SIG News 5 Manifesto: A Friendly Deconstruction

SIG Manifesto 

(SIG News 5: September 2026)

 

 

I.

 

The new, bumper edition of SIG News (#5) is out now - arriving two months ahead of its cover date and two weeks ahead of its public launch at the Mausoleum - sorry, Museum - of Youth Culture (see below). Edited by the established team of Russ Bestley, Tim Gibney, Kevin Quinn and Roger Sabin, it assembles an eclectic mix of articles by a disparate group of authors from both within and without the University of the Arts London (UAL). 

 

By deliberately choosing the inky medium of an old-school, limited-run newspaper, SIG's explicit aim is to thumb its nose at mass circulation and the algorithmic curation of the online world. Anyone interested in the history and practice of music- and style-based subcultures is guaranteed to find something to excite them in this issue. 

 

However, it is the ever-changing SIG Manifesto, printed boldly on the back cover, which I invariably read first, and it's this ten-point text that I'd like to discuss - by which I mean deconstruct - here. Let us begin by looking at each point in turn, offering a brief response before building towards a critical overview of a text that functions as a public declaration of the Group's ideology. 

 

Ultimately, we are obliged to ask: does this text genuinely rally readers to radical action, or does it risk encouraging mere repetition of the same old inauthentic busyness [1] and the restless pursuit of novelty? 

 

II.

  

1. We at SIG News decree that the high-street purveyors of plainstream bad dreams dispense nothing more than tribal whorefare. A cavalcade of copycat caricatures and clone-clowns cascade across mediascapes devoid of depth and bereft of breadth.

 

Point 1 playfully, if somewhat aggressively, sets the tone: mock-authoritative, mock-confrontational, and mock-avant-garde, delivered with an over-reliance on alliteration and Situationist-style wordplay. 

 

Strip away the performative hostility, however, and it's a bog-standard critique of the Mainstream Media (MSM). It accuses the latter of lacking both substance and diversity whilst actively exploiting social divisions for profit (tribal whorefare), manufacturing systemic anxiety (bad dreams), and recycling formulaic content (copycat caricatures).

  

2. Scenes should be heard, not spread. 

 

Point 2 of the manifesto posits that for subcultures to remain authentic and flourish, they must foster local, organic connections through live performance, material publications (such as fanzines) and word-of-mouth, rather than engaging in global, digital dissemination. In line with subcultural theory, the statement also suggests that exposure via modern media causes rapid commodification and the loss of a scene's underground edge.

 

Ultimately, there's nothing virtual or viral about SIG News: it demands physical presence. Ironically, however, by demanding scenes remain localised, it inadvertently privileges those living in metropolitan cultural hubs whilst excluding the isolated, provincial outsider, i.e., the sort of poor sod stuck in the sticks or in some shitty seaside town that SIG often seems to champion.

  

 

3. Within the suffocating technological netweb 'DIY-bother' has become the despairing mantra of an autonomous muddleground desperate for something 'more'. 

 

Point 3 suggests that within a restrictive digital infrastructure, autonomous DIY culture has devolved into an exhausting, ineffective, and futile struggle - hence DIY-bother.

 

Whether we like it or not, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have successfully co-opted, neutralised, and commercialised creative independence, transforming the radical punk ethos of Do It Yourself into a neoliberal chore that demands constant content creation, algorithmic self-optimisation, and endless self-promotion.

 

Independent creators are left confused, isolated, and trapped on a digital muddleground - profoundly exhausted by the machinery of the burnout society [2], yet desperate for an authentic path forward that doesn't involve feeding the algorithm.

 

 

4. Be impossible, demand the unrealistic.

 

By reversing the famous Situationist slogan from May '68 - Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible - this point serves as an update appropriate to the age of capitalist realism [3]. It is a potent mix of defensive absurdism and revolutionary desire for alternatives in an era dominated by the mantra there is no alternative.

 

By becoming-impossible, one becomes capricious and unclassifiable and thus useless to systems that rely on reliable data and predictive modelling. By demanding the unrealistic, one asks for the very things that consumer capitalism cannot commodify or deliver: silence, secrecy, and stillness.

 

   

5. It is absolutely normal to be resolutely on the outside of anything and everything. 

 

Point 5 normalises and validates splendid isolation and magnificent marginalisation, asserting that refusing to belong to any mainstream group, trend, or digital network is a completely valid way to live. 

 

This position is arguably more countercultural than subcultural. For in actively rejecting anything and everything one acknowledges that even the most radical subcultural movements will eventually be compromised, co-opted, and commodified. 

 

However, in affirming such an extreme model of individualistic detachment, it becomes politically problematic for those of a more socialist persuasion who believe that it requires collective power (i.e., solidarity with others) to build lasting alternative structures.  

 

  

6. Inspiration + imagination x application = no sweat.

 

Quite possibly, this is the point I dislike the most. It reads like an uninspired motivational slogan dreamed up by some corporation trying to sound knowledgeable about the creative process. Ironically, it undermines SIG's own depiction of cultural production as involving a good deal of sweat (not to mention blood and tears). Only artificially intelligent machines don't sweat.   

 

If I were to be generous, I might accept that the author of this manifesto is attempting to subvert the capitalist no pain, no gain work mantra. In other words, they might be trying to say that when one is genuinely inspired, creative work ceases to feel like alienated, exhausting labour. 

 

However, by dressing this concept up as a reductive, pseudo-logical mathematical formula they have ended up producing a trite, neoliberal slogan that completely devalues the demanding reality of artistic practice.

 

 

7. Omniformed existences expire with no trace. A feast of spectres amasses. 

 

Jesus! Point 7 reads like gothic poetry as much as cultural theory. Nevertheless, the warning here is stark: if you allow yourself to be shaped entirely by the Matrix, your life will leave no lasting legacy; you will expire with no trace and the world will become haunted by the ghosts of mass-produced human entities who failed to realise their potential or blossom as individuals.

 

Put another way, it's arguing that total conformity leads to a form of spiritual and cultural death and what Mark Fisher would term lost futures.  

 

 

8. Humanarchism is the logical evolutionary step away from total disconnection towards renewed social connection. Unplug, turn off, conjoin in. 

 

Is humanarchism a SIG neologism? At any rate, it's a new word to me; a portmanteau blending humanism and anarchism which suggests that in order to survive the isolating effects of modern digital life, society must evolve a new philosophy that rejects technological control in favour of autonomous (and essentially analogue) human community. 

 

There's no point (and no fun) in being connected to networks if we are physically out of touch not only with other people, but with animals, plants, and objects. We need a form of libidinal materialism born of desire, not merely a new idealism. 

 

Unfortunately, whilst I approve of the necessary update to (and inversion of) Timothy Leary's famous countercultural mantra, I'm not sure humanarchism is the best term for this new philosophy. 

 

Also, one must ask how realistic is this as a solution; by simply instructing people to unplug and turn off the SIG manifestoists assume people can easily walk away from the digital infrastructures that control their jobs, bank accounts, and daily communication and make a nostalgic return to pre-internet socialising [4]. 

 

 

9. Renounce the over-the-counterculture. Spurn the splendour-vendors and venal frontiers. Difference is natural indifference.

 

I like that last sentence: Difference is natural indifference (even if, obviously, I think indifference is a highly stylised pose born of stoicism and dandyism and has nothing natural about it). Indifference, along with several other 'I' terms - irony, insouciance, insincerity - is one of my watchwords here on Torpedo the Ark (TTA). 

 

The starry individual does not care about being noticed or need to be validated. They are secure in their own distinctiveness and completely indifferent to mainstream trends, social media metrics, or corporate attempts to categorise them - and, as the rest of the point makes clear, they have renounced the over-the-counterculture too which all-too-often means pseudo-rebellion and commercialised bullshit sold by splendour-vendors (i.e., hucksters working in the advertising business or those in marketing who wish to build and promote brands).    

 

Of course, again, this sounds good - but it involves the same naive romanticism as we have encountered already; just because you choose to ignore the Matrix it doesn't mean you are outside of it; in capitalist reality, modern data tracking doesn't care if you are indifferent to it; the system still tracks your habits and monetises your lifestyle; it might frame your structural isolation and indifference, for example, as the adoption of a zen attitude (Would you like to buy a yoga mat?)   

  

 

10. Fashion is no more than a fleeting fad. Follow nothing except your shadow. Go forth and amplify. 

 

The SIG Manifesto ends with a tripartite series of slogans intended, one assumes, to inspire readers and incite them to acts of defiant rebellion. 

 

The third - Go forth and amplify - is simply a play on the biblical injunction given initially by God to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28) and then later repeated to Noah and his sons (Genesis 9: 7). I suppose it's encouraging us to find our own voices and to speak up (so is again at odds with the ethos of silence and shutting the fuck up promoted on TTA). 

 

The first sentence - Fashion is no more than a fleeting fad - is one that I'm astonished to see in a manifesto born of a university which includes the London College of Fashion as one of its six constituent colleges. Also, as the author of Philosophy on the Catwalk (2011), I am very much of the view that in fashion we can discover "all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been" [5].

 

As for the fleeting character of fashion - or what we might term after Barthes the logic of fashion - isn't that its beauty and philosophical importance? Lars Svendsen is spot on when he writes: 

 

"Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." [6] 

 

This is why, one might suggest, the most interesting writings on fashion have tended to come from our poets and novelists; for "they alone are sufficiently free from its perceived triviality" [7]. 

  

As for the second sentence ... ironically, despite speaking of shadows, it's another essentialist injunction; for it is saying, is it not, be completely self-reliant and look only to your own true self for direction. One of the problems, however, is that Baudrillard powerfully illustrated how in an obscene hyperreal world and an era of total transparency, we have no shadows!  

 

So that's another issue - one of many - for the signatories of the SIG Manifesto to address ...

 

 

III.    

 

We are told to memorise the ten-point SIG Manifesto and ignore it at our peril. 

 

Obviously, this is said humorously - but, somehow, the text doesn't leave us smiling and I suspect that's because it functions primarily as an academic pastiche rather than a viable blueprint for contemporary cultural resistance. 

 

Whilst it accurately diagnoses the exhaustion inherent in a hyper-commodified digital landscape, its structural utility is limited by an outdated binary framework. It posits, for example, an enlightened avant-garde operating from an imaginary external position that ignores how modern capital functions through decentralized, participatory networks. 

 

Consequently, directives to unplug (Point 8) or remain on the Outside (Point 5) overlook the material reality that economic survival and communication are fundamentally embedded in digital infrastructure. Further, by framing resistance as a personal lifestyle choice, the manifesto risks falling into bourgeois individualism and what theorist Mark Fisher termed the privatisation of discontent, effectively atomising opposition rather than fostering collective solidarity.

 

Aesthetically, the wider SIG project draws heavily from historical precedents, specifically 1970s punk fanzines and 1990s culture jamming. The decision to print SIG News as a physical newspaper highlights a deliberate engagement with obsolete media forms, positioning the work closer to an archival art project than a contemporary subcultural critique. 

 

However, viewed through the lens of radical graphic design and visual history, the SIG Manifesto might be said to succeed on its own terms. For while it lacks a coherent political strategy for navigating an algorithmic mediascape and, theoretically, it has more holes than a proverbial piece of Swiss cheese, it functions effectively as a stylish conceptual provocation, illustrating the profound difficulty of offering meaningful resistance today. 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Heidegger terms this Geschäftigkeit - a key concept introduced in Sein und Zeit (1927) as a structural component of Dasein's everyday manner of existing; i.e., constantly occupied with the immediate tasks at hand and numerous daily distractions. 

      For Heidegger, this relentless busyness is a coping mechanism; one that allows us to avoid confronting the deeper questions of our existence, including our own mortality. It is closely connected to his concept of Verfallen, wherein the individual tumbles into superficiality and evaluates their life simply by how much they are doing, losing their authentic self in the process. 

 

[2] The phrase Müdigkeitsgesellschaft was used by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han as the title of an essay first published in German in 2010 (the English translation by Erik Butler was published by Stanford University Press in 2015). 

      It might be noted that the term literally translates as fatigue society, but the word burnout - coined in 1970 by the German-born American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to refer to a state of mental and physical exhaustion - arguably has greater contemporary resonance.     

      Readers who are interested can find a two-part post published on Torpedo the Ark back in November 2021 discussing Han's text: click here to access part one.  

 

[3] The phrase capitalist realism is, of course, forever associated with Mark Fisher; see his book of this title (Zero Books, 2009). The first of a three-part post written on this work published on Torpedo the Ark earlier this year can be accessed by clicking here. 

      In brief, capitalist realism refers to the fact that capitalism is more than an economic arrangement of society or a political ideology; that it has become a singular reality that is so all-encompassing that we mistake it for the natural order or inevitable way of the world. This, in turn, makes alternative models either unimaginable or seem foolish and utopian: 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' as Fisher famously puts it. 

  

[4] It must also be pointed out that in demanding that people gather and collaborate as what D. H. Lawrence would term a democracy of touch, point 8 is at odds with point 5 - remain a singular individual on the outside of everything.

 

[5] Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 57. 

      Admittedly, this novel derides those who would make of fashion the basis of all human experience, but, contrary to his own idealism, Carlyle is obliged to concede that clothes do play a crucial role in materially constituting the self.  

 

[6] Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons, (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.

 

[7] Roland Barthes, 'Language and Clothing', in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, (Berg, 2006), p. 21.  

 

Bigger Than Football: In Praise of the Norwegian Viking Row

Team captain Martin Ødegaard leads Norway's Viking Row 

after reaching the last sixteen of the 2026 FIFA World Cup 

 

 

I. 

 

First we had the Mexican Wave - originating in US sports arenas in the late 1970s and early 1980s [1], but which gained its name and came to the attention of the wider world during the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico.

 

Then we had the Icelandic Thunderclap - a synchronized chant that starts with a slow, deliberate clap paired with a shout of Huh! Growing progressively faster and more intense, it culminates in a thunderous roar (thus the name). 

 

Again, it's thanks to TV that it became universally associated with Iceland and their supporters during the UEFA Euro 2016 tournament (the one in which Iceland - the smallest nation ever to qualify - knocked out England to qualify for the quarter-finals). But just as the Mexican wave is actually American in origin, the thunderclap has its origins in Scotland; supporters of Motherwell having a very similar clap-chant routine.

  

Whilst the Mexican wave is essentially a bit of harmless fun which frequently serves to amuse spectators during a dull moment or a long stoppage in play, for Icelandic supporters the thunderclap has a spiritual dimension known as samheldni - a concept to do with cohesion and solidarity and which refers to the bond that keeps a people unified and strong. 

 

And now we have the Norwegian Viking Row - a synchronised action and chant performed by the Norwegian football team and their fans - which has become the viral phenomenon of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, capturing the imagination of millions of people around the world: click here. 

 

Commencing with the sound of a loud horn, it involves participants sitting as if in a longboat and - in unison to an accelerating drumbeat - drawing an imaginary oar through water while chanting Ro (no prizes for guessing what word this is the Norwegian spelling of). 

 

As Norway's star striker Erling Haaland said on Instagram alongside a clip of the squad rowing after their victory over the Ivory Coast (sending them into the last sixteen): This is bigger than football - and, as a matter of fact, I think it is - although what this means exactly is as yet unspoken. 

 

It may be something that was consciously devised (by school teacher Ole Frøystad), carefully choreographed, and massively promoted online, but, arguably, it taps into something ancient, authentic, and magical; just like the runic-style lettering and numbers used on the players' shirts [2].     

  

 

II. 

 

However, as Jon Henely points out in an article in today's Guardian, not everyone is impressed; "with some noting that the Vikings' reputation is primarily for looting, pillaging and general brutality" [3]. 

 

The novelist and Professor of English Janne Stigen Drangsholt, for example, used her column in Norway's leading newspaper to criticise what she perceived to be an unhealthy masculine aesthetic. 

 

This is really disappointing coming as it does from such an intelligent woman. It feels like a textbook manifestation of what the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher called the 'Vampire Castle' - a class of bourgeois critics who suck the joy and innocence out of solidarity, driven by a deep mistrust and contempt for anything invested with desire that arises from ordinary people [4].

 

To be that mistrustful of a collective ritual reveals the very issue Fisher diagnosed; an impulse to pathologise the longing of young, white working-class males to experience a sense of belonging and togetherness, reducing a harmless celebration to a toxic vibe. 

 

"Others", again to quote Henely, "have expressed concern about the use of Norse imagery, noting that in Scandinavia Norse symbolism is now associated with far-right, nationalist and neo-Nazi groups" [5] - and, somewhat amusingly, "Norway’s neighbours have complained that they were Vikings too" [6] and that they also once rowed long boats and wore the mandatory horned helmets, etc.

 

Po-faced Norse historians can't help pointing out what they term inaccuracies in another attempt to spoil the celebrations: As a matter of fact, the Vikings didn't do this and didn't wear that. Regardless of what these killjoys say, however, "the chant has won over many Norwegians, who have posted countless videos of themselves rowing" [7] and Norwegian members of parliament have not only dismissed criticism as absurd, they have taken part in a row themselves, organised by the speaker. 

 

It may, ultimately, be ersatz ethno-nationalism designed for a digital age, but it beats singing 'Wonderwall'.  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] On 15 November 1979, the wave originated at a National Hockey League game between the Colorado Rockies and Montreal Canadiens at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado. Credit for its invention is given to professional cheerleader Krazy George Henderson. 

      The earliest available video documentation of a wave, led by Henderson, was recorded on 15 October 1981, at a Major League Baseball game in Oakland, California. 

 

[2] Designed by Nike, the geometric, angular font draws heavily from the Elder Futhark, which is the oldest known runic alphabet used by the Norse and Germanic peoples. Runic fonts have seen numerous revivals over the years and were central to 18th century Scandinavian nationalism, 19th century Germanic occultism, and 20th century Norse paganism.  

 

[3] Jon Henley, '"Bigger than football": Norway fans' Viking row makes waves at World Cup', The Guardian (3 July 2026): click here. 

 

[4] See Mark Fisher, 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013), this important essay can be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 659-667.  

 

[5] Jon Henley, The Guardian (3 July 2026).

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Ibid.  

 

 

Congratulations to Maya Joint

Maya Joint 

(Aus WTA ranking 87) 

 

 

Congratulations to 20-year-old Australian tennis player Maya Joint for her victory yesterday at Wimbledon over the 44-year-old former champion Serena Williams, who was making her singles comeback after four years away from the game.  

 

Congratulations also to journalist Matthew Syed for writing the only honest assessment of the match in The Times this morning. It stood out against the rose-tinted commentary of other pundits who relied on lazy, predictable narratives mixing old-fashioned nostalgia with virtue-signalling sentimentality. 

 

Unsurprisingly, the BBC coverage was so painful it required the mute button. Nick Mullins, Tracy Austin, and John McEnroe fawned endlessly over Williams in the commentary box, whilst Clare Balding was her usual obsequious self in the studio.

 

If retired legends want to play the senior circuit and relive their past glories, that's fine by me. However, I don't wish to see them on Centre Court lapping up the adoration of the fans just for old time's sake or so that their children can see mom or pop in action.  

 

Joint's victory was not only a win for her; it was a victory for the future and for tennis.

 

  

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Five

Mark Fisher Haunted by the Spectre of 

Jean-François Lyotard Until the Very Last 

(SA/2026)

 

I.

 

Torpedophiles who have been following this series of posts on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire (2021) [a] will recall my surprise (and disappointment) that in Lecture Four he didn't take the opportunity to dive deep into Anti-Oedipus (1972), even whilst admitting that Deleuze and Guattari were the spectres that continued to haunt his thinking. 

 

Well, it is even more surprising in light of Fisher's decision to concern himself more with socio-historical writings rather than French theoretical texts, to find that Lecture Five is centred on Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) - a notoriously difficult and intense work that even the author eventually came to regard as his evil or nasty book [livre méchant] due to its aggressive rejection of the rigid moral, political, and theoretical frameworks of the political left - specifically Marxism - in favour of a chaotic celebration of accelerated desire [b]. 

 

Fisher obliging his students to engage with Lyotard having just lectured them on 1970s American labour history and countercultural idealism the week before, is like being taught to swim by someone who lets you paddle for a bit in the shallows near the shoreline before throwing you in the deep, shark-infested waters.  

 

 

II.  

 

Fisher begins by reading aloud a passage from Libidinal Economy in which Lyotard (ironically) suggests that English industrial workers actually enjoyed their subordination and the destruction of their bodies by the capitalist machine: 

 

"the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they [...] enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion  [...] in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity [...] enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs [...]" [c]  

 

While this pissed off many of his Marxist contemporaries, it is something that D. H. Lawrence had seriously explored in his fiction many years earlier. In Women in Love (1920), for example, he writes of how Gerald Crich reorganises the mines owned by his ailing father in line with the latest technology and modern work practices:

 

"Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method [...] the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heartbreaking in its mechanicalness.

      But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. [...] There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted [...] They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system [...] Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did." [d]  

 

That perfectly anticipates Lyotard and his politics of desire. It also explains why, personally, I didn't find anything terribly provocative in Lyotard's book back in the '90s (although a fair amount of material that simply perplexed or bored).     

    

 

III.  

 

The key takeaway from Lyotard is that there is no revolutionary outside to capitalism; no primitive societies or subversive regions. This, says Fisher, is the "relentless message" (182) of Libidinal Economy - it's a "scathing assault" (182) on those thinkers who believe otherwise and a slap in the face to those Leftists still romanticising May '68. 

 

Furthermore: Marxism itself (certainly in its Old Man guise) "is never done with the prosecution of the case against capital" (191). Consequently, the revolution is always deferred; there is no climax or consummation. Marxism is forever stuck at the level of critical foreplay.     

 

One might ask at this point why Fisher wants his students to consider Lyotard's nasty book - it seems to negate his own political project of acid communism. 

 

The answer is that Fisher uses Lyotard's pessimistic analysis - which is less a critique and more a diagnosis - to map the fatal flaw of the modern Left; i.e., its abandoning of the terrain of desire and its own retreat to a joyless, defensive moralism that is despised by the proletariat. 

 

Lyotard captures this with savage perfection in the following quoted by Fisher:  

 

"'You situate yourselves on [...] the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalised desires be totally ignored, forbidden [...] you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that!'" (204)

 

And, of course, the working class does suffer, but so too do they enjoy "'swallowing the shit of capital'" (203) - including its sausage pâtés - until fit to burst. 

 

Fisher sees the task of a postcapitalist politics of desire (acid communism) as countering this by building an alternative future that is ultimately more pleasurable than anything capital can offer; to oblige Marx to become the Little Girl at last ...   

  

 

IV. 

 

Bringing his lecture to a close, Fisher provides a convenient summary:

 

"I think, then, that the libidinal economy [...] is largely to do with [...] a kind of hatred of almost all existing left-wing models of what political transformation entails. [...] These [left-wing projects] are all inadequate and all for the same reason [...] in that they don't take the desire of the capitalised seriously. They reject it and [...] therefore keep re-inscribing moralism." (204)

 

It's not enough to understand Marx - you also need to understand the Marquis de Sade! Capitalism and desire are inseparable; capitalism is desire. Thus, we need to "throw aside a simple utilitarian model of desire" (205) - i.e., one in which we seek out pleasure and wish to avoid pain. To acknowledge that there's an intimate and complex relationship between these two things has a number of implications - not least for political theory. 

 

I have to say, I'm still not entirely sure how Fisher thinks his concept of acid communism shows the fly the way out of Lyotard's libidinal bottle. He accepts that desire is key and he doesn't moralise in the manner of many on the Left. But he rejects the idea that capitalism is totalising and absolute and insists there must be a tasty vegetarian alternative to capitalism's sausage pâtés (so to speak).

 

If only the collective consciousness of the People can be raised and expanded, so that new - psychedelic - desires can be produced and politically channelled ... And so we end up once more falling back on Fisher's favourite phrase - if only [e].      

 

 

V. 

 

 

Lecture V (5 December 2016) was to be the last that Fisher gave in his Postcapitalist Desire seminar series. 

 

Following his suicide on 13 January 2017, the remaining ten weeks of the course could obviously not go ahead as planned. Which is a shame, 'cos it would have been fun to hear what he had to say about technofeminism and cyberfeminism in week ten and interesting to discover also his thoughts on Nick Land's 'Machinic Desire' in week eleven. 

 

But there you go - no more miserable Monday mornings for him - and just a (boring) sixteen track playlist for the rest of us ... [f]  

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

[b] Originally published as Économie Libidinale in 1974, the work was translated into English by Iain Hamilton Grant and published by The Athlone Press (1993). 

      Lyotard wrote the book in an intentionally vulgar, violent, and quasi-pornographic style designed to outrage his Marxist contemporaries. Its most notorious provocation - which I examine in relation to the fiction of D. H. Lawrence in Section II - was the claim that the 19th-century proletariat derived a dark, masochistic pleasure from being physically consumed by the industrial machinery of capital. 

      Equally controversial was Lyotard's accelerationist insistence that all modern political systems (capitalist, socialist, or fascist) are ultimately fuelled by these exact same chaotic libidinal energies. 

 

[c] Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, quoted by Fisher in Postcapitalist Desire, p. 180.  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 230-231. 

      Sir Clifford Chatterley reforms his coal mines in a similar fashion to Gerald Crich in Lawrence's final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). I discussed all this in my PhD thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), completed in the philosophy department when Fisher and friends were raving about Lyotard and his Libidinal Economy but refused to engage with Lawrence's work, despite the fact that Lawrence had been named by Deleuze as one of the four great heirs to Spinoza and despite the fact that Nick Land was on my Graduate Progress Committee, so knew of what I was up to under the supervision of Keith Ansell-Pearson. I guess I simply wasn't cyberpunk enough for members of the CCRU.   

 

[e] See section VI of the post written on Lecture IV (published 28 June 2026) where I examine Fisher's overreliance on wishful thinking - If only things had gone differently in the '70s ... If only we could make X, Y, or Z happen in the future ... etc. - allowing his desires to heavily influence (if not actually determine) his political philosophy: click here. 

      His supporters will doubtless dispute this and refer to the concept of hyperstition - i.e., they'll insist that Fisher wasn't just engaging in wishful thinking, but attempting to produce real effects via theory-fictions that make themselves true; a speculative idea is introduced into culture, people believe it and change their material behaviour based on that belief, et voila! their actions physically construct a new (alternative) reality. 

       

[f] See Appendix Two: '"No More Miserable Monday Mornings" Tracklist' in Postcapitalist Desire, pp. 217-220.  

      Matt Colquhoun explains that the title refers to a post on k-punk (18 July 2015) and that the sixteen songs listed provide a "mode of consciousness-raising" (218) and have a tonic effect: 

      "Taken as a whole, [the playlist] auto-affects the brain into a state of joyful indignation [...] the freedoms these songs promise remain soulful, and this emboldened soul rattles the subjugated body out of its contemporary complacency" (219). 

        Unfortunately, for me, it's going to take more than a mix of pop, reggae, and disco to buy into Fisher's revolution; let's just say he has much broader taste in music than I do (and I would sooner stuff my ears with beeswax than listen to the sound of the Sleaford Mods).   

 

 

To read the four other posts in this series on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire published on Torpedo the Ark, please click here. 

 

  

Getting Straight to the Point: Reflections on the Sophie Cunningham/DeWanna Bonner Incident

 

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham pointing 

Photo by Grace Hollars / IndyStar (USA Today Network)

 

 

I. 

 

Formed by extending the arm, hand, and index finger, the gesture of pointing plays an important role within human non-verbal communication - as do other hand gestures, of course - although it by no means has a universal meaning. 

 

Thus, pointing - especially at other people - can be considered highly inappropriate in certain contexts and in many cultures; not only disrespectful, but rude and aggressive.

 

This seems to be because the extended finger is an accusatory gesture; one that makes people feel not only objectified and put on the spot, but blamed and shamed in some manner. And no one likes that; even those who are guilty of wrongdoing and deserve to be pointed out and pointed at. 

 

 

II. 

 

Whether that includes the professional basketball player DeWanna Bonner who was finger-pointed at for 22 seconds by opposing player - and now social media sensation - Sophie Cunningham, I don't know. 

 

Bonner certainly issued some choice words at Cunningham after a brief altercation involving Bonner and one of Cunningham's teammates (Caitlin Clark) in the 4th quarter of a game between Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury [1], but (as far as I understand) trash talk is an accepted, deeply ingrained part of the game in US basketball.

 

So whether she deserved to have Cunningham pointing at her - after foolishly making it clear how much she objected to being pointed at - for such a ridiculously prolonged period is debatable. However, what is not debatable is that the incident was hilarious (dumb, but hilarious!) [2] - and that Miss Cunningham is a true star of the internet age.

 

For as one might imagine, a countless number of memes have now been generated, including one (shown below) which gives us a glimpse of the celestial nature of a 29-year-old woman who has built a reputation as one of the WNBA's most fearless and competitive players, forever ready to stand up to her opponents on the one hand and stand up for her teammates on the other.   

 

D. H. Lawrence famously suggested in his late verses that aspects of divinity are revealed in the faces and forms of individuals when they are momentarily unaware of themselves in the moment. He calls this purity and it this quality which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes their flesh gleam with a kind of radiance and the bright flame of being [3].  

 

A lot of people hate (and fear) artificial intelligence, but seeing this AI generated meme arguably enables us to understand what Lawrence means ...  

  

Image of Sophie Cunningham giving us a glimpse

 of the goddess within her
 

 

Notes

 

[1] This game was played on 22 June 2026 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The Indiana Fever defeated the Phoenix Mercury by 86 points to 77.

      It might also be noted that Bonner and Cunningham have a complicated history as former teammates. Both played for the Fever during the 2025 season before Bonner abruptly left the team after just nine games. Cunningham later criticised Bonner on her podcast for failing to send a professional goodbye text to her teammates, establishing a deep-seated rivalry long before this game.

 

[2] To watch the incident on Instagram, click here. 

 

[3] For more on this idea and for references to the relevant poems by D. H. Lawrence, see the post titled 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021): click here. 

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Four

 

Image via the Acid Horizon 

YouTube channel [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Okay, Lecture Four of Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire [b] - 'Union Power and Soul Power' - a little bit of American labour history (do try and stay awake at the back). 

 

Have y'all done your preliminary reading since I published the post on Lecture Three, the key text being Jefferson Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010), particularly the chapter 'Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class' (pp. 23-75)?

 

Well, don't worry, neither have I; but I'm confident Fisher will bring us all up to speed ... [c]  

 

 

II.  

 

How does group consciousness practically develop in the historical moment? And what might we learn with reference to our own time?

 

These are the questions Fisher wishes to address here. Along with: why did it all fail; why was there no working class revolution in the US in the late 1960s / early '70s? 

 

Or to put it another way, why did Nixon win - and win big - in '72 and why have the neoliberal Right in the shape of the Republican Party continued to win, often with popular working-class support (think Reagan and Trump, for example)?   

 

I think the answer is pretty clear - though not one the Left will ever concede; as a rule, working class people do not like countercultural hippies and radical activists who want to destroy the American way of life - liberty, the pursuit of happiness, apple pie, etc. They don't want "unprecedented ferment" and "diverse leftism" (154). 

 

Some left-wing commentators say this makes certain elements of the working class reactionary and resentful (deplorable as Hillary Clinton would say). Today, young white working class males are invariably demonised as racist and misogynistic. 

 

To be fair to Fisher, however, he never bought into this. Indeed, he frequently pushed back against condescending stereotypes and rejected broad, pejorative characterisations - such as the term chav - arguing that left-leaning intellectuals needed to empathise a little more and moralise less [d]. 

 

Having said that, he does not deny working-class resentment as the "driving force of reaction" (156) in the 1970s and after, defining the term as "a form of anti-solidarity" and "anti-consciousness" (156) that keeps people divided.  

 

 

III.     

 

The idea that there's no class system now - that we're all either middle-class or, in Lawrence's view, one vast proletariat that has become quite literally robotic [e] - is interesting and worth looking at a little more closely. 

 

Technically speaking, Fisher is right that we can't all belong to the middle - "That is an impossible typology" (157). He's amused, however, by the doubleness of the idea: 

 

"It's both disavowing class at the same time as it's assuring the impossibility of completely overcoming it. Because if we're all in the middle class then, really, there is no such thing as class struggle anymore. But hold on! We're still talking about class [...] we still have to use the term class but in the very attempt to eliminate the concept." (157) 

 

That's true, I suppose, but doesn't really say a great deal and I feel as if Fisher has forgotten his Deleuze and Guattari from back in the day when Anti-Oedipus was his main point of reference. If one turns to the section titled 'Capitalist Representation' in chapter 4, one finds a detailed explanation of how a simple idea of class no longer cuts the conceptual mustard:

 

"That the State is entirely in the service of the so-called ruling class is an obvious practical fact, but a fact that does not reveal its theoretical foundation [...] from the viewpoint of the capitalist axiomatic there is only one class, a class with a universal vocation, the bourgeoisie. [...] This proposition contains something other than an ideological blindness or denial. Classes are the negative of castes and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been decoded." [f]

 

What I think that means is that there is no fundamental difference between the banker, the baker, and the candlestick maker; they are subjugated as functionaries into one and the same flow of capital. And ultimately, only the bourgeoisie remains as the decoding and decoded class. Deleuze and Guattari continue (and I'm quoting several paragraphs at some length here as it seems to me important): 

 

"The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters [...] But the bourgeois field of immanence [...] institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves [...] The bourgeois sets the example [...] more utterly enslaved than the lowest slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine." [g]  

 

"It will be said that there is nonetheless a class that rules and a class that is ruled [...] the distinction between the flow of financing and the flow of income in wages. But this is only partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two [...] and integrates them both in the continually expanded reproduction of its limits. So that the bourgeoisie is justified in saying, not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of its axiomatic: there is only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow [...] and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castes and the statuses [...]" [h]     

"In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it designates the 'negative' of codes, that implies there is only one class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere: it is between [...] the class and those who are outside the class [les hors-classe]. Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage its cogs and wheels. [...] If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos [...] at the level of decoding [and desire], in their basic antagonism at the level of the axiomatic [...] [i] 

 

 

IV.

 

Now, I've no idea why Fisher - who must know this material intimately - didn't bother to refer to it and discuss it with his students. By his own admission in week one, although not on the official reading list, Deleuze and Guattari remained the spectres behind the course - so why not summon them here?

 

Perhaps he simply felt it was time to move on with his thinking; to find more practical points of reference and prioritise different conceptual frameworks - more socio-historical and a little less theoretically sophisticated. 

 

In his late work, as he formulated his ideas around acid communism, Fisher seems keener to figure out the material reasons why the liberatory potential of the late-60s and early-70s collapsed rather than re-engage with the philosophical abstractions of poststructuralism. 

 

And so, if for strategic (and pragmatic) reasons only, Fisher remains committed to the idea of class: class struggle, class solidarity, and the raising of class consciousness - regardless of what Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari write [j]. 

 

Though Fisher also wants to tie class to other things, such as race and gender, and promote the possibility of "an intersectional class politics" (158). Class structures may no longer really exist thanks to the capitalist axiomatic doing away with all traditional social and cultural codes and forms, but it can be reproduced in order to create a little unity and solidarity. 

 

Ironically then, it's communism - not capitalism - that wants to keep class in place; for class "goes against the actual dominant tendencies" (159) of capitalism: to decodify and deterritorialise and to ensure all that is solid melts into air [k].     

  

 

V. 

The danger, of course, is if you bring class back - particularly in an intersectional form - you reify it and it becomes identitarian - that is to say, "defined not by its consciousness or by its agency but by particular identity characteristics that are prescribed to it" (160). 

 

Fisher wants class back in the picture. And he wants intersectionality. But he doesn't want identitarianism. The question is: can he have the first two things without the third today, when everyone is obsessed by identity politics? I doubt it. And he seems a little naive in hoping that people will see that class consciousness is all about working people recognising they share a common position and have common interests "in spite of whatever cultural, personal, subjective qualities"(161) they possess. 

 

For Fisher, it isn't that class is "more important than those other forms of identification or forms of struggle" (160), it's just that "when class is no longer there [...] the given picture is necessarily incomplete" (160) and everything is fatally distorted. 

 

But, for my next door neighbour, being a Muslim matters more - way more - than anything else; including acid communism. Fisher might say that this shows a concern only with his present and his past [l] - that my neighbour lacks a form of consciousness that is "different from identity" (165) and which is about the subject's future becoming as it has a transformative dimension and has hyperstitional effects. 

 

Unfortunately, my neighbour - newly arrived from Pakistan with his wife, parents, children, and brother - probably wouldn't understand wtf Fisher was talking about and would care even less. He just wants to extend his kitchen and perform his obligatory daily prayers (Salah - the second pillar of Islam). 

 

What is more, I suspect that if you were to ask him what needs to be done to resolve the crucial antagonisms that divide society he would doubtless argue for the imposition of Sharia - again, I'm pretty sure he'd not call for acid communism. 

  

 

VI. 

   

Fisher closes Lecture Four with a series of what ifs ... 

 

"What if "countervailing forces hadn't managed to assert themselves in the Seventies?" (170) What if a "new alliance of workers, the counterculture, etc., had come together in a sustained way?" (170) What if neoliberalism hadn't triumphed and everyone had demanded the abolition of work?    

  

To me, this is pretty desperate stuff - but Fisher feels these are some of the key questions of our age and which open up a vision of the future and a "potential route into postcapitalism" (170). 

 

Does anybody remember the scene in an episode of The Inbetweeners [S2/E3] when Will, exasperated by the views and behaviour of French exchange student Patrice, launches into an anti-French rant? Challenged by Simon on its racist content, Will exclaims: "He's made me racist!"

 

Well, that's kind of how I feel when reading Fisher at times: I don't want to be cynical - but he's made me cynical! 

 

"What if there was no 1973? What if there was no recession?" (170) What if we could turn back time and reverse the conditions of the late 1960s and early '70s into the current moment? Arrgh! So many hypotheticals on one page! 

 

Posing such questions is not a sign of resistance - more a sign of political hopelessness and philosophical exhaustion. Fisher has nothing else to say other than what if and nowhere else to go other than yesterday; no wonder he suddenly starts listening to The Beatles when all his troubles seemed so far away.   

 

 

VII. 

      

Actually, Fisher does have one additional point to make in Lecture Four - and it concerns aesthetics ... 

 

Fisher thinks that what carried the revolutionary forces along and sustained the necessary conditions for change was the counterculture; "and the counterculture the was primarily driven through music" (171). It was pop music - as much as politics - that offered the "vision of a liberated world" (171) [m]. 

 

As Dewey Finn taught his students at Horace Green: One great rock show can change the world! [n] 

 

Or as Fisher puts it, music feeds into the revolutionary struggle, man; and the revolutionary struggle feeds into the music, creating a "positive feedback loop" (171) and a "vector for the dynamics of transformation of the social world" (171) - which is nice, but nowhere as catchy and explains why his career as a Hollywood script writer never really took off. 

 

For Fisher, culture leads the way; "in lots of ways" (172) and the counterculture is "not just a counter-politics; it's a range of forms of cultural expression" (172) that allowed us "to imagine a completely transformed world" (173) in an act of performative anticipation. 

 

As Miss Brodie would say, in her best Edinburgh voice: For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. [o]   

 

But for those like me, made cynical - and yes, even a little irritated by Fisher's utopianism - this is just tiresome. Particularly as he knows as well as I do what happened: 

 

"It failed. It went wrong. There were moments of rupture. There were glimmers. There was a sense of something that could have been different. But it didn't work out that way." (172)

 

And rock 'n' roll rebellion - whether led by hippies wearing Afghan coats or punks in their leather jackets - was just as commodifiable as anything else.  

 

Nevertheless, we are, I suppose, encouraged to try again (for if at first you don't succeed ...) - to desire anew and find our mojo once more (or transformational libido as Fisher calls it). And that means turning to Jean-François Lyotard and falling back into French theory ... 

 

See you for Lecture Five ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This podcast from the Acid Archives - Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher (Full Episode) - was uploaded to the Acid Horizon YouTube channel in December 2022, but first put out in September 2020. Matt Colquhoun guest stars. Those who would like to listen can click here.  

 

[b] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this book will be given directly in the post.   

 

[c] Amusingly, when Fisher asked his class to share their responses to Cowie's book he was met with silence, which tells us either they were naturally reticent, or that quite a few of them hadn't read it either.   

 

[d] See, for example, his important essay 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013), which can be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 659-667. 

      I believe that Fisher got a lot of shit from some readers for this text, in which, amongst other things, he champions Russell Brand and sticks up for Owen Jones. It can be read online here. See also my post on Torpedo the Ark (30 Sept 2023) in which I discuss this essay. And readers who are interested might like to also check out Em Colquhoun's xenogothic website where they have mounted a spirited defence of the piece on several occasions. 

 

[e] In the second version of his final novel, Lawrence writes: 

      "There was no longer any such thing as class. The world was one vast proletariat. Everything else had gone. The true working class was gone, as much as the honourable bourgeoisie, or the proud aristocracy [...] a vast homogeneous proletariat made up the whole of humanity." 

      See The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 492.   

 

[f] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press Ltd., 1984), pp. 253-254.  

 

[g] Ibid., p. 254.  

 

[h] Ibid.

 

[i] Ibid., p. 255.

 

[j] Actually, Deleuze and Guattari would support him in this as a matter of praxis. The task, they write, of any revolutionary socialist movement is to organise a "bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes" and to both embody the idea of class interest in consciousness and actualise it in an organised political party "suited to the task of conquering the State apparatus" (Anti-Oedipus, 255). 

       

[k] This phrase - 'all that is solid melts into air' - is famously found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). 

      Funnily enough, this was Nietzsche's main gripe against capitalism too; that it made society and culture impossible. From his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), Nietzsche argued that capitalism undermined the 'internally sturdy and sensitive bonds' that existed between rulers and ruled in noble society. This essay can be found in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 176-186.

          Readers might like to note that I examined Nietzsche's critique of capitalism in my doctoral thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), written during the same late-90s period in the philosophy department from which Fisher himself emerged.

 

[l] Fisher says that if minority race and religious groups understand themselves only by the features which they already possess, this is a form of reification: "You are already what you identify with." (167)

      Unfortunately, it's not these features - as positive as they may be - that define a people as a revolutionary class: "It's their structural and antagonistic position and the potential for transformation that occurs once consciousness develops that makes them potentially revolutionary agents." (167) 

      This, I think, explains why it is the radical Left likes to flirt with Islamists and secure the Muslim vote; it sincerely believes that one day the Muslims will see that their best interests are not served by Muhammad but by Marx. It's a fantasy, of course, and - ironically, one might even say a form of false consciousness.   

 

[m] So you see, my remark about The Beatles with which I closed section VI wasn't just inserted to be humorous or to take a pop at Fisher for the sake of it.    

 

[n] As I'm sure most readers will know, this line is from the film School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003), starring Jack Black as Dewey Finn.  

 

[o] As I'm sure most readers will know, this is a line from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Macmillan, 1961).  

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three can be read here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: The Beatles, 'Revolution', B-side of 'Hey Jude', a single release from 1968: click here.

 

  

Earth Calling the Sophia Space Agency - An Alternative View by Jennifer Davis Taylor

Jennifer Davis Taylor and Melpomeni Kermanidou 

(Project Leader of the Sophia Space Agency)

 

 

Never let it be said that Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage alternative perspectives ... 

 

Here's a thoughtful response submitted by Jennifer Davis Taylor - an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who was present at the Sophia Space Agency audio event at Kings Place that I wrote about in a recent post: click here. 

She writes:  

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

Like you, I attended the launch of Melpomeni Kermanidou's debut album released under the name of the Sophia Space Agency, but I noticed entirely different things about both the staging and the spatial audio playback.

      

For me, the theatre space was defined by its intimacy - just right for twenty or thirty people. We weren't overcrowded. I liked the proportions of the room and the ratio of space to people because I didn't feel unnerved by the energy around me. The stage was bathed in blue light. The three empty chairs, with ferns interspersed between them, gave me a sense of anticipation. The eye masks we were handed at the door heightened this feeling for me. It felt as if there might be a party game, with some slight unpredictability that would enhance the fun. 

      

What initially strikes me about your post, Stephen, is that you understood the event as a scene before experiencing it as a playback. That feels right. Meni's white dress and boots were not incidental decoration; they communicated that the event was a kind of carnivalesque space - theatrical and operating slightly outside the normal rules of social interaction. Her appearance gave us permission to expect the unexpected. She appeared to have dressed not only for the event but for the imaginative space the work itself asked us to enter: retro-futuristic, feminine, controlled, luminous, slightly alien. Because she appeared after the playback, her appearance also felt like a validation of our varied internal imaginative responses to the experimental soundscape. 

      

The contrast of her appearance with the two men on stage may well have been a failure of individual sartorial taste. However, accidental as it may have been, I also found it to be an effective foil. Meni was easily able to hold the visual and conceptual field of the event almost by herself. At the same time, the men's presentation demonstrated an asymmetry of cultural permission. Male authority is often allowed to arrive uncomposed, rumpled, ordinary, even careless. Female artistry in dress, because it is more expected, also has a kind of privilege in public. Women are allowed to carry atmosphere, beauty, and coherence, even though they are also often expected to enact that symbolic labour. 

      

That imbalance became part of the performance, whether anyone intended it or not. The stage picture quietly exposed who is permitted to appear as an expert without adornment, who needs to dress up to be received as one, and what that dressing up costs. Meni's costume was beautiful. However, it also leaned into her identity as a performance artist rather than only as a musical innovator. I was reminded of Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, whose technological inventions anticipated later developments in wireless communications. Even today, that far more significant contribution remains overshadowed by her glamorous persona. In this case, had Meni not performed sartorially, she might not have carried the evening so successfully. Could she have appeared in rumpled clothes and smeared makeup? Would that have drawn more attention to her genius? I suspect not. 

 

Further to this, I was also interested in your argument about spatial audio producing a kind of cathedral effect: immersive, beautiful, technically pristine, but finally perhaps too complete. That seems to me the strongest critical idea in the post. The problem is not that the music is beautiful, or even that it is overwhelming. The problem is what happens when a work leaves no remainder - no gap, no exterior, no accidental birdsong, no human roughness through which the listener can breathe. 

      

While I was experiencing it, however, I wasn't disturbed by the rules of the space or by the idealistic premise. Perhaps this was because the experience was finite for me. I didn't worry about its implications as a large collective movement or as a mass vehicle for a set of values. The producers admitted that this style of music does not lend itself easily to mass consumption. The technological setup for enjoying it is prohibitive and inconvenient. Therefore, I could contemplate beauty and accept transcendence as a gift that Ms Kermanidou and Martyn Ware were trying to offer, without feeling that I had to buy into their idealism wholesale. 

      

More troubling, for me, was the clash between the themes of the work - planetary destruction - and the medium itself, which relies on cyberstorage and power centres that may also be environmentally harmful. Even though I was struck by that potential irony, I also saw how the music fulfilled some classic roles of art: to be of its time, to generate new forms, and to make visible the contradictions of the present.       

 

It was a rich and enjoyable experience that gave me a lot to think about. I learned a lot. I took away questions that will help me to be a better thinker and artist.

 

 

Notes

 

Jennifer Davis Taylor appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

 

As stated, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who holds a PhD from The Warburg Institute (University of London) and specializes in seventeenth-century French art and literature, women's studies, and material culture. 

      

Her forthcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault (Peter Lang), reframes Perrault not merely as a fairy tale author but as a theorist of design whose collaborative studio practice staged radical allegories of female agency.

 

Readers are encouraged to visit the website: jenniferdavistaylor.com for further information.