Visions of Malcolm

Malcolm McLaren as played on screen by David Hayman (1986), 

Mark Gatiss (2010), and Thomas Brodie-Sangster (2022)

 

 

I. 

 

I am not an actor. Not in any professional sense, at least. But I imagine that portraying a well-known public figure whose persona is established in the cultural imagination is particularly difficult because the audience already knows how they look, move, and speak.  

 

Rightly or wrongly, viewers will scrutinise the performance in order to assess its accuracy and if something feels off - perhaps only in the smallest detail - this can make the whole thing seem fake and awkward. 

 

Getting the voice right - but without sounding like one is simply doing a comic impression - is perhaps the hardest thing of all. Nevertheless, there are some actors who enjoy the challenge and have an almost chameleon-like ability to play famous real-life figures; one thinks of Michael Sheen, for example, who has given legendary performances as Tony Blair, Brian Clough, and Kenneth Williams [1].  

 

Whether Sheen has some supernatural ability to get under the skin of others and channel their essence - or is just a consummate professional who does intensive research, works closely with voice coaches, and has the kind of features and physique that lend themselves well to different roles - I don't know. 

 

But he's an immensely gifted actor and it's a shame he hasn't played Malcolm McLaren as I think he'd do a great job. He even has the slightly goofy grin, naturally curly hair, and Aquarian-white complexion needed for the role. 

 

Still, who knows, maybe one day ... And in the meantime, we have three other actors to discuss who have given us their on-screen versions of Malcolm: David Hayman, Mark Gatiss, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster ...

 

 

II.  

 

Of the three, Scottish actor David Hayman faced perhaps the greatest challenge when preparing to play Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986). For he had to embody someone who was a still living (and still notorious) cultural provocateur. 

 

Because Malcolm was such a distinctively animated character, Hayman could not rely on simply reading a standard script outline for his interpretation. He was obliged to meticulously study many hours of filmed interviews with McLaren in order to try and master his accent and intonation which was an amusingly camp mix of art school affectation and cockney [2]. Obviously, he also attempted to get McLaren's theatrical hand gestures and mannerisms spot on too. 

 

Primarily, however, Hayman focused on capturing McLaren's mercenary energy, portraying him as a scheming, detached observer of events who viewed human tragedy purely from the perspective of marketing and media. In Cox's film, he gleefully delivers a line describing Sid Vicious as a fabulous disaster rather than a mere bass player. 

 

That's not entirely unfair or inaccurate, but it does mean we are not shown anything of McLaren's greatest asset - his charm. 

 

Malcolm possessed a very powerful, highly contradictory kind of charisma that he used to captivate, influence, and, yes, manipulate people. There was a reason that so many individuals bought into what Johnny Rotten would dismiss as McLaren's bullshit and if he prioritised cultural provocation over the well-being and long-term success of the band, well, that's not something that troubles me.  

 

My main gripe with Hayman as McLaren is this: he looked too damn old! Malcolm was a young-looking 31-year-old when Sid Vicious joined the Sex Pistols in February 1977. But Hayman, aged 37, was a much more mature screen presence in 1985 when the film Sid and Nancy was shot, as can be seen in the above photo. (And note to wardrobe: McLaren never wore Lennon-style sunglasses.) 

 

Finally, it's interesting to discover that a planned meeting on set to film a promotional face-to-face between McLaren and his cinematic doppelgänger was abandoned after Malcolm saw some early footage from the film and was appalled by how the production was shaping up.    

 

III. 

 

Next on our list is Mark Gatiss, who played McLaren in the biographical drama Worried About the Boy (dir. Julian Jarrold, 2010) [3], about the rise to fame of the singer Boy George (played by Douglas Booth) who very briefly sang on stage with Bow Wow Wow (as Lieutenant Lush) [4].

 

With slightly unfortunate timing, the 90-minute film aired on BBC Two on 16 May 2010, just five weeks after Malcolm's death. 

 

Gatiss approached the role differently to Hayman and gives us a markedly different vision of McLaren, whom he portrayed as more of an old-school impresario and natural-born showman who was then shifting aesthetically from punk nihilism to a new romanticism.     

 

Hayman's McLaren was cruel and calculating: Gatiss tapped into the lighter side of his character; flamboyant and eccentric, a man with wild hair and waving hands who could charm the birds from the trees; less arch-manipulator and more a shrewd and inspiring mentor to young artists such as George (and before him Adam Ant).     

 

Reflecting on playing real public figures like McLaren, Gatiss later revealed that his philosophy is not to attempt an exact impersonation, but to try and convey a suggestion of the person without letting the truth get in the way of the story being told. 

 

In other words, whereas Hayman gave audiences a darker, perhaps psychologically more realistic version of McLaren, Gatiss delivered the performative, larger-than-life figure who wished to cause trouble and make cash from chaos in the name of fun rather than malice.

 

Critics and viewers rightly praised Gatiss's performance. Writing in the Financial Times (21 May 2010), John Lloyd described it as a "vividly cynical cameo". Again, my only issue would be that Gatiss was just slightly too old for the role and his McLaren seems to be based more on a mid-rather than an early '80s version of the character. 

  

 

IV.

 

The most recent actor to try on McLaren's tartan bondage suit is Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who played him in Danny Boyle's six-part miniseries Pistol (2022) [5]. Arguably, his was the standout performance of the entire show - salvaging an otherwise Disneyfied production - and he cleverly pitched it somewhere between David Hayman's hard-edged version and Mark Gatiss's high camp take on the character.

 

Rather than frame McLaren as a detached puppet master, Brodie-Sangster and series writer Craig Pearce actively tried to avoid making him a one-dimensional villain. Brodie-Sangster aimed to show why it was that young, working-class kids would willingly follow him in the first place, highlighting McLaren's genuine, infectious passion for a cultural and artistic revolution.

 

Because he has so much more screen time to develop the character, Brodie-Sangster is able to both experiment with the role and relax his way into it. He later admitted that he found playing the part not only a lot of fun, but liberating for him as an actor.  

 

Physically, Brodie-Sangster had a distinct advantage over the earlier actors who played the part. For he actually possessed the slight build, youthful face, and naturally boyish energy of the real McLaren. Also, during filming he was the exact same age as Malcolm in 1977 and that certainly helped. As does the fact that he pretty much nails the distinct, slightly high-pitched, breathless cadence of McLaren's vocal delivery [6]. 

 

There's a joy in his performance and no trace of tiredness. Having said that, McLaren's character isn't softened too much or emptied entirely of its more Machiavellian aspects. And whilst it's arguable whose performance is best - Hayman's, Gatiss's, or Brodie-Sangster's - the latter's is certainly my favourite.   

In sum: without possessing the uncanny power of Michael Sheen to transform into the character being played, each of the three captured a vital facet of a McLaren who spent his entire life ensuring that nobody could ever completely pin him down.

 

V. 

 

Finally, to end on an ironic note, it might convincingly be argued that the best performance by someone playing McLaren was given by McLaren himself in Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). 

 

In fact, so good was his hyper-stylised performance in this film that there are still people to this day who take it for an accurate representation - i.e., who miss the fact that McLaren was acting and that he wasn't aiming to expose the truth about himself but construct a self-satirising myth; that the film was a fictionalised narrative in which McLaren played the version of himself that he wished to be - not a documentary, ffs.    

 

The film's relentless cynicism was so perfectly tailored to McLaren's public persona that audiences completely fell for it - believing the lie that the Sex Pistols project was merely a manufactured, art-school scam used to sell bondage trousers from 430 King's Road. 

 

In later years, McLaren regretted being too good an actor. Being mistaken for his role as The Embezzler proved to be burdensome, when it meant that the public, the press, and cultural historians refused to see him as an avant-garde artist, but only as a fast-talking fraud and flamboyant failure.  

 

 

Malcolm McLaren as Malcolm McLaren (The Embezzler) 

in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Sheen played Blair in three works written by Peter Morgan: The Deal (dir. Stephen Frears, 2003), The Queen (dir. Stephen Frears, 2006), and The Special Relationship (dir. Richard Loncraine, 2010). He played Clough in The Damned United (dir. Tom Hooper, 2009), and Williams in Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! (dir. Andy De Emmony, 2006). Sheen has also played other famous faces including David Frost, Chris Tarrant, and Prince Andrew.

 

[2] One could write an entire post trying to describe McLaren's unique accent and intonation. His voice bridged the gap between his Jewish North London roots and his art school education. Thus, he retained the flat vowels of Estuary English, but stretched them out theatrically. 

      Sometimes, he spoke breathlessly at speed; at other times he spoke quite softly and deliberately as if drawing you into a secret. The pitch would go up and down depending on his level of excitement and this gave the delivery its camp and comic aspects. The most notable thing, however, was how he spoke about popular culture with the elevated vocabulary and conceptual framing of a French intellectual, creating a surprising juxtaposition and making him a highly articulate and amusing storyteller.

 

[3] Click on the link provided in the main text and go to 1:02:22-1:08:10 to watch Gatiss's short but memorable performance as McLaren. 

 

[4] Bow Wow Wow were the band McLaren assembled and managed after the Sex Pistols. George O'Dowd - who would become known to the world as Boy George - was, at that time (1980), a nineteen-year-old "gender-defying club kid noted for his soulful singing voice, sassy demeanour and outrageous appearance". O'Dowd's relationship with McLaren and the band was, however, extremely short-lived and he made only a couple of appearances on stage with them. See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020). The line quoted is on p. 471. 

  

[5] Don't get me started on Pistol ... Readers who want to know what I think of this show can see the post 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Castration' (30 Mar 2021). 

 

[6] Brodie-Sangster noted in promotional interviews that he found McLaren's voice the hardest element to capture, describing it as a mix of a salesman's hustle and an intellectual's lecture, delivered with an almost childlike glee.

 

 

Echoes of the Punk Age - by Jimmy Jazz (In the Manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald)

 Echoes of the Punk Age (SA/2026)

 

It was an age of anarchy; it was an age of art. 

It was an age of gobbing, and it was an age of safety pins.

 

 

Editorial Note

 

The release in October 1976 of 'New Rose' by the Damned was the first signal of the coming youth revolution [1]. Caroline Coon gave the British movement a name: Punk Rock [2]. 

 

In this post, Jimmy Jazz, who remembers the time and observed the subcultural changes of the era first-hand, shares some thoughts in what is essentially a pastiche of a well-known essay written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1931 [3].   

 

Endnotes have been added to provide context and clarification of terms or references that may be unfamiliar to some readers.      

 

 

*************************************** 

 

I. 

 

It is now almost impossible to write about the Punk Age with genuine enthusiasm without being suspected of senile dementia. 

 

Many punk scholars still succumb to excited nostalgia when they happen upon any of its characteristic terms or images - even though these terms and images have long become familiar forms emptied of any meaning, magic, or menace and ultimately serve the Spectacle. 

 

Having passed over into the world of pure simulation where it exists posthumously as a marketable visual code that is fixed and forever circulating in media and fashion networks, the Punk Age is as undead as any other era in which complex history is replaced by a comforting myth.  

 

And yet, despite everything, the present writer still looks back to the mid-late 1970s with a certain fondness: for in a very real sense it shaped who he is today (for better or for worse).  

 

That brief six-year period, which began when SEX first opened its doors on King's Road in the autumn of 1974, ended when - as if reluctant to grow old or witness its own recuperation - punk signalled its own spectacular demise with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and the closure of Seditionaries in the autumn of 1980.            

 

 

II.

 

When a pair of burly policemen took Alan Jones into custody for wearing a Cowboys T-shirt and charged him with displaying an obscene print in a public space - and when SEX was subsequently raided by the porn squad, arresting Malcolm and Vivienne on indecency charges - it was the sort of measure bound to alienate the more intelligent and sexually liberated young people. 

 

We didn't know much about the history of free speech in the UK, but we did know that such fascist tyranny and harassment had to be opposed - even if, after the failure of the hippies, we were scornful of the effectiveness of passive resistance and non-violent protest. 

 

For the so-called Summer of Love left those old enough to remember cynical and disappointed rather than optimistic and it was characteristic of the Punk Age that it had no interest in Peace and Love, maaan. Theirs was the politics of boredom and the aim was to exit the twentieth century via a revolt into style; a sartorial attempt to flee the totalising logic of capital through a belief in the ruins.        

 

 

III.

 

It was an age of anarchy, it was an age of art, it was an age of gobbing, and it was an age of safety pins [4]. A cold and distant Queen sat upon the throne of the United Kingdom; her regime making morons of us all. 

 

Nevertheless, we were filled with destructive potential and, thanks to McLaren and Westwood, style belonged to us. Where once we had looked to Carnaby Street, now we assembled at 430 King's Road as the power to determine the look of music and the sound of fashion passed from one generation to another.  

 

The Bromley Contingent were by-far the best-dressed group of people in the world: who could tell them what was stylish and what was fun? They created their own look and their own pastimes. 

 

The punk revolution - even before it was called such - "created a sensation out of all proportion to its novelty" [5]. As far back as 1975, the Bowie-inspired youth of London's suburbs had discovered that to dress up so as to mess up was a form of empowerment and that, ironically, bondage straps can set free. In other words, by weaponising fetish gear, they transformed restrictive rubberwear into a sign of negative freedom.  

 

At first, punk was confined to a small underground scene, mostly consisting of the Sex Pistols and their friends and followers. Among other young people the old standards and old tastes prevailed. Long-haired hippies in their flared jeans were still regularly encountered on the high street. Only during the Summer of Hate did the Punk Age fully blossom, consigning Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the dustbin of history.  

 

Scarcely had the normally staid citizens of the UK calmed down after the Bill Grundy Incident and the media storm that followed, before the wildest of all generations - the generation which had been too busy playing with their dolls to know about the Summer of Love - brusquely shouldered anyone over twenty-five out of the way and pogoed into the limelight. 

 

This was the generation who dramatised themselves as anarchists, the generation that wanted to fuck the rich up the arse and eventually self-destructed less through a lack of ability and intelligence than through a lack of caring about long-term success. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Arguably, the Sex Pistols topping the charts with 'God Save the Queen' in June 1977 and playing on a boat on the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament was the highpoint of the Punk Age. 

 

For though the era continued even after the band split up in January 1978 [6], it became less and less an affair of rebellious youth and was now renamed (and repackaged) as the New Wave by the elders of the music business looking to regain control over punk's disruptive chaos and make money by promoting big-selling acts acceptable to the US market. 

 

New Wave was like an orgy staged by the impotent at the Cambridge Rapist Hotel tired of missing out on the action and ready to feast on young flesh. As MAMIE record boss Ed Bird informed Steve Jones: 

 

"The Sex Pistols are finished, over! We don't take risks in this business anymore - we don't need to. Anarchy has dropped out of the Top 20 - punk is dead! Rock 'n' Roll can mean anything we want it to mean - peace, love, bringing people together. It can get rid of politics - it can be art, big money, the normal promotion of records. And it's fun!" [7]

 

By 1980, New Wave itself was old hat - say hello to the post-punk world of New Romanticism! Even McLaren and Westwood decided that pirates excited more than rockers and that having gold dust in one's hair was preferable to gel.   

 

The hardcore punks who, in their black leather jackets with 'Punk's Not Dead' defiantly written on the back, refused to quietly fade away or accept that the world had moved on - who rightly pointed out that all the same forces of reaction and stupidity remained in place - soon became as boring as the old hippies that they used to sneer at (and perhaps even more pathetic). 

 

The fact is, once the hacks of Fleet Street made punk headline news the game was nearly over and when the glossy magazines started to celebrate it punk had long ceased to even be news. The songs and the fashions of the Punk Age had changed everything whilst at the same time changing nothing.    

 

 

V.

 

The cooler, more creative, more experimental members of the Punk Age - those who had been to art school and liked wearing makeup - divided into a wide variety of new post-punk subcultures. The more aspirational started wearing expensive suits and were assimilated into the corporate machine where they carved out well-paid professional careers in the media (some of these cunts are still on our TV screens today). 

 

Others, however, just settled back into the normal world; got a job, got married, bought a house, had kids, took up hobbies, and one day looked in the mirror and found they were fat and bald and would no longer dare say bip-bam-boogie and a booga rooga to a policeman [8]. Many of these people now go to punk nostalgia fests and retro events in the vain attempt to relive their younger days, or satisfy their longing for a past they never actually experienced first hand [9]. 

 

 

VI.

 

But what about poor Sid? 

 

That is often the refrain I hear from concerned liberals today. Poor Sid, allowed (and encouraged) to disappear into the dark maw of drug-addled violence. Charged with murdering Nancy (12 October 1978), Vicious found himself in jail on Rikers Island and then, released on bail and awaiting trial, fatally overdosing on heroin supplied by his own mother: too fast to live, but not, it turned out, too young to die (2 February 1979).  

 

Malcolm once said if the Punk Age had continued it would have become much more brutal and destructive and many don't approve of his (rather fanciful) terrorist posturing [10]. But I don't care for their retrospective moralising. 

 

It was fantastic to be young, pretty and vacant in such a nihilistic time: when the apple cart was up-ended just for the pleasure of seeing which way the apples would roll; to not give a shit about anything said by parents and teachers and to think criminals and other notorious figures were more inspiring than second-rate pop stars and boring politicians.  

 

To those who look back in horror on the follies of youth and the excesses of the Punk Age - I give two fingers: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" ... and it seemed only a matter of time before the Grundy generation would step aside "and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were" [11]. 

 

Of course the Punk Age seems "rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more" [12].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] 'New Rose' was released on 22 October 1976 on Stiff Records, and is acknowledged to be the first UK punk single. The debut single from the Sex Pistols - 'Anarchy in the U.K.' - was released by EMI the following month (26 November). 

      Whilst it's impossible not to love Brian James's punk-pop ditty, the latter track, written by Cook, Jones, Matlock and Rotten, is in a different league: a genuine call to action rather than simply a song belonging to an exciting (but in many ways conventional) music genre. Click here for the astonishing live performance of 'Anarchy' on So It Goes (broadcast 4 Sept 1976).  

 

[2] Caroline Coon is widely credited with helping popularize the term 'punk rock' via her pioneering music journalism (although she didn't coin it). After attending early performances by the Sex Pistols in 1976, Coon recognised a revolutionary shift in youth culture was taking place. Coon is also credited with coming up with the name 'Bromley Contingent' for the stylish early followers of the Sex Pistols (which included Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol). 

 

[3] A reference to Fitzgerald's essay 'Echoes of the Jazz Age', which analysed the socio-cultural conditions that gave rise to a fascinating form of hedonistic youth culture in the 1920s. Tap on the link provided to read the essay online as a Project Gutenberg Canada ebook (2014).   

 

[4] This is a reworking of the famous opening line of Fitzgerald's essay: "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, it was an age of satire."   

 

[5] A direct quote from Fitzgerald's 'Echoes of the Jazz Age' (1931). 

 

[6] The Sex Pistols played their final show on 14 January 1978 at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco. 

 

[7] Dialogue from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980). The scene set at the (fictional) Cambridge Rapist Hotel is highly provocative to say the least, exposing how the music business exploits young flesh. The MAMIE record boss is played by actor Johnny Shannon.  

 

[8] This echoes the line in Fitzgerald's essay that reads "one day in 1926 we looked down and found we had flabby arms and a fat pot and couldn't say boop-boop-a-doop to a Sicilian". Obviously, the line suggests that he and his contemporaries had suddenly grown old and culturally irrelevant. 

      'Boop-boop-a-doop' was the playful baby-talk catchphrase of Helen Kane, the 1920s singer who inspired cartoon character Betty Boop. It symbolises the carefree, frivolous, and bubbly pop-culture slang used by the flappers of the Jazz Age. As for the phrase 'to a Sicilian', this refers to a tough, hard-working and down to earth breed of people - i.e., just the kind of people who were scorned by the Bright Young Things. 

      The phrase has been updated in the post by incorporating a line from the Bow Wow Wow song 'C30 C60 C90 - Go!' (EMI 1980) and replacing the Sicilian with an authority figure; the policeman who is shrugged off and ignored in the song by the teenage punk pirate.    

 

[9] In 2012, the writer John Koenig coined a neologism for this pseudo-nostalgia for a cultural era or historical period one didn't actually live through: anemoia. While it's not a clinically recognised psychological state, it refers to a genuine feeling experienced by a growing number of individuals - thus the growing interest in older music, vintage clothing, classic films, etc.

      Readers who are interested might like to see The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig (Simon & Schuster, 2021), or visit his official website of this name: click here.   

 

[10] In a piece by Michael Watts in Melody Maker (June 1979), McLaren said this when asked how things would have developed if the Sex Pistols had stayed together: "They'd have created serious mayhem. They'd have been an awful lot more brutal and evil. In the end it wouldn't have been puking at airports - it would've been much more to do with burning down buildings." 

      Commenting on this, Simon Reynolds says it is fanciful: "Punks were far more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators. They were merely pretending to be monsters and psychopaths as part of their campaign of symbolic warfare." 

      Reynolds continues: "But the parallels with terrorism are there: escalating shock tactics, goading the authorities into repressive measures. The typical punk move was to commit some kind of outrage, through clothes, language or imagery, and then scorn the revulsion they had sought and achieved." 

      See his review of Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), titled Serious Mayhem in - London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 5 (10 March 2022).

 

[11] The first phrase lifts from the famous opening of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The closing sentiment reworks a line from Fitzgerald's 'Echoes of the Jazz Age' (1931). 

 

[12] This is the final, poignant sentence of Fitzgerald's essay, presented almost exactly as written. It serves as the ultimate admission that the magic of any youth subculture is fatally tied to the transient intensity of youth itself.

 

 

Wild, Wild, Wild Youth: A Hundred Years of Anarchy

  

Philip Gibbs: Young Anarchy (Hutchinson and Co., 1926)  

Sex Pistols: Anarchy in the U.K. (EMI, 1976)

 

'I have no tolerance with the spirit of anarchy which is threatening to destroy 

this country of ours; none with the open immorality of youth 

who are dancing their way to the Devil.' [1]

 

I.

 

As ageing punks across the land will know, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' - the debut single by the Sex Pistols; a four-piece rock group styled and (mis)managed by Malcolm McLaren, consisting of Steve Jones on guitar, Paul Cook on drums, Glen Matlock on bass, and frontman Johnny Rotten on vocals. 

 

Originally issued in a plain black sleeve [2], the single reached number 38 on the official UK Singles Chart despite EMI withdrawing the record and firing the band following the Bill Grundy Incident [3].

 

It remains one of the great pop songs: a clarion call to an entire generation of youth - or, more precisely, to that tiny minority of angry, alienated teens who aligned themselves with those described by Peter York as the "extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars" [4]. 

 

In other words, teens like me [5] who, even now, five decades later, still think it sounds fantastic: play here. 

 

(And some of you still naively imagine that The Clash are the only band that matters ...!)  

 

 

II.  

 

What ageing punks across the land will probably not know, however, is that this year also marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Young Anarchy - a newsreel novel [6] by the largely-forgotten English journalist and author Philip Gibbs [7].   

 

Published soon after the General Strike (3-9 May, 1926) [8], the book explores generational divides and political tensions in post-War Britain, offering a fast-paced commentary on contemporary events. 

 

The punks of their day - so-called Jazz Age youth - are portrayed by Gibbs as rebels who reject old ideals of obedience and duty. Their rebellion - whether expressed through acts of cultural hedonism or radical left-wing politics - is framed as a desperate response to the horrors of the Great War.  

 

True to Gibbs's own political liberalism, the book's narrator acts as a well-meaning, moderate observer; one who expresses sympathy for workers fighting for fair wages, but at the same time strongly opposes militants who use industrial action to threaten national stability and young people seemingly out of control and happy to drink and dance their lives away. 

 

This, said of a group of what Gibbs terms Glad Young Things in 1926, might also have been written by some old fart observing the staff and customers of SEX in 1976: "Born into the beginning of a new epoch, with a new mentality [...] We of the older generation cannot catch them up or hold them back. They have escaped from us." [9] 

 

 

III. 

 

Ultimately, both the novel Young Anarchy and the single 'Anarchy in the U.K.' serve as vital, time-capsule dispatches from eras when British society felt precariously close to the edge. 

 

Whether processing the lingering trauma of the Great War through a mixture of decadence and hedonism in 1926, or venting the frustrations of economic collapse and cultural stagnation by gobbing and pogoing in 1976, both generations of youth terrified the establishment by refusing to inherit an untenable status quo. 

 

Gibbs's forgotten book reminds us that the instinct to tear it up and start again did not begin with safety pins and ripped t-shirts - it is, rather, a recurring British tradition born whenever the promises of the old order ring hollow. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This is the reactionary Bishop of Burpham speaking - a character in the novel who does not approve of the younger generation openly jeering at religion and expressing revolutionary ideas. He finds them perplexing, distressing and terrifying: "They seem to me lawless, anarchical, and utterly lacking in any sense of duty and discipline." This includes his own son, Jocelyn, studying at Oxford where he encounters socialism, and his daughter, Nancy, who has published a successful (if somewhat racy) novel. Whilst he disowns them both, his sister, Elizabeth, is far more positive about her nephew and niece and the young generally in whom she sees great future potential.  

      The lines quoted are on p. 7 of the US edition of Philip Gibbs's Young Anarchy (published by George H. Doran, 1926) and available free online thanks to the New York Public Library.  

 

[2] There were only a couple of thousand copies of 'Anarchy in the U.K.' issued in the black sleeve; after that, it was sold in the standard EMI sleeve with a hole in the middle so the label information could easily be read. See the post on TTA titled 'But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It ...' (24 March 2024). 

 

[3] For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the U.K.', and explain what the new subcultural phenomenon called punk was all about. 

      Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - was not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to a female member of their entourage called Siouxsie Sioux. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a "dirty sod" and a "dirty old man". 

      Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to "say something outrageous" - which he did; calling Grundy a "dirty bastard" and a "dirty fucker". Grundy responded, "What a clever boy!" to which Jones hilariously replied, "What a fucking rotter!" 

      Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI (keeping their £40,000 advance) and branded by the media as public enemies. The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time.

 

[4] Peter York, 'Them', Harpers & Queen (October, 1976). Quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329. 

 

[5] I was thirteen when 'Anarchy in the U. K.' was released, but I didn't fully commit to the punk cause until the summer of 1977 around the time of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, when it became clear that one was either for the Crown or the Sex Pistols.    

 

[6] Newsreel fiction refers to a literary technique in which a writer splices actual news headlines, advertising slogans, and historical documents directly into the text with the aim of capturing the chaotic public consciousness of an era increasingly shaped by the media. The style is famously used by American author John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36). 

 

[7] Philip Gibbs (1877-1962) served as one of five official British war correspondents during the First World War and was determined to be a writer just like his father and four of his siblings, producing an astounding number of books in his lifetime. 

      One extremely knowledgeable blogger writes: "In many ways Philip Gibbs is the archetypal male middlebrow writer of the inter-war period. Immensely prolific, he appealed strongly to the thoughtful decent middle class, worried about the way the world was going and wary of extremes." See the post Philip Gibbs and 'Heirs Apparent' (3 June 2013) on George Simmers' blog Great War Fiction Plus. 

      On a later post  - The Novels of Philip Gibbs - a checklist (17 Dec 2017) - Simmers writes that whilst today many of Gibbs's novels are largely forgotten and remain "of more interest to the historian than to the connoisseur of literature", he is, nevertheless, a very readable and interesting writer. 

 

[8] Called by the TUC in solidarity with the miners, around 1.7 million transport, printing, dock, and heavy industry workers walked out, bringing much of Britain to a standstill. It is worth noting that in Gibbs's novel the General Strike is something of a turning point; suddenly, the Glad Young Things rally round for king and country and do their scabby bit by driving buses and working at the docks. Gibb's writes: "That youth of ours [...] so careless of criticism, such rebels against authority, so reckless of convention [...] played the game according to the rules, and in the spirit of the old tradition." [Young Anarchy, US edition, 1926, p. 309.]

      Similarly, many punks proved to be right-thinking people when push came to shove - even Johnny Rotten is now seen as a national treasure, who loved his mother, loved his wife, and didn't really mean those nasty things he said about Her Majesty, describing anarchy as a bourgeois fantasy only ever subscribed to by people like McLaren. Young Anarchy suggests that the essentially peaceful and liberal spirit of England will always win out against more extreme, revolutionary ideologies and perhaps that is in fact the case. 

      See George Simmers's review of Young Anarchy (20 Oct 2025) published on Reading 1900-1950 - a Sheffield Hallam University blog site concerned with readerships and literary cultures in this period. And see also an earlier review by Simmers of Gibbs's novel published on his own blog (29 June 2008) - click here - upon which the later piece is largely based.   

 

[9] Philip Gibbs, Young Anarchy (George H. Doran, 1926), p. 134. 

      This marks the novel's thematic resolution; the narrator finally accepts that society has shifted permanently into a new era, leaving his generation behind. 

 

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.