Pretty Punk Vacancy Contra Sado-Libertine Apathy

The Marquis de Sade looks on as Johnny Rotten 

acts pretty vacant for the cameras

 

'I have a very strong feeling that the opposite 

of love is not hate - it's apathy.' [1] 

 

I.

 

Consult any modern reference source and you will find apathy defined as a lack of emotion, interest, and/or concern. It is presented as a state of perfected indifference; a clinical curbing of enthusiasm. 

 

More often than not, apathy is also regarded in a negative light; as a psychopathological problem that sits on the same spectrum of diminished motivation as abulia and, at the extreme, akinetic mutism. Because they lack a sense of drive and seem to have no purpose or meaning, apathetic individuals are believed to have an inferior quality of life. 

 

Expressive individuals who like to openly display their emotions and endlessly bang on about their feelings, think apathetic individuals must be suffering from depression or some other brain disorder. It's not normal - and it's not natural - to be so cold and detached. It seems to betray not only an absence of passion, but a lack of soul - which is why Christians have historically condemned apathy as a deficiency of love and devotion to God and listed it among the seven deadly sins: sloth [2].

 

The Ancient Greeks, however, thought a little differently on this matter. And so, although the modern English term apathy (first used in 1594) is derived from ἀπάθεια (apatheia), it is important not to confuse or conflate the two terms. For the Stoics, for example, apatheia signified a desirable state of indifference toward events and things that lie outside one's control (and it is still considered a virtue today within Orthodox monasticism and certain schools of Gnosticism).    

 

 

II.  

Moving on from this brief history of apathy and its etymology, I'd like to discuss the concept as developed within the work of the Marquis de Sade, contrasting this with how the idea was expressed in the scene that developed in and around 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s. 

 

My aim is to show that although there were Sadean currents within punk as conceived by McLaren and Westwood - examined at length and in detail by Matthew Worley [3] - there's a world of difference between Johnny Rotten's pretty vacancy and l'apathie of those libertines who do their philosophising in the bedroom rather than at a pervy fashion boutique. 

 

 

III. 

 

According to Matt Worley: "Punk's cultural body bore Sadean scars." [4] 

 

It's a nice line. 

 

And Worley is right to suggest that, at some level, punk was "transmitting the echoes of Sade's howl through the mediums of popular music and fashion" [5]. 

 

However, while McLaren and his young protégés may have subscribed to an ideology of sex, style and subversion coupled to a kinky aesthetic incorporating safety pins, swastikas, and fetishwear, what they almost certainly did not do was read the works of the Marquis de Sade.

 

For if they had, they would have learnt that central to Sade's transgressive philosophy was the formal concept of l'apathie ...    

 

To understand what our punk friends missed, one might look to the Fifth Dialogue of Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), wherein the libertine Dolmancé encourages fifteen-year-old Eugénie to systematically discard traditional moral values in favour of l'apathie. 

 

He explains how the sensations resulting from apathy are vastly superior to those born of emotional sensitivity and advocates a total shift toward cold indifference and egoistic gratification: 

 

"Ah, Eugénie, believe me when I say the delights of apathy far outweigh those of virtue; the latter have only one application, whereas the former can excite and overwhelm one's whole being." [6]  

 

Thus, far from being a secondary concern, l'apathie - derived from the ancient Greek apatheia [7] - is an ideal given primary importance by many (if not all) of Sade's philosophically-minded libertines. 

 

More than a passive lack of feeling, l'apathie is a deliberate, active mechanism with specific functions; eradicating empathy, purging all moral sentiment, and ensuring the libertine's pleasure is derived entirely from the will. Complete indifference to the suffering of the victim thereby eliminates all emotional dependency upon the amorous object. 

 

As Bataille observed in Eroticism (1957), a sadist who indulges their raw impulses simply for instant gratification or bourgeois pleasure is merely a poor doomed creature ruled by vice. True sovereignty requires passion to be strictly disciplined and compressed. L'apathie is the ingenious method used to reject spontaneous emotion, converting raw impulse into a calculating, destructive energy that allows the libertine to abandon the all-too-human aspects of his character. 

 

Deleuze further formalised this in Coldness and Cruelty (1967), arguing that Sadean apathy is fundamentally directed against sentiment. Because moral guilt or emotional pleasure represents a dangerous dissipation of mental focus, the libertine derives ultimate satisfaction from pure mathematical and philosophical reasoning. His sex, as Lawrence would say, is in his head - but that's precisely where he wants it to be. 

 

L'apathie acts as a mechanism that clears away emotional noise, transforming sex into something experienced in the mind and imagination rather than the body and its organs, thereby allowing the ego to contemplate the pleasure of negating natural instincts [8]. By maintaining zero degree coldness, the libertine becomes a machine capable not only of acts of debauchery, but violent atrocity.     

 

IV. 

 

Early punk was to a large extent defined by a rhetoric of boredom, blank generational indifference, and pretty vacancy. The Sex Pistols explicitly stated that they didn't care and Rotten boasted of the fact that he had no feelings for anybody else (only his beautiful self) [9]. 

 

However, like almost everything else, this was merely a defensive (and stylistic) pose against systemic disappointment. The majority of punks, bless them, wanted to have fun, and to feel, and to have a rosy future full of career opportunities. Theirs was a form of faux apathy and feigned indifference - the fact that Rotten would often berate his audiences to get off their arses gives the game away. All too often punk was an expression of sincere moral outrage and a frustrated desire for change.     

 

V. 

 

In conclusion: punk's relationship with Sade remains purely superficial, transactional, and aesthetic and, as a form of Romantic idealism, punk has opposing goals to Sadism [10].  

McLaren and Westwood may have exploited aspects of Sade's work - mostly the tits and bums - just as they borrowed from numerous other sources in order to fuck the rich up the arse and generate cash from chaos, but, ultimately, they were more interested in anarchy and the politics of boredom than apathy and la philosophie dans le boudoir. 

 

 

Photo of Jordan (the first Sex Pistol) 

by David Parkinson (1975) [11] 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Leo Buscaglia, Love (Charles B. Slack, 1972), p. 112.  

 

[2] The word sloth comes from the Old English term slǣwþ, simply referring to pace meaning as it did slowness. But by the late 12th century, the term now written as slewthe or slouthe, had developed a markedly moral connotation and shifted to mean indolence. It was applied specifically to those who avoided their duties and neglected their responsibilities. 

      In the 14th century, it was finally adopted as the English translation of the Latin term acēdia (a state of spiritual apathy) and listed among the seven deadly sins. Thus, in Catholic theology, sloth is more than mere laziness; it's a culpable lack of effort to do good and a willful refusal of the joy that comes from purposeful living and divine goodness. To put this in punk terms, the slothful individual is vacant to the point of no longer caring about their status or condition (the original Greek term - ἀκηδία - literally meant an inert state without pain or concern).  

      Although I here wish to write primarily of apathy, I hope at some future point to return to the concept of acedia (sometimes written as accidie). I am particularly interested in how as it has been used in more modern times by figures including Aldous Huxley, who wrote an essay on the subject in 1923, and Walter Benjamin who in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), describes acedia an 'indolence of the heart' that can lead to the ruin of great figures. Some readers might recall that I have previously said something on acedia in my 'Mourning Post' (25 April 2023). 

 

[3] Matthew Worley, 'Whip in my valise: British punk and the Marquis de Sade, c. 1975-85', in Contemporary British History, 36 (2), pp. 277-321. 

      In brief, this essay argues that punk was an attempt by McLaren and Westwood to fuse youth and sexual subcultures in order to provoke a dominant culture believed to be repressive. Worley examines the Sadean influences on this project conceived at 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s, suggesting that the Divine Marquis had a seminal impact on the punk movement. 

      The essay is available as a pdf at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/104006/  

 

[4] Matt Worley ... p. 303.

 

[5] Ibid., p. 305.  

 

[6] Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir, trans. Meredith Head (Creation Books, 2004), p. 94. 

 

[7] Sade explicitly borrowed the structural technique of l’apathie from ancient Greek philosophy, describing it in Juliette (1797-1801) as an outstanding example of the benefits that one gets from studying Stoicism. Like the Stoics, Sade believed in the sovereignty of reason, rigorous self-discipline (askesis), and independence from external distractions or stimuli (self-sufficiency). 

      However, Sade radically inverted the ethical purpose of Stoicism based on his fundamentally opposing view of existence. For example, the Stoics saw Nature and the Cosmos as essentially harmonious and benevolent. Sade, on the other hand, saw Nature and the Cosmos as destructive and chaotic. The Stoics also wished to eliminate the negative emotions (rage, fear, lust) in order to cultivate a healthy, happy human being. Sade was more interested in suppressing moral feelings (of pity and remorse, for example) so as to engineer a monster of coldness and cruelty who views others merely as disposable objects.  

      Ultimately, Stoic apatheia is about freedom from emotional turmoil in order that one can lead a good life; Sade's model of libidinal sovereignty sees l'apathie as a means to detach oneself from conscience and all human feeling in order to consummate nihilism. As Blanchot says, it's a shocking inversion of values.  

 

[8] The question of nature is not straightforward in Sade. On the one hand, he would agree that the deliberate destruction of all human feeling is unnatural. But, on the other hand, he would argue that by achieving complete insensibility to the suffering of others the libertine frees their passions from moral law and mimics the destructive indifference of Nature herself.   

 

[9] See the posts on the Sex Pistols' songs 'Pretty Vacant' and 'No Feelings' published on TTA on 30 July 2018 and 19 April 2023 respectively. 

 

[10] The 18th-century Romantic poet Novalis declared that the goal was to cast off apathy and to live a life full of passion and feeling; burning like a flame on the edge of ecstasy - and that sounds closer to the punk ideal of living fast and dying young than the Sadean ideal of l'apathie in which one puts the heart on ice and lives a life that is both unnatural and inhuman. See the post 'On Phlegm, Philosophy, and Apathy' (25 April 2023). 

 

[11] This famous photo by David Parkinson of Jordan (Pamela Rooke) modelling a red-rubber outfit from McLaren and Westwood's King's Road store, SEX, featured in a six-page article titled 'Sado Sex for the Seventies', written by David May, in the adult magazine Gallery International (Vol. 1, No. 4, 1975). 

      A copy of the magazine has thankfully been preserved by cultural historian and McLaren's biographer Paul Gorman in his archive. For more information - and to purchase your very own copy of the above in excellent condition (priced $300) - visit recordmecca.com  

 

    

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One

Repeater Books (2021) [a]

Design by JohnnyBull.uk

 

 

I.

 

Arguing that modern nihilism is essentially the collapse of all values into exchange value and that the revolutionary struggle has become a war waged by lovers, my doctoral thesis Outside the Gate [b] might have been subtitled: towards a postcapitalist politics of desire.

 

And so, I was naturally interested to see what Mark Fisher's approach to this subject would be in a lecture series he began (but didn't finish) at Goldsmiths in 2016 [c].  

 

 

II. 

 

Desire is one of those words that remains a key concept in critical thinking and is used widely across several disciplines (though not always in quite the same way). More than a simple biological urge, it tends to be viewed as a complex socio-linguistic construct that shapes human subjectivity, drives consumer culture, and interacts with power structures.

 

Like Fisher, I took my understanding of the term from Deleuze and Guattari, who critiqued traditional psychoanalytic views by arguing that desire is not caused by lack, but is a productive revolutionary force that shapes reality and builds new connections - an interpretation also found in the work of D. H. Lawrence, who writes that desire is a "strange current of interchange" [d] flowing between all things and bringing them into touch.

 

By the time I'd submitted the above thesis in March 2000, however, I was already a bit tired of the term and sympathetic to Foucault's argument that - despite everything - it always carried with it the assumption that human desires are not only innate but innately positive and healthy and that society only ever represses, exploits, or distorts them. 

 

Foucault famously told Deleuze he couldn't bear the word desire and preferred to speak only of bodies and their pleasures, arguing that localised pleasures acted as sites of transgression that could resist the normalising power structures that create categories of desire and identities [e].  

 

However, as I've mentioned, I'm intrigued to see what Fisher makes of this concept in his final lectures; how he excavates forgotten forms of desire from out of the past and invokes new and futuristic forms of desire beyond capitalism. 

 

And so, let us then turn to Lecture One: What is Postcapitalism (7 November 2016) ...

 

 

III. 

 

Fisher boldly puts to his class of students the following idea (much promoted by neoliberalism): Protestors against capitalism don't really want what they say they want ...

 

"What they want is all the fruits of capitalism - and ultimately that's why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world." (39)

 

They want global equity and justice, but they want their iPhones more.

 

Obviously, Fisher as a left-wing accelerationist and acid communist - i.e., one who believes in the existence of postcapitalist desire - rejects this. He thinks it's possible to "retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital" (41) while at the same time move beyond it.      

 

Unfortunately, I don't share his political optimism rooted in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1970s. 

 

My thinking remains rooted (some would say trapped) much more in the cynical and destructive nihilism of the Sex Pistols and I'm a little disappointed as well as surprised to see Fisher, who had "previously been scathing about the legacy of the counterculture" [f], beginning to trust the hippies after all and daydream about what might have been if only the fusion of the counterculture and radical politics had "been more successful" (42) and lasted longer than it did.  

 

I agree with Fisher that Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) prefigures the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, but it's only incredible in that it's not to be taken seriously. I referred to it several times in Outside the Gate, but even at the time I recognised its utopianism was, like all forms of utopianism - even those presenting themselves as framed within Marxist materialism - too good to be true.  

 

Fisher tells his students that Marcuse is "a kind of precursor of Deleuze and Guattari" (42), but I think that's a little misleading - even if qualified by the use of the words kind of. 

 

For whilst it's true that Deleuze and Guattari admired Marcuse's intentions, they fiercely criticised his work in L'Anti-Œdipe (1972), arguing that Eros and Civilization does not go anywhere near far enough - in fact, even Wilhelm Reich went much further when it came to radically thinking the question of desire and society. 

 

Marcuse - and Fisher must know all this - continues to frame desire through Freud's lens of repression (and lack); fails to break out the Oedipal triangle; and, finally, maintains a dualistic division between work and play, which Deleuze and Guattari wish to dissolve.  

 

IV.

 

And then there's the question of consciousness ... Something Fisher is looking to raise in order to challenge the "ambient political assumption" (43) of capitalist realism that there's no alternative to the free market [g]. 

 

When it comes to consciousness raising, Fisher says we can all learn from feminist activists and members of various civil rights movements; i.e., people who like to share experiences in support groups, insist that the personal is political, and examine how different forms of inequality and subordination intersect.  

 

Obviously, while raising awareness does not automatically fix things or bring about meaningful change, it is, arguably, the crucial first step toward challenging the status quo. 

 

However, as someone who has sat in on a number of seminars and meetings designed to politically enlighten, let me tell you, they can also be boring as fuck and waste huge amounts of time; they can also quickly become echo chambers in which pre-existing views and prejudices are reinforced.    

 

Fisher seems to be particularly concerned with class consciousness, which is understandable given his background. Born in 1968 in the East Midlands to working-class parents - his father was an engineering technician and his mother a cleaner - Fisher's perspective was fundamentally shaped by his childhood experiences and he would later argue that being working class involved a deeply internalised feeling of ontological inferiority [h].  

 

As an Essex boy also born in the 1960s to working-class parents - my father was a printer at the Bank of England and my mother a housewife who had part-time jobs cleaning - I absolutely understand what he means. My own political consciousness was raised when I was about six years old and my mother told me a story about how my father was once knocked off his bike as he cycled to work by one of the bosses in a big car who didn't even bother to stop; that told me all I needed to know about class.    

 

 

V.

 

The final lecture that Fisher gave - in week five (5 December 2016) - was a reading of Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) and I'm looking forward to hearing what he says about a work that, in Fisher's own words, makes the particularly strong case that "there's no possible retreat from capitalism - there's no space of primitive outside to which we can return, we have to go all the way through capitalism" (45) now, like it or not.  

 

It's a shame that we never got to hear his thoughts on the subjects due for discussion in weeks six through fifteen - including accelerationism, cyberfeminism, and the work of Baudrillard - but there you go; the course was, as Matt Colquhoun puts it, "tragically interrupted" [i]. 

 

And it's kind of touching that, apparently, for the first few weeks after his suicide "students continued to use the seminar room during the module's scheduled Monday morning time slots to sit together and remember their lecturer" [j]. This mournful vigil eventually transformed into a self-organised reading group - a collective act that tells us something not insignificant about Fisher's impact. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Opening things up to his students, Fisher encourages them to share their thoughts on the course structure and content. He hopes that they will supply what is missing - namely, ideas drawn from the world of art and culture, suggesting that the role of aesthetics in political theory is often "underestimated by elements of the so-called Old Left" (50).    

 

He also hopes they'll interrogate the term postcapitalism, which he uses in preference to communism or socialism, words "tainted by association with past failed and oppressive projects" (50). Fisher argues that postcapitalism also implies victory:

 

"If you're talking about postcapitalism, it implies that there's something beyond capitalism. It also implies [...] a victory that will come through capitalism. It's not just opposed to capitalism - it's what will happen when capitalism has ended. It's not some entirely separate space [...] we're not required to imagine a sheer alterity, a pure outside." (50-51)

 

I have to say, I'm not sure about this: the prefix post doesn't always mean beyond or after when used in a cultural and/or philosophical context, does it? Take, for example, postmodernism - a term that implies neither a simple temporal progression nor a clear victory over modernism. It signifies a critical engagement with and a transformation of the root word rather than what comes after.

 

To be fair, Fisher recognises the somewhat complicated (even ambivalent) relationship between capitalism and postcapitalism; the fact that we might enjoy the pleasures and products it provides but still want something else, something more, something different. The fact is, capitalism and postcapitalism have overlapping timelines and the latter relies on the former in order to make its critique. 

 

Rather than think in terms of victory or progress, it would be better to view postcapitalism as capitalism coming to terms with its own ambiguities, limitations, and, indeed, radical possibilities - or does that make me capitalocentrist?    

 

 

VII.

 

In response to a question from a student, Fisher mentions his concept of acid communism and Matt Colquhoun is surely right to say that he uses his new lecture-seminar series "to workshop his next book" [k], which he defines here as psychedelic consciousness plus class consciousness; i.e. the becoming-hippie of Arthur Seaton.  

 

Again, as I think I've indicated, acid communism is not an idea I'm convinced by, though it's an interesting turn of phrase in which each term modifies the other and breaks them out of existing associations.   

   

I am more onside with Fisher when he says that one of the things most needed is a politics free from ressentiment. 

 

He suggests that solidarity might be crucial to the building of such. However, because solidarity is "tainted by association with Leninism" (61), he prefers the term fellowship - a more Lawrentian-sounding term, although - ironically - the word originally referred to a type of business consortium [l].  

 

 

VIII. 

 

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Mellors sends Connie a letter in which, amongst other things, he sets out his vision of a postcapitalist world, arguing that communal regeneration was possible once men and women realised that life and the pursuit of money are not one and the same thing:

 

"'If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend [...] if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash [...] They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on [...] Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend.'" [m]

 

I thought of this when Fisher introduced the idea of folk politics to his class - a concept developed (but not shared) by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, which argues that radical politics should consist of "'localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism'" carried out by people "'content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations'" (62) [n].

 

Fisher also rejects folk politics - and I can see the problems. On the other hand, however, I worry about the revival of grand political narratives and those who think in terms of great events and the total transformation of society.  

 

It would seem to me that acid communism can only succeed if it learns how to be "content and constant in invisible activities" [o] and change is administered in what Nietzsche calls small doses over long periods of time. Rome wasn't toppled in a day. And: "The chicken does not break the shell out of animosity." [p]    

 

 

IX.

 

I had to smile at Fisher's confession that he doesn't know anything about economics - particularly as a friend of mine bought the book hoping to learn something new and insightful on this subject (which he teaches). 

 

I did try to pre-warn him that Fisher was basically a cultural theorist more interested in the impact of capitalism on mental health, the arts, and desire rather than the risk of inflation or what to do about the trade deficit. 

 

More interested in suggesting, for example, that The Beatles provide a great example of what a post-work society might look like:

  

"They didn't have to work. They'd made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work [q]. Then their most interesting, experimental stuff emerged [...] partly because they were freed from the pressure of having to worry about a salary [...]" (76). 

 

Fisher then asks his class: "Is that a silly example or not?" (76), which, perhaps from politeness, is a question left hanging (though I think we all know the answer).    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references given in the post (in round brackets) refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Stephen A. Hall, Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. This thesis was supervised by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Bell. A revised version was published in 2010 by Blind Cupid Press.  

 

[c] The course was supposed to last for fifteen weeks, but Fisher killed himself on Friday the 13th of January 2017, so the remaining ten weeks of the seminar did not go ahead as planned. The course syllabus (along with suggested reading) is included as Appendix One in Postcapitalist Desire (211-216).  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years Before the Mast', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 109. 

 

[e] Deleuze, in turn, expressed his hatred of the term pleasure, which for him marked an interruption of the immanent process of desire. See 'Désir et plaisir', in Magazine littéraire, Issue 325 (October 1994), pp. 59-65. Note that this text was actually written in 1977 as a private letter from Deleuze to Foucault (via their mutual friend François Ewald).   

      An English translation of this text by Melissa McMahon can be accessed via the Monash University website: click here. It can also be found in Deleuze's Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975 - 1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 122-134.        

[f] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 1. 

 

[g] See Colquhoun's Introduction for an interesting discussion of Fisher and the idea of consciousness raising, pp. 15-17. 

 

[h] See the article 'Good For Nothing' in The Occupied Times (19 March 2014): click here. The piece can also be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 668-670 (the phrase 'ontological inferiority' is found on p. 669).

 

[i] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 29. 

 

[j] Matt Colquhoun, Appendix One, Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 211.   

 

[k] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 9.

 

[l] Fellow derives from the Old English fēolaga, which translates literally to 'one who puts down money in a joint undertaking'. So a fellowship was originally a group of partners in property or business. It was only later that it took on the broader modern meaning of a community of people sharing common interests.  

 

[m] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 299-300. I discuss the contents of Mellors's letter in Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 258-261. 

 

[n] Fisher is quoting Srnicek and Williams writing in '#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Urbanomic, 2014), p. 354. 

      Just to be clear, the authors reject folk politics in favour of a model that is 'at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology' and which 'seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow'.   

 

[o] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Book V, § 534, p. 211.  

 

[p] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 305. 

 

[q] I don't think it's being overly pedantic to point out that, as a matter of fact, although by 1964 The Beatles were generating astronomical revenues, their personal wealth was limited and cash flow was restricted by poor early recording contracts, high British taxes, and manager Brian Epstein's initial handling of their business and publishing rights. 

      It was not until the following year that the four members of the band finally had millions of pounds in their personal bank accounts. 

       

In Anticipation of the Forthcoming Book 'Punk & the Animal' (Intellect Books, 2026)

(Intellect Books, 2026)
 

 

I. 

 

One of the forthcoming books I'm looking forward to this autumn is Punk & the Animal: Ethos, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Laura D. Gelfand and Angela Bartram [1]. 

 

And the reason I'm curious is because apart from the fact that Sid Vicious was named after Rotten's aggressive pet hamster, I can't really think of any alignment or intersections between a subcultural movement that originated in the 1970s and multicellular organisms belonging to the biological kingdom Animalia [2]. 

 

In fact, one of the things that lyricist and lead singer with the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten, insisted upon was that he was not an animal [3] and the punk movement as I remember it was an urban experience (The Clash) with a deliberate sense of its own artificiality (X-Ray Spex) [4].  

 

And so, it will be amusing to see how, for example, Kieran Cashell approaches the idea of punk as enactive animality (i.e., a form of nonhuman behaviour). And it will be fun to discover what rodent-loving Russ Bestley has to tell us about the rat in punk lore [5].

 

 

II.

 

If I'd been asked to contribute to the above volume - which I wasn't - I suppose I may have discussed the division of animals into three main categories made by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus [6]:

 

(i) Oedipal animals - particularly pampered pets with which people form sentimental attachments. It's popularly believed that dog owners come to resemble their mutts, but, unfortunately, it's more often the case that domesticated creatures reflect the all-too-human neuroses and petty personal histories of their owners.  

 

(ii) State animals - i.e., archetypal (sometimes mythological) creatures affiliated with fixed territories and molar classifications; noble beasts that symbolise the power and history of a nation, such as the lion and the unicorn as seen on the UK's Royal Coat of Arms.  

 

(iii) Pack animals - i.e., demonic creatures that must be conceived collectively, such as wolves, bats, and rats. Deleuze and Guattari are also fond of animals that typically swarm - particularly insects - as they conveniently illustrate the idea of a multiplicity (a large, self-organising body or assemblage). 

 

No prizes for guessing which category they were most excited by. 

 

And no prizes either for what my argument would have been; namely, that we might also describe these pack animals as punk animals and examine how forming a molecular alliance with these creatures may enable a becoming-animal of the human being [7].  

 

 

 

 Stuffed punk rat made by mbcreature

etsy.com 

 

Notes

 

[1] For more details of this text due to be published in October - including a list of contents - please visit the Intellect website: click here.  

 

[2] Cynics might suggest that this volume is primarily an example of academic trend-merging; a hybrid book born of two increasingly exhausted sub-genres - Punk Studies and Animal Studies - as publishers, editors, and authors all desperately seek novel areas of research.

 

[3] I'm referencing the track 'Bodies', which can be found on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here. 

 

[4] I'm aware that the second wave of punk in the early 1980s became concerned with animal rights, anti-vivisection, and vegetarianism. But this anarcho-hippie variant (typified by bands like Crass) wasn't something I was involved in or cared about.

 

[5] Dr Kieran Cashell is a lecturer and researcher at the Limerick School of Art and Design, within the Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland. His chapter is titled 'Nonhuman Behaviour: Punk as Enactive Animality' and opens Punk & the Animal (2026). 

      Dr Russ Bestley is Reader in Graphic Design & Subcultures at London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). His chapter immediately follows and is titled 'Rattus rattus: The Rat in Punk Lore'.

 

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988). See the section '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...' (pp. 232-309). 

      Note that Deleuze and Guattari also allow for exceptional animals that can't always be categorised; animals such as Moby Dick, for example, or the Cheshire Cat. Russ might like to be reminded also that they make frequent reference to rats - including the large and highly intelligent rat named Ben, star of the 1971 American horror movie Willard (dir. Daniel Mann).

 

[7] I really don't wish to go over the concept of becoming-animal again at any length, as I have discussed and referenced this idea in several earlier posts on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

      Let it suffice to say that it describes a dynamic and experimental process whereby a subject detaches from fixed, normative identities and enters a continuous, molecular flow of traits, speeds, and affects shared with the non-human world. It does not mean mimicking, imitating, or literally transforming into an animal - and it involves more than merely using an image of rat, for example, as a band logo à la The Stranglers.

 

 

See the neo-Landian follow up to this post published on 27 May 2026 - reflections on a dead rat - click here. 

 

 

Terminal Boardom: An Open Letter to Ian Trowell with Reference to His 'Holidays in the Sun' Exhibition (2026)

Ian Trowell: Holidays in the Sun: Sex Pistols, Scarborough and the Seaside 

Scarborough Library (2 - 30 May 2026) [1] 

'I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom! 

Where the punk band plays Tiddely-om-pom-pom!' [2]

 

 

I. 

 

In May 1976, the Sex Pistols decided to play their first gigs outside of the Greater London area and take their (nameless) subcultural revolution on the road - unaccompanied by Malcolm who was otherwise engaged - to Barnsley, Middlesbrough, and Scarborough ...

 

And this month, Scarborough's resident punk scholar, Ian Trowell, is marking the 50th anniversary of the Sex Pistols performing in the North Yorkshire seaside town with an exhibition mounted on half-a-dozen large display boards in the Community Space located at the rear of the main library.  

 

What is known by those within the Punk Scholars Network as archiving anarchy ... [3]

 

 

II. 

 

Titled Holidays in the Sun, the exhibition was designed in collaboration with Russ Bestley and gathers materials and testimony from the notorious band's visit to Scarborough in the spring of 1976, as well as their return visit as part of a secret tour in the summer of '77, by which time they had become public enemies number one. 

 

The images and artefacts are accompanied by a detailed and thoughtful narrative which helps create a startling contrast between the everydayness of Scarborough and the extraordinariness of the Sex Pistols. More broadly, the exhibition also reflects upon the intimate and enduring connections between  British coastal towns and youth subcultures. 

 

A series of planned events include a panel discussion on punk as anti-fashion and a talk led by Trowell on how punk has been written about over the last half-century, affording an opportunity to look at the manner in which history and memory are constructed through myth. 

 

 

III.  

So far, so press release-y. 

 

Here, I'll try to say something a wee bit more critical, in the form of an open letter that touches on the inherent friction between punk's chaotic origins and the orderly demands of curation. 

 

 

Dear Ian,

 

Firstly, congratulations on the exhibition, in which I know you've invested a good deal of time and effort (not to mention your own money). The boards provide an interesting mix of Sex Pistols lore, local history, and wider cultural context and I applaud most of your aesthetic choices. 

      Use of Jamie Reid's iconic Never Mind the Bollocks colour scheme, for example, is a nice touch. Not only does it make the display visually stimulating, but it succeeds in tying the exhibition together; i.e., it provides chromatic consistency and creates the intuitive flow between panels you were aiming for.   

      However, the black lettering works much better on the lemon-yellow background rather than Board 3's bubble-gum pink. I can't say I'm a great fan either of that headache-inducing razor font used for the main title. Personally, I'd have gone with the more familiar blackmail-style lettering; sometimes, the cliché is best.

      I also think your pedagogic will to inform coupled to a writer's love of word play [4] has, unfortunately, hindered rather than helped you here. Phrases such as 'subcultural sartorial markers' create an intellectual barrier as most people not only do not use language like this, but feel intimidated by it. It's a shame, I think, that the texts read less like a punk manifesto and more like something torn from the pages of a museum guide. 

      Their length as well as their complexity was also an issue. With board word counts doubling the recommended 150-word maximum, the narrative risks losing the casual observer, whose attention span is notoriously fleeting [5]. 

      It's for a similar reason I also wonder if it was the best decision to have a fixed sequence of display boards. For a majority of people like to float freely from one board to another, like butterflies going from flower to flower, depending on whatever catches their eye rather than follow a progressive narrative. And so, whilst you may wish to construct a logical order to the display allowing for a continuous historical narrative, it could be argued you are denying the viewer's agency to drift - a quintessentially punk mode of experiencing.

      Ultimately, the most anarcho-nihilistic iteration of this project would have been to have erected six entirely black boards à la John McCracken, thereby confounding visitors, referencing your own black square project [6], and suggesting also those imposing alien artefacts that catalyse cultural evolution in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [7]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Amusingly - and somewhat depressingly - the Sex Pistols (feat. Frank Carter) are due to perform at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre on Sunday 2 August, 2026, supported by The Stranglers and The Undertones: buy your tickets here. 

 

It would be great if they could have Trowell's boards on display in some capacity - and I really hope Ian gets some seaside punk rock confectionary made for sale on the day. 

 

 

Ian Trowell (2026)

 

  

Notes

[1] Readers who wish to know more are encouraged to visit Trowell's Substack - SUB>SUMED - where he discusses his 'Holidays in the Sun' project in a post dated 5 March 2026: click here.

      The image used to illustrate this post is a detail from Board Number 1, taken from Ian's Instagram account: click here. 

 

[2] Lyrics (with one minor change) from the popular British music hall song 'I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside', written by John H. Glover-Kind in 1907 and made famous by music hall singer Mark Sheridan, who first recorded it in 1909. It was composed at a time when yearly visits by the British working class to the seaside were booming. Click here to play on YouTube. The Sex Pistols incorporated this song into their act in 2007, as a segue into 'Holidays in the Sun' - click here for their gig at the Brixton Academy (10 November 2007).

 

[3] I'm not entirely hostile to this process; of the three ways that the spirit of punk is exorcised - commodified by capital; Disneyfied by cunts in the media; absorbed into cultural history by academics - the latter is probably the least objectionable. See the post 'On Torn Edges and the Need to Archive' (25 March 2024): click here. 

 

[4] By his own admission, keeping text within a tight word count isn't Trowell's strong point; "I like to waffle, to draw in interesting tangents, and to play with language". See his Substack post linked to above. 

 

[5] It has been calculated that, on average, a visitor to an exhibition will only spend 10-15 seconds reading, before moving to the next thing on view. 

 

[6] I discuss Trowell's black square project in the post titled 'But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It ...' (24 March 2024): click here. 

 

[7] As far as I remember, the featureless black monoliths in 2001 are highly advanced, multi-purpose machines built by an unseen race of aliens with very precise dimensions in a strict 1:4:9 ratio.

She's Dead I'm Alive I'm Yours: The Story of Who Paid Sid's Bail

She's Dead I'm Alive I'm Yours (feat. Sid Vicious) 

Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood 

Seditionaries (1978)

 

 

I. 

 

Created in the sixteen-week period between Nancy Spungen's murder in October 1978 and Sid's death in February 1979, the 'She's Dead I'm Alive I'm Yours' shirt was one of McLaren and Westwood's final designs for Seditionaries. 

 

Showing Vicious surrounded by dead red roses (that give the impression of blood splatter), the design was often printed on white cotton T-shirts, but featured also on long-sleeved muslin tops [1]. 

 

For some, it reflects the tragic (if seedy) romanticism of punk. For others it shows an appalling lack of taste and human decency - even the website Punk77 feels obliged to note: 'It's not even shocking anymore, just a bit sad.' [2]      

 

At the time, however, the shirt was hurriedly produced for a practical purpose; namely, to raise funds for Sid's bail and future legal fees (Vicious was accused of inflicting the single knife wound from which 20-year-old Miss Spungen died). 

 

 

II. 

 

The oft-repeated claim that Mick Jagger secretly stumped up the cash - spread by Rotten many years after the event in order to portray McLaren as uncaring and unwilling to help - is essentially false [3]. As a matter of fact, Virgin Records paid the bail [4] and Malcolm did what he could in the circumstances (even though, technically, he was no longer managing the former Sex Pistol). 

 

It was Malcolm, for example, who immediately flew to New York upon hearing of Sid's arrest and it was Malcolm who hired a lawyer to represent Vicious at the arraignment. Not Jagger - and not Rotten, who was busy promoting his new band's debut single, released the day after Spungen's murder [5]. 

 

Even when McLaren's assistance to Vicious is acknowledged, "it is often interpreted as being not only exploitative [...] but opportunistic, in that keeping Vicious alive and out of jail would maintain what remained of the Sex Pistols' viability" [6].

 

That interpretation, says Paul Gorman, does Malcolm a great disservice. For "the strenuousness with which McLaren attempted to establish Vicious's innocence and survival belies a human resolve" [7] to do the right thing by Sid and display a virtue rarely associated with punk - compassion [8].  

  

 

Notes

 

[1] An example of such can be found in the MET Collection: click here. 

 

[2] Quoted from the page devoted to Seditionaries on the long-running independent website Punk77 operated by Paul Marko: click here.  

 

[3] In a 2013 interview with the Daily Record, Rotten claimed that Jagger had generously paid the legal fees. However, any offer of financial help that may or may not have been made by Jagger never materialised. Unfortunately, the story has been widely repeated and entered into punk legend. The full interview can be read here. 

[4] Mo Ostin, the boss of Warner Records - the Sex Pistols' American label - refused to help and, in fact, "used the murder case to terminate the recording contract with Vicious, Jones and Cook", whilst maintaining a good working relationship with Rotten. 

      McLaren also asked Billy Meshel, the group's US music publisher at Arista, but he too declined to cough up the cash. Left with no other choice, McLaren turned to Richard Branson and the Virgin boss agreed to pay the $50,000 bail (as a kind of advance on delivery of the soundtrack to The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle). 

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 407.

 

[5] Rotten's new group, Public Image Ltd., who were signed to Virgin, released their first single, 'Public Image' on 13 October, 1978. Their debut album, Public Image: First Issue followed in December of that year. 

      For all Rotten's professed sadness and guilt over what became of his friend, he actually did nothing to help - essentially writing Vicious off as a lost cause. His claims that he was prevented by McLaren from helping are, one suspects, a lot of baloney.  

 

[6] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 406. 

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

[8] Obviously, I'm aware that, for McLaren, human tragedy and brilliant branding were never mutually exclusive and that while it's legitimate to credit him for showing up in New York when others didn't, we should be careful not to mistake his actions as pure compassion. 

      If, on the one hand, he seemed to genuinely care for Sid and want to keep him out of prison, on the other hand he was not above making the most of events for his own artistic and commercial ends.   

 

You Are Reading a Post About Making a Film About Mark Fisher

We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025)

Poster image by Joe Magee 

closeandremote.net

 

We are assembling a post about Mark Fisher and, 

now that you're reading this, so are you ... 

 

 

I. 

 

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian a couple of days ago, by Lauren Kelly [1]. It was on Mark Fisher; a cultural theorist who, somewhat ironically, continues to haunt the media almost ten years after his death and seventeen years after he published the slim volume - Capitalist Realism (2009) - that ensured he would be born posthumously.

 

It's a good book [2]. But, like many other works regarded as seminal, it now risks becoming a kind of foundational text - i.e., essential reading for those who wish to have an understanding of contemporary neoliberal culture conveniently packaged and given a stamp of approval by critics, commentators, and other left-leaning intellectuals who secretly envy its astonishing popularity and sales figures [3].

 

Ultimately, it's easier to keep referencing Fisher c. 2009 and regurgitate his critique, rather than imagine an alternative future oneself. Of course, that's not Fisher's fault and, in his later work, he seemed keen to stress that Capitalist Realism was only ever intended as a starting point and not meant to be the last word on any of the subjects it touched upon.

 

Fisher spoke about developing post-capitalist desire and acid communism, but it's his debut book that most readers seem to fixate on and find most relevant [4], in the same way that orthodox punk fans still think Never Mind the Bollocks was the Sex Pistols' finest moment, rather than The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.       

 

 

II.  

  

Whatever one thinks of Fisher, the fact is he's an increasingly influential and pervasive figure and there's currently an experimental documentary doing the rounds that aims to disseminate his ideas to a still wider audience by mixing theory with real-world footage.

 

Titled We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025), this 65-minute film written and directed by Simon Poulter [5], cheerfully places itself outside the world of mainstream production; it was funded by Poulter and fellow artist Sophie Mellor (who edited the work), using an Instagram account to recruit a network of seventy collaborators - including a technical crew - to assist with the project.

 

There was no advance budget; no studio backing; and no institutional permissions - just the determination to make a film that affirmed Fisher's belief that decapitalised cultural production and collective agency was still possible among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation.

 

Methodologically, the work draws from both situationism and the rhizomatic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari - rejecting arborescent models in favour of open systems of exchange:

 

"By way of archival recordings, interviews and fictional performance, Fisher's philosophy of 'hauntology' recurs throughout [...] maintaining that modern society, as a result of 'capitalist realism', is haunted by futures that failed to happen [... as] narrator Justin Hopper explains." [6]  

 

Since the autumn of last year, Poulter's film has been screened "in universities, back gardens, cinemas, living rooms and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden" [7]. 

 

I've not seen it yet - I'm hoping to attend the screening at the ICA on 19 May - but would like to offer support to the work carried out by Mellor and Poulter working as Close and Remote. I might not share all their political views and moral values, but, nevertheless, I feel a certain level of comradeship - not least of all because Poulter is an old punk rocker and a man who loves butterflies ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lauren Kelly, 'The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher', in The Guardian (17 April 2026): click here. 

 

[2] Funnily enough, I haven't written a post critically reviewing the book, even though I have done so for other works by Fisher: click here, for example, for fragmened remarks on Ghosts of My Life (2022); or here for part one of a two-part post on The Weird and the Eerie (2016). I am planning to examine Fisher's most well-known text shortly. 

 

[3] According to Lauren Kelly in her Guardian piece: "As of December 2025, more than 250,000 English-language versions of Capitalist Realism have been sold, with translations available in Spanish, Italian, Arabic Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean and Danish."  

 

[4] I think it's fair to say that Fisher's concept of acid communism has not attained the same widespread cultural recognition as his thinking on capitalist realism. Primarily, that's because his work in this area was cut short by his suicide in 2017 - acid communism exists only as an introduction and a few notes - but it's also the case that the former was a far more speculative concept, whereas the latter is a tangible malaise experienced here and now. 

      Given the choice, most people, it appears, prefer to feel depressed by the present, than imagine their future happiness based on the retrieval of old dreams and unrealised desires. A few academics, artists, and old school k-punk fans might be excited by the concept, but acid communism is a bit niche for mainstream readers (and maybe - since it relies on a certain level of political and countercultural utopianism rooted in the late 1960s and early 1970s - it seems a tad nostalgic and old-fashioned for younger readers who don't remember this time).  

 

[5] Torpedophiles will recognise the name of artist and aurelian Simon Poulter from a post published on 1 Feb 2026: click here.    

 

[6] Lauren Kelly ... see reference and link in note 1 above. It should be pointed out that Justin Hopper doesn't narrate as himself, but in character as Professor Parkins; a spectral guide to Mark Fisher's life and work.

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

 

Bonus: click here to play the trailer to We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025). 

Sid Vicious Vs the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society

Sid Vicious (Sex Pistol) Vs Chris Jones (Editor of the

Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Newsletter)

'Tunbridge Wells is Tunbridge Wells, and there is nothing really like it upon our planet.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Tunbridge Wells - or, as it likes to style itself Royal Tunbridge Wells - is a town in Kent, about 30 miles southeast of London, with a reputation for being a bastion of conservative middle class values and disgust with any ideas which might possibly conflict with these values. 

 

 

II.

 

Sid Vicious was assigned the role of bass player for the Sex Pistols after Glen Matlock was pushed out of the band in February 1977. He couldn't play, but he looked good and had the right attitude and his tragic death two years later, aged 21, established him as a punk icon.  

 

 

III.

 

In 2017, Chris Jones, editor of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Newsletter, decided to offer readers his personal view on the question of whether Sid Vicious should be commemorated with a red plaque, due to the fact that he had lived for several years as a child in Tunbridge Wells (1965-71), before moving with his mother to Stoke Newington. 

 

In a nutshell: he wasn't happy about the idea, describing Sid as an exhibitionist thug - which is not entirely unfair or wildly mistaken - and challenging the idea that he should be celebrated as a symbol of youthful rebellion:   

 

"He was rebelling certainly, but mainly against the preceding generation of popular culture the 'peace and love' generation, which, as you might gather, was 'my generation'. We were idealistic, campaigning for a fairer world, civil rights, equal pay, and fighting against apartheid and the Vietnam War. To Sid Vicious, though, we were pretentious,and perhaps some of our beliefs, or the expressions of those beliefs can seem a little twee ..." [2] 

 

In a piece that becomes increasingly laughable as the moral and political rhetoric is ramped up, Jones continues:     

 

"Sid, though, was driven by darker thoughts and motivations. He would not have liked today's Tunbridge Wells: open-minded, international, tolerant, proud to have been the only part of Kent to vote 'Remain'. He would have thought us politically-correct, though he may have used rather stronger language." [3] 

 

 

IV. 

 

This, obviously, is an old story. 

 

I'm sharing it, however, partly because I'd not heard it until a few days ago and partly because it amazes me that, forty years after the event, punk - and the memory of the Sex Pistols in particular - can still get members of civic society hot under the collar; that the ghost of Sid Vicious can still frighten and appall old hippies like Jones.     

 

Needless to say, Sid didn't get his plaque: it was decided that his connection to the town was too slight to merit recognition (but that no moral or musical judgement was being passed on the deceased Sex Pistol). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] H. G. Wells, Christina Alberta's Father (Jonathan Cape, 1925). 

 

[2] Chris Jones, writing in an editorial for the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society Newsletter (Autumn 2017): click here. 

 

[3] Ibid.