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.  

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Book Meme

 

Mark Fisher and three of his intellectual heroes: 

Messrs. Kafka, Spinoza, and Ballard 

 

 

I. 

 

It hardly seems appropriate to comment on Fisher's reading habits as, for the most part, I have never read the authors that seem to mean the most to him; Kafka, Spinoza, Margaret Atwood, et al.  

 

Well, I've read some Kafka and I value Deleuze and Guattari's study of Kafka in terms of a minor literature, but I've never made of him the "intimate and constant companion" [a] that Fisher makes of him. 

 

I don't know why that is - what does make us love certain writers and the books they produce over others? 

 

Barthes famously answers this question in terms of desire. We privilege those writers whose texts have a sensual appeal; their language and writing style causes a certain frisson resulting in an intense form of pleasure that he terms jouissance. To put it somewhat crudely: it ain't what they say, it's the way that they say it (that's what gets results). 

 

In other words, our preference for certain writers and certain books is subjective and sometimes even authors that we like and like a lot, fail to produce that je ne sais quoi that is required for us to really love them, as Fisher loves Kafka. 

 

And sometimes, even brilliant authors whom everyone insists we should love - such as Joyce, Dostoevsky, Burroughs and Beckett - either leave us cold or rub us up the wrong way. 

 

 

II.           

 

Fisher says that reading a really great work of philosophy - he names Spinoza's Ethics - "is like running a Videodrome cassette: you think you are playing it, but it ends up playing you, effecting a gradual mutation of the way you think and perceive" (25).

 

And that's true, of course. Which is why philosophy is a dangerously perverse practice and why the Athenians were not wrong to charge Socrates with corrupting the youth.

 

Interestingly, Spinoza gave the Nazis a particular headache; as a Jewish philosopher, his works were viewed as un-German and so many of his books were confiscated and banned - but they just couldn't bring themselves to burn them, acknowledging the praise given to Spinoza by great figures in German cultural life including Goethe and Nietzsche. 

 

Having ordered the seizure of a valuable collection of his books from the Spinoza Museum in Amsterdam in 1942, Alfred Rosenberg determined to solve the Spinoza problem by reconciling the philosopher's genius with Nazi ideology - unaware of what Fisher calls the Videodrome effect.      

 

 

III. 

 

J. G. Ballard is an author that Fisher and I share knowledge of and love for, although I value his better-known novel Crash (1973) over his earlier (more experimental) text The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). 

 

That's because I require a little more in the way of plot and character development than Fisher, betraying the fact that I have a background in English literature rather than theory and doubtless making me a bourgeois romantic in the eyes of some.    

 

Still, despite my more conventional character, I agree with Fisher that Ballard helped rescue us from "decent humanist certainties and Sunday supplement sleepiness" (26) and, obviously, that's one of the reasons to admire him.   

 

 

IV.

 

I still find it a little surprising that punk scholar Russ Bestley doesn't much care for Greil Marcus's secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces (1989); describing the study as "deeply flawed - and unfathomably influential" [b] and a largely failed attempt to "make connections between the Sex Pistols, Dada, Surrealism and the philosophies of much earlier political agitators" [c]. 

 

That might be true, but it's often the case that we learn more from such failed attempts to form rhizomatic connections than we do from successful, self-contained books based on arborescent models that are proud of their own organic interiority, etc.  

 

And so, I agree with Fisher that the work's "vast web of connections opened up an escape route" (26) and brilliantly made the point that pop music "can only have any significance when it [...] reverberates with a politics that has nothing to do with capitalist parliamentarianism and a philosophy that has nothing to do with the academy" (26). 

 

It's not perfect by any means, but it largely succeeds in registering the impact and importance of punk - particularly the Sex Pistols - which is why, I suppose, Malcolm McLaren was always a big fan of the book.   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, 'book meme' (20/06/2005), in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 24. All future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post. 

 

[b] Russ Bestley, Turning Revolt Into Style, (Manchester University Press, 2025), p. 13. I discuss Bestley's book at length in several posts previously published on TTA: click here.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 57. 

 

 

This is one of several planned posts in the 'Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk' series: click 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. 

 

On Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (Another Post in Response to Simon Solomon)

Image: Marian S. Carson Collection 

at the Library of Congress

 

 

I. 

A common form of corporal punishment for boys and junior officers in the British navy was being bent over the breech of a cannon in order to be caned or whipped on their exposed buttocks. This practice - painful, but not disabling - was euphemistically known as kissing (or marrying) the gunner's daughter and Adam Ant once wrote a song alluding to it [1].

 

II. 

I thought of this when Simon Solomon recently admonished me for providing an 'unsourced reference taken from the heavily doctored Will to Power and as such non-canonical' [2]. 

It wasn't so much that I felt I was about to receive a light beating, but I did feel I was being tied to Nietzsche's canon - i.e., those works which were written and published by him in his lifetime [3] - and forced to pledge love and loyalty only to his authorised books.

And I have to confess that, just like Captain Renault, I was shocked - shocked I tells ya! - to be reprimanded by Herr Solomon of all people; an independent scholar whose reading of Hölderlin in terms of schizopoetics and things that go bump in the night [4] is unorthodox to say the least. 

Indeed, some - including those of a more Swalesian mindset - might even describe it as heterodox, i.e., a work that not only deviates from older, more conventional readings, but wilfully perverts them. By his own confession, Solomon's passionate appreciation (and translation) of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin involved fucking the latter up the arse in order to produce some kind of monstrous offspring [5].      

 

So, for Simon to invoke the canon and insist that I play by the academic rules and show my obedience to (and conformity with) the law that governs what is and is not an acceptable text, is, I think, a bit rich.  

III. 

Having said that, I accept that there are seminal texts - i.e., works which are highly influential and possibly lay the foundation for future study - but I'd not even call these texts canonical (and what is seminal work for me - such as Sade's La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), is merely a white stain on the history of French literature for others).  

 

Ultimately, to invoke the canon and wish to uphold it, is to give support to those texts which, as Barthes would say, come from culture and do not break with it; texts which are linked to "a comfortable practice of reading" [6]; texts which have authority and have achieved the status of timeless classics; texts which are meant to contain eternal truths.

As a white European heterosexual male, I'm not obsessed with deconstructing, decolonising, expanding, or queering the canon; I simply don't wish to be strapped to it and thrashed by those who think I should show a little more respect to the Political Father.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adam Ant, 'Marrying the Gunner's Daughter', from the album Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (Blueblack Hussar Records, 2013). Not one of his best songs, but click here if you fancy giving it a listen.  

 

[2] See Solomon's comment dated 27 November 2025 and posted at 17:14:00 on Torpedo the Ark in response to a post titled 'On (Not) Taking a Stand' - click here. And see note 3 below for why Solomon is right to be wary of material extracted from The Will to Power.  

 

[3] Ecce Homo can also be included as part of Nietzsche's canon; for whilst it was published posthumously in 1908, he had completed writing it in 1888. 

      However, the book of notes assembled from Nietzsche's Nachlaß (i.e., literary remains) by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche working in editorial collaboration with his friend Peter Gast and titled Der Wille zur Macht (1901) is an entirely different kettle of fish and references to this work should be treated with a certain amount of caution. 

      His sister's claims that this was the magnum opus Nietzsche had hoped and planned to write can certainly be dismissed and some Nietzsche scholars have gone as far as to describe it as essentially a philosophical forgery. Nevertheless, the significantly expanded second edition containing 1,067 sections (1906) has been translated into English - most famously by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910 for the edition of Nietzsche's works edited by Oscar Levy and by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in 1968 - and the book remains one often consulted by readers of Nietzsche (albeit a non-canonical text as Solomon says).

      Readers who would like to know more about the publication history of Nietzsche's work might like to see William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (University of Chicago Press, 1996). 

 

[4] See Solomon's 2020 book Hölderlin's Poltergeists: A Drama for Voices, published under the Irish spelling of his name as Síomón Solomon (Peter Lang, 2020). I have written extensively on this book on Torpedo the Ark: click here.   

 

[5] In the book cited above, Solomon writes enthusiastically of what he describes as Deleuze's bum banditry, a reference to the way in which the latter liked to approach certain other thinkers from behind and below. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6.  

[6] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 14.

      Like Barthes, I prefer texts that discomfort and impose a state of loss; texts which unsettle "the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories" and bring to a crisis our relation with language itself (texts a bit like Nietzsche's, in fact - including his non-canonical writings).   

 

 

Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale

Hi, my name is Pete, 

and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]  

 

 

I. 

 

Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ... 

 

For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay. 

 

We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000. 

 

So we have some things in common. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration. 

 

And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day. 

 

As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse! 

 

III. 

 

Two confessions: 

 

Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects. 

 

It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7]. 

 

Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either. 

 

That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism. 

 

What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here. 

      For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 

      As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above. 

      In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what. 

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35. 

 

[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny. 

      Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website. 

 

[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse. 

      For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here. 

 

[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here. 

 

[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history. 

      As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits. 

      One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.