Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 1: Introduction and Prologue

Simon Reynolds: Retromania

Faber and Faber (2012) 

 

 

I. 

 

This year marks the 15th anniversary of Simon Reynolds's celebrated book on pop culture's addiction to its own recent past: Retromania. 

 

So that seems like a good excuse to dust off my trusty yellow paperback edition [a] and reread its 450-odd pages divided into three main sections - the first two given the Savilesque titles 'Now' and 'Then' and the third designated 'Tomorrow' which, I suppose, is now our present - reassessing its arguments as I go along.   

 

Let's begin, however, by discussing the book's front matter: an Introduction that poses the crucial question: "Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is ... its past?" [ix]; followed by a Prologue which considers the concepts nostalgia and retro which are central to the study. 

 

 

II. 

 

I've always loved this opening sentence: "We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration." [ix] 

 

For whilst some younger readers might consider it inappropriate to casually use terms referring to mental health issues in such a jocular manner, I admire Reynolds's light-hearted writing style and do not believe for one moment that he's an ableist (though he does seem to also have a liking for the slang term lame, which is regrettable).

 

Like me, Reynolds belongs to another (perhaps less sensitive and politically less correct) generation; one that studied T. S. Eliot at school and so produces sentences such as "This is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set ..." [ix] in an attempt to be amusing, not intellectually intimidating or elitist.

 

Still, we're here to discuss pop's loss of dynamic energy and temporal sluggishness, not Gen Z's wokeness and the shift in linguistic standards since 2011, so let's push on ...

 

It's hard not to agree with this:

 

"Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be [...] dominated by the 're-' prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments." [xi]

 

Or this:

 

"Too often with new young bands, beneath their taut skin and rosy cheeks you could detect the sagging grey flesh of old ideas." [xi]

 

And I suppose I understand (though don't quite share) Reynolds's (quasi-Nietzschean) anxiety about the "uses and abuses of the pop past" [xiii] and the way in which retro has become democratised and mainstream. For these days anyone can play with the past and dip into the historical dress-up box, whereas retro used to be the "preserve of aesthetes, connoisseurs and collectors" [xii], i.e., individuals who self-consciously expressed themselves "through pastiche and citation [...] combined with a sharp sense of irony" [xii-xiii].  

   

Reynolds is not quite saying that it's okay for wealthy, well-educated people to go in for period stylisation and antiquarianism, but unhealthy for the hoi polloi to be fascinated by the "fashions, fads, sounds and stars" [xiv] of their own youth, but he appears to regard retromania as a form of digital decadence leading us to the abyss. 

 

It feels, he says, "like we've reached some kind of tipping point" [xiv] and face cultural catastrophe; not just the end of pop music, but innovative new work in other areas too, such as theatre, film and fashion. Even toys and games and food fads are now retro: "But strangest of all is the demand for retro porn"

[xviii] [b].

 

Is that really so strange though? And is retro-consciousness really so wrong or harmful? 

 

I mentioned the almost Nietzschean feel to Reynolds's argument that pop music ought to be all about the present - that "the essence of pop is the exhortation to 'be here now', meaning both 'live like there's no tomorrow' and 'shed the shackles of yesterday'" [xix] - and this really does echo the German philosopher's insistence that history must serve the needs of life (with the latter understood to be creative, vigorous action in the present) [c]. 

 

Nietzsche's warning that an excess of historical knowledge can produce historisches Fieber and that this can paralyse individuals and cultures, is pretty much what Reynolds is warning of retromania. I suppose that this is why it's so vital that we have the capacity to forget. But in the era of YouTube - which he discusses in chapter 2 of his book - how can we ever do that? 

 

As Reynolds notes:   

 

"All the sound and imagery and information that used to cost money and physical effort to obtain is available for free [...] We've become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data." [xx-xxi]

 

 

I can't recall if Nietzsche blames any group of people in particular for the oversaturation of 19th century life with history - I think he holds the education system and German culture collectively responsible - but I do know Reynolds blames hipsters for inculcating retromania as the "dominant sensibility and creative paradigm" [xix] in the early 21st century: 

 

"The very people who you would once have expected to produce (as artists) or champion (as consumers) the non-traditional and the groundbreaking - that's the group who are most addicted to the past." [xix-xx]

 

 

After all, why be cutting-edge, when you can just press the replay button; why be a creator, when you can be a curator? "The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde" [xx] - for it's so much less demanding to fall back into the safety of the past than step forward into an unknown future.  

    

All this being said, Reynolds now adds an important qualification (and makes a necessary confession): 

 

"Retromania is not a straightforward denunciation of retro as a manifestation of cultural regression or decadence. How could it be, when I'm complicit myself [...] as a historian, as a reviewer of reissues, as a talking head in rock documentaries and as a sleeve note writer." [xxi]

 

Indeed, even as a music fan, he's complicit and as "addicted to retrospection as anybody" [xxii] - however, and this is why Reynolds can be characterised as a romantic optimist at heart - as much as he gives in to the "lure of the past", he pines (Mark Fisher-like) for "the future that's gone AWOL" [xxii]. 

 

In other words, Reynolds still believes that mañana es otro día ... If only because, deep down, he feels that retro is ultimately "lame and shameful" [xxiii] - the kind of informal moralism that his readers have come to anticipate. 

  

 

III.

 

Does anyone else find it a little odd (and a little unnecessary) to follow an introduction with a prologue in a work of non-fiction? Still, I'm not complaining; if Mr Reynolds wishes to further set the scene, define terms, and provide a little more (political and philosophical) context to his study, then that's fine with me.

 

His brief history of nostalgia as word and concept - starting as a spatial-geographical condition (the ache of displacement) before becoming a temporal condition (the longing for a lost time) - is certainly appreciated [d] and Reynolds is right to remind his readers that nostalgia "hasn't always served the forces of conservatism" [xxvi]; that radical movements often dream too of restoring a golden age.

 

But let's get back to the world of pop and one of the key passages in the Prologue:

 

"In the second half of the twentieth century, nostalgia became steadily more and more bound up with popular culture [... and] is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer-entertainment complex: we feel pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up our youth. Eclipsing individual pursuits (like hobbies) or participatory local activities (like amateur sports), the mass media and pop culture take up an ever-increasing proportion of our mental lives." [xxix-xxx] 

Memory, in other words, is now colonised and exploited by capitalism as a resource and the past is mined (rather than idealised or revered) as a source of pleasure and profit. It's not just pop that eats itself, we too cannibalise and consume our own lives; the symbol of retromania is surely the ouroboros (the serpent which swallows its own tail). 

 

But where does the term retro come from? Reynolds dismisses the idea that it's a linguistic spin-off of the Space Age and its retro-rockets and suggests, rather, that it is merely a detached prefix. He also stresses that for most people it's something of a dirty word; too associated with "camp, irony and mere trendiness" [xxxii]. 

I'm not quite sure why these things are thought more negatively than "musty, mouldering old stuff" [xxxii], but guess Reynolds is probably right to say that they signify "a shallow, surface-oriented attunement to style, as opposed to a deep, passionate love of a music scene's essence" [xxxii]. 

 

But that's precisely why, despite sharing some concerns, I would choose retro pop over prog rock and prefer to hang out at 430 King's Road rather than Louis Balfour's Jazz Club. Ultimately, this means rejecting even the austere monarchy of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and privileging The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in all its anarchic eclecticism [e].  

 

I suppose what I'm admitting here is that I prefer fashion, ideas, images, and chaos over music (be it recorded and played on the radio or performed live by the actual musicians), whilst strongly suspecting that Reynolds loves music above all other art forms and, indeed, all other things [f]. Which is fine: but it's where he and I differ and one can't help wondering if, in fact, retro isn't a moral and cultural danger, but a valid aesthetic form of its own ...? 

 

Notes

 

[a] All page references given in the main text are to this edition. 

 

[b] See the post: 'On the Pleasure of Queer Nostalgia' (3 April 2015): click here. 

 

[c] See Nietzsche's essay 'On the uses and disadvantages of history for life', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57-123. See also Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), a work cited by Reynolds - see the long footnote in bold on pp. 26-28.   

 

[d] I'm particularly grateful for the reference to Svetlana Boym's work on reflective nostalgia versus restorative nostalgia, in The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2002).  

 

[e] Reynolds makes much the same point I'm trying to make, but refers to the schism in the British folk scene between purists and those who are rather less militant in their asceticism; see pp. xxxiii-xxxv.    

 

[f] In an interview from way back in 2006, Reynolds attempts to explain why he has devoted so much of his time and energy to writing about music and taking music seriously (as opposed to literature or film). Partly, he says, it's because rock music was the most powerful cultural force when he was a teenager and partly it's because he believes music to be the most democratic art form. Also, there's something almost magical about music: 

      "It meshed with everything. It connected to politics, it connected to all the other arts [...] Music was [...] the thing that gave a bit extra to whatever you were doing and you wanted to have some connection to it. [...] Music was definitely both the centre of everything and what took you to other things and connected you to other things. [...] But, to me, music was the only thing really worth being excited about."

      See 'Simon Reynolds: interview by Wilson Neate', Part 1 of 2 (Feb 2006), in the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever: click here.     

 

 

To read part 2 of this post on Retromania, please click here. 

 

To read part 3, click here. 

 

Parts 4 and 5 will follow in due course ...

Reflections on the Ghost of Vivienne Westwood

Walking down the King's Road, one encounters many ghosts but I was still rather taken aback by the spectral image of Vivienne Westwood rising up before me: 

 

 

Vivienne Westwood by Invader (2024)  

 

Known for his ceramic tile mosaics based on the pixelated art of early 8-bit video games, the French street artist Invader [1] has created a spooky posthumous portrait of the iconic British fashion designer wearing a version of the Destroy shirt created in collaboration with her partner Malcolm McLaren. 

 

Readers familiar with the photo taken at Seditionaries upon which the portrait is based, will note how an alien figure has replaced the swastika and inverted crucifix of the original design:

 

 

Vivienne Westwood by Norma Moriceau (1977)

 

 

On entering the tiny store based at 430 King's Road - forever preserved in its final incarnation as Worlds End - one can't help but remember the dead: not just Vivienne, but Malcolm, Jordan, Sid, Debbie Wilson, Tracie O'Keefe ... et al.  

 

And one can't help wondering if there are ways of being haunted by the past which are vital and allow for a critical nostalgia which troubles the present and enables us to live yesterday tomorrow. 

 

To paraphrase Heidegger, mayn't it be the case that only a ghost can save us now ...? [2]

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Invader is a pseudonymous French street artist whose work can be found in major cities in numerous countries around the world, often in culturally and/or historically significant sites, although Paris remains the primary location for his work. 

      Often deriving inspiration from the video games he loved to play when growing up in the 1970s and '80s - Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario, etc. - he often publishes books (and maps) to accompany his installations (or 'invasions' as he calls them). 

      As one might imagine, like Banksy his works have attracted the attention of wealthy collectors and have sometimes been stolen to order off of the walls upon which they were installed (something he has tried to counteract by selecting sites that are more difficult to reach and creating larger works with more delicate tiles that cannot be removed without damaging the piece). When legitimaely sold in galleries, his work can fetch six-figure sums. 

      Shepard Fairey, again as one might imagine, was an early admirer, writing: 

      "Invader's pop art may seem shallow, but by taking the risk of illegally re-contextualizing video game characters in an urban environment that provides more chaotic social interaction than a gamer's bedroom, he makes a statement about the desensitizing nature of video games and consumer culture. In a postmodern paradox, a game like Grand Theft Auto takes the danger of the streets and puts it in a safe video game, while Invader takes a safe video game icon and inserts it into the danger of the streets." See Shepard Fairy, 'Space Invader', Swindle magazine, No. 3, 2004.

 

[2] Heidegger's famous statement - Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten - appeared in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. 

      Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal savior, anymore than by my use of ther term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. Like Heidegger, I'm calling upon an event outside of human control that triggers a radical and transformative cultural shift that allows for a new revealing or mode of being; or, like Mark Fisher in his hauntological writings, I'm referring to a manifestation of a lost future or a potentiality that has not been actualised.  

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.  

      See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2022) - a work on which I published a three part post in November 2023: click here for part one on lost futures and here for part three on hauntology.   

 

In Defence of Torpedo the Ark

Torpedo the Ouroboros (SA/2026) 

 

 

I. 

 

It didn't take long into the New Year before a familiar critique resurfaced (from a familiar source): 

 

I've noticed how an increasing number of posts on Torpedo the Ark rely upon the recycling of extant material and fear that, if you are not careful, then you will end up like the snake that swallows its own tail - a symbol which might mean different things within various esoteric traditions, but by which I refer to an author unable to generate original insights and so engaging in an act of self-cannibalism, allowing a once excellent blog to become trapped in a doom loop of nostalgia and pastiche. [1]

 

 

 

II. 

 

I don't know if that's a fair criticism to make: it's certainly not entirely accurate. For one thing, my critic mistakes the vital process of autophagy for the pathological condition of autosarcophagy. 

 

Unlike the latter, which is often linked to severe mental and cultural disorder [2], the former is a highly regulated process necessary for good health and hygiene (homeostasis); a bit like dreaming, whereby the mind preserves order by purging psychic detritus during sleep [3].

 

Obviously, TTA refers on occasion to its own history and, yes, there is a strong degree of thematic recurrence as I return to established areas of interest and favoured authors and this may create a sense of circularity. Nevertheless, I like to think that when I reimagine and recontextualise old ideas and images, I do so in an active manner and in a way that does not risk my becoming-Ouroboros [4].

 

Ultimately, what is a doom loop of nostalgia and pastiche to one man is the laughter of genius to another and my temporal objective has always been to challenge the idea of time as a straightline that leads from the past into the present and thence into the future and any recycling is part of this deconstructive strategy rather than a sign of intellectual fatigue. 

 

Those who accuse TTA of idealising the past or furthering what Mark Fisher described as the slow cancellation of the future [5] have, I'm afraid, missed the point.             

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Extract from an email I received this morning (2 Jan 2026) from a correspondent happy to be quoted, but who wishes not to be identified. 

 

[2] Those interested in autocannibalism as a cultural phenomenon, may like to see Jean Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal, trans. Chris Turner (Seagull Books, 2010), in which an analysis is given of the West's fatal penchant for consuming and absorbing its own values and histories (and not only those of other peoples). 

 

[3] I'm taking the Lawrentian position put forward in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). See the post 'Sleep and Dreams' (6 Feb 2015): click here. 

 

[4] Like D. H. Lawrence, I'm not a fan of 'him with his tail in his mouth' - see the post dated 16 August, 2016: click here.  

 

[5] See the section on this idea in Fisher's Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2014). I published a three-part post on this work back in November 2023: click here to access the first part on 'Lost Futures'.  

 

 

The Slop-ification of Literature: One Night at the UnHerd Club

Poster for 'The slop-ification of literature' with James Marriott, Ed West, 

and Kathleen Stock at the UnHerd Club (London, 8 Dec 2025)

 

 

I. 

 

Located along a 'beautiful side street in London's Westminster', the UnHerd Club is a place where 'intelligent people can come together to talk freely and without fear of retribution'. 

 

In other words, it's a members' club based in one of the wealthiest parts of Town, with a cosy bar and a large library where they hold discussions and debates, lectures, and seminars, or interview well-known authors keen to promote a new book.

 

My friend cynically described it as:  

 

A posh talking shop above a posh restaurant intended to attract the kind of conceited middle class individuals who, laughably, like to imagine themselves part of a persecuted minority for having dared to separate themselves from the semi-literate masses.     

 

Perhaps that's a bit unfair - but it's not far wide of the mark (the clue is in the very name of the club).  

 

II. 

 

Despite my friend's less than favourable impression of the UnHerd Club, he invited me along on Monday to a talk entitled 'The slop-ification of literature', featuring three speakers: 

 

(i) James Marriott, a Times columnist who writes on society, culture and ideas. Before joining the paper he worked in the rare book trade. He is also the author of a weekly newsletter published on Substack: Cultural Capital.

 

(ii) Ed West, an author, journalist and blogger, who has worked as the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He frequently posts work on his Substack, amusingly called Wrong Side of History.      

 

(iii) Kathleen Stock (OBE), is a British philosopher and writer, whose research interests include aesthetics, fiction, and sexual politics. Her trans critical views brought accusations of spreading harmful rhetoric and obliged her to resign from her post at Sussex University in October 2021. A contributing editor at UnHerd, her articles can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

III. 

Essentially, the argument put forward by all three of the above was that due to the rise of accessible AI and the total ubiquity of smartphones, we are now in a post-literate society and belong to a new dark age of endless scrolling.  

 

This, they said, is a very bad thing; because whilst reading books elevates the human spirit, watching videos on social media results in brain rot. We should, therefore, read more and scroll less.  

 

And, err, that was really about it ...

 

It's not that I don't - as a Lawrentian - in part agree with them, but what the speakers didn't seem to fully appreciate is that people are not the passive victims of the tech giants and social media companies; that they willingly yield to the network in which they are integrated; that they love their 24/7 virtual lives and the gadgets that facilitate it such as smartphones and i-Pads.  

 

And what the speakers call brain rot is what most people experience as happiness and they are grateful to YouTube and TikTok etc. for providing them with a world in which they can finally feel safe; a world which anticipates and addresses their needs. 

 

Thus, rather than wanting to spend less time online, most people wish to immerse themselves ever further into the digital realm and become one with their digital selves (their avatars), in much the same way that Narcissus once desired to become one with his own reflection. 

 

It is, ultimately, a kind of religious desire; a wishing to submit to something greater in order to find not freedom but fulfilment (or a kind of fatal satisfaction). People are exalted by belonging to the digital new order beyond feeling or reason; they may lose their minds and their hearts might perish within them, but it's what they want; to participate in a great and perfect network. 

 

 

IV.

 

What the trio of speakers needed to do (but didn't) was place the discussion within a broader philosophical discussion on the question concerning technology; someone mentioned Mark Fisher at some point, but it was Heidegger - not Fisher - who needed referencing. 

 

For Heidegger it is who recognised that the "threat to man does not come [...] from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology" [1], rather it's the essence of technology as a form of revealing that he terms enframing [Gestell] wherein the greater danger lies. 

 

To speak about removing smartphones from classrooms or restricting access to social media for those under the age of sixteen, is to entirely fail to understand that the problem has to do with 2,500 years of Western metaphysics and the fall into idealism. 

 

I would politely suggest, therefore, that Marriott, West, and Stock read less Jane Austen and more Heidegger. And more Baudrillard, too; for the latter is another author whose predictions about the world we now inhabit and his insights into digital culture have proved to be extremely prescient [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994), p. 333. 

      See the two-part post 'O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology', published on TTA on 26 May 2016: click here to access part one, or here for part two.    

 

[2] See the essay by Bran Nicol and Emmanuelle Fantin entitled 'How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today's AI 30 years before ChatGPT', in The Conversation (4 November, 2025): click here. Fantin and Nicol are the authors of a new Baudrillard biography published by Reaktion Books (2025), my thoughts on which are presently being published on TTA; click here to read part one of what will be a four-part post. 

      I think a good book to start with by Baudrillard might be The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), described by Fantin and Nicol as "one of Baudrillard's most prophetic texts, valuable even now, more than thirty years after its publication, as a key to understanding our 'permanently online, permanently connected world'" (Jean Baudrillard, 2025, p. 96); a world where the screen has replaced the mirror and each individual exists in their own kind of bubble, like an astronaut inside their spacesuit.    

 

 

This post is for Thom B. and Nick Cave. 

 

From Victory to Stone: Into the Uncanny Valley with Daniel Silver

Daniel Silver: Uncanny Valley (29 November 2024 - 18 January 2025)

Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square, London) 

Photo by Ben Westoby / frithstreetgallery.com 

 

I. 

 

Firstly - and I hope this doesn't seem too pedantic - but the concept of the uncanny valley does not refer to an underworld in which one finds oneself lost, as the press release for the new exhibition of work by British sculptor Daniel Silver at the Frith Street Gallery claims [1]. 

The uncanny valley - as I'm sure many torpedophiles will know - is a psychophysiological phenomenon (rather than a mythogeographical location, such as Hades) that refers to the unease and revulsion experienced by people when challenged by certain ambiguities, inconsistencies, and/or discrepancies (in voice, movement, or appearance) of the almost but not quite human [2].  

 

 

II.

 

Daniel Silver was born in London, in 1972, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and The Royal College of Art.  

 

He describes his sculptural work as an attempt to combine ancient and modern elements whilst, simultaneously, communicating something of the timeless (and universal) character of humanity - not a project that I approve of, obviously.

 

For such idealism invariably means a retreat from external reality and the positing of a fantasy of inner life and essential being that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain mankind within some kind of crypto-theological or, in this case, a psychoanalytic narrative (Silver is a reader of Freud, so not surprising that he should think about the family ties between his pieces).  

 

Having said that, Silver does remain committed to celebrating the substantial nature of his figures, in bronze and large, heavy pieces of raw marble excavated from an old Italian stone yard, and it's this that most excites about the ten pieces in this exhibition (certainly more than the oedipal elements that he attempts to overcode the work with). 

 

Indeed, if I were a sculptor, I would be exclusively concerned with materiality and the fact that human biology is founded upon and born of geology, not Geist - i.e., that organic life evolved from inorganic rocks and minerals in a chemical process known as abiogenesis (now there's a title and a theme for a new exhibition) [3].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Click here to go to the Frith Street Gallery website where full details of Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition (29 Nov 2024 - 18 Jan 2025) can be found and a copy of the press release downoaded.

 

[2] This term, uncanny valley, is an English translation (by the art critic Jasia Reichardt) of a phrase coined in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori - bukimi no tani. In order to avoid association with the earlier psychoanalytic concept of das Unheimliche (which Freud developed from the work of Ernst Jentsch), the phrase is sometimes alternatively translated in English as valley of eeriness (which is unfortunately not quite as catchy, even if arguably more accurate).

      According to Mark Fisher, the eerie is a distinct mode of strangeness that troubles the notion of agency and makes us question our own existence or uniqueness, making us feel anxious or apprehensive. It has very little to do with Freud's concept and should not be equated to the latter.    

      See Mark Fisher, the Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016). And see my two-part post on this work published 10 October 2023: click here.   

 

[3] Paula Zambrano, Curator of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society, anticipates what I'm suggesting here in her short piece posted on 6 December 2024 on the CAS website, writing that Silver's work "exists between the human and non-human, intertwining rocks with bodies, minerals with flesh, embodying multiple temporalities". That's spot on, I think. 

      Unfortunately, however, she ends her piece mistakenly claiming that the uncanny valley is "shaped by memories and desires" and "is the realm of the underworld as a metaphor for the unconscious", thereby falling into the Freudian trap that Mark Fisher warned against (see note 2 above).

      To read Zambrano's article in full, click here.    

 

 

Musical bonus 1: The title of Silver's exhibition - 'Uncanny Valley' - comes from a track by the singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn working in collaboration with author Robert MacFarlane, that was released as a single from the studio album The Moon Also Rises (Transgressive Records, 2023): click here.

 

Musical bonus 2: The title of this post - 'From Victory to Stone' -  comes from a track by the Scottish punk rock band the Skids, released as the second single from their debut album Scared to Dance (Virgin Records, 1979). Written by Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson, it reached number 10 in the UK Singles Chart: click here.  

 

Click here for another post written on Daniel Silver's Uncanny Valley exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery (29 Nov 2024 - 18 Jan 2025).   

 

 

Better Dead Than Woke: Reflections on Sam Tyler's Suicide in 'Life on Mars'

 

The central cast of Life on Mars (BBC One, 2006-07)

 

 

I. 

 

Whether by accident or subconscious design, I have long avoided watching the British TV show Life on Mars (2006-07), starring John Simm as Detective Inspector Sam Tyler, who, following a car accident, wakes up to find himself in 1973 and obliged to adapt his politically-correct model of policing to the times, working under the command of DCI Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister).  

But, since it's now being broadcast nightly on That's TV3 (Freeview channel 75, 9pm, Monday to Friday) - and since I was intrigued by Mark Fisher's k-punk posts on the first and last episodes of the series, which can be found in Ghosts of My Life [1] - I figured, what the hey, I'll give it a go ...

 

 

II. 

Initially, I didn't much like Life on Mars - I found the character of Sam Tyler and all the supernatural elements irritating. Not only did I not know what the fuck was going on - what was real and what wasn't - I didn't much care. And if I simply wanted to enjoy a seventies cop show, I could catch The Sweeney on almost any day of the week over on ITV4 without all the poncy postmodern elements [2].  

 

However, I gradually learned to love it: particularly for what Fisher calls its reactionary character and, indeed, for its amusingly nihilistic message that I'm very much tempted to endorse; i.e., that it's preferable being dead in 1973 than alive in the drearily woke (and somehow far less real) present. 

 

As I wrote in an earlier post:

 

Those who now sneer with politico-moral correctness and a sense of their own cultural superiority at the music, the fashions, the TV, and pretty much every other aspect of life in the 1970s need to be told (or in some cases reminded) that it was more than alright - it was better. For despite all the boredom, blackouts and bullshit of the time, people were happier and I'm pleased to have been born (and to have remained at heart) a 20th century boy. [3]    

 

If by jumping off a roof top like DC Tyler one could guarantee arriving in seventies heaven based upon one's own experiences of the period, then, again, I'd be very much tempted to do so ...

 

It's not that I lack confidence in the future (or the possibility of such) - although I don't share the progressive optimism of those who insist that the sun will necessarily come out tomorrow - it's more a case of accepting the fact that the future belongs to those young enough to still have dreams, whereas to those of us who are now on the cusp of old age and who value the beauty of memories and madeleines belongs the lost past [4].   

 

And death. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014). The article I refer to, pp. 76-79, is entitled 'The Past Is an Alien Planet: The First and last Episides of Life on Mars' and is based on two posts published on his k-punk blog (the first dated 10 Jan 2006 and the second 13 April 2007).

 

[2] Fisher argues that Life on Mars was basically a cop show; "because it is clear that the SF elements [...] were little more than pretexts; the show was a meta-cop show rather than meta-SF". See Ghosts of My Life ... p. 78.

 

[3] See 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' (24 July 2018): click here. 

 

[4] I'm (rather obliquely) referencing the French filmmaker and critic Chris Marker, who describes madeleines as any object or moment that serves as a trigger for the strange mechanisms that can suddenly transport you to the past. 

      Obviously, Marker adopts the idea from Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). Readers who are interested to know more might wish to get hold of Marker's multimedia memoir Immemory (a CD-ROM released in 1997). 

 

 

Musical bonus: David Bowie, 'Life on Mars?', 1973 single release from the album Hunky Dory (RCA Records, 1971): click here for the 2015 remaster on YouTube. 

 

 

And I Wanna Live Yesterday Tomorrow

Malcolm McLaren Paris (1994)

 

'The only artist capable of rekindling the spark of hope in the past is the one who is 

firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy is victorious.'

 

 

I.

 

Retrofuturism - born of the fact that capitalist realism makes tomorrow inconceivable - doesn't imagine future worlds that are projections from the present; it imagines future worlds that are reclaimed from the past. 

 

At first, this seems like fun. But there's a certain melancholic pessimism in concluding that since one can no longer look forward and dream of what might be, one is obliged to look back and (wistfully) recall what might have been. 

 

No wonder that the cultural theorist most often associated with this idea, Mark Fisher, topped himself.

 

However, for those who can bear it, retrofuturism's exploration of the tension between past and future - and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology - is a philosophically fascinating topic; one that, surprisingly, has quite a long history - certainly pre-dating Fisher's analysis - although its import as a concept has grown in recent years, perhaps as the present becomes ever-more unbearably dystopian. 

 

 

II.

 

Funny enough, although the word retrofuturism wasn't then part of my philosophical vocabulary, I first came across the idea in a song recorded by Malcolm McLaren in 1994, the last line of which is: And I wanna live yesterday tomorrow [1].

 

I remember thinking at the time that it was a nice, rather clever line - probably borrowed, I assumed, from one of those writers, like Walter Benjamin [2], who meant a great deal to McLaren, but I didn't reflect any further on it. 

 

However, thirty years later, and here we are ... The line has come back to haunt me and this paragraph from McLaren on reclaiming history (rather than just pissing on it) now seem to me of crucial importance: 

 

"The question I find most interesting is how you reclaim history. This is a very different thing from repackaging it. It's not about nostalgia, which is basically dead tissue. Living yesterday tomorrow should be about reclaiming history then reversing it into the future. If you can discover how to do that, you are probably doing everything an artist genuinely wishes to be involved in. One must aim to use certain disruptive practices to challenge the dominant cultural forms and relax the grip of authority." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The song I refer to is entitled 'Mon Dié Sénié' and can be found on McLaren's album Paris (1994): click here to play.

 

[2] See what Benjamin writes, for example, in the well-known essay 'On the Concept of History', in Selected Writings, Vol. 4., (Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389-400. Composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, this short work by Benjamin is essentialy a critique of historicism.

 

[3] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman, in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2002), pp. 718-19. 

 

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lasses?

Top: Brigit Forsyth as Thelma Ferris (née Chambers) 

Bottom: Sheila Fearn as Audrey and Anita Carey as Susan  

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (BBC TV 1973-74)

 

I was saddened to hear about the death yesterday of Scottish actress Brigit Forsyth, who played Thelma, Bob's fiancée and - after their marriage in episode 13 - wife, in the hilarious British sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973-74), written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

Thelma, a rather prissy librarian who wished to enjoy a respectable, lower middle class life in suburbia, was in some ways intended to be an unsympathetic character and yet, as the series unfolded across 26 episodes, it became clear that she was a warm and loving woman. 

 

And, looking back now, she also strikes me as sexually attractive (or hot as people like to say today); particularly when dressed as Peter Pan in the Christmas special at the end of season two, or wearing her short black nightgown whilst on honeymoon in episode 14.

 

In fact, as one's desire becomes increasingly tied to nostalgia, it seems to me that the series was full of beautiful actresses playing memorable characters - not just Brigit Forsyth as Thelma, but also Anita Carey as her sister, Susan; and Sheila Fearn, as Terry's sister, Audrey; or Pamela Conway, who played Gloria, the barmaid; Elizabeth Lax, who played Bob's secretary, Wendy; Juliet Aykroyd, who played Anthea, Thelma's assistant at the library ... 

 

Even Sandra Bryant (as Glenys) and Margaret Nolan (as Jackie) appear in one episode entitled 'I'll Never Forget Whatshername' (S1/E5).  

 

Sadly, several of the above are now no longer with us [1]. But, thankfully, we can still watch them on film and remember them in our hearts; a special generation of women, born in the 1940s [2], who lit up my childhood in the 1970s and continue to enchant today. 

 

Why don't women - and, indeed, men - born after 1979 have the same allure? 

 

'Eras produce certain faces', says Mark Fisher [3]. And he got that right. 

 

Unfortunately, the present era seems to produce fresh-faced (or photoshopped) faces lacking in all character: almost ugly in their perfection (just as faces in the past were often beautiful in their imperfection).       

 

Notes

 

[1] Anita Carey died in July 2023; Elizabeth Lax died in June 1996; and Margaret Nolan died in October 2020. Some readers may recall I published a post expressing my admiration of the latter on 5 Nov 2015: click here. 

[2] Elizabeth Lax is the exception to this, born as she was on 8 Feb 1950. 

[3] See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 74. 

On Oblivion

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Brassier continues: 

 

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

 

In other words: oblivion über alles ...

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

[7] Ibid., p. 228.

[8] Ibid.

 

 

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

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

Laura Oldfield Ford Ferrier Estate (2010)

 

 

I.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

III.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV.

 

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

 

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

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

V.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

Notes

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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