it. 

 

He also mourns the "absence of futuristic-ness" [a] in the fabric of daily life and says neostalgia became an increasingly widespread feeling during the opening decade of the 21st century, though, I have to admit, I didn't feel this "pang for the future that never arrived" [362]; perhaps because I preferred The Flintstones to The Jetsons [b] - or maybe because I hate motorists at ground level and the last thing I would want to see is flying automobiles blotting out the sky. 

 

Whatever the reason, I'm not particularly disappointed the future didn't arrive - for I never really expected or wanted it to. And when it has interfered with the present in the form of advanced (and alien) technologies, it's not been entirely advantageous - are we really any happier or better off now that we experience the world via a series of screens or have outsourced our thinking to AI? 

 

I don't think so: and Reynolds isn't particularly impressed by the digital age, which he describes as more decadent in character than heroic. He wants the world of Star Trek and to be able to beam on board the USS Enterprise - not the future glimpsed in Blade Runner in which it rains all the time, or the grotty on-board conditions of the commercial starship Nostromo, as seen in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).  

 

 

II.  

 

Sooner or later, Reynolds was always going to relate this idea of nostalgia for the future to the world of popular music - which I guess is fair enough, considering he's a music journalist, critic and author. 

 

But, if I'm honest, it gets a little boring reading about bands and DJs and genres of music I've never heard of and I can't help wondering at the kind of books Reynolds might have given us had he spent a little more of his time reading literature and philosophy and a little less listening to records ... [c] 

 

III.

Is nostalgia chiefly a "not feeling at home in the here-and-now, a sensation of alienation" [370]? That seems to view it as tied to a model of deficiency and/or lack; a model which, as a Deleuzian, is obviously problematic for me. 

 

Might we not think nostalgia as a form of desire; something positive and productive? By tying nostalgia to the (socially constructed) idea of lack, Reynolds views it as the pursuit of a missing (ideal) object, which is all very Freudian and Lacanian, but is that really where he wants to go? 

 

(I think perhaps he does, but I don't.)

As for alienation ... Why bring in a dated 19th century concept like this; one that relies on the very deficiency model rejected above? Further, if there's no human essence - and there is no human essence - then how can a subject ever really feel or be alienated? 

 

Perhaps Baudrillard is right to say (rather amusingly) that we are today alienated from alienation and that we have moved beyond the dramas of alienation played out in modernity. Either that, or that alienation is now total within an age of simulation in which the individual is fully codified. 

IV.
 

"In recent decades, nostalgia for the future has gradually lost its vagueness and become tied to a specific idée fixe: an archaic and sometimes comically ossified idea of what the future is going to be like." [370] 

 

In other words, it's become a retro-futurist emotion, stimulated by popular culture and in particular a vision of the future that was in large part invented by the Disney Corporation: 'Tomorrowland' (1955) providing the material blueprint for the plastic utopia to come. 

 

Amusingly, Tomorrowland is now a museum - and, after visiting, Reynolds came to much the same conclusion as Bruce Handy writing in Time in 1998: The future isn't what it used to be - i.e., it's "desperately uninspiring and lugubrious" [372] - which is shit in anybody's language. 

 

But is the fault less Disney's and more ours? Have we lost the ability to dream as a culture and "to come up with visionary goals to aim for" [372]?

 

Possibly. 

 

But again, let's enter a note of caution before throwing ourselves on the floor and bewailing our own inability to imagine the future. For mightn't it be a sign that we have wised up a little as a culture; that the postmodern abandonment of grand utopian visions - particularly when these are tied to dangerous political ideologies - is something we should be proud of. 

 

I certainly don't wish to resurrect the myth of rational progress and recommit to a single telelogical future; I rather like the ambiguity of the present and have no desire for a better world. I believe in the ruins of The City of Tomorrow and if that makes me a cynic, or a pessimist - or even a defender of capitalist realism - well, so be it. 

  

 

V.   

 

Moving on ... and essentially skipping a couple of sections, we come to the end of chapter 11, in which - to my surprise - Oswald Spengler again puts in an appearance; just what is Reynolds's fascination with this historically significant but intellectually marginal (and marginalised) figure? 

 

He refers us to the Faustian spirit identified by Spengler in his 1931 work Der Mensch und die Technik - a spirit which, says Reynolds, "is the dynamic behind modernism and modernisation, the impulse that propelled both the space race and twentieth-century music's exploration of sonic space through electronics" [394]. 

 

That may or may not be true, but this Faustian spirit is also tragic in nature and Spengler is adamant that there can be no prudent retreat into the past - not even one made in order to recover a lost future. He also dismisses optimism as a form of cowardice [d], so, ultimately, I can't see the appeal of his work for Reynolds, though he has clearly been influenced by the latter as this paragraph illustrates:

 

"When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so - the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with decor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society - the total picture does look a lot like decadence. Retro culture would then be just another facet of the recline and fall of the West." [394-395]          

 

Reynolds suggests that this leaves opens "the possibility of the new coming from outside the West, from regions of the globe where culture is less exhausted" [395]. He specifically mentions China and India - "set to be the economic and demographic powerhouses of the century" [395] - and two cultures which, interestingly enough, Spengler also regarded as high-level, equal in spiritual greatness to the West. Obviously, both are ancient cultures and yet, paradoxically, they "feel 'younger' than us at the moment" [395].    

 

I have to admit, I have my doubts (and concerns) about the idea that the economic and geo-political future belongs to Asia; for there are multiple factors (including some we cannot foresee) that might prevent the global dominance of China and India. 

 

Nevertheless, Reynolds also seems to pin his musical hopes on the non-Western world, now that the "Anglo-American pop tradition is all innovated out" [396]. But again, I'm not sure the Chinese Communist Party will allow an explosion of "popular energies and desires" [396] amongst the young. 

 

And the last time they encouraged such it resulted not in the Summer of Love, but the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, so those who advise the West to simply rest and outsource the future to Beijing should be careful what they wish for.    

 

 

VI. 

 

I smiled to hear that even William Gibson has given up on the future; that he prefers these days to speak of atemporality and the digital Now. 

 

When I was in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s and the CCRU was a thing (if it ever was a thing), Gibson's 1984 novel Necromancer was required reading. Unfortunately, I found it to be one of the most boring books I have ever attempted to read - right up there with Naked Lunch (1959) and Silas Marner (1861).   

 

However, I agree with Gibson that the 21st century is richer, stranger and more complex than any imaginary future and that science fiction, therefore - at least in the traditional speculative sense - is now redundant: the future is here already and our task today is to explore the alien present [e]. 

 

Reynolds, however, isn't of this view: "Gibson's perspective is so completely other to my own that I'm flabbergasted." [397] I'm sorry about that, although it's always nice to see a piece of 18th century British slang being used.

 

 

VII. 

 

And now, the end is near - chapter 12 - the final chapter: 'The Shock of the Old' ... Time for Reynolds to address those questions he posed, but perhaps failed to fully address along the way. 

 

Questions such as: Given that I enjoy many aspects of retro, why do I still feel deep down that it is lame and shameful? [403 - italics in the original].

 

I'm tempted to suggest it's because, Simon, you still labour under the illusion of psychic depth. If you were a little less soulful - became a little more floral - you'd miraculously find much of the shame you experience (which seems more moral than instinctive in nature and which often serves to hinder your enjoyment) simply fades away. 

 

Of course, becoming-flower isn't easy. But, if a wasp can manage it, I'm sure you'll be able to find a way (and can always turn for advice to Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus).  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Reynolds admits that his understanding of rock and pop is very much infused by the "belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future" [403]. The funny thing is, he says this in part due to the fact he was born in 1963 - 'The Year That Rock Began'. 

 

But I was born in the same year, and my understanding of popular culture isn't weighed down by this belief. Perhaps that's because I was born under a different star sign [f]; or perhaps it's because I took the work of postmodernists such as Lyotard more seriously than Reynolds and have made terms such as irony, incredulity, and insouciance watchwords rather than belief, teleology, destiny, etc.        

 

Again, by his own admission, his obsession with and loyalty to music served only to consolidate his outmoded ideas and beliefs:

 

"Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, the spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock. These surges of renewal served as a booster shot for me, reconfirming the modernist credo [...]" [404] 

 

That's a really rather terrible admission of bias; superhonest, but shocking. And for me it confirms Jamie Reid's idea that music prevents you thinking for yourself [g]. 

 

Reynolds continues: "There is an argument that the linear model of progress is an ideological figment [...] [404] - well, yes, I made exactly this argument earlier in this post. 

 

But despite having his belief in progress badly shaken by recent events, Reynolds sadly chooses to avoid the argument and instead just doubles-down on his position: "As a died-in-the-wool [sic] modernist [...] I would find it hard to break the habit of a lifetime [...] Giving it up would feel like giving in, learning to settle for less." [404]  

 

Again, that's honest, but disappointing: he sounds like one of those Japanese soldiers stranded on a Pacific desert island for many long years and refusing to accept the war finished long ago. I know some people admire holdouts - and perhaps there is something admirable about an act of defiant resistance - but ... well, there are surely better hills to die on than that of popular music. 

 

 

IX.  

 

Reynolds doesn't like flatness and so he won't think much of Pancake Tuesday, Jane Birkin's physique, or the Deleuze and Guattari text recommended earlier. 

 

For as the title suggests, Mille plateaux is all about flat terrain and molecular politics, rather than mountain peaks and what Reynolds describes as the momentous and by which he refers to molar events and the idea that these alone bring about significant historical change or progress. 

 

As an object-oriented philosopher, I subscribe of course to a flat ontology, which is to say, to the idea that all objects exist on the same plane of reality and I can't help suspecting that Reynolds would not care for this model of being; that he rather likes hierarchical structures that allow for judgement. 

 

Or perhaps he just has a fear of feeling emotionally flat and this explains his need of newness and constant stimulation, including, during his rave days, the entactogenic drug ecstasy [h].

 

 

X. 

 

Another thing Reynolds does not like is stillness; he wants things to keep moving - and moving forward at pace. But hasn't he heard that sometimes one can be quick even when standing still (that speed and intensity do not necessarily require movement)? Stillness isn't synonymous with stasis and stagnancy.

 

I refer him once more to Deleuze and Guattari, and their notions of lines of flight and deterritorialisation; neither of which are progressive ideas - there's no linear movement from A to B - but both of which allow for radical change and the breaking away from established habits, structures, and identities so as to invent new ways of thinking and acting. 

 

Stillness is a keyword for me now; as it became for Roland Barthes in his late work on the Neutral  and I'm pretty sure the latter also writes in praise of flatness too.  

 

 

XI. 

  

This couple of sentences made me smile: 

 

"This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me. Don't they want to push them aside?" [408]

 

Apparently not! 

 

But is it any more mystifying than why the author of Retromania should wish to cling on to ideas from the late-19th and early-20th centuries to do with progress and making everything new.   

 

Maybe young people don't give a shit anymore about when a genre was first invented and don't feel that "vague nostalgia [...] for a lost golden age when music had power and integrity" [410] that Simon and Sandi Thom think they should. 

 

Maybe they prefer music that is less potent and less meaningful, but also doesn't demand that they adhere to it with fanatic loyalty and at the exclusion of all other interests; maybe they don't need mythical rock gods (or even the NME) to tell them what to think and feel any longer [j].     

 

 

XII.

 

Reynolds's closing remarks on the economics and politics of pop culture in an era of postproduction were provocative. I particularly like the bit about meta-money and meta-music being connected at some fundamental level (although I don't know if it's true outside of Marxist analysis):  

 

"Culture, as the superstructure to the economy's base, reflects the gaseous quality of our existence. The insubstantiality of the economy revealed itself, horribly, a few years ago. We are still waiting for the music-about-music bubble to burst." [420-421]

 

For Reynolds, it is fashion which provides the "nexus between late capitalism and culture" [421] - the point where they intermesh. If video killed the radio star, fashion killed popular music; infecting the latter with its "artificially accelerated metabolic rate, its rapid cycles of engineered obsolescence" [421].

 

The logic of fashion has polluted the sweet river of time that once flowed gently but inexorably from past to future. Or as Reynolds writes: "Fashion - a machinery for creating cultural capital and then, with incredible speed, stripping it of value and dumping the stock - permeates everything." [422]

 

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I smiled at this. But I also feel I have to push back a little - even if Reynolds himself slightly qualifies the above by conceding that the fashion-isation of the world "can't totally explain the rise of retro rock" [422].

 

Firstly, it's a little surprising that a self-professed modernist like Reynolds should so dislike fashion - the most modern of all modern phenomena. But then lacking any telos - any final purpose - I suppose fashion was always going to seem trivial and superficial to Reynolds. 

 

One might have imagined, however, based on the experimental and radical nature of the music he privileges, that he'd rather approve of the manner in which fashion ruptures the order of referential reason, dissolving old values and conventions. It may only provide the illusion of change, but there is a genuine passion at its heart: the passion for empty signs and cycles and for making the insignificant signify and it's this which makes it of interest (to me at least). 

 

 

XIII.    

 

If fashion is for Reynolds is a non-starter and if "it is now pretty clear that pop is living on borrowed time and stolen energy" [422], then where do those who care about cultural vitality and rescuing lost futures go from here?   

 

Reynolds says he'd "love to nominate hauntology" [423] as the answer to this question and as "the alternative to the curatorial model of art" [423]. But he can't bring himself to do it. For he knows that in many ways even those figures he admires working in this area, such as Ariel Pink [i], "are postproduction artists too, rummaging through the flea market of history and piecing together the audio equivalent of a junk-art installation" [423].    

 

By his own admission, this leads to a tricky question for Reynolds as an Ariel Pink fan and champion of the hauntological in general: what exactly is this music's contribution? 

 

"In fact, what in today's musical landscape is rich enough, nourishing enough - which is to say, sufficiently nonderivative - to sustain future forms of revivalism and retro? Surely, at a certain point, recycling will just degrade the material beyond the point that further use-value can be extracted." [424]. 

 

That seems a fair observation. But surely then, when this point is reached is precisely when people will - from necessity - create new sounds. So he should find comfort in this idea - and that thing he cherishes called hope. 

 

And indeed, he does: concluding his study with a line that might have come from Fox Mulder's bedroom wall: "I still believe the future is out there." [428] 

 

So, there was really nothing to worry about all along ... 

 

  

Notes

[a] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 362. Future page numbers will be given directly in the text and refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Strangely, however, I prefer Lt. Ellis in her silver mini-skirt [click here] to Loana in her fur bikini, although I'm not blind to the appeal of prehistoric women: click here.  

 

[c] His brief reading of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet on page 369 is excellent and I only wish Mr Reynolds wrote more on Portuguese poets and French thinkers such as Baudrillard - whom he mentions several times, but never really engages with - and spent a bit less time discussing rap music, rave culture, and obscure electronic groups from the 1990s.     

 

[d] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: a Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. C. F. Atkinson, (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1932), p.103.  

 

[e] That's really not such an outlandish view; J. G. Ballard said much the same thing way back in the seventies; i.e., that sci-fi should stick to exploring the all-voracious present and mapping inner space and the impact of modern technology on the human psyche. For Ballard, in sum, the job of the writer is to invent reality as we already live inside a fictional world order. See the Preface to the French edition of his novel Crash (1974): click here.  

 

[f] I was born on 13 Feb and that makes me an Aquarian; Reynolds was born on 19 June and that makes him a Gemini (and so more prone to belief and less sceptical in character) - or so I'm told by someone who takes this kind of thing seriously.  

 

[g] I'm referring to Jamie Reid's 'Stratoswasticastor' design: click here for details on punkrocker.org.uk 

 

[h] See Simon Renolds, Generation Ecstasy (Routledge, 1999), in which he takes the reader on a tour of the world of rave culture and techno music as a dosed up and blissed out insider. For Reynolds, MDMA was the essential ingredient or catalyst; the magic pill that allowed for a communal and transformative experience bordering on the spiritual (although he does also acknowledge its more troubling aspects).   

 

[i] Reynolds names the American musician and singer-songwriter Ariel Pink as (probably) his favourite artist of the 2000s, even if his hypnogogic sound is "woven out of blurry echoes of halcyon radio pop from the sixties, seventies and eighties" [xxiii] - i.e., the "grand period of primary pop productivity" [423].  

 

[j] As a father of children, Reynolds recognises that younger people do not think the same way that people of his generation think; do not care about the same things: "they're not the least bit interested in the capital 'f' Future, barely ever think about it" [425-426] and their urge to escape the present is satisfied "through fantasy [...] or digital technology" [426].  

 

 

Other posts in the Retromania series can be accessed by clicking here.