matt-colquhoun-egress-on-mourning-melancholy-and-the-fisherfunction-1

EGRESS

EGRESS: ON MOURNING, MELANCHOLY AND MARK FISHER Matt Colquhoun

Published by Repeater Books An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd Unit 11 Shepperton House 89-93 Shepperton Road London N1 3DF United Kingdom www.repeaterbooks.com A Repeater Books paperback original 2020 1 Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Copyright © Matt Colquhoun 2020 Matt Colquhoun asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover design: Johnny Bull ISBN: 9781912248872 Ebook ISBN: 9781912248889 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

CONTENTS 0 The Fisher-Function 1 1 Into the Weird 21 2 Reaching Beyond to the Other 69 3 Mental Health Asteroid 105 4 Unconsciousness Raising 131 5 Friends, Communities & Ghosts 181 6 Acid 233 7 An Afterword — A Lesson 255 8 An Addendum — An Egress 265   Images 267   Notes 269   Acknowledgements 298

… at the limit of discursive thought experience tends not only toward the outside, toward death; it also tends toward contact with another, toward community. Indeed, so much that “[t]here cannot be inner experience without a community of those who live it.” Inner experience requires a community of lucky beings drawn together, bound together in their excessive movement, in their fall away from themselves. This, then, is “where” community is located: in the chance movement of insufficiency; in the openness that my being is in exceeding the requirements of homogenization, preservation, and justification — in the movement outside oneself, which falls in love, dies, laughs, cries, mourns, celebrates, suffers. — Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, “Editor’s Introduction” in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication

THE FISHER-FUNCTION 14th January 2017 Saturday — one week into the new semester at Goldsmiths, University of London. The library is busy, as it always is. The winter sun is making the days dark early and it has been raining heavily all week. My friends and I — all of us postgraduate students — are stationed on the second floor, each working on two essays simultaneously, both due on the following Tuesday. I am trying my best to be productive and not procrastinate when my phone lights up on the desk in front of me. Taking any excuse for a five-minute Twitter break, I pick it up mindlessly to read a push notification on my phone’s lock screen, telling me that a tweet from the account @RepeaterBooks is proving popular within my social network: In memory of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), an inspiration and a friend. Our thoughts are with his family.1 I’m confused. I pass my phone over the desk divide to a friend writing an essay for Mark’s class. They, in turn, pass it to the person next to them. The tension passes like a wave from one person to the next. No one knows what to say. We start to quietly panic as our minds race, exchanging concerned looks rather than words, unable to make sense of such little information and still aware of the fact that we are in a library. 1

EGRESS I soon start receiving messages from others about the tweet, asking if I’ve seen it or have any further information. Everyone asks the same question, incredulously, not expecting any real answer: “Is it true?” At first, we assume it to be some kind of hoax or misunder­ standing. We’d heard from Mark just last week. He’d sent an apologetic email to his whole class saying that he would have to cancel his first lecture of the new semester because he’d broken his arm and had to go to the doctor about it. We didn’t know how he’d managed to hurt himself but we began to wonder. Maybe it had been a bad enough break that he needed to have surgery on it? Perhaps there had been complications in the operating room? It hadn’t seemed all that serious… I decided to put Mark’s name into Google followed by the word “dead”, cringing at the bluntness of the search function but not knowing how else to corroborate the rumour. A former keyboardist in the band Wham!, also named Mark Fisher, had died just a few weeks ago, in December 2016. Surely they meant this Mark… But Repeater Books were Mark’s publisher, having just released his latest book, The Weird and the Eerie. Furthermore, Repeater was an enterprise that Mark himself had helped set up with colleagues from his previous venture, Zero Books. They wouldn’t get this wrong… Surely… We sat in silence, continuing to work between short, shocked bursts of disbelief. After just a few minutes, we stopped. “What am I doing?” someone said. “What’s the point now?” Later that evening, our worst fears were confirmed. On Friday 13th January 2017, Mark Fisher had died by suicide. *** In the months that followed Mark’s death, answering the question “What’s the point now?” became an intense collective project within and around Goldsmiths, informing a great deal of activity, including 2

MATT COLQUHOUN — but by no means limited to — a summer term public lecture programme organised by students and staff within the Visual Cultures department that Mark himself had been a beloved part of. Titled The Fisher-Function, the lecture series ran for seven weeks throughout July and August 2017.2 The sessions were built around a selection of lesser-known works made by Mark in various different registers — from blogposts and academic papers to musical mixes and audio essays. The series took its name from a eulogy given by Robin Mackay at a memorial service held on Goldsmiths campus. One month after Mark’s death, Robin would speak to Mark’s impact on the world — his ability to rally people together and foster cultural movements — but also to that entity, that thing that wrote through Mark but which he would not take credit for. Writing on his k-punk blog, for which he was initially best known, Mark would acknowledge “blogging’s tendency to summon a strange double, a second self that seems both alien yet which cannot entirely be disavowed”.3 He also had a novel response to the question of how he managed to sustain his incredibly prolific blogger’s energy: “The answer is that it isn’t me who’s writing.” To describe how he was able to write and keep writing would be to give only a “technical description of how this body has been used as a meat puppet for channeling uttunul signal”, speaking to a force outside time that was wholly other to the subject “Mark Fisher”, perpetually alienated and reduced to a meal to satisfy capitalism’s eternal need for sustenance.4 This distanced relationship to his own capacity to be inspired and create was not simply an exercise in modesty or self-deprecation but spoke explicitly to the use of his “k-punk” persona as a online avatar. It created another Mark; a Mark separate to the man doing the typing; an impersonalised figure who was able to draw together movements and communities across cyberspace, far exceeding the bounds of his biological existence. It was this affective function of the Fisher entity — alongside the meat puppet — that was also now, suddenly, no longer with us. 3

EGRESS Robin asked those present: What is the Fisher-Function? How did it make itself real, and how can we continue to realise it? Many of us naturally feel a need to ensure this is a moment when the force [Mark] brought into our world is redoubled rather than depleted. And to do so, to continue his work and our own, we have to try to understand his life, and the consequences of his death, at once horrifying and awakening, as a part of the Fisher-Function. And I don’t simply mean the intellectual contributions that we can appreciate, extend, take forward into the future; I also mean what we need to learn in terms of looking after ourselves and each other, right now.5 It is precisely the Fisher-Function that we will explore in this book, through the very experience of community that gave the term such resonance in the immediate aftermath of Mark’s death, at Goldsmiths as well as much further afield. We will explore the ways in which Mark the man and k-punk the uttunal signal constituted porous relations between people, and we will consider their tandem disapperance as an egress that should be collectively held open and that cannot be ignored. Our opening epigraph speaks well to this affective understanding of community that Mark’s death galvanised for so many of us. We too found ourselves bound together in our excessive movement, in our fall away from ourselves — and it was in this fall, in the exceeding of our individual experiences, that our community was — for a short time at least — located. However, this “location” was not locatable. Although birthed, for many, from within Goldsmiths, it was not institutional — it grew implicitly beyond Goldsmiths; beyond ourselves. It was a community formed by the molten intensities of a shared experience that nonetheless could not be shared. *** The works of Georges Bataille are central here — and it is from a book on Bataille that this book’s first epigraph is taken. Throughout 4

MATT COLQUHOUN his life, Bataille would repeatedly explore the frictions and tensions that moved and amorphously structured our communal relations and their limits — limits that Bataille not only wrote about but actively pursued and experienced. Born in France in 1897 and initially drawn to a life in the Catholic priesthood, Bataille is today most famous as a pseudonymous writer of “pornographic” texts who, like the Marquis de Sade before him, explored the carnal particulars of human desire and its relationship to a “base materialism” that lurks beneath our considerations of both our bodily functions and our global politics. Bataille’s was an all too literal bod(il)y politic in this sense, the political instability of his lifetime being considered analogous to the innate instability of subjectivity that had long haunted the entangled histories of philosophy and politics, and which had been exacerbated only a few decades previously by the birth of psychoanalysis. He considered the eternal war that structures all of human existence — a war between ways of being; between the illusionary consistency of the “I” of our selves and the often ugly nature of a body’s perpetual degradation and change; the ways in which we contend with this entropic downward spiral into dissolution as we struggle to make sense of it, ourselves and each other. Bataille extended these observations to both impossible heights and impossible depths, writing on countless encounters, both personal and historical, virtual and actual, wherein humanity had found itself at the very limits of what it was able to process and understand. His obsession with so-called “limit-experiences” would lead him to write on everything from the anatomy of the human foot to the fifteenth-century serial child-murderer Gilles de Rais, and beyond to the cosmic nihilism of Aztec sun worship and human sacrifice. He was also a diarist, and the journals he kept during the Nazi occupation of France would bring all of his philosophical and literary excursions crashing down into an immanent and abject reality of global and local suffering. Whilst the life of Georges Bataille may be some distance from the work of Mark Fisher, in subject matter most explicitly, Mark 5

EGRESS also wrote on limit-experiences throughout his life and most explicitly towards its end. For instance, in his final unfinished essay, an introduction to what was likely to have been his next book, Acid Communism, Mark considers the impact of LSD on the French philosopher Michel Foucault when he embarked on a fateful trip to California’s Death Valley in the 1970s, writing that, for Foucault, the “limit-experience was paradoxical: it was an experience at and beyond the limits of ‘ordinary’ experience, an experience of what cannot ordinarily be experienced at all.”6 Mark saw Foucault’s experimentation with psychedelics as an exploration of those “conditions which made ordinary experience possible” but which, through psychedelic practices, “could now be encountered, transformed and escaped — at least temporarily.”7 Whilst Foucault may have found limit-experiences most readily available through the use of psychedelics, for Bataille our encounters with such experiences — no matter how “base” or seemingly transcendental — are inherent to all of human existence. He would go so far as to define “being” itself through the unshareable nature of inner experience — that experience which “responds to the necessity in which I exist” and our human capacity “to challenge (question) everything without acceptable rest”; that experience which “is questioning (testing), in fever and anguish, what man knows of the facts of being.”8 This, for Bataille, is the driving force behind all of philosophy — but also poetry and literature and, indeed, life itself. It is — perhaps unavoidably — a violence. It is the true nature of a life lived through the very questioning of its own foundations, both historical and contemporaneous. This mode of thought may already be familiar to us. It resembles the abyssal questioning that many find at the heart of that midtwentieth-century philosophical phenomenon: existentialism. Bataille, however, had no interest in the Sartrean nausea of a parochial and individualised thought that had come to define that particular movement for him. Indeed, Bataille’s 1943 book Inner Experience would receive a damning appraisal from the existentialist-in-chief, Jean-Paul Sartre himself, in an review written for the journal Les 6

MATT COLQUHOUN Cahiers du Sud, in which Sartre admonished Bataille with his tone of spiritual superiority, denouncing him as “a mystic who has seen God and rejects the all-too-human language of those who have not.”9 Bataille later responded to Sartre’s brutally negative review by agreeing with many of his criticisms and findings, recognising that they offered up an opportunity for critical communication, the very motor of the inner experience he had attempted to write about. It was precisely through his rebuttal to Sartre that Bataille would level his own challenge to existentialism’s inherent individualism. Bataille, in explicit contrast to Sartre, was interested in communal relations above all else — not as a hellish necessity for an otherwise isolated individual but rather as the driving force of a civilisation that must always embrace its own multiplicity, especially and despite those moments when such an exercise feels like it might tear up the very foundations upon which we base our understanding of ourselves. Whereas Sartre infamously wrote that “hell is other people”, Bataille instead reframed communication as a psychedelic intoxication in which the self can reach its outside and be all the better for it. In his play No Exit — from which that oft-quoted line is taken — Sartre depicts hell as being devoid of “red-hot pokers”, instead consisting of little more than three people in a drawing room who are locked in a communicative deadlock. The horror of this secular hell, for Sartre, is defined by the paradox of an individual misanthropy which nonetheless knows that to isolate oneself completely from the other is to lose oneself completely. How can we truly know ourselves at all without the opportunity of seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of another? Hell is other people, yes, perhaps, but it seems that abject isolation is worse even than that. Hell is the inescapability of other people. Bataille’s view of humanity was not so different, although he rejected Sartre’s stern melodrama. Bataille’s vision of the world was far more Dantean, choosing to supercede all Christian dogma, controversially affirming the absurdity of our situation and inserting a perverse laughter back into the Divine Comedy of 7

EGRESS human existence. For example, later mocking Sartre’s misanthropy in his work On Nietzsche, Bataille dramatises their disagreement, as Sartre may have done himself, all too seriously, through a strange and humorous scene in which the two are “dancing face to face, in a potlatch of absurdity, the philosopher — Sartre — and me.”10 Here the very disagreement occasioned by Sartre’s review, in which he deems Bataille to be a woefully insufficient thinker on the nature of human experience, was a perfectly perverse remonstration of Bataille’s attempts to take a scalpel to his own thinking. He notes that Sartre himself demonstrates how the presence of another is necessary to any attempt to actualise one’s chosen self-abolishing activity. He writes with a masochistic admiration of Sartre’s ability to describe “the movement of my mind, based on my book, emphasising [its] foolishness from the outside, better than I could from within”, folding Sartre’s own observations back into their encounter. He adds, in telling and still mocking paratheses: “(I was moved).”11 Evidently inspired by Sartre’s denunciation, Bataille would later write that “being” is constituted by a “principle of insufficiency”, referring to the foundational characteristic not just of inner experience but of all of human communication and conflict whereby the “sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other.”12 This is to say that, for Bataille, to be is to be entangled in the questioning of one’s own and another’s being, and it is here that community both finds and fails itself, in its folded alterity. In light of this conceptualisation of communal relation — itself innately insufficient — Bataille’s friend and fellow philosopher Maurice Blanchot would later ask, “What, then, calls me into question most radically?” Writing posthumously on Bataille’s legacy, debating whilst also enacting the communal thinking at its heart, Blanchot was posing this question rhetorically but also perhaps with one particular individual in mind, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who had likewise chosen to reevaluate Bataille’s works in the aftermath of 8

MATT COLQUHOUN his death but who was unconvinced by his amorphous evocations of a transgressive collective subject. Blanchot argued otherwise. Answering his own question, he writes that what calls an individual into question most radically is their experience of death, and a particular kind of death at that. It is not, he writes, “my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death”, but rather “my presence for another who absents himself by dying” that calls me into question most radically. This is to say that, for Blanchot, it is generally only through the rupture of a community that we are able to intimate the existence of a community at all. It is only through our presence for someone who is absent that we can truly understand the implications of our communal relations. As Blanchot continues: “To remain present in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community.”13 *** To engage with this Openness, this Opening, is perhaps to “egress” — a word used by Mark in his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, to describe the latent acts of exit that were central to the weird fictions he wrote about so passionately and so frequently. Mark begins by noting how the “weird” is an important cultural and aesthetic form for the ways in which it “de-naturalises all worlds, by exploring their instability, their openness to the outside.”14 The “outside” here refers to a mode of radical exteriority — philosophically understood as that which is fundamentally beyond the scope of human perception, experience and intuition. We will explore this concept in more depth in a later chapter but, for now, we shall only emphasise the ways in which the weird, in its probing of the innate instability of subjectivity, as well as that of the world around us, has a tendency to uncover our blind spots and 9

EGRESS our unknowns, as well as alternative configurations of those things which we may not know are in fact changeable. Isolated within the context of Mark’s final published work, the political implications of the concepts of “egress”, “the weird” and “the eerie” are not made as explicit as one might expect. This is perhaps because Mark himself was in the habit of routinely calling himself into question, for better and for worse, and The Weird and the Eerie was something of a break from all that had come before it — a work of cultural criticism that chose to distance aesthetics from any explicit reference to our contemporary politics. Considered beyond its own bounds, however, we can see Mark’s conception of the “weird” as being as much a part of the quotidian mundanity of life under capitalism as it was a part of the fictions that he read and wrote about for his final book. Indeed, the book routinely falls back on the weirdness of the everyday, containing subtle echoes and acknowledgements of his various and generic daily experiences — of teaching and learning, of falling in love, of doing his taxes. By taking the aesthetics out of his politics, and considering said aesthetics on their own merits, the weirdness of our political realities only becomes more pronounced through their difference from the fictions we deploy to make sense of them. This was, in essence, the last hurrah of Mark’s “cold rationalist” mode — a current within his thought that was as openly indebted to the seventeenth-century rationalism of Baruch Spinoza as it was the totally wired politics of Fall frontman Mark E. Smith. For Fisher, freedom and ethics do not come from our capacity to simply do whatever we please but rather from our capacity to understand how and why we do them. Although the experiences explored in weird fiction may be anything but rationalist in this sense, Mark’s attraction to the strange in fiction more broadly came from its dramatic interrogations of our own realities. Things are not what they seem. This is as true of haunted houses as it is of life under capitalism. Mark’s response was to implore us to ask ourselves: “Who or what is it that cannot or will not explain what it is doing or why it is doing it?”15 Who or what has something to hide? Who or what has the most to gain by doing so? 10

MATT COLQUHOUN Here Mark’s conceptualisations of the weird and the eerie, within the wider context of his writings, begin to resemble ontological — as opposed to aesthetic — tools for the creation of passageways to the Outside. These could be, for instance, passageways between capitalism and its suppressed socioeconomic alternatives, but Mark would also extend the physical act of egress to include the cognitive and speculative exits that are already available to us all in our daily lives. He emphasised this repeatedly, on his k-punk blog, by championing Spinoza’s particular brand of “psychedelic reason” — the ways in which the Dutch philosopher “tells you not to get out of your head” through the use of drugs, for instance — which, useful in some circumstances, dissolve the ego all too temporarily — but rather “how to get out through your head”, dismantling the “Foreign Installation” of the superego that lies within it.16 This may require some great effort on our part but not necessarily under the auspices of governmental infrastrucutres, much less the intrusions of psychotherapy. This rational dismantling was radical and psychedelic, as far as Mark was concerned, because human beings come fully equipped with all that they need to enact it. This is to say that the weird can be found simply by paying closer attention to the ways of the world around you. Seeing the world as it already is can take you to far stranger places than any hallucinogen, in part echoing Mark E. Smith’s message on the Fall’s 1980 single “Totally Wired”: “You don’t have to be weird to be weird.”17 Mark’s final and unfinished writings constitute the further development of his thought in this regard, speaking specifically to the egresses that might be made possible by an “acid communism”. We will explore this provocative neologism in more detail later — for now, we will restrict ourselves to highlighting its immediate relevance to our Blanchotian conceptions of communication and community. Blanchot’s previously referenced writings on community later referred specifically to the problem of communism as it appeared within the popular imagination in the late twentieth century. In his 1984 book The Unavowable Community, for instance, Blanchot 11

EGRESS writes of communism as a possibility that is always already caught up within its own impossibility. This speaks not only to the “spectre of communism”, as it has so often been named since its famous conjuration by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, but also to “community” itself as a particular problematic of the human condition. For Blanchot, since the idea of communism — and community more broadly — continues to haunt Europe and the world at large, it must be considered not only as a political question but as an ontological one also. For Blanchot, in this sense, “community” becomes the desirable essence at the heart of any communist project which nonetheless remains shrouded in the shadows of its historical failures. He recognised that many of the left’s contemporary political projects remain indebted to a communistic sense of solidarity with our fellow human beings despite communism’s supposedly dwindling relevance to contemporary politics, a political reputation that has — at least until relatively recently — been wholly derisory.18 Whilst the political left’s enemies may dismiss this loyalty to a communist project as symptomatic of a trademark naïvety and stubbornness, for Blanchot the survival of the communality of communism suggested that the desirability of a new collective subject — contrary to the manditory individualism of capitalism — could not be exorcised as easily as the failure of communism as a paradoxically state-driven project seemed to suggest. However, such a vision was not rose-tinted and utopian. Instead, Blanchot would persistently wonder how any true version of communism could ever be possible if, as Bataille suggested, human communication and collectivity is grounded by a principle of insufficiency. In response to this, he would sketch a newly paraontological orientation towards communism, excavating from the reality of its squandered existence in the popular imagination the subjective ideals that constitute our very understanding of its historical desirability. In this way, Blanchot was seeking to develop his project beyond communism’s historical “totalitarianism(s)”, a beyondness that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy later summarised 12

MATT COLQUHOUN as serving the constitution of a “‘community’ that is not given” — particularly by the rigid and bureacratic infrastructures of the capitalist state — “but that gives itself as a goal.”19 As a result, in attempting to rethink communism in the late twentieth century, Blanchot found himself coming back full circle — back to questions of community and communication that are, to invoke the spirit of another philosopher, Jacques Derrida, haunted by their very multiplicities and immanence to the Other; revenant questions that will always return.20 *** Considering Blanchot’s strangely hopeful communities that are founded on grief and historical failure, the questions at the heart of the Fisher-Function are worth reiterating here: What are the consequences of Mark’s death on his own thought and writings? What is the role of (his) death in the formulation of a postcapitalist community — acid communist or otherwise? What are the revenant questions that his death brings back to the fore of our politics and collective imaginations? Most immediately, the surreality of death as it is experienced by those that remain alive injects a strangeness deep into the heart of our communities. Through its weirdness, the abject reality of death clarifies the stakes of our politics like nothing else and likewise ruptures the strange behaviours we take for granted in this world of ours. Any attempt at writing about the works of Mark Fisher, at this point in time, must contend with these problematics, and this book repeatedly and explicitly attempts to do so. Beginning its existence as a Master’s disseration — or rather, as one student’s attempt to carry on learning from a man who was traumatically no longer around to teach — I found Mark’s death enacting many of the instances of egress that he wrote about. However, at no point does this book wish to suggest that Mark’s suicide was, in any sense, an act of protest — as many of Mark’s friends have made clear, in the end Mark’s mental health was not a political issue but tragically 13

EGRESS personal. Nor is it the intention of this book to use Mark’s death as a convenient anecdotal entry point for a purely philosophical and para-academic project. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that the news of Mark’s death led to various communal revolts wherein familiar modes of interpersonal relation became insufficient and had to be reevaluated. In this way, Mark’s suicide presented an opportunity for “egress” only to those of us left behind, in being an event that occasioned an emotional exit from present circumstances, giving birth to communal praxes of care and intensifying a newfound desire for political change across various scales and locations. At Goldsmiths in particular, we found ourselves acting in new ways in each other’s company. Through the grief and the despair, we found ourselves questioning the surreality of our previous modes of existence, asking of ourselves: “What if we always treated each other like this?” And, more importantly: “Why have we not acted in this way before?” We should also note here, before we continue, that this book is a paradoxically singular product of this very process of ontopolitical questioning, at once private and depressive, collective and joyful. It is as much a product of the processes of grief and depression, mourning and melancholy, as it is about these subjects. At worst, you might describe it as one long and protracted coping mechanism; an exercise of confidence in the face of hopelessness. Due to its — at times — self-centred nature, the process of writing this text has occasionally provoked anger and suspicion as my own sufficiency has been questioned by those around me, and particularly by those who felt they knew Mark a lot better than I did. This is something to be expected. As such, I cannot say if — and, in fact, I very much doubt that — these pages speak to the experiences of anyone else who was close to the situations and circumstances it describes. An innate awareness of this situation only necessitates further the act of speaking for myself. However, it is my hope that what was begun as a personal process undertaken in the midst of a communal trauma may nevertheless, through the dislocating act of writing it 14

MATT COLQUHOUN all down, allow these experiences to unfold outwards and take on a life beyond the communities within which this book was initially produced. Furthermore, it is also my hope that the resonances acquired by the texts explored herein, in the orbit of Fisher’s own writings and references, might also be continuously sustained, their vibrations travelling far beyond the pages of this book into the hearts and minds of others. It is precisely this contagious, affective and transductive resonance that remains the beating heart of the Fisher-Function — as it was, indeed, the beating heart of all of Mark’s writings. In light of these experiences, it is from within the (un)grounding, the egress of Mark’s death, that this book must still necessarily begin. This is because there is no recovering from the force of reading a life and its works under the weight of such extreme circumstances, but through our explicit consideration of the event of Mark’s death it is my belief that the ethical and political stakes of his writings, and the writings of others, can reveal themselves to us again more clearly. Throughout this difficult process, Mark’s death may at times become distressingly impersonal, as an event sometimes held necessarily at a distance, but we must remember that Mark himself believed that “forms of depression are best understood — and best combatted — through frames that are impersonal and political rather than individual and ‘psychological’.”21 It is likewise my belief that, through a sensitive consideration of the political implications of Mark’s death, we may find that the new and intensified praxes of communality and care that so often erupt from within grieving communities can spread and effect change further afield. By asking these difficult questions of ourselves, honestly and openly, we may find hope — and not just hope but confidence. As Mark wrote on his k-punk blog in May 2015: “We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act.”22 To write in service of this act is not to weigh down themes of collectivity and communication with a tone of self-righteousness or piety. The Fisher-Function is not a call to liturgy — regardless of how much Mark’s writings were imbued with a certain spiritual 15

EGRESS agnosticism. It is instead an attempt to grapple with difficult questions through grief which, in their being abjectly unshareable, rupture the very function of the first-person narrative so often deployed on the following pages. This is to say that “Egress” is a book that wants to be kind and, if at all possible, gentle. However, it also wants to rip down the “I” that litters its pages, dissolving itself through the externalisation of its own narrative’s affects. This narrative dissolution is embraced because so much of the book was written in the midst of a moment when the world felt utterly broken and it was first intended to be nothing more than a personal and semi-private attempt to climb out of such a circumstance. It was an attempt to rebuild a world and a thought that seemed to fail, in the moment of Mark’s death, its own creator. And what thought can recover from an event such as that? We will attempt to strive for a new and currently under-defined Fisher-Function precisely because it is new, with the very process of its instantiation being so resolutely different to the actualities of a present moment that its description might just wrest us from our sociopolitical complacencies. In these moments, this book’s language may take on an energy of delirium but we shall attempt to deploy the cold rationalism of grief in order to escape its bounds. This delirium in itself, however, can be useful to us. As Blanchot would describe it, it is a delirium that emerges from the immensity of the effort that must be made, the necessity of again putting into question all of the values to which we are attached, of returning to a new barbarity in order to break with the polite and camouflaged barbarity that serves as our civilisation, the unknown toward which we direct ourselves — for we absolutely do not know what man could be — the terrible violence that the inequality in the satisfaction of needs provokes, the enslavement to things, the governance of things, as well as the dialectic proper to technology, the inertia, finally, the fatigue…”23 16

MATT COLQUHOUN It is the river of capitalist capture and it is weird. For Blanchot, as for Mark, as for many of us, to recognise the potential of this thought alone is intoxicating. *** The first chapter in the book, “Into the Weird”, will consider Mark’s philosophical trajectory and the affects of the Fisher-Function alongside the problematic of “left melancholy” as described by Wendy Brown — a problematic Mark understood to be a central condition of capitalist realism. We will also ask what political agencies can be drawn from the entangled experiences of death and loss in the context of Mark’s association with the projects of accelerationism and Prometheanism, drawing on the writings of Mark’s many friends, associates and influences, as well as engaging with a broader history of the relationship between the politics of mental health and (post-) capitalism, both of which Mark wrote about at length. Chapter Two — “Reaching Out Beyond to the Other” — will consider the prevalence of fraught Bataillean communities within the works of weird fiction that Mark loved so much, particularly the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James and Joan Lindsay. Furthermore, the racialised insufficiency with which Lovecraft, in particular, littered his weird tales will provide us with an opportunity to consider the legacy of Mark’s controversial former lecturer and fellow member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Nick Land, as well as the impact of Land’s writings on Mark’s attempts to wrestle with the human and inhuman dynamics of our various political movements. The following chapter, “Mental Health Asteroid”, will relate these issues to contemporary film and television and, particularly, to how visual media are expanding our capacity to think the climate crisis and the impending possibility of our own extinction — two concerns that have been gathering momentum in recent years and which have 17

EGRESS emerged as the central political concerns of our time. The climate crisis is also a political issue that requires a new kind of collective politics and we shall see how the philosophies of community can be extended into this recently reinvigorated movement as well. Chapter Four, “Unconsciousness Raising”, will explore the more immediate implications of discourses of community and death as they resonate with the lived oppressions that so many are struggling with in our present moment, with particular attention paid to the various political struggles in the USA that have erupted onto the world stage since the election of President Donald Trump, all of which will be read through representations of America’s own history, particularly the anachronism of the television series Westworld. Chapter Five, “Friends, Communities and Ghosts” will ruminate in more detail on the lived experiences of friendship that have been encountered over the three years since Mark’s death, as well as suggesting that music may provide the best foundation for a functionally weird communist politics. This chaper also contains an in-depth philosophical exploration of the concept of friendship in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Friedrich Nietzsche, before turning to Mark’s conceptualisation of an acid communism. Chapter Six will explore the ideas that have become most readily associated with “acid”, spreading throughout the political left with a perhaps surprising virality given Mark’s essay’s unfinished nature, turning to its antecedents in the dance music cultures that have previously made used of the word “acid” so extensively. Chapter Seven, “An Afterword — A Lesson”, will serve as a final return to the rupture as it was experienced within Goldsmiths, University of London, providing us with an opportunity to affirm the strangeness of teaching that meant so much to Mark’s work and the ways in which politics have routinely undermined our educational institutions in recent years, both for better and for worse. Finally, there is a short addendum, a final egress, which takes a moment to ask, before this book ends, what we should do with the questions in this book that inevitably remain unanswered. 18

MATT COLQUHOUN *** The underlying question here is one of grief — of communal grief that finds itself everywhere in popular culture, externalised and represented in the most surprising of places; of how unfinished thoughts function not only as a coping mechanism for dealing with interpersonal and intellectual loss but also as a platform on which to build new futures. In light of this, we will consider the narratives of TV shows such as The Walking Dead, The OA and Westworld, as well as the music of the Caretaker and Aphex Twin, each with their focus on a different kind of personal and political egress. Whilst our visual media so often render these questions through fantasies of transcendence, our music is far more immanant, and we will later consider this fissure between the two. Mark’s death still remains unthinkable in the face of all these considerations that are to follow, but a turn towards speculative narratives and pop-cultural experimentation nonetheless feels productive. It is likewise a way of deploying the Fisher-Function in a manner indebted to Mark’s own approach to cultural criticism. In particular, these televisual narratives have the potential to radically externalise the stakes of thinking the unthinkable by making it impersonal — a thinking that Mark’s own writings now, for us, in the aftermath of his suicide, simultaneously enact and undo. By considering all of the above within the context of the Fisher-Function most explicitly, this book hopes to demonstrate how depressive and mournful thought can nonetheless fuel hope, confidence and praxis within communities that form around the affects of death, grief and mental illness. But first, we must begin with a moment wherein these affects first revealed themselves to so many… 19

The door was always a threshold leading beyond the pleasure principle, and into the weird. — Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

INTO THE WEIRD 20th January 2017 Many nights after Mark’s death were spent at Kodwo Eshun’s house. Mark’s closest friend and colleague at Goldsmiths, Kodwo allowed his kitchen to become a space where many of the bereaved could gather to be together. Exactly one week after Mark’s death, I found myself alone at Kodwo’s kitchen table, having gone round to help make preparations for a wake that was due to be held there the following evening, and to which many of Mark’s friends and family had been invited. No one was home but the radio had been left on. As I sat and waited, numb to the events of the preceding week, I listened to live coverage on BBC Radio 4 of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. 21

EGRESS Trump’s inauguration speech was all the more offensive in that moment. It was predictably divisive but, at the same time, he also called for peace and unity across the nation, paying lip service to many of the global challenges that the political left feared his time in office would inevitably exacerbate. Both events — heavily foreshadowed if nonetheless deemed to be impossible before they were actualised — one unfolding live across the Atlantic, the other all too close and still reverberating from the week before — were obscene in their juxtaposition. My most vivid memory of that day, that week, is a shattered white bowl seen through a doorway, swept into a jagged pile on the floor at the foot of the stairs — a broken object seen through the space of an open doorway, a latent egress. 12th February 2017 Over the next month, I found myself falling into a deep and dark depression of my own. Although I was no stranger to grief, the shock of Mark’s death felt unprecedented. Whilst everyone 22

MATT COLQUHOUN responded differently, I found an intimate knowledge of the day of Mark’s suicide, shared — somewhat recklessly — by those closest to him, hard to bear. I shared this information myself, without thinking, with my flatmate, after returning home from an emotional dinner at Kodwo’s, and saw it rip her apart inside. It was information that was hard to bear alone but I also hadn’t realised what I was feeling until I saw it in her own face. I regretted sharing this information immediately. Over the weeks that followed, I’d never been so haunted by a thought before; by a mental image. I found it hard to look at Christmas decorations that people had not yet taken down, casting shadows of strange fruit across walls and ceilings. Struggling to look after myself and finding my own thoughts inescapable, I felt unable to attend the campus memorial service that took place at Goldsmiths on 12th February 2017, where Robin Mackay first invoked the Fisher-Function. Instead, with the day of the memorial service falling on my girlfriend’s birthday, I decided to leave London for Manchester, taking time away to adjust to a new course of antidepressants in her company whilst, at the same time, attempting to “take a break” from what Kodwo had begun to refer to simply and gravely as “The Rupture”. I failed to take such a break, however. The deepening depression made sleep impossible and was exacerbated by guilt over my choice to escape a reality my friends continued to exist in. Desperate for distraction, I opted to spend successive nights transcribing recordings made by a fellow student of Mark’s postgraduate module, “Postcapitalist Desire”. A new module that Mark had begun teaching on the MA Contemporary Art Theory course at Goldsmiths in late 2016, only five of the projected fifteen lectures took place. Listening to the first introductory session, I was struck by a reference to Wendy Brown’s concept of “left melancholia” which Mark referred to, via the writings of J.K. Gibson-Graham, as an “attachment to a past political analysis or identity” which overrides any “interest in present possibilities for 23

EGRESS mobilization, alliance, or transformation.”1 Noting the ways in which the political left are better attuned to their “monumental” failures than to their successes, Gibson-Graham describe the average leftist as a melancholic subject who, “rather than grieving and letting go,” identifies more closely with their own lost ideals and, therefore, no longer looks to the future — “looking inward rather than seeking new alliances and connections.”2 After reading aloud an extensive passage from GibsonGraham’s 2006 book A Post-Capitalist Politics, Mark continued: “I think anyone who’s read any account of left-wing politics will recognise these pathologies”, which are “related to this problem of the inability to deal with the contingencies and uncertainties of the present.”3 Transcribing these words, I was transported back to Kodwo’s kitchen. The pathologies, contingencies and uncertainties to which Mark was referring loomed large in our immediate reality. Personal and political grief had become hopelessly entangled and their contradictions were felt more violently than ever before. Not only was the left losing elections around the world, it had also lost in Mark one of its finest theoreticians and optimists. However, at the same time, what we were faced with was far more complex than what Gibson-Graham described. What we were faced with was a paradox of melancholic mourning, of the personal and the political, each undoing the other. These concepts of grief, desolation and dejection failed to live up to the experiences unfolding around us. Held up to the horror of reality, all modes of thinking fell apart in our hands. *** Shortly after Mark’s death, a poster made by persons unknown began appearing around Goldsmiths campus, on notice boards, in windows and on doors, featuring a quotation from Mark’s bestselling 2009 book Capitalist Realism. Kodwo would later take one and affix it to the door of Room 235, the office he had shared with Mark up until his death. The quotation read: “Emancipatory politics must always destroy 24

MATT COLQUHOUN the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”4 The quotation was well-chosen, with its hope for emancipation resonating with both our burgeoning collective politics and our seemingly inescapable grief. By the time I had returned to London from Manchester, the quotation had become a mural, painted one night by my friends on a wall by the campus library. My isolating exit from our collective situation, whilst I did not regret taking it, was transformed in that moment, on seeing the results of the collective activity I had been so sorry to miss. This act presented a new opportunity to engage with our surroundings with a new care and criticality; an opportunity that would have to extend across various scales and locations for any meaningful action to take place, with a refutation of the separation between education, community and treatment for mental ill-health integral to this. 25

EGRESS *** Mark had, at some point, sworn himself off the use of antidepressants. Although he was not against them absolutely, he was open about how they had not worked for him. Personally, I had found their affects transformative. They provided an impersonal and critical distance from an otherwise overbearing cloud of grief. This distance, in turn, brought about a new sense of clarity when regarding the situation in which we had found ourselves. This was not to bury the structural impact of medical assistance under an emancipatory politics but rather to critique the ideals often applied to both in tandem. Whilst antidepressants were — and continue to be — instrumental in allowing so many to cope with their depressions, I realised I could not allow their success to overshadow the more systemic issues that exist within our mental health services today. The first time I began taking antidepressants I was sixteen or seventeen years old — I can no longer be certain of the exact start date. Due to a succession of unfortunate personal experiences and the pubescent unleashing of hormonal neuroses, I had become stuck in a dangerous cycle of gradually escalating self-harm. Not yet understanding the nature of my own depression I was ashamed 26

MATT COLQUHOUN to tell my parents that I was suffering as I did not want them to think that the life they had given me was not enough. Without their knowledge, I referred myself to my GP, supported by friends who were too young, as was I, to understand the intracacies of the causes and lived experiences of mental ill-health. After going through various psychiatric assessments, eventually having to confide in my parents due to the fact I was not yet an “adult”, I was incessantly questioned by various local authorities, all the while finding my feelings were worsening under the authorative skepticism of outside persons. Eventually, the day finally came when I was told I could go onto a course of citalopram and six weeks of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). At the time, I was already painfully aware of the fact that my school’s counsellor, who I had initially approached in order to receive support during my GCSE years, and who I later bypassed given her incompetance, had blamed my depression solely on my listening to too much Radiohead and Sonic Youth. (I wish this was hyperbole.) Encouraging those with regular appointments with her to bring CDs to quietly soundtrack their sessions, to be judged and dismissed based on our responses to this otherwise comforting opportunity felt like the deepest of betrayals. Mental health services in schools are better now, I am told, and the onset of serious mental health conditions at a young age is less likely to be dismissed as par for the course when you have erratic pubescent hormones. This does not mean, however, that there is not a long, long way to go. When I later came off antidepressants, it wasn’t by choice. As a young adult, I moved to Wales to begin an undergraduate degree in photography and, when I tried to get a repeat prescription once I was there, my request was repeatedly denied. Despite now being over the age of eighteen, I was made to feel completely out of control of my own treatment. I went cold turkey on the SSRIs that I’d been taking for two years. There was no communication between my old GP and my new one and so I went back day after day after day, complaining of symptoms that I later learned, from my own research 27

EGRESS rather than any professional insight, were the result of severe ADS (Antidepressent Discontinuation Syndrome). This experience only served to exacerbate my depression even further. I felt like I was going insane, if I wasn’t already. Maybe I was approaching the situation all wrong? I was certainly unsure of how best to navigate the bureacracy of modern-day psychomedical treatment. Maybe I was overreacting? From the outside, maybe I looked as pathetic as I felt, failing to inspire sympathy or compassion because of my very constitution as a wretched human being? These were irrational and depressive thoughts, no doubt, but they were emboldened by my interpersonal encounters with both peers and medical professionals nonetheless. When describing the primary and most disconcerting symptom of ADS, colloquially referred to as “brain zaps” — an electric shocklike sensation that had become hugely distracting, like cognitive hiccups, as if someone were tapping the inside of my skull with a cattle prod every few minutes — my new doctor assumed I was making up the experience, I can only assume because she herself had never heard of or been through it. Despite presenting my GP with the ADS Wikipedia page which perfectly described my symptoms, I was repeatedly dismissed as being an over-dramatic person who was not in possession of the right forms or contacts. When I started selfharming again, and drinking heavily after two years of medicallyadvised abstinence, I was treated like a burden, a time-waster and someone who was woefully seeking some sort of attention I wasn’t getting elsewhere. But of course I was seeking attention. Assistance was offered by no one. All I wanted, desperately so, was to get better. I wanted to stop hurting and return to a chemical solution that had previously provided relief. Instead, I stopped eating, started drinking more heavily and later ended up in hospital due to the return and escalation of my previous self-harming coping strategies. I was completely failed not only by the NHS but everyone around me who was privy to my experiences. Once I “recovered” (that is, after I deeply repressed my issues), things were OK for a few years. I had one more round of CBT without 28

MATT COLQUHOUN medication, after the depth of my repressions had become painfully apparent to my long-term girlfriend and counter-productive to any attempts at sociality but, on the plus side, I had not selfharmed in seven years. When Mark’s death ripped the floor out from underneath me and brought me back to a dark place I almost thought I’d left behind forever, going back on antidepressants was the first thing I decided to do because I knew they worked for me. Unfortunately, our mental health services still did not. This problem is not limited to the NHS, of course, and any aspersions cast upon it are done so tentatively in this country, as I too have the utmost respect for the National Health Service as the UK’s crowning socialist achievement. But must that foreclose all criticisms of how it functions? In truth, my experiences were symptomatic of a confluence of failures that spanned various public services and governing bodies. In this sense, I knew these problems were broadly societal rather than being isolated to a single institution or trained professional. After all, many of my friends had begun treating me the same way as the doctors I eventually turned to. “Why can’t you just get over it?” became the exasperated response. This was as much an issue of social understanding and compassion as it was an issue of counter-productive bureaucracies. Mental health, in this sense — and as Mark himself would write — is a political issue precisely because it transcends, obliterates and often falls between the boundaries set by our proud social institutions and capitalist realities. Later I discovered that, whilst many improvements have been made, much has also gotten worse. The counselling services at Goldsmiths, for instance, had been privatised in the years prior to Mark’s death and so, following that horrifying event, if you wanted to talk to a professional you had to call a non-descript number and hit a series of buttons in order to be connected to the right department where you’d be dealt with accordingly over the phone by an outsourced human resources company. Receiving professional support for acute mental distress following communal trauma was now on the same level of quotidian bureacracy as ringing your bank. What Mark had called “bureaucratic 29

EGRESS anti-production” was traumatically epitomised by the institutional compounding of our present distress. Further affects of our faltering bureacracies were writ large in various news articles written in the aftermath of Mark’s death. That summer, Zoe Fisher, Mark’s wife, would speak to her local newspaper, the Ipswich Star, about the ways in which she and Mark were also dealt with by phone. As a result of this distanced approach, Mark was “able to convince his GP he did not need treatment.”5 Zoe explains how she and Mark had fallen “foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place, shifting services to different areas.”6 She would note how the “hospital services are always attentive and on the ball, but once you leave hospital the GP becomes your access to any help.” This was tragically similar to my own experience, seven years previously. She describes, heartbreakingly, how their experience was “problematic and very frustrating” precisely because of “the way things are set up.”7 It is because of these gaps in the infrastructures in which we are embedded that collective and communal action became a necessity within and around Goldsmiths following Mark’s death. If we could not rely on our institutions, we would have to rely on each other. The importance of Mark’s statement about emancipatory politics becomes clear here, emphasising the centrality of radical social democracy within his thought. The response should never be to accept the state of things but rather to demand better and more comprehensive experiences — whether we are dealing with our democracies, our rights as workers or as patients. We must remember that the present state of all these things is fragile, despite the assurances of public relations departments that exist solely to convince us otherwise. All that is solid may melt into PR, as Mark writes in Capitalist Realism, but that is all the more reason for us to insist that what seems impossible is, in fact, attainable. And even if things do work, we must ask ourselves if they can work better. Antidepressants, in this context, certainly worked for me and many others, but should that foreclose a critique of the infrastructures that provide us with this medication or which make us depressed in 30

MATT COLQUHOUN the first place? No. So what if the drugs work? Like the psychedelics Mark later wrote about, these drugs offer only temporary hope. We require something deeper, something more long-term, and from every perspective, the buck always stops with capitalism. In light of this, Mark wrote that depression “is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture” — it is, in itself, a symptom of “what happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities.”8 Quoting the psychologist Oliver James he highlights how, “in the entrepreneurial fantasy society,” we are taught “that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background — if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.”9 Mark’s talk of societal privilege, whether in reference to mental health or socioeconomic existence more generally, often served to highlight the depressing realities of competitive labour we all find ourselves restrained by under a capitalist system. Elsewhere, he wrote about how our collective depression “is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination.”10 The illusionary meritocracy to which our ruling classes profess allegiance is nothing more than a trojan horse for the enforcement of their own ideals, behaviours and standards. As a result, within our political lives most explicitly, we accept “the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act.”11 Mark wrote that this “isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’.”12 The cards are not stacked in our favour. We might ask ourselves, rather than continuing to gamble with what we are given, if perhaps it is better for us to play a different game altogether. For Mark, although the radical overhaul of the current system is “a formidable task indeed”, it is the “rebuilding of class consciousness” that must be sought if we are to remedy our situation.13 This is to say that present contingencies can only be acknowledged as such if we uncover them together. We must always remember, “in spite of what our collective depression tells us”, that this can be done.14 The invention of “new forms of political involvement, reviving 31

EGRESS institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?”15 This confident thinking, along with the quotation taken from Capitalist Realism and painted on the walls of the Goldsmiths campus, is essential for thinking about the next phase of Mark’s thought: his acid communism. At the time of his death, Mark was further developing an articulation of his desire for an emancipatory politics that could become an antidote to this aforementioned “left melancholia”, offering up a comprehensive vision not only of the left’s past — which, as the collective amnesia of the left’s successes in the twentieth century seemed to show, was more necessary than many cared to admit — but also of its potential new futures. If the structure of his “Postcapitalist Desire” course was anything to go by, Mark had planned to use his next book to explore everything from the Allende government in Chile to contemporary issues within the field of cybernetics, such as automation, communication and free access to information. He was also, uncharacteristically, looking back to 1960s and 1970s counterculture. This is surprising at first glance, not least because Mark’s cultural tastes were more “Love Will Tear Us Apart” than “Love Is All You Need”. Beyond Gibson-Graham’s particular distillation of the problems at hand, Mark was also evidently inspired by Wendy Brown in her original description of left melancholy, in which she highlights the left’s failure “to apprehend the character of the age and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character”, as well as its “anachronistic habits of thought and its fears and anxieties about revising those habits.”16 In line with this, Mark had also written, in his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life, about the “anachronism and inertia” afflicting twenty-first-century culture, hidden behind the thin veil of a “superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement” that is integral to late capitalism.17 In his most famous cultural critique — his theory of cultural “hauntology”, for which he extended the insights of philosopher Jacques Derrida in blogospheric collaboration with the music critic 32

MATT COLQUHOUN Simon Reynolds — Mark describes how the futures we once looked forward to — in our fictions, our music and our politics — have failed to materialise, and in their place we now have a repetitive cycle of retrospection and pastiche. Simon Reynolds, in particular, would write in his 2011 book Retromania about the templexity of “pop culture’s addiction to its own past” as a peculiar form of nostalgia which “in the modern sense is an impossible emotion, or at least an incurable one: the only remedy would involve time travel.”18 Reynolds describes the musicians of that time as “consummate scavengers” trawling “through charity shops, street markets and jumble sales for delectable morsels of decaying cultural matter.”19 Drawing on Derrida explicitly, Reynolds writes how “hauntology” allowed the Marxist philosopher “to use the philosophically problematic figure of the ghost — neither being nor non-being, both presence and absence simultaneously — to discuss the uncanny persistence of Marx’s ideas after the death of communism and ‘the end of history’.”20 And it was this philosophical problematic that would inspire a new generation of artists, musicians and academics following the dawn of the new millienium. Beyond Reynolds’ observations, and the term’s renewed popularity within both academia and the art world, it was Mark who attempted to transpose these insights into a theory through which he would consider the impact of lost futures on the politics of the present and, indeed, the impact of lost futures on those imperceptible and new futures still to come. Whilst much has been made of Mark’s particular explorations of hauntology, in practice it has often been rendered hauntographically by others. The difference between an -ology and an -ography, following French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his essay on literary symptomatologies, “Coldness & Cruelty”, is that the former “cannot be reduced to the elementary functions of ordering and describing” which constitute the latter, but it is precisely such an “ordering and describing” that we have seen hauntology be deployed in aid of.21 In this sense, hauntology — a Derridean pun on the word “ontology”, with its French pronunciation clashing with spectral associations 33

EGRESS when heard by Anglophonic ears — should be seen less as a description of the repetitive semiology of capitalist modernity and more as a study of its innate nature and its effect on us as subjects. This was made most clear for Mark by the “metaphysical crackle” that had begun to permeate the digital cultures of the 2000s. Drawing on the works of Philip Jeck, Boards of Canada, Burial, the Ghost Box record label and the music of Leyland Kirby’s most famous musical project the Caretaker, what defined “this ‘hauntological’ confluence” of musicians, for him, was their “confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.”22 We might better understand this cultural impasse as the inertial whiplash of the West post-Y2K. For both Reynolds and Fisher, it was already obvious that countless cultural futures have come and gone over the course of the ninteenth and twentieth centuries, albeit with an aesthetic relevance that persists whilst nonetheless being abandoned in favour of new potentials. As Reynolds writes in Retromania: “Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, of course, from the Renaissance’s veneration of Roman and Greek classicism to the Gothic movement’s invocations of the medieval.”23 However, following the immense hype of the turn of the century, it seemed like the fervor of Nineties dance music and rave culture had plateaued into an impassable, monolithic and unprecedentedly fossilized late-capitalist form, meaning that, by “2005 or so, it was becoming clear that electronic music could no longer deliver sounds that were ‘futuristic’.”24 For Mark, the issue here was precisely with the way in which the future had been preemptively over-defined so that our sense of what constituted the “futuristic” as an aesthetic mode “now connoted a settled set of concepts, affects, and associations.”25 He continues that what specifically “haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.”26 The stagnation of aesthetic experimentation at that time was not simply the result of the deterioration of a creative thinking on the part of musicians in the early twenty-first century, rather it was worth paying attention to as the indirect expression of a mourning of 34

MATT COLQUHOUN a “whole mode of social thinking” and, more specifically, a mourning of our collective cultural capacity “to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”27 Mark wrote that this mourning did not occasion a moment of cultural regret but rather the acceptance of a situation in which culture would develop “without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system.”28 However, much like ontology’s own relation to the being it wishes to understand, we might consider the eventual if not culturally immediate purpose of hauntology to be to observe the pathological impact of these lost futures so that we might, in future, act differently, in the face of late capitalism’s subsequent and paradoxically static cultural turmoil. It is in this sense that two of Mark’s most important influences, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, following the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, emphasize a process of becoming rather than a state of being, focusing on our ontological movement in order to avoid any misunderstanding of being as a fixed and unchanging state. Hauntology, likewise, points to the event of our precious subjectivity’s arrest and degradation. A question nonetheless perpetuates: “What's next?” The hauntological observations Mark brought into the popular imagination are important and insightful for understanding not only his work but also how he would later put such concepts to use. If we move swiftly past this most famous phase of Mark’s thought it is so that we might better appreciate hauntology’s place in the movement of his thinking and its relation to futures new as well as lost. This is to emphasize the paradox of thinking hauntology hauntographically as some sort of key and unmoving concept to be deployed statically within the present order of things. Falling into this trap, many of Mark’s present-day critics may go so far as to denounce hauntology altogether as little more than a fad that has faded into cultural irrelevance just as quickly as it appeared, with contemporary dance music moving far beyond the precipice of a foretold stasis. But we might argue it was precisely due to our new awareness of our former cultural “stuckness” that 35

EGRESS we have moved forwards into the future with such vigor, reigniting the momentum of our collective imagination and the sociopolitical action it inspires. Mark also emphasized this maneuver, albeit somewhat imperceptibly, moving without fanfare from the initial melancholy of his hauntological thinking to the explicit momentum of his accelerationist mode. Mark’s writings on accelerationism can be seen, in many respects, as a reaction to his own writings on hauntology and their subsequent reception. Having described the nature of our contemporary “stuckness”, the accelerationist discourses of the mid-2010s were an attempt to move towards and to answer hauntology’s innate but underacknowledged question of “What is to be done?”. Unfortunately, this theoretical mode has since been widely misappropriated and misunderstood. The woefully populist interpretation of accelerationism — which is now so often found in blinkered analyses of right-wing discourses undertaken by the mainstream media, occassioned by the twofold hype and controversy surrounding the term as its influence continues to spread through the various misreadings of online imageboard users — is that it is a process of accelerating capitalism’s self-destructive mechanisms so that we can sooner reach its demise. If this were the case, hauntology’s cultural relevance would have persisted. In particular, the proclamation made in the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant — the perpetrator of two successive mass killings in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 — that his actions were “accelerationist”, epitomises a right-wing bastardisation of the term which views the acceleration of social chaos as something to be achieved rather than something which is already happening to us as subjects of late capitalism.29 Instead, the “acceleration” inherent to accelerationism originally refered to the impact of the rapidity of technological innovation on a human subject that could not adapt quickly enough to the social impact of its own innovations, inevitably leading to a culture that can no longer keep up with the speed of its own development and leading precisely to the stuckness 36

MATT COLQUHOUN observed by hauntology and the resentment of contemporary right-wing populisms. This is to say that it is precisely the panicked and violently terroristic subjectivity epitomised by Tarrant that accelerationism first foresaw and attempted to critique. In line with this common misunderstanding, Andy Beckett wrote in a 2017 essay for the Guardian — which was perhaps the “fringe” philosophy’s most public exploration to date — that accelerationists “argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified — either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.”30 As many accelerationist thinkers had already explained some years previously — Pete Wolfendale most succintly31 — this is a largely inaccurate and reductive definition of the concept as it was described in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, specifically their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus. Many more nuanced interpretations of accelerationism now exist that span the entire political spectrum — from left accelerationism (L/Acc) to a right accelerationism (R/Acc) but also a number of more explicitly philosophical considerations such as unconditional accelerationism (U/Acc) and the xenofeminist offshoot of gender accelerationism (G/Acc).32 However, suspending the particulars of these definitions for the time being, we should note that Mark described the concept of accelerationism for himself as follows: Capitalism is a necessarily failed escape from feudalism, which, instead of destroying encastement, reconstitutes social stratification in the class structure. It is only given this model that Deleuze and Guattari’s call to “accelerate the process” makes sense. It does not mean accelerating any or everything in capitalism willy-nilly, in the hope that capitalism will thereby collapse. Rather, it means accelerating the processes of destratification that capitalism cannot but obstruct.33 37

EGRESS Here Mark is noting that, despite the apparent collapse of the feudal system that preceded our capitalist realities, whereby the subjects of a given nation-state had to work for the benefit of a landowner in order to “enjoy” certain rights and protections, the modern worker nonetheless remains locked in a similar mentality of servitude in return for the basic means to exist. This is to say that, whilst the dissolution of feudalism consolidated power away from feudal lords and over to the heads of a nation-state, its labour dynamics nonetheless remain intact as the primary source of productive power within society at various scales. Karl Marx referred to this process as “primitive accumulation”, and this is likewise the source of Fisher’s assessment of our “failed escape” from feudalism. Aware of the fragility of its own position, however, capitalism as a system implements countless failsafes whereby its territories of influence appear fluid and adaptive to a constant barrage of internal changes. This is, in essence, the engine at the heart of a Western politics controlled by a feedback loop of conservatism and progressivism; of left- and right-wing politics. Whilst concessions may be made on issues of social justice, other elements of our social traditions are continuously and heavily enforced, and all the while capitalism persists as a hegemonic system that takes credit for any and all progressive changes that occur within (and despite) its own boundaries. However, these wavering boundaries of progress, dangled in front of us like carrots of innovation, simply offer up the illusion of the new without ever truly providing it, producing what Mark once called a “frenzied stasis.”34 Indeed, the illusion of contingency within a capitalist system is allowed to proliferate just enough so that the overarching structure is stabilised. From within, given bouyancy by the changes it allows, the belief that there is no alternative continues to persist. When Mark speaks of accelerating the process of that which capitalism produces but also “cannot but obstruct”, he is referring precisely to this dymanic: capitalism’s inherent processes of adaptation that infrequently reveal alternatives and outsides to us before blocking their full-scale implementation and exploration. This is to say that whilst progressivism and conservatism, in equal 38

MATT COLQUHOUN measure, push up against capitalism’s own limit-experiences, they are never allowed to reach beyond them. Simon O’Sullivan, another of Mark’s colleagues from within the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, has also written on the political dynamics of accelerationism in this sense, and his writings are particularly relevant here for the ways in which he emphasises the implications of these limit-experiences on our familiar philosophical and political understandings of subjectivity. In an article for the website Metamute, O’Sullivan writes that left accelerationism, for instance, “involves something more immediately recognisable: a communist subject, or a subject that is the product of collective enunciation.”35 Pioneered by Fisher and others who positioned themselves explicitly on the left side of politics, this accelerationism has sought the establishment of a new kind of human subject that is “the result of the knitting together of ‘disparate proletarian identities’ … capable of ‘abductive experimentation’ in to how best to act in the world.”36 Whilst the technological acceleration which epitomised accelerationism’s populist conception is welcomed, O’Sullivan writes that this is “not only because this is the only realistic grounds on which to address the iniquities of capitalism itself (on its own terrain as it were), but also, precisely, because such an acceleration might offer up platforms for a new and different kind of subject to emerge.”37 However, as O’Sullivan continues, accelerationism’s right-wing variant — or rather, its pro-capitalist variant — a distinction Mark himself made in his first “Postcapitalist Desire” seminar — “as incarnated in the writings of Nick Land — would seem to call for an end to this subject altogether (the figure drawn in the sand as Michel Foucault once had it), in favour of a specifically non-human machinic process that continues alongside, and is more or less oblivious to the human.”38 A former student of Land’s, Mark would return to his writings in order to draw out a more humanist accelerationism that could transform the affects of left melancholy and its impact on modern subjectivity under what he had already described as a “capitalist realism”. In his book of the same name, Mark sought to emphasise 39

EGRESS “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system … it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”.39 He saw a more humanistic conception of accelerationism as necessary because capitalism’s staying power is determined most explicitly by its colonisation of the mind of the subject in which it finds its own ephemeral footing. It is only through capitalism’s collectively instantiated and ideologically insistent grounding that we believe it is the only realistic system of political and economic organisation available to us. This process of transforming subjectivity — called for previously by Mark in his definition of accelerationism in which he references Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “destratification” (a more detailed exploration of which can be found in the chapter “Unconsciousness Raising” below) — was central to all of Mark’s accelerationist writings in which he emphasised the potential of libido and affect to instantiate post-capitalist alternatives. In his central accelerationist essay, “Terminator vs Avatar”, Mark — via Jean-François Lyotard’s self-described “evil” book Libidinal Economy — calls explicitly for the transformation of our impotent melancholy into a newly productive rage so that we might instrumentalise libido for fresh political purposes. This polemic phase of Lyotard’s political philosophy was infamous for its suggestion that the English peasantry were masochists who secretly enjoyed the exhaustion “of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell”.40 Mark wrote in response, channelling Lyotard’s own libidinal expressionism and updating it to our present moment, vindicating Lyotard’s transformative vision of a masochistic but aspirational proletariat who would become the new English middle class: Hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities, families and villages. Hands up, furthermore, those who really believe that these desires for a restored organic wholeness 40

MATT COLQUHOUN are extrinsic to late capitalist culture, rather than fully incorporated components of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure.41 Lyotard’s writings may have been exemplary of a once vitriolic and polemic capitalist critique that has long been lost, but Mark demanded that that this “evil” mode must be rediscovered anew, both within popular culture and within a similarly complacent academia. For Mark, beneath “Lyotard’s ‘desire-drunk yes’ lies the No of hatred, anger and frustration: no satisfaction, no fun, no future.”42 His was a productive negativity, in this sense — an active nihilism, constituted by a biting rhetoric which — whether agreed with or rejected — might just provoke the sort of libidinal revolution that capitalism itself has long denied us through its mechanisms of affective capture. In this way, Lyotard’s polemical politics foreshadowed the attention economy of contemporary capitalism. Whether you like it or not, you have to react, and whilst capitalism has today monetised this predictable outrage for clicks, Lyotard saw this mode of critique as a potential trigger for political uprising, if only it can be let off its monetised leash. Instead, today, this rupturous rhetoric only serves to entrench think-tank predictions and election data, deployed in favour of the retention of the status quo. For Mark, however, this mode of affectation nonetheless remained fertile ground for the procurement of “the resources of negativity” that the left must make contact with once again.43 With his next book, Acid Communism, Mark had planned to tap into the affects of Lyotard’s double-pincered yes-no through the (re)establishment of a psychedelia — or his own conception of it at least: a “digital psychedelia” which Mark believed could help us overcome the “stupefaction” and “paralysis of agency and imagination”44 that was the ultimate result of our manipulation by “capitalist sorcery” — here referring to the book of the same name by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, who write about the way in which there is “something decidedly maleficent about capitalism, with the bourgeoisie as ‘the sorcerer, who is no longer able to 41

EGRESS control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’.”45 Writing on the work of artist collective the Otolith Group in 2012, Mark explores their film Anathema as an example of this new kind of psychedelia; a “counter-sorcery, a weapon made from the very same materials that capitalist sorcery itself uses.”46 He writes about how what he calls de-psychedelization “is an aspect of capitalist realism that reduces everything to the imperatives of business and to neurotic psychological interiority.”47 He continues: “Lucid, delirial and exploratory, digital psychedelia rediscovers the dream time that capitalist realism has eclipsed.”48 Digital psychedelia, then, is a conceptual weapon for use against the enforced illusions of capitalist realism and against our further stupefaction by capitalism’s effective colonisation of unconscious experience, here referencing the unconscious processes that Sigmund Freud referred to in his 1899 work The Interpretation of Dreams as “dreamwork” — the work done by the unconscious mind to construct a seemingly linear and believable narrative from the fragmentary and implausible nature of our dreams.49 Mark writes that “any reality constructed must be a tissue of inconsistencies”, extending Freud’s conception of the processes of the unconscious to the ironing-out of neoliberal ideologies which currently govern everyday waking life under capitalism. He notes that this process is precisely what leads us to believe that “the confabulations we live are consensual.”50 Blind to this self-fulfilling process of coercion, we believe in capitalism’s self-confidence despite its blatant failings and inconsistencies, again speaking to the intense stupefaction and paralysis of human agency and imagination. (Here again, we might note that Mark’s call for confidence instead of hope is a seizing of capitalism’s own modes of affective production.) Capitalism is not consensual but its processes of stratification have now spread so far and so deep within the collective psyche that we daren’t think to question them — or, worse still, we forget that we even have the capacity and agency to do so. As Mark continues: “What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradictions, and it is this which Wendy Brown 42

MATT COLQUHOUN picked up on when she argued that it was precisely dreamwork which provided the best model for understanding contemporary forms of power.”51 For Mark, the best way to counteract capitalist dreamwork and establish this digital psychedelia is through the harnessing of a particular brand of capitalist sorcery that his friend, the political theorist Jodi Dean, had previously called “communicative capitalism”. Dean defines this particular form of capitalism via the ways “in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies.”52 Elsewhere she notes how “the convergence of communication and capitalism in a formation that incites voice, engagement, and participation” has only succeeded in further capturing these innate functions of subjectivity within “the affective networks of mass personalized media.”53 She continues: These networks materialize a contradiction. On the one hand, social media networks (and communicative capitalism more generally) produce a common, a collective information and communication mesh through which affects and ideas circulate. On the other, these networks presuppose and intensify individualism such that widely shared ideas and concerns are conceived less in terms of a self-conscious collective than they are as viruses, mobs, trends, moments, and swarms. … Channeled through cellular networks and fiber optic cables, onto screens and into sites for access, storage, retrieval, and counting, communication today is captured in the capitalist circuits it produces and amplifies.54 Mark takes up this same conceptualisation in his essay “Touchscreen Capture”, which once again considers the Otolith Group’s Anathema. For Mark, as with Jodi Dean, it is “not human groups or individuals who have access to an unlimited wealth of information; it is capitalist cyberspace that now has virtually unlimited access to us — to our nervous systems, to our appetites, to our energy, to our attention.”55 43

EGRESS We ourselves become the network “through which communicative capitalism circulates and proliferates.”56 Mark’s emphasis on capitalism’s access to our biological anatomies is not simply euphemistic. As he would repeatedly note, in the decade since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, communicative capitalism has seeded a biological basis for itself by infiltrating and materialising our hard-wired necessity to communicate with one another and by monopolising the modern technological means of doing so. This “biological basis” relates to Herbert Marcuse’s prescient argument in 1969 that, in an affluent society, “capitalism comes into its own” by permeating “all dimensions of private and public existence.”57 As such, Dean’s conception of a communicative capitalism provides this process of biological permeation with a technological update, and Mark considered both Dean and Marcuse in tandem as he too attempted to chart the continuous acceleration of this same process. Marcuse argues that what is needed if we are to counter these processes of permeation is the establishment of a biological foundation for socialism through the mechanisms of the Great Refusal — the name he gives to a “rationality of negation” that is inherent to art which, in itself, is always a “protest against that which is.”58 That which is is constituted for Marcuse by contemporaneous norms and standards of morality, and so his almost Nietzschean analysis is tied explicitly to social taboos. He highlights, for instance, the perceived “obscenity” of the politics of sexual liberation during his lifetime in stark contrast to the normalisation of state and institutional violences that were routinely exercised against, for instance, the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Such moral contradictions are useful for us to observe. Considering the shifting sands of public opinion, and particularly the extent to which they were influenced by the infrastructures of the state, Marcuse suggests that, given the influence of the state on the very structures of social morality, and therefore the human drives themselves, it becomes obvious that these drives are inherently plastic. 44

MATT COLQUHOUN The distinction between these two moments of political unrest is constituted, for Marcuse, by two levels of “human nature”. The first and more superficial level is wholly at the mercy of the state, as that principal governor and shaper of subjectivity. It is at this level that “a society constantly re-creates, this side of consciousness and ideology, patterns of behaviour and aspiration as part of the ‘nature’ of its people.”59 As such, it is only by “sinking down” into the base and biological level of human nature that real social change can be achieved. As Marcuse writes, unless a moment of revolt “reaches into this ‘second’ nature, into these ingrown patterns, social change will remain ‘incomplete’, even self-defeating.”60 For Fisher and Dean, late-capitalist technologies have usurped morality in this equation but the processes are nonetheless the same — a process Mark refers to as “libidinal engineering”, which we are subjected to via the inherently capitalistic processes of branding and advertising, all contained under the general rubric of public relations “which constantly cyberblitzes our brains and nervous systems.”61 What is needed, then, for Marcuse — and for Fisher and Dean in their timely update — is a harnessing of the plasticity of our desires for other means and ends; for other futures. If a biological foundation for communicative capitalism can be libidinally engineered in as little as ten years, as Apple’s iPhone has masterfully demonstrated, surely we can re-engineer these drives to establish new foundations for socialism and/or communism in another not-so-distant future. 9th June 2017 As weeks turned into months, these emancipatory politics became increasingly visible outside of Goldsmiths, particularly around the time of the 2017 UK general election. Prior to the election, many predicted an easy win for the incumbent Prime Minister Theresa May and her Conservative Party. 45

EGRESS However, pollsters were soon upset by a surge in support for the Labour Party led by the supposedly “unelectable” Jeremy Corbyn. When the results of the election were called in the early hours of 9th June 2017, for the left at least, the Conservative Party’s “win” — a technicality, in many respects, given the fact that the party were unable to achieve a parliamentary majority, retaining power only through the establishment of a coalition government with members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party — seemed less important than what Labour’s increase in parliamentary seats showed the party’s naysayers: they did not have to represent a hallowed “centre ground”, as they had done since Tony Blair’s tenyear premiership, in order to win elections; they could win popular support with a blatantly socialist manifesto. Through a playful grassroots campaign that included, most notably, popular merchandising, often based around mash-ups of Corbyn’s name with designer sportswear logos, it seemed that socialism was becoming — against all the odds and against more prevalent political trends elsewhere — a quantifiable social desire that was notably being expressed through capitalism’s own semiotic mechanisms. It seemed that what Mark had referred to as capitalist realism was being dismantled before our very eyes. It is here that the importance of the word “egress” within Mark’s later thought reveals itself most explicitly. Whereas Marcuse, with his focus on morality, spoke of transgression — of going against an established moral system — Mark’s egress was an attempt to radically leave the system altogether through a reclaiming of its outside-seeking functions in explicit relation to the aesthetic practices that constitute the Great Refusal. This is digital psychedelia, but it is also acid and designer communism — the latter being Mark’s previous attempt to reclaim the maligned phrase “designer socialism”, “a pejorative term … used to condemn those on the left who were interested in the new kinds of semiotic and technological machineries that were being rolled out in the 1980s.”62 Mark’s consistent proliferation of related phrases and neologisms was his attempt to further cultivate aesthetic 46

MATT COLQUHOUN weapons, counter-sorceries, for use against capitalist realism, with each phrase sharing an emphasis on the innate plasticity of our desires. These counter-sorceries were, for Mark — and remain, for us here today — weapons for rupturing the domineering illusion of neoliberalism’s false consistencies and there are many like them still in circulation, albeit being put to use for other ends. The now-common usage of the neologism “redpilled”, for instance, popular amongst right-wing communities online and borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, is a particularly resonant instance of digital psychedelia that already exists within the pop-cultural sphere. The phrase first came to prominence amongst so-called “Men’s Rights Activists” as a “metaphor for the supposed epiphany of gender inequality against men, or beliefs that contemporary social values and gender role expectations are intended to benefit women more than men.”63 It is now used to indicate any form of supposedly “enlightened” political consciousness that has overcome the sociocultural hegemony of leftist progressivism. By harnessing the mechanisms and dynamics of online virality these groups and others like them have aided a variety of right-wing political projects, from the terrorising of so-called “Social Justice Warriors”, on- and offline, as the apparent enforcers of a moralising “political correctness”, to the election of Donald Trump as the selfproclaimed enemy of a political establishment. It must be remembered, however, that the “Red Pill” is not an inherently right-wing concept. In The Matrix, the protagonist Neo — a lonely computer hacker increasingly fed up with his 9-to-5 existence — is trying to establish contact with a clandestine community of fellow hackers who promise him the answer to a mysterious question that seems to follow him throughout his adventures in cyberspace: “What is the Matrix?” We soon learn, alongside Neo, that the Matrix is in fact the name given to a computer simulation of the late twentieth century, in which Neo’s consciousness has so far exclusively “existed”; a simulation created by machines who have enslaved humanity in what is actually two hundred years in the future. 47

EGRESS The clandestine community that Neo seeks consists of fellow humans who have escaped machinic enslavement but who continue to “jack into” the Matrix so that they might undermine the illusion of that which is from within. They do this in order to free others still trapped within late capitalism’s machinic grasp and fight the machines that control the world of the Matrix on their own turf. In line with Mark’s own analysis, within the universe of The Matrix it is the machines of capitalism themselves that perpetuate the illusion of capitalist realism in the popular imagination long after the — very real — end of the world. In a pivotal scene, the leader of the resistance, the messianic Morpheus, offers Neo his freedom in the form of a choice between two pills: one blue, the other red. Having shown potential but not yet knowing the true nature of his existence, Morpheus tells Neo that this is his last chance. After he has taken one of the pills on offer to him, there is no turning back. Morpheus explains: “You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” We soon learn that the Red Pill allows the person who takes it to see the formation of the Matrix for what it truly is — a digital simulation — initiating the taker’s subject-rupturing egress. Neo, choosing the Red Pill and subsequently undergoing a course of intensive training, is additionally given the power to shape the Matrix at will. In this way, the Red Pill is a medium through which one can manipulate perception and desire, allowing for the “upload” of knowledge, objects and abilities through a neural interface — which all humans are now “born” (or rather, “grown”) with — directly into the “hardware” of the human brain and its central nervous system. It is a psychedelic drug through which the real conditions of existence become not only available but immediately plastic, and not just temporarily but permanently, allowing for the interruption of the biological foundation of the Matrix that the machines have implanted into the collective consciousness of an enslaved humanity. 48

MATT COLQUHOUN At its heart, then, The Matrix is an anti-capitalist cinematic fable of political and philosophical choices, and the film’s success can be attributed to its ability to dramatise abstract questions usually only debated by political philosophers. With its narrative combination of drugs, Prometheanism — which we will discuss in a moment — and machinic enslavement, The Matrix could easily be read as an acid communist and left accelerationist parable. However, today it is as if the right-wing monopolisation of the Red Pill requires that the left abandon its analogous potentials… Prometheanism is a philosophical project that speaks to these potentials explicitly. The philosopher Ray Brassier, also a friend of Mark’s, has defined the term, in his essay “Prometheanism and its Critiques”, as “the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and the world.”64 The concept is inherently concerned with technology and, in its contemporary context, the digital realm. Brassier goes on to suggest that whilst “the idea of remaking the world according to the ideals of equality and justice is routinely denounced as a dangerous totalitarian fantasy”, our contemporary technologies nevertheless allow for “the 49

EGRESS technological re-engineering of human nature.”65 He argues that the stakes of Prometheanism lie in its potential unsettling of the “fragile equilibrium” between that which is God-given and that which is man-made, referring to the fundamental difference between human nature and human creativity. As such: “The Promethean trespass resides in making the given.”66 Whilst many believe that no matter the nature of our technological advances we can never hope to transcend “birth, suffering, and death as ineliminable constants”, Brassier cites the ways in which advancements in medical technologies have already radically transformed our understanding of the human condition.67 He asks: “What exactly is reasonable about accepting birth, suffering, and death as ineluctable facts, which is to say, givens? And by what criterion are we to discriminate between evitable and inevitable suffering?”68 These already difficult questions later become: “How much suffering are we supposed to accept as an eliminable feature of the human condition? And what kinds of suffering qualify as inevitable?69 We might consider this discussion of suffering alongside Mark’s desire for a postcapitalism, a desire inherently tied to his call for a repoliticisation of mental illness. We might ask ourselves, applying Brassier’s insights to the conversation at hand: What are the true stakes of applying a left accelerationist and Promethean thinking to a concept like left melancholia, at a time when public discussions of mental health and public grief are at their most prevalent? When we imagine accelerationism as an antidote to left melancholy, how exactly can this “fringe philosophy” transform these affects from within the midst of a collectivised mental suffering? If what is desired through the proliferation of a digital psychedelia is an altered political consciousness, can the affects of mental health conditions under capitalist realism be harnessed in aid of a process of consciousness raising similar to that which Mark sought to establish through digital psychedelia and his more personal writings? Are such attempts healthy or are they doomed to be nothing more than a familiar anachronistic pessimism? 50

MATT COLQUHOUN Mark was optimistic. Discussing Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes’ book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education in his essay “The End of Emo-Politics”, Mark explores the ways that “therapy filled the gap that appeared when New Labour explicitly repudiated the concept of class struggle.”70 He rejects Ecclestone and Hayes’ suggested alternative responses, which he believes endorse “the very emotional remoteness that superficially justifies the therapeutic turn.”71 Here the therapeutic turn refers to a seemingly irreversible moment following which psychology became an inescapable aspect of Western society — not only medically speaking but also popculturally. The proliferation of self-help books, in particular, has only served to integrate the very mechanisms through which we understand our own minds into a broader capitalist system, seeding what Mark referred to disparagingly as our “magical voluntarism” — the imaginary belief that we can solve all of our own problems through acts of individual will, closing off any collective critique of the system in which we find ourselves. For Mark, this was why “individual therapy — even that practiced by a sympathetic and politically progressive therapist — can only ever have limited effects.”72 Instead, what is necessary is that we “engage in collective practices that will reverse neoliberalism’s privatization of stress.”73 14th June 2017 Echoing the proximity of Mark’s death to the US presidential election, one week after the UK general election, on 14th June 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-storey housing block in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London. The fire raged throughout the night and into the following morning as firefighters struggled to bring the enormous inferno under control. Photographs and video of the fire likewise spread through our social networks and the mainstream press — images that were traumatically familiar to all who saw them post-9/11. However, this horrific spectacle was not created by some Terrorist Other — it was the result of homegrown working-class oppression, failed social 51

EGRESS housing policies and policies of austerity that had been pursued by successive governments over the previous decade since the financial crash of 2008. According to official estimates at the time, the fire claimed the lives of around eighty people. This count has since been lowered to seventy-one, but many volunteers and other organizations still believe the actual death toll to be higher than this due to the reported prevalence of undocumented residents within its walls. Local communities were flooded with a politicised grief and anger that was painfully familiar in a year already defined by successive acts of terrorism. Parliamentary and local government support was lacklustre, compounding present feelings of neglect. In response to the government’s failure to act as needed, communities around London rallied together to provide aid and relief to those affected. As if the event of the fire itself was not revealing enough of the state’s incompetence and its systematic failing of marginalised groups, the community response was so effective that the London Anarchist Federation went on to declare: This is anarchism in action. We must look more and more to this kind of grassroots organisation in the future as capitalism seeks to strip away social services in line with its strategy of austerity.74 The general election and the Grenfell fire — both unprecedented in their own ways — fostered new potentials for major political change in the UK. The grief and pessimism, the mourning and melancholy, that each event provoked was palpable. If the subsequent marching on local council offices was not enough, the tower itself continues to stand as a monument to “social murder”, as Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell controversially described it. Alongside its other high-rise landmarks — the Shard, the Gherkin, the WalkieTalkie, the Cheese Grater — London could now count the Graveyard amongst them. McDonnell’s declaration, however, started a trend — explicitly absent from mainstream media coverage but prevalent on the 52

MATT COLQUHOUN streets around the tower — that would begin a national process of consciousness raising. The term “social murder”, deemed hugely controversial and inflammatory by various media pundits, was instead a reference to the writings of Friedrich Engels, who wrote in 1895 of the ways in which the state avoids taking the same level of responsibility often demanded, under law, of the individual: When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet … the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.75 It was a new awareness of this discrepancy that would seed revolt amongst the communities both near to and far from the tower. Now that a social housing block — rather than a private economic or educational institution — had become a symbolic and real site of trauma, state violence and neglect, the political discussion shifted once again. With no investigation launched that would consider whether or not the mismanagement of the tower was an instance of “social manslaugher”, the state itself found itself called into question by much of the population of its capital city. Robin Mackay, tweeting in the aftermath of both the general election and the Grenfell fire, rightly wished that Mark were still around to offer his thoughts on his k-punk blog. He would have surely had a lot to say. 53

EGRESS *** The collective and communal response to the crisis that befell Goldsmiths — and similarly the tragedy of Grenfell Tower — functions precisely as a form of consciousness raising to this end (a form of collective political praxis that we will also explore in more detail later). Responses included the explicit highlighting of class struggles and, particularly in the orbit of Grenfell, the voices of those affected were prevalent and loud both on- and offline, repeatedly speaking truth to power. The response to Mark’s death at Goldsmiths, whilst less a subject of intense interest and scrutiny for the national and international press, likewise involved practices of consciousness raising, repeatedly attempting to hold governing bodies to account for their previous and ongoing failures in ways inspired by Mark’s own writings. For instance, in “Good For Nothing”, his most vulnerable essay on both his personal and our collective depression, Mark details the ways that capitalism itself — and particularly the state-sanctioned project of austerity that hopes to protect it — is largely responsible 54

MATT COLQUHOUN for the endemic levels of mental distress that we see all around us. He writes: We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination.76 In this way, capitalist realism engenders a kind of psychic “slow violence” through its cycles of individualisation and psychologization, which serve to explain away mental illness whilst ignoring their role as causes of it. “Slow violence” is a term borrowed from the writer Rob Nixon, which he uses to describe the gradual and largely imperceptible violence of ecological neglect that is perpetuated by capitalist nationstates. It is also an accurate term for the gradual and imperceptible affects of psychological violence that result from neoliberal and latecapitalist policies, bureaucracies and social neglect.77 Discussing these processes in Capitalist Realism, Mark writes: The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. Considering mental illness as an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels 55

EGRESS of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the Left wants to challenge capitalist realism.78 Many admirers of Mark’s work — myself included — came to his writings through identifications with these most personal of experiences which he would deploy as a kind of anecdotal theory, elevating the personal to the level of the political in opposition to neoliberalism’s forced delineation between the two. This mode of writing was, for many, Mark’s most affecting and effective critical register. However, Mark’s writings on depression were not in themselves depressive. Their power lay in their immanence to his emotional state, their and his clarity, and in his talent for making the affects of this state transductive. The painful question remains: Why did this process, in the end, not work for Mark himself? Or rather, why did it stop working? Whatever the answer, it does not mean that his writings must stop working for us here, right now. Such a question is central to the Fisher-Function, making it necessary to contend with the political problematics of mental health discourses honestly and from a place where the personal and political implications of Mark’s thought feel most explicit; from a place of lingering grief and abject depression where the rupture both necessitates a renewed intensity of productive thought and makes traumatically thinkable the act of following Mark through to the void. It is perhaps a result of the sensitivity of these issues that Brown and Gibson-Graham are conservative in their own analyses of left melancholia. Mark wanted to transform the affects of left melancholia for productive ends — which is to say that he was not prone to the superficialities of politically impotent positive affirmations. Death featured predominantly in his writings. In his PhD thesis, for instance, entitled Flatline Constructs, he conceptualised a radical plane of immanence on which everything — animate and inanimate, organic and nonorganic — could be seen as “dead”. He would ask: “What if we are as ‘dead’ as the machines?”79 This cybernetic plane of immanence 56

MATT COLQUHOUN — which he called the Gothic flatline — was related to his concept of a “Gothic Materialism” which he developed to analyse the accelerated proliferation of non-human forces acting upon the capitalist world and its subjects. The question posed by this radical plane of immanence can be formulated as follows: Can we understand death outside of its opposition to life, outside the organic, and alongside the machines that increasingly affect the structure of our reality? Undermining the horrific finality of death, Mark hoped to engender a new thinking, towards a world in which a lack of biological “life” no longer meant a lack of agency, and he chose to articulate this through the Gothic aesthetics that appealed to him most. The sense of the Gothic established here would remain a constant presence within Mark’s writings for the next twenty years. For instance, his use of the concept of “Gothic Materialism” in 1999 must be thought, he writes, as “a deliberate attempt to disassociate the Gothic from everything supernatural, ethereal or otherworldly.”80 However, in his 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie, he adapts the concept to include the supernatural, ethereal and otherworldly explicitly, in order to invoke a more entrenched and historical association with Marcuse’s Great Refusal and the emancipatory potentials found within the other-worldly as it appears in so much weird fiction. Here the darkness of death, in opposition to — but nonetheless entangled with — the light of life, undergoes a reappraisal that is not wholly negative. As with Sigmund Freud, we are at the mercy of both in equal measure, and Freud would use the terms eros and thanatos to refer to our own internal life and death drives respectively. Whilst the former governs our most basic human instincts, which we exercise unconsciously in order to stay alive, the death drive is the obscure pulsion that drives our emotional constitution — the side that is violent, destructive and angry. The questions raised by Mark’s work in this regard are similar to those formulated by Lyotard, Marcuse and Brassier: Capitalism has demonstrated the plasticity of our drives through its very manipulation of them — 57

EGRESS that is, both eros and thanatos in tandem — and so surely we can also re-engineer the death drive too for positive ontopolitical ends? Following on from Freud’s analyses of the modern subject, Marcuse was one of the first to undertake a prolonged analysis of the effects of industrial capitalism on our drives in this way in his 1956 book Eros and Civilisation. Discussing the death drive (which will be explored in much more detail later) Marcuse writes that, contrary to the more superficial understanding outlined above, it does not represent destructiveness “for its own sake” but rather “for the relief of tension.”81 It is the underside of “an unconscious flight from pain and want”, distinct from the more explicit desiring function of eros, which arguably reflects more individual pursuits, precisely because it seems to be most “affected by the historical changes which affect struggle.”82 In this sense, thanatos is not only the drive best associated with anger in a wholly negative sense. It is also our drive towards revolt. Therefore, it is by harnessing the plasticity of the death drive that we are most likely to summon our collective revolutionary spirit. Considering this plasticity alongside the complex nature of Mark’s interests, it is perhaps worth holding Brown and Gibson-Graham’s conceptions of left melancholy up to further scrutiny. Enzo Traverso’s 2016 book Left-Wing Melancholia offers an alternative view of the concept that aligns far better with Fisher’s and Marcuse’s thinking. He returns to Freud who, in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia”, suggests a much thinner distinction between these two titular states of mind. Freud describes how mourning and melancholia are affective in opposing directions — mourning is seen as a natural emotional response to the loss of an external love-object; melancholia as an inward-facing pathological response to a loss of self-esteem and ego. Apart from this apparent opposition, these two emotional states in fact share many similarities. Freud was already aware of this. He wrote that it is “most remarkable that it never occurs to us to consider mourning as a pathological condition and present it to the doctor for treatment, despite the fact that it produces severe deviations from normal behaviour”83 — and mourning can also, of course, lead to melancholia. In light of this, Traverso explains: 58

MATT COLQUHOUN In Freud’s terms, we could define “Left melancholy” as the result of an impossible mourning: communism is both a finished experience and an irreplaceable loss, in an age in which the end of utopias obstructs the separation from the lost beloved ideal as well as a libidinal transfer toward a new object of love. This seems to be the interpretation suggested by Wendy Brown, according to whom Left melancholy is a “conservative tendency” impeding subjects from finding a new “critical and visionary spirit.” However, one could observe that it is precisely the lack of a new spirit and vision that annihilates any attempt to distance oneself from the lost object and to overcome the loss. This “conservative tendency” could also be viewed as a form of resistance against demission and betrayal. Because of the end of utopias, a successful mourning could also mean identification with the enemy: lost socialism replaced by accepted capitalism. If a socialist alternative does not exist, the rejection of real socialism inevitably becomes a disenchanted acceptation of market capitalism, neoliberalism, and so on. In this case, melancholy would be the obstinate refusal of any compromise with domination. If we abandon the Freudian model and “depathologize” melancholy, we could see it as a necessary premise of a mourning process, a step that precedes and allows mourning instead of paralyzing it and thus helps the subject to become active again. In other words, melancholy could be seen as an enabling process in which, according to Judith Butler’s lexicon, the subject experiences “a withdrawal or retraction from speech that makes speech possible” (a vision that Freud himself would have finally accepted in The Ego and the Id).84 This passage alludes to many of the topics that Mark was wellknown for writing about, particularly lost futures and capitalist realist pathologization. Read through Mark’s thinking, Traverso’s conception of left melancholia can be understood as a symptom of capitalist realism in itself by assigning this pathologized melancholy a previously repressed sociopolitical foundation. Crucially, Traverso also highlights the productive potential of melancholy and mourning 59

EGRESS by referencing the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, who suggests elsewhere that “melancholy offers potential insight into how the boundaries of the social are instituted and maintained, not only at the expense of psychic life, but through binding psychic life into forms of melancholic ambivalence.”85 Even Wendy Brown notes, in her original exploration of the term, the distinction between the melancholy of the left and mourning and melancholy more generally as they are experienced by the individual, pointing to Walter Benjamin’s “well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work”, as well as how, “in his study of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative wellspring.”86 If this creative wellspring is utilised as effectively by a collective as it is by an individualised subject, what else can the affects of mourning and melancholy make possible? The apparent nihilism of this thinking, in the sense that it is an active rebuke of hegemonic pathologization and its associated culturally familiar responses, is already embedded within the accelerationist discourses previously discussed, which were “introduced into political theory to designate a certain nihilistic alignment of philosophical thought with the excesses of capitalist culture (or anticulture).”87 This nihilism, however, is far richer than the populist understanding of the term as “the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.”88 Brassier defines an appropriately inhuman (and somewhat acccelerationist) nihilism in his 2007 book Nihil Unbound as “the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mindindependent reality, which, despite the presumption of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.”89 This nihilism speaks explicitly (once again) to the plot of The Matrix and, indeed, the film opens with a fitting reference. In an 60

MATT COLQUHOUN early scene from the film, Neo is seen selling a mysterious MiniDisc — which we can only assume contains some kind of hacking software or computer virus — to a man who has knocked at his door. Taking the man’s money, Neo retrieves the MiniDisc from a hollowed-out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, the title of the last chapter clearly visible — “On Nihilism”. 61

EGRESS In the book, Baudrillard argues that today’s nihilism “is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyse it.”90 Baudrillard goes on to argue that 62

MATT COLQUHOUN we are in a new state of nihilism, following on from the popular nihilisms inherent to the artistic movements of Romanticism and Surrealism — movements that epitomise Marcuse’s conception of the Great Refusal — but now, he writes, all that remains is a “fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us”91 — which speaks more to the inhumanism of Landian accelerationism than Mark’s Marcusian interpretations. Baudrillard goes on to ask: “What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake?”92 In much the same way that Neo’s copy of Simulacra and Simulation is hollowed out and filled with new weaponised countersorceries, Fisher and Brassier offer us a Promethean nihilism: an affirmative project of philosophical emancipation; a nihilism that “is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”93 Mark, in his essay “Practical Eliminativism”, describes this speculative nihilism as a transgression of (or, perhaps, what we might call an egress from) capitalist experience; as a pushing beyond the limit-experiences outlined by Bataille and Blanchot in this book’s introduction. The crux of this speculative opportunity is, for Mark, a “kind of impossible quest to experience not only the maximally intense, but beyond that, the quest to experience from a position where experience itself is not possible; i.e. death, death itself as the limit.”94 To return to Bataille for a moment: his relationship to transgression in particular can be read as being complementary to Marcuse’s previous identification of the role morality plays in structuring society. Bataille’s conception of transgression is extended in this regard in his book Eroticism, in which he argues that it is, in fact, transgression that constitutes society as such. In his analysis of Bataille’s Eroticism and the explorations of communal transgression found therein, David Allison describes how, for Bataille, transgression “produces a new world, that 63

EGRESS of the sacred”; a world that is “opposed to the workaday, the quotidian necessity of laboring, the rule-governed tedium of the human condition.”95 The sacred, a key concept for Bataille, here refers to a “radical, subversive negativity”96 — that Great Refusal at the intersection of literature, philosophy and experience; a folded outside that is immanent to the discourses of religion and spirituality that so morbidly fascinated him. The world of the sacred, similar to the weird world that Mark implores us to investigate, here becomes desirable for its capacity to lead us “into what lies beyond the limits usually observed.”97 Attempting to transform our understanding of “death” along these lines, Mark notes how death (and the death drive), cognitively speaking, can refer not just to “individual death, but hyper-death, and not just the unexperienceable, but the evaporation of the very possibility of experience.”98 The necessity of such a thinking is made explicit by our considerations of our own extinction due to the climate emergency (to be explored in the chapter “Mental Health Asteroid” below). As Mark writes, our response to such an emergency cannot be along the lines of: “You can’t experience extinction, and so we no longer need to worry about that.” Instead, the possibility of our own extinction must become “a speculative and cognitive challenge” that we take very seriously. In challenging Bataille’s belief in the sociopolitical importance of transgression, Mark presents egress as an alternative tactic — not to rest on the transgression of this world’s meanings and values, but to exit and establish new ones altogether from the subjective position of “death” — an experiential impossibility, maybe, but a cognitive necessity in present circumstances nonetheless. Here, the event of death is perhaps more closely related to a collective “ego-death” rather than the death of an individual subject as a biological entity and so, with this in mind, and with particular relevance to the libidinal engineering discussed earlier, Mark goes on to ask, since experience is inherently aesthetic, “How can one have the aesthetic without experience?” He suggests that 64

MATT COLQUHOUN the “question now is whether a certain kind of defacialization can be recovered — whether a practical, not merely theoretical, eliminativist project can be resumed, and whether we can start getting out of our faces again.”99 This is precisely a question of egressing the limits placed on subjectivity by capitalist realism. Neo’s egress from the Matrix is likewise a process of defacialization — from simulated mask to actual self — and the mental risks of such a process are made clear by his new mentor, Morpheus. After the Matrix has been revealed to him, Neo goes into shock — he collapses, vomits and passes out. Morpheus later apologises, saying he and his crew do not usually “free” anyone as old as Neo — the longer someone has “lived” in the Matrix, the less able they are to recover from the shock of egress and the demands it places on subjectivity; on an individual’s neuroplasticity. In this way, The Matrix’s instantiation of the process of reaching the outside of that which is is more Adornian than Marcusian. As Mark writes in the introduction to Acid Communism, in the work of Theodor Adorno, “we are invited to endlessly examine the wounds of a damaged life under capital; the idea of a world beyond capital is despatched into a utopian beyond. Art only marks our distance from this utopia. By contrast, Marcuse vividly evokes, as an immediate prospect, a world totally transformed.”100 The Weird and the Eerie also vividly evokes the immediate prospect of such an other-wordly transformation by exploring aesthetic precedents for “getting out of our faces again.” Strengthening this link to The Weird and the Eerie in the introduction to Acid Communism, Mark goes on to discuss the accessibility of and desirability for “the outside” — the outside of that which is; of capitalism; of reality as we know it — both now and within mid-twentieth-century counterculture. This is less an endorsement of a boundless hedonism through substance abuse and more of an attempt to recapture a particular cultural moment, a moment defined by experiences — and, more importantly, 65

EGRESS experiments — that were in absolute opposition to a burgeoning capitalist realism. It is this, rather than drug use itself, that Mark had always championed via his psychedelic brand of Spinozism. As he writes in “Psychedelic Reason”: The problem with drugs is that they only put the Alien Parasite Entity (= His Majesty the Ego = the thing that calls itself you) to sleep. Their dissolution of the APE is temporary, all-too temporary. And after a while, the neuronal battleground — what you are fighting over AND what you are fighting with, i.e. the only resources you have — is itself damaged. APE has its way as you are dragged/drugged into permanent low-to-deep level depression.101 He continues: Drugs are like an escape kit without an instruction manual. Taking MDMA is like improving MS Windows: no matter how much tinkering $Bill [Gates] does, MS Windows will always be shit because it is built on top of the rickety structure of DOS. In the same way, using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end because Human OS has not been taken out and dismantled.102 Here we can see why Mark may have become more interested in the cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. LSD is not a political tool in and of itself, but the cultural prevalence of psychedelia at the time can be seen as an unprecedented openness to the potential reconstruction of the “Human OS”. Today capitalist realism has become so entrenched, culturally and psychologically, that the outside of the individualised capitalist subject is no longer attractive and desirable; no longer psychedelic. Instead, the horror of the outside is all that remains. This lost outsideness remains integral to both philosophical and political understandings of subjectivity, and new resonances 66

MATT COLQUHOUN have emerged in recent years with regards to how a political praxis towards the outside might take shape. What is required first, before we consider the stakes of this thinking further, is that we take one more step, heading deeper into the weird… 67

Such a lot the gods gave to me — to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other. — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider”

REACHING BEYOND TO THE OTHER H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Outsider” made its first appearance in print in the April 1926 issue of pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. It certainly suits such a publication. A surreal story full of inconsistencies and implausibilities, theories abound as to the scenario it is actually describing. The tale follows its protagonist — the eponymous Outsider — as they try to make sense of but also escape from their surroundings. Unnamed, ungendered, undescribed, the Outsider is trapped inside a dark and ruinous castle which seems to defy all logic and reason, filled with watchful portraits and skeletal remains. Despite feeling strangely at home within the castle’s walls, the Outsider is driven by a curiosity to discover the world outside — and so they begin to look for an exit. The journey to the castle’s outside is fragmentary and dream-like. Stumbling bewilderedly through non-Euclidean environs trying to glimpse the night sky, the Outsider eventually comes across a party in a castle that looks unnervingly like their own, albeit ruinous in other parts than the one they are familiar with. They enter only for all in attendance to flee in terror. Seeing the horror from which the revellers have fled — something “not of this world — or no longer of this world … a leering, abhorrent travesty of the human shape”1 — the Outsider soon realises that this terrifying form belongs to them, although they are at first unable to reconcile the abjectly alienated interiority of the Self with the gruesome image of the Other reflected back at them in “a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.”2 With this revelation — that the Outsider is the other and always was — the story ends. There is no final resolution to this endlessly interpretable tale. Denied any satisfactory answers to the questions Lovecraft leaves 69

EGRESS us with, we might wonder if “The Outsider” is an account of a dream or if the unnamed protagonist is a ghost or otherwise immortal being, doomed to haunt the shadowy castle in which they find themselves, with so much time having passed that the Outsider no longer remembers how they came to be. Here we might emphasise the fractal nature of this tale, which seems to contain innumerable echoes of itself across various scales. What carries the narrative is not the terror of the dark outside of the castle but the horror of the Outsider’s own interiority that is, to them, so absolutely unknown. Just as they struggle to comprehend the innate sense of homeliness they feel within the castle walls, the Outsider cannot seem to grasp their own experience of being a self. In the castle they call home there are no mirrors with which they can see their appearance and they have no recollection of hearing a voice — “not even my own”, the Outsider declares somewhat mournfully, “for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud.”3 The strange trajectory of this weird tale, and its narration of an unknown interiority seeking an unknown exteriority, speaks specifically to a passage found in the introduction to Mark’s 2016 book The Weird and The Eerie — a passage that echoes persistently throughout the rest of the text, signaling to his best-known writings on the psychosocial affects of capitalism, as well as the horrors these affects provoke within the depths of a perpetually alienated subject. Considering capital itself as the ultimate “eerie entity” — which is to say, an immaterial but seemingly agentic force — Mark wonders about the various other ways “that ‘we’ ‘ourselves’ are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces”, before adding, with all the melodrama of a Hammer horror film trailer: “There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was.”4 Following this echo of the Outsider’s abyssal self-realisation, it is fitting that Mark then begins his book with his own exploration of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. He notes that “it is not horror but fascination — albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain 70

MATT COLQUHOUN trepidation — that is integral to Lovecraft’s rendition of the weird.”5 This differs, for example, from the eerie tales of the Cambridge provost and twentieth-century ghost-storyteller extraordinaire M.R. James, explored later in the book, for whom “the outside is always coded as hostile and demonic.”6 By contrast, whilst “the glimpses of exteriority” to be found in James’ stories were thrilling to his readers, “they also came with a firm warning: venture outside this cloistered world at your peril.”7 Mark’s view of the outside as a folding of the inside imbues the stories of both James and Lovecraft with a certain conservatism, and both are somewhat infamous today for their unsavoury and reactionary views. However, Mark’s reflexive insight also injects their works with a certain irony. For instance, Lovecraft’s racism, classism and elitism — his belief in a superior class of white men who find solace above the horror of the masses in the loftiest heights of art and culture — betrays the insecurities of a sickly, depressed and sexually repressed man who resented the lot he had been given in life. Rather than blame societal structures or his own ineptitude, however, Lovecraft casts his aspersions onto other people, echoing a Sartean misanthropy. In this sense, it is perhaps unsurprising that Lovecraft was such a fan of James, whom he showered with praise in his 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, claiming that James was a genius on par with Lord Dunsany, one of Lovecraft’s more widely recognised influences. James was everything that Lovecraft wished himself to be. On paper he even resembles a Lovecraftian protagonist as a well-respected scholar and researcher of medieval manuscripts who helped uncover various lost treasures and archaeological curiosities along England’s Suffolk coastline. He was also a former provost of the most elite institutions in the country — first Eton and then Cambridge — and, perhaps unsurprisingly, his stories carry an air of classism that remains associated with these institutions to this day, with the land of the peasantry outside these ivory towers playing host to cursed archaeological finds that enact their revenge on the excesses of modernity and the curiosity of an 71

EGRESS otherwise protected upper class, echoing the views and privileged existence of the author himself. The pair’s squeamishness, expressed alongside their narrative horror stories, towards ways of life other to their own, particularly when regarding forms of non-traditional self-exploration, suggests an inverted awareness of the philosophical and political Outsides that Mark himself would probe throughout his life. However, whilst James and Lovecraft buried numerous layers of prejudice under their quests for the Outside, Mark would affirm such metaphors for their revolutionary potentials. But what is this Outside exactly, and how might we understand it beyond the fictitious narratives of Lovecraft and James? *** “The Outside” is a concept that has long haunted the history of philosophy under various different names and formulations, each — more often than not — buried under a theoretical impenetrability. Nonetheless, we would do well to pay it closer attention before continuing. Most concisely and most broadly, we can recognise that all conceptualisations of the Outside share problematizations of the human subject alongside attempts to think that which is “beyond” phenomenal limit-experiences. Such a concise definition, however, leaves much to be desired. Tellingly, the best explanation of the philosophical Outside can be found in the work of another colleague of Mark’s from his time as a member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, of which he was a part whilst a student at the University of Warwick. In her PhD thesis, entitled “Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine”, submitted to the university in the year 2000 — one year after Mark submitted his own — Anna Greenspan explains the Outside as follows: 72

MATT COLQUHOUN In colloquial language the terms inside and outside are used to demarcate simple spatial relations. The boundaries between them are physical and the passage which connects one to the other, though not always easy to negotiate, is never completely blocked. For no matter how secure, walls can always be scaled, doors opened, and gates unlocked. In philosophical language, however, the terms inside and outside designate a relation that is altogether more impermeable. For whether of an individual subject or organism or of a social code or structure, interiority, as a philosophical concept, indicates an absolute segregation. The inside, in this context, is a mode of containment that operates not through physical boundaries but by an imperceptible border which draws the contours of all that can be thought and perceived… [W] hen used in this absolute sense, the division between inside and out is not a spatial determination but a temporal one. Existence is an enclosure not because it happens in space but because it locks us in time. It is perhaps for this reason that one can detect a tendency in both philosophy and religion to oppose the concept of time with notions of liberation, escape and interiority. For an inside that is bounded by temporal rhythms must find its outside in a realm which is exterior to time.8 This temporal Outside broadly aligns with another version of the concept, as described within the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant, although for him there was no such illusion of liberatory escape. Kant instead speaks of a “noumenal” world — his term for the way in which things (may) exist beyond their mediation through human sensory experience, on the other side of “phenomenal” appearances — which we can think abstractly but can never truly know. Put another way, whilst we can become acquainted with things in nature through sensory perception — touch, smell, sight, sound — measuring their existence against categories of experience — space and time — we can only infer a knowledge of their existence through our own abstract thinking. We can never know the true nature of what Kant calls the thing-in-itself, without 73

EGRESS us. This absolute unknowability is fertile ground for all kinds of abstract horror. A few centuries later, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would describe a similar sense of Outsideness through his conceptual formulation of “the Real” — his term for that realm of thought which is absolutely unconscious, beyond the “imaginary” and “symbolic” orders of human understanding. Here, no doubt inspired by the post-Kantian writings of the German Idealists, Lacan folds Kant’s insight over onto itself in order to discuss those aspects of human consciousness that are unknowable even to itself. After all, we ourselves are part of the same nature that we cannot ever truly know. For Lacan, it was the primary purpose of psychoanalysis to probe this Outside — this “primordial real”; the Real of the human subject as it first enters the world; that part of the subject that exists below the strata of social construction and moral coding. As such, Lacan would refer to the Real, in more Freudian terms, as a “pre-Oedipal” absolute. It is a “real that we do not yet have to limit, the real in its totality, both the real of the subject and the real he has to deal with as exterior to him.”9 Throughout all his works, Mark made frequent use of terminologies readily associated with both Kant and Lacan’s conceptualisations of the Outside. Lacan’s Real, in particular, featured frequently in his writings on capitalism. In Capitalist Realism, for instance, Mark writes about the Real in terms that we are, by now, already familiar with, noting how, for Lacan, “the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress: indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality.”10 The Kantian Outside, however, was most often explored through Mark’s cultural interests, particularly the literary and cinematic genres of horror and weird fiction — genres that have frequently (if implicitly) explored a more Kantian Outside through narrated “experience” rather than objective academic analysis, and with an imaginative flare that has fascinated countless readers for decades. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” remains a noteworthy example of this. 74

MATT COLQUHOUN Other writers have addressed the Outside as a shared obsession of literature and philosophy far more explicitly. Eugene Thacker, for instance, in his 2011 book In The Dust of This Planet, explains that rather than write a “philosophy of horror” he hopes to channel weird fiction’s ability to articulate “the horror of philosophy: the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility — the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language.”11 The writings of H.P. Lovecraft remain a case in point in this respect and so, with this non-philosophical mode of expression in mind, we might reconsider the story of “The Outsider” through our new understanding of this philosophical externality. Imprisoned by their own subjectivity, the Outsider is shielded from the objective truth of their existence, but to see themselves — to witness the inside as a folding of the outside — is as intolerable as any encounter with pure exteriority. There is no moving beyond the weird tale’s final moments when the Outsider crosses the boundary of their enclosed subjectivity and irreversibly lets the Outside in. This makes “The Outsider” a particularly interesting example of Thacker’s desired non-philosophical language: it is written from a seemingly impossible perspective, expressively depicting the inexpressible, describing the barely lucid acquisition of a noumenal knowledge. Whilst being readable, it is a narrative that nonetheless actively resists being imaginable to the reader. All fictions that explore the Outside share a journey like that found in Lovecraft’s short story — with the Outside being unrepresentable, it is precisely a crossing of the event horizon of subjective experience that becomes the focus and final cognizant instance of these treacherous tales. As such, the Outside is almost exclusively investigated from the perspective of an individual who confronts — or rather, is confronted by — the Outside. However, there are never (and there cannot ever be) any witnesses to the final crossing over this experientially transcendental divide. 75

EGRESS This unknowability does not stop the curious from following the same path as those who have gone before them, however. In fact, the mystery of such an experience encourages others to pursue it explicitly. For instance, whilst “The Outsider” explores the horror of the outside in the first person (or, we might say, perhaps more accurately, the “non-person”), many other stories by Lovecraft are told one step removed from the traumatic events of such an encounter as if to exacerbate the intolerability of such a first-hand experience. In these tales, those who have experienced the horror first-hand are driven insane and are, therefore, in no position to retell their story with any lucidity. The best example of such a narrative can be found in Lovecraft’s most famous story, “The Call of Cthulhu”, which is told through a first-hand reading of secondary accounts. A man, investigating a series of strange and seemingly unrelated events, reads a succession of documents which recount the experiences of his doomed predecessors as they embark on the same fateful journey of discovery that the narrator is only just beginning. One story is told via a police report written by Inspector John R. Legrasse who, notably, tells the story of his hunt for a cult of outside-worshippers. In stark contrast to Legrasse himself, exacerbating the tortured individuality of Lovecraft’s many narrative investigators, the cult embody the Outside as a comprehensible threat to society in their channelling of the powers of Lovecraft’s greatest creation: the great priest Cthulhu — one of the Great Old Ones, whose “dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which never died.”12 What is notable about this story in particular, but also many other examples found in weird fiction, is that it seems that, no matter what horrifying and unthinkable form the Outside may take, it is through community alone that its affects can be harnessed and transduced. Another example of such a communal channelling can be found in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, the focus of the last chapter of Mark’s The Weird and the Eerie. Here, Mark notes how, as in the works of Lovecraft and James, the novel “invokes 76

MATT COLQUHOUN an outside that certainly invokes awe and peril“, but it also, more importantly, describes “a passage beyond the petty repressions and mean confines of common experience into a heightened atmosphere of oneiric lucidity”.13 The novel begins with the disappearance of three students and one teacher from an all-girls’ boarding school in Victoria, Australia. The women, exploring a rock formation at the titular local beauty spot, go through a truly bizarre experience. Suddenly overcome by drowsiness, one by one they fall asleep. One member of the group, Edith, awakens to find her friends in a trance. It seems that she is less susceptible to the lure of the Outside than her peers: “her inability to let go of [her] everyday attachments […] ultimately prevents her from making the crossing”, says Mark.14 Instead, she watches as the women disappear behind the rocky monolith they had just been exploring, giving themselves over to an unknown agency. The women are never seen again, and the effect of their disappearance on the rest of their community is catastrophic. The final sentences of Mark’s book note how — unlike Edith — the other girls are “fully prepared to take the step into the unknown”.15 However, their disappearance occurs so early on in the novel itself that it can hardly be said to be its focus, although its impact certainly lingers. With no explanation for their absence, locals assume all kinds of violent ends for the women, imaginatively filling in the void left by their encounter with the Real. The boarding school eventually shuts down as concerned parents withdraw their children and members of staff resign, but this is not the worst of the community’s misfortunes. Their stress and grief eventually reach their peak with two separate suicides: namely, a student, Sara, and the school’s headmistress, Mrs Appleyard. The mystery of the women’s disapperance may tantalise the reader as much as it does the novel’s internal community but it is the grief of absence unexplained or “death” not yet understood that ruptures the rest of the world the women have left behind. As Mark writes: “They have disappeared, and their disappearances will leave 77

EGRESS haunting gaps, eerie intimations of the outside.”16 In this instance, the community is wholly unable to harness the outside as the girls did. They are too far removed from their exit whilst nonetheless bearing witness to its aftermath. In light of Mark’s suicide in January 2017, this ending to The Weird and the Eerie is unsettling to read. Whilst the disappeared women may have collectively embraced the Outside, now more than ever we cannot forget the ways in which the school community is traumatically undone by their exit. Death is, of course, the ultimate limit-experience, the ultimate challenge to subjectivity, and here grief becomes the affective result of being haunted by the Outside through the absences that death imposes upon both individual and community. Indeed, this was precisely how the affects of Mark’s death were diagrammed by Lucy Wallis (pictured) in a class at Goldsmiths run by Kodwo Eshun in 2017 — a class that was later given over to collectively processing the impact of Mark’s death on us all.17 Mark’s death explicitly intensified the stakes of his thought in this way as his sudden absence became an eerie intimation of the very Outside that lurked in the background of all his writings. It must be 78

MATT COLQUHOUN remembered, however, that whilst death was a topic he discussed frequently, so was the collective subjectivity he saw as essential to any postcapitalist future. It is worth returning here to Mark’s nascent attempts to reinvigorate the psychedelic praxes of consciousness raising that have come to culturally define the 1960s and 1970s, which he hoped to channel through his future-oriented postcapitalist desire — praxes that will become increasingly important to us and will be returned to later. We might be so bold as to say that the 1960s and 1970s have undergone a similar process of spacetime perforation as that experienced by students at Goldsmiths and the community in Picnic at Hanging Rock, albeit at a very different scale. These decades persist into the future precisely because of their absences. What has disappeared and how is it unknown to us? Unable to fully contend with their ephemeral nature, we are haunted by times passed, incapable of harnessing the power of their disappearances so that we might occasion cathartic passages into new ways of life. It is in much the same way that we can understand the left’s own political failures, and even its founding principles. The exorcism of Marx and Engel’s infamous spectre of communism, for example, is first of all dependent on it being a spectre negatively conceived. To exorcise it would be to evict a great negativity — something past; something no longer alive which bothers the present in its restlessness. The preferred formulation is surely Herbert Marcuse’s spacetime-twisting “spectre of a world that could be free”.18 Marcuse’s spectre is, in this way, an eerie entity: an atemporal failure of absence and presence. It haunts but is nonetheless speculative — a ripple in spacetime that teases that which is not (yet) ours. Therefore, we cannot refer to Marx-Engel’s and Marcuse’s particular spectres as ghosts in any classical sense. To use another, far more recent example, we might instead consider these spectres to be like holograms, particularly those found in Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 blockbusting sci-fi sequel Blade 79

EGRESS Runner 2049. In the film, Ryan Gosling’s character, the aptlynamed K, is “haunted” by the spectre of a normative existence, “personified” (predictably) by his holographic and endlessly sexualised AI girlfriend Joi, who is the extent of his family given that he is an android. Joi is a ubiquitous product whose companionship is available to all, commodified in gargantuan advertisements exacerbating the USP of her sexual desirability. She is also the spectre of K’s desired domesticated future — an existence that is (he hopes) to come rather than one that is lost. Joi, then, is not a spectre of what was once had but rather the spectre of an expectation he is denied. She is a spectre in reverse — not of loss but of that which has yet to be fully materialised. In this sense, for K, Joi is a mirroring of his own unconsolidated self. We, however, needn’t solidify our limitations in the same way. The challenge of Marx’s thinking today, two hundred years on from his birth, is surely to shift the hauntological image of the ghostly spectre towards a reinvestment in immaterial forces, directing flows towards the material revolution we supposedly no longer desire with the same intensity as we once did. These potentials are not wholly absent from our political discourses. Similar approaches are clearly visible in the political debates of the last few years. For instance, to return to the UK general election of 2017, the Conservative Party spent an inordinate amount of time and energy habitually ridiculing and criticising the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party for wanting to drag the country back to the 1970s — an era that was fatally associated, in the popular imagination, with miners’ strikes, power outages, economic strife and social upheavel. And yet, Mark, along with many others on the contemporary left, instead argued that what the Labour Party were encouraging was the return of that decade’s rising class consciousness; the return of its potentials rather than the superficial aesthetics of its abortive “revolutions”.19 In the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, Mark explains why this potential (if seemingly paradoxical) return of the 80

MATT COLQUHOUN new remains cogent within our contemporary moment, once again returning to the hauntological observations of his previous thought whilst emphasising the necessity of a practical response to them. He writes that, in recent years, the 1960s in particular “have come to seem at once like a deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now — a time when people really lived, when things really happened”: Yet the decade haunts not because of some unrecoverable and unrepeatable confluence of factors, but because the potentials it materialised and began to democratise — the prospect of a life freed from drudgery — has to be continually suppressed.20 Mark seemed to want to encourage the revitalisation of a community of Lovecraftian Outsiders, embedded within the popular imagination, unsure of how they arrived in their present circumstances but nonetheless curious to leave the cloistered world in which they have found themselves. The problem, however, is that the political right has already begun to set in motion a similar project of their own, violently and somewhat successfully, and it is perhaps this unfortunate similarity that occasioned Mark’s use of the word “egress”.21 The “Exit” had already been taken… *** In many of his writings, particularly on his k-punk blog, Mark was never shy about acknowledging the influence of Nick Land on his thought. The two had worked together as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) at the University of Warwick in the late 1990s — a collective of “renegade academics” whose potent homebrew of pop-cultural fictions and obscure philosophies, flavoured with a distinctly Lovecraftian mythos, continues to have considerable occultural influence today.22 81

EGRESS Whilst the group was largely anonymous and acephalic, always opting for a collective voice over a deferral to any chief spokesperson, much of its output has nonetheless become closely associated with Nick Land, the group’s most infamous and outspoken former member. Following the dissolution of the Ccru in the mid-2000s, Land himself seemed to disappear, with many unsure as to where he was or what he was doing.23 When he reemerged online, now living in Shanghai and running a number of pseudonymous blogs and Twitter accounts, his politics seemed to have taken a dramatic shift to the right. To those more familiar with him, however, it seemed like, at the very least, he was attempting to occupy a decisively non-normative political position, in explicit opposition to much of the political and philosophical establishment, just as he always had done. In more recent years, controversy continues to surround Land’s social media presence, due to his rampant political incorrectness, further miring his reputation so that he has become a persona non grata even beyond the walls of the academy with which he had previously waged war. Despite this, there can be no denying that the sphere of influence of his earlier writings and the intensity of his teaching methods remains vast, passed down to others who populate the entirety of the political spectrum. Mark’s approach to politics, as discussed here so far, may seem fundamentally at odds with the popular understanding of Land’s own modus operandi today, but the pair’s later writings suggest that they continued to share much in common philosophically — shared interests that they would nonetheless disagree about, often publicly and polemically across the blogosphere of the mid- to late 2000s. Just as Thacker wrote of his interest in a philosophy that “enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility”, the shared project of Land and Fisher is arguably one of applying the implications of such an approach — often used to discuss more abstract questions of ontology — to the more immediate concerns of political philosophy. For example, whilst Fisher’s most famous project, in Capitalist Realism, was to explore the notion put forth by Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek that “the end of the world is 82

MATT COLQUHOUN easier to imagine than the end of capitalism”, Land, in The Dark Enlightenment — his controversial essay on neoreactionary (NRx) thought24 — instead explores the end of democracy as the limit of contemporary sociopolitical thinking. The initial focus of Land’s essay on the Dark Enlightenment is the political concept of Exit as it has been previously put to use by thinkers both famous and infamous, such as Albert Hirschman, Fredric Jameson and Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin — with his association with Moldbug’s reactionary neomonarchism further fuelling the fire of his own controversies. Here, however, the concept of Exit is given a uniquely Landian twist, influenced by his mastery of the transcendental philosophies of Kant and others. Similar to “egress”, Landian Exit refers to both an epistemological and practical exit from hegemonic social structures and belief systems. Land, however, proposes that Exit be used against democracy as a pervasive political failure rather than capitalism as an socioeconomic one. He writes: Democracy and “progressive democracy” are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Whilst “extreme right wing” governments have, on rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have ceased to care whether anyone is “pay[ing them] attention” — they have been looking for something else entirely: an exit.25 Land goes on to define the social model he sees as politically desirable with the phrase “no voice, free exit”, drawing explicitly 83

EGRESS on the political philosophies of Albert Hirschman and Mencius Moldbug to formulate a radical expansion of what we understand as “freedom”.26 This formulation describes a non-democratic system of government in which citizens have no “voice” but are free to leave whenever they wish, making a citizen’s relationship to government analogous to the relationship between customer and business — a controversial vision that has become more and more prescient as neoliberalism has continued in its zombified death-throes through which privatisation is deployed as makeshift life support for any and all social services and where soon all that will be left for a government to outsource will be itself. Under this model, whilst customers have no say in how the state-as-business is run, they are nonetheless welcome to opt for another competing service provider if they are unsatisfied with their experience. It is a capitalist perversion of the leftist and antistatist rallying cry for “no borders” and Land is not unaware of the irony. He describes the model in another way on his blog, noting that, today, governments, whether “traditional or experimental”, are always “legitimated from the outside — through exit pressure — rather than internally, through responsiveness to popular agitation.”27 Here nation-states, like all businesses, especially today, are transformed into risk-averse institutions that do not rule by force (whether dictatorial or legislatory) but rather govern in fear of popular opinion, echoing capitalism’s innate fear of progressivist causes which it perpetually absorbs and appropriates. However, whereas a large protest would cause almost any business to radically shift its position and bend to the pressures of its public relations department, protests against state governments have for many years been largely ineffective in changing policy and legislation. For instance, although we have seen various capitalist entities expand their boundaries to include the demands of various political movements — the #MeToo and LGBTQ rights movements most visibly and recently — nation-states remain stubbornly loyal to their own (arguably outdated) processes — a reality illustrated by sluggish government responses to successive record-breaking 84

MATT COLQUHOUN climate protests. As such, although Land’s vision may be horrifying, coming from the right, it nonetheless remains prescient when we consider our contemporary political realities and the largely ineffective protest strategies of popular politics. What is missing here, however — and what is missed by the slogan-like simplification of “no voice, free exit” — is the temporal complexity of Land’s maneuver. He describes how conservative and reactionary ideologies are made paradoxical in their retreat towards or repetition of what has come before. Indeed, the term “neoreactionary” already suggests a paradoxically new approach to the old — it is a “progressive conservatism” that disembowels the meanings usually attached to either of those two words. Land’s Exit, in this sense, is a diagonal movement through these ideologies which, in their cyclonic relation to each other, offer new approaches towards progress and, therefore, time itself in their coupled divergence from the classic liberal model of teleological progressivism.28 Rather than this being understood as a moment of slippage into the realms of science fiction, Land’s writings on “templexity” — as he calls it — are instead a concretisation of why, perhaps, time-travel — with its inherent ethical and political implications: “Would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” — fascinates us so much. Politics and time are inherently related, as are time and capitalism, and so “modernity” itself becomes a word that not only connotes an ever-evolving period of contemporaneity but also a political process in itself. In line with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as previously discussed, time is taken to be (along with space) central to any consideration of ontology and is, therefore, central to how we apprehend not just sensory but political experience also. Moreover, with modernity being an inherently ontopolitical project that has destabilised the “subjective reality” of time (as Kant refers to it), Land considers the ways that we might break free of our present moment by observing the negative feedback-loop of late-capitalist modernity — the founding project of accelerationism. AS such, whereas Mark would write about capitalism’s “slow cancellation 85

EGRESS of the future”, calling for us to escape the system’s grasp, Land’s position seems to be one that goads capitalism’s self-fulfilling temporal cancellation, emphasising the ways in which time exists as a totally uncontrollable and noumenal outside force that has chosen capitalism as its authoratitive vehicle here on earth. This is to say that, for Land, we have as much chance of escaping capitalism as we do time itself, and the inhuman horror that awaits us on the other side of both fascinates him as morbidly as any Lovecraftian protagonist. Here Land, too, is a Lovecraftian Outsider, a shadow out of time driven by exit, in opposition to the political establishment’s Jamesian warnings to the curious. Land hears the warning that one should “venture outside this cloistered world at your peril” but pushes forwards all the same, searching for the horror of his own reflection in the cold and unyielding surface of modernity. On his Xenosystems blog, with its penchant for abstract horror, Land could not be more clear on this. He hurls himself into all sociopolitical outsides: the outside of the academy, of established politics (on the left and the right), and, most importantly of all, the outside of popular opinion. “The Outside is the ‘place’ of strategic advantage”, he writes. “To be cast out there is no cause for lamentation, in the slightest.”29 Neither Land nor Fisher shy away from the horrors that the traversing of these limits might summon within the mind. Though Mark would disagree with Land on many occasions, always staying true to his own radical form of social democracy, we cannot deny that, despite the current posthumous popularity of Mark’s work, his writings often provoked controversies of their own. Today, this would no doubt continue were he to mention Land’s work as openly as he once did but, as recently as 2016, Mark was still actively working with the ideas of his former mentor — critically, without a doubt, but with far more patience and sincerity than many today would dare address to them. In “Postcapitalist Desire”, for instance, an essay that would later give its name to Mark’s postgraduate module at Goldsmiths, he explores the legacy of Land’s work in the present in greater detail. 86

MATT COLQUHOUN Describing Land’s most influential 1990s work as being “guided by the assumption that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible”, Mark nonetheless implored the left to treat his works “as something other than anti-Marxist trollbait.”30 He provides three reasons as to why: “Firstly, because they luridly expose the scale and the nature of the problems that the left now faces.”31 Secondly, because “they expose an uncomfortable contradiction between the radical left’s official commitment to revolution, and its actual tendency towards political and formal-aesthetic conservatism.”32 And finally, “because they assume a terrain that politics now operates on, or must operate on, if it is to be effective — a terrain in which technology is embedded into everyday life and the body; design and PR are ubiquitous; financial abstraction enjoys dominion over government; life and culture are subsumed into cyberspace.”33 None of this suggests that Mark wholly agreed with Land’s vision of the present or of the left’s futures, but he still took Land’s challenges to contemporary leftism seriously. Whereas the procapitalist Land wrote, for example, that “post-capitalism has no real meaning except [as] an end to the engine of change”34, for Mark this was only true if capitalism was allowed to have its way, fully colonising the melancholic mind of the leftist subject and wholly entombing it within its own passivity. Land calls the end result of this process a “Transcendental Miserablism” — the terminal beach of leftist political praxis that, faced with capitalism’s absorption of “every source of social dynamism”, cannot contend with the ways in which “growth, change and even time itself” have become “integral components of [capitalism’s] endlessly gathering tide.”35 Constantly trying to stay ahead of this miserablism, Mark writes again and again about notions of temporal egress into “a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being.”36 In this sense, Mark recognised that Land’s predictions were 87

EGRESS coming true, and Land’s waning social standing did not change that fact. This was precisely why the left’s own constitutions had to be radically and perhaps painfully explored and extended. This call for extension was nonetheless coupled with a political vigilance. The goal, for Mark, was to stay one step ahead of capitalism’s consolidatory forces and its “blobjective” nature. Alternatives were of no use if they could be immediately folded back into the system they were attempting to escape from. This acknowledgement of capitalism’s “blobjective” tendency to absorb everything it comes into contact with was likewise something that Mark and Land’s writings shared, albeit with Land embracing it and Fisher rejecting it. Land even acknowledges that his project is an inverted embrace of what was originally a leftist critique. On his Xenosystems blog, where he frequently declares himself to be on the side of capital, Land considers how the left’s analyses of capitalism’s energetic dynamics — always more perceptive, he admits, than the right’s — remain indebted to the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique that capital “is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethno-geographical locality, and… increasingly commands impressive resources with which to ‘liberate’ itself, or ‘deterritorialize’”.37 This is to say that, for Land, to look for Outsides is to play capitalism at its own game — a game it has seemingly perfected. The left has little chance of winning. Therefore, it is Land’s intention to ride capital’s coat-tails into a wholly new inhumanist existence. For Mark, however, the goal is to establish a new game altogether. Whilst Fisher may have agreed with the strategic advantage of the Outside, his opinion of what strategies are to be deployed from such a position could not be more different. For Mark, thinking through the work of Herbert Marcuse, the history of Western art is already littered with exit strategies. The unfinished introduction to Acid Communism presents an explicitly leftist instantiation of Land’s Outsider position in this sense, challenging a contemporaneous and popular left that can at best be described as working to a model of all voice and no exit, imploring them to open up their horizons and 88

MATT COLQUHOUN put their money where they mouth is, learning from past mistakes and daring them to exit capitalism into other ways of living — ways of living that are so close and still accessible but are often considered neutered by capitalism’s co-optive mechanisms. 1960s and 1970s counterculture remains a prime example of this. Fisher writes that, “as much as Marcuse’s work was in tune with the counterculture, his analysis also forecast its ultimate failure and incorporation”.38 He continues that a major theme of Marcuse’s 1964 book One-Dimensional Man was precisely “the neutralisation of the aesthetic challenge” brought to bear on capitalism by the avant-garde cultures of the twentieth century. In this way, Marcuse was particularly concerned “about the popularisation of the avantgarde, not out of elitist anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture.”39 His concern was well substantiated. After all, Mark notes, Marcuse had already seen “capitalist culture convert the gangster, the beatnik and the vamp from ‘images of another way of life’ into ‘freaks or types of the same life’”.40 Capital’s stifling of any meaningful Exit other than its own remains a central point of contention within many other contemporary leftist discourses, particularly those in the orbit of Black and queer studies, which often share Fisher’s attempt to rethink the pessimism of an exit-as-apocalypse ideological default. Land, however, in this framework, doubles down on capital’s deterritorializing capacities, removing any purely humanistic agency and suggesting that, at present, Exit is the sole prerogative of capital and not of those caught up in its rhythms, pulsions and patternings. Whilst Land seems to suggest that we must channel the inhumanist exit of capital as a pure exteriority, Fisher instead suggests a collective channeling of Lovecraftian aesthetics leading to the formulation of new cultures, which remain the only way for the political left to egress without betraying its humanist heart. 89

EGRESS To continue our brief invocation of Black and queer studies, we might look to the likes of Lee Edelman’s 2004 book No Future — notable for its titular challenge to heteronormative temporality41 — or the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva for further examples of pockets of the political left which are re-evaluating and mutating theories of temporal embodiment and a historic (yet often enforced and racialised) inhumanism. For example, Da Silva, in her essay “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Towards the End of the World”, ponders explicitly Black exit strategies, asking, “Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing?”42 Her mode of thinking about Blackness, associated with a school of thought known as Afro-pessimism, seems to affirm the dehumanising tendencies of an innately white supremacist and capitalist reality and look for exits to be found therein rather than seek an absorption into that very same system’s purview of what is normal and worthy of existence. This sense of an Outsideness, concerning the subjective realities of racial, sexual or other minoritarian positions more generally, has always been a central concern of weird fiction, albeit often without an explicitly empowering and liberatory orientation, instead appearing through various kinds of xenophobic subtext. In “The Call of Cthulhu”, for instance, Lovecraft describes the Cthulhu cult, brandishing his now notorious racism, as an “indescribable horde of human abnormality”; a naked “hybrid spawn” consisting mostly of seamen with “a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands” which gives, he continues, “a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult".43 Whilst this sort of language has led many today to dismiss Lovecraft and his influence outright, others argue it is more productive to affirm these tandem literary and philosophical dynamics of xenophobia and xenophilia and note the dynamics that such writings highlight, even in their negativity. Just as Mark would attempt to affirm the limit-experiences of death, beyond our popular 90

MATT COLQUHOUN understanding of the concept, and including Land’s challenges from the right, here we find others affirming the limit-experiences of capitalism’s negatively conceived subjectivities. To stay with Lovecraft’s invocation of voodooism a little longer, we may consider John Cussans’ recent book Undead Uprising — which we will consider again in the next chapter — in which he charts the relationship of Haitian “voodooism” in particular to that country’s various political uprisings through a more multiplicitous image of the zombie, understood as both Haitian revolutionary and Western pop horror icon. In his book, Cussans explores the various uses of Black bodies in fictions such as Lovecraft’s and the ways in which these representatives of other ways of being are made analogous to a Western Outside. Whilst such examples are evidence of a pervasive societal racism more than anything, the more recent transformations that these same figures have undergone has rendered them less racialized and more generically critical of society as a whole. As Cussans writes, the “zombie-figure, beginning its popular unlife as a ghastly allegory for the horrors of colonial slavery and the potential of humans to be reduced, by sorcery and commerce, to soul-less, living-dead cadavers in the 1920s, has developed into the most ubiquitous figure for the end of humanity as we know it at the end of history.”44 Cussans also highlights a notable split in the figure of the “zombie” as a symbolic and aesthetic trend in popular culture, suggesting there is a gap between the zombie understood as livingdead and the zombie understood as the living possessed by a higher power, encapsulating a complex diagonal analysis between wage labour and the affects of capitalism more generally, which many continue to struggle to marry together in thought today. Through a close reading of William Seabrook’s Haitian memoirs, which popularised the figure of the zombi in the United States in the 1930s, Cussans notes that although “the zombi and the possessed person will become peculiarly interwoven when the former migrates into cinema, they were for Seabrook very different kinds of being.” 45 91

EGRESS For Seabrook, having immersed himself in a colonial and explicitly occultist fascination with Haiti’s voodoo culture, the zombi could be, on the one hand, represented by “an individual devoid of all will and subjective agency, reduced to the mere husk of a person, forced to labour mindlessly like a brute or automaton”.46 Here the antecedents of our familiarity with the zombie as a dramatised critique of capitalism are obvious. On the other hand, however, the zombi could also be a positive and revolutionary figure within various Haitian communities, seen as a person “possessed by a god”. Cussans highlights how, “despite sharing some of the uncanny, automatic behaviour and hollowed-out subjectivity of a zombi”, this latter figure was instead seen as “something superhuman, ecstatic and miraculous”.47 He continues: “Such idealisation of the ‘divinely unconscious automaton’ before which we are ‘less than nothing’ is further evidence of the paradoxical relationship between the living-death of modern, mechanical, industrialised labour and the revitalising Dark Demon of Negro mystery cults”.48 In line with the moral inversion of our understandings of death and Blackness, this version of the zombi is “a mystical idealisation of divinity-incarnate that ultimately gives way to ego-obliterating ecstasy and collective, orgiastic excess”.49 Returning to the “hybrid spawn” of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cult, we see a similarly problematic flattening of this distinction internal to the zombi that Cussans is critiquing. For Lovecraft, it is the Cthulhu cult, consisting of “subalterns” possessed by the great priest Cthulhu, who are “less than nothing”, as seen through the surrogate eyes of the State, personified by Inspector Legrasse, whilst they are also representatives of “something far deeper and older than negro fetichism” which seems capable of reaching out into a new beyond.50 Racism and revolution are conflated into a single heterogenous body politic. To return to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, we find a similarly convoluted controversy at the heart of the book’s contemporary reception. Whilst race is unexplored in the novel itself and Lindsay uses none of the slurs and stereotypes deployed by Lovecraft, although this is due to the racialised Other’s omission rather than any cross-cultural insensitivity, it is the fact that the 92

MATT COLQUHOUN novel is set in a real place that further entangles her narrative with Australia’s fraught history as a former British colony. The success of Lindsay’s story, along with its grounding in real dates and places, has led to this magical realist fiction becoming something of an urban legend in the Australian popular imagination. The real Hanging Rock — traditionally a space of great cultural and spiritual importance for the indigenous population — has, as a result, become a popular tourist attraction based solely on its relationship to the novel. The local tourist board have even installed a statue on the site of the novel’s disappeared protagonist, Miranda, who leads the other women out of their cloistered reality and instigates their egress. However, many campaigners have argued that the overbearing legacy of the book on its namesake is erasing the site’s much longer history and importance to indigenous peoples and that the statue should be removed. A report on the controversy for ABC Australia includes an interview with Amy Spiers, an activist who summarises her movement’s complaints as emerging from Elspeth Tilley’s 2012 book on Australian literature, White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth. Spiers explains to a reporter how Tilley’s book explores the ways that Australia’s weird fictions, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, overtly concerned with the hostile landscape of the Australian Outback, implicitly “forget the non-white”.51 In this sense, some Australian fictions are given an acutely Lovecraftian and Jamesian undertone, with their understanding of the Outback-asOutside imbued with an implicit racism but nonetheless retaining the same cautioning message: leave this cloistered world at your peril. Spiers continues: We spend a lot of time telling these stories of white vanishing because we’re anxious about our place in Australia and we’re anxious about our history and how we took over the country. Why are we thinking obsessively about white women going missing and not facing our own history of destruction?52 93

EGRESS To wholly equate this question with our forgetting of the non-white is, perhaps, a misstep — the result of an anxiety which closes off other readings. Spiers’ concerns resemble little more than a critique of subtext. As we’ve already discussed, Bataille saw these entwined histories of destruction and self-destruction as inherent to our understandings of the human condition and, indeed, to all of our fictions. He wrote on this explicitly in his work Literature & Evil, arguing that any “rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication”.53 This is precisely the tragic irony of the communal response found within Picnic at Hanging Rock, which emerges from the local’s utter bafflement at the girls’ escape from their way of life. This is to say that, whilst the Australian public’s subsequent fawning over the statue of Miranda is undoubtedly regrettable, the novel itself would surely not exist were it not for an awareness — even if a subconscious one — of the nation’s fraught and fragile history in the aftermath of colonialism. After all, the girl’s disappearance from the novel’s community already echoes the disappearance of an indigenous people. They become as absent as the racialised other already was. As a result, the book already offers, through both its content and form, an opportunity for (un)consciousness raising that the opportunism of an economicallydriven tourist board has nonetheless undermined. Rather than collapse like the community in the book itself, the fissures the novel dramatises for us in “the real world” are covered over by capitalism. A more honest literary analysis is sidestepped because of the risk it poses to the system from which the novel argues we should exit, and so Miranda becomes a symbol for the tourist industry, stripped of the egress she initially represented. The nature of this egress was made more clear by Joan Lindsay herself in an addendum to the novel, cut during the editing process and later published separately, which describes the event of the women’s disappearance in much more detail. This addendum, as Mark notes in The Weird and the Eerie, is far more explicit in its symbolism than the book itself, describing the women throwing 94

MATT COLQUHOUN off their corsets — an act more obviously representative of the restrictions and oppressions of a patriarchal society. Now, however, this exit has been undone. If the statue should be removed, it is not only because of its symbolic erasure of the site’s prior uses but also because it renders Miranda, quite literally, frozen in place — undisappeared to remain in purgatorial stasis in service of capital, oddly like Han Solo, encased in carbonite, reduced from mythic transgresser to material commodity. With this in mind, we might agree with Amy Spiers that the statue’s existence is frustrating, but because of the emphasis it places on the characters themselves rather than the egress they undergo. As such, we should instead emphasise that it is our very wrestling with such questions of our own existence on a broadly human level, whether explicitly decolonial or concerning our relationships to our neighbours more generically — as in Sartre’s No Exit — that is open to us all. The girls’ exit is all of ours. There is certainly more to be said here about the pressures on literary whiteness to “go native” (which we will discuss in the chapter “Unconsciousness Raising” below), but we must first consider the necessity of this fraughtness more generally regarding any introduction of the new. Mark wrote on the problematics of this emancipatory newness on numerous occasions, considering the auto-destructive aesthetics of his beloved goth and post-punk subcultures, which were exemplary in this regard for the ways in which they wholly differed from contemporary anxieties around possibilities of the new. Writing on his blog in 2016, Mark noted the ways in which the lost nihilisms of the subcultures of the 1980s are stark in contrast to the “conservative progressivism” of our present moment — an inverted form of Land’s “progressive conservatism”. He writes: The principle behind post-punk was the popular-modernist idea that you couldn’t repeat things, you couldn’t use forms that had become kitsch — and yesterday’s innovation was today’s kitsch. So post-punk was driven by a principle of difference 95

EGRESS and self-cancellation; a constant orientation towards the new, and a hostility towards the outmoded, the already-existent, the familiar. That’s why Simon Reynolds called his book on post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again.54 For Mark, what was important to consider was that this “hostility towards the already-familiar has weakened to the point that it has disappeared.”55 As far as he was concerned, we “can’t be hostile to the past in the way that post-punk was because we don’t now have a sense of the present or the future anymore.”56 Such an analysis makes the alt-right’s contemporary and oft-repeated exclamation that they are the “new punk” appropriately moot, not only because of their focus on the self-preservation of the mythos of whiteness but because punk has always had well-documented on-off political and aesthetic flirtations with fascism, no doubt due to the inherently slippery nature of its auto-destructive aesthetics. 96

MATT COLQUHOUN Aesthetic questions of Exit are further complicated here. Writing on post-punk’s more fascistic auto-destructive tendencies on his k-punk blog — illustrated most explicitly by Joy Division’s aesthetic appropriations of images of the Hitler Youth on their debut EP, An Ideal for Living (pictured) — Mark comments on an analysis of fascism found in the works of both Paul Virilio and Deleuze and Guattari, which maintained “that fascism is essentially selfdestructive: a line of pure abolition.”57 Quoting Slavoj Žižek, he continues: “Fascism is just the name for one more variant of the Romantic lust for the Night when all identity, all individuation, is subsumed in ‘an ecstatic aestheticized experience of Community’”.58 Here again community emerges — albeit anxiously — as a concept central to the channelling of Outsides, and this was an issue explored in depth by the political philosophies of the latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, this question remains potent today. Desire is a vehicle rather than a destination, and we are as capable of a collective desire for fascism as we are for communism. Capitalism’s seemingly absolute capture of our desires raises the stakes of these potential offshoots considerably. In many respects, we can summarise the works of Land and Fisher through these stakes explicitly. They were also central to the works of many of their influences — Deleuze and Guattari most notably. For example, whilst Fisher’s politics were most obviously collective (if not always explicitly communist), even Land’s model of “exit pressure” surely relies on a collective desire for exit within a given political system if that pressure is to have any weight at all. To complicate matters further, in line with his critiques of “communicative capitalism”, as discussed in the previous chapter, Mark recommended practices that were extra-democratic. His argument seemed to be that capitalism cannot be “voted out”, just as it was not “voted in”, but a big enough change to the cultural status quo — that is, our collective consciousness — could at least make it sociopolitically redundant. 97

EGRESS This double-pincer of “community” — with its equally dystopian and utopian potentials, depending on which side you’re on — grounds many takes on the “question of communism” as it has been discussed in recent years by Continental philosophy. Whereas fascism seems to hold self-destruction as its central subconscious motif, many writings on communism present the destruction of the Other as a folding of the auto-destruction of the Self — calling back to the writings of Maurice Blanchot referenced in our opening introduction. Blanchot’s words bear repeating: “To remain present in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community.”59 We should remember here that Blanchot’s comments on community were initially written in response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1983 essay, The Inoperative Community — an extensive essay on the role of community and communism in Bataille’s thought and their disappearance from the world of Western politics following the rise of individualism and the failure of communism in the late twentieth century. Blanchot would extend Nancy’s thoughts whilst arguing that this sense of community is not lost but rather still persists (albeit noumenally) and his response occasioned a correspondence between the two which would last for a number of decades. However, it was Nancy who was to have the final word. In late 2001, just prior to Blanchot’s death in 2003, Nancy wrote a short book, La communauté affrontée, in which he details the history of their conversation and its various twists and turns. He redescribes the essence of “community”, at this point, which he had — he admits — first failed to account for, as that “space between us — ‘us’, remaining in the great indecision where this collective or plural subject stands and stays condemned never to find its own proper voice”.60 He then goes on to describe a typically Blanchotian paraontological community that is constituted by an unknowable and unavowable bond that dares us “to think the unthinkable, the 98

MATT COLQUHOUN unaccountable, the intractable of being-with, but without subjecting or submitting it to any hypostasis.”61 It should be noted that Nancy was writing this latest response to Blanchot just one month after the attack on New York’s World Trade Centre on 11th September 2001. Such an event of international trauma was, he writes, “all at once a confrontation and an opposition, a coming before oneself so as to challenge one’s self, so as to part within one’s being a gash that is the condition of this being”.62 This gash is presented here as a primal wound. It is not created by tragedy — tragedy is rather a finger stuck through it, making us all too aware of its implicit and unseen existence. As such, for Nancy, the events of 9/11 instigated a colossal questioning of the Western self. Not unlike the horrors of the Second World War that influenced Bataille’s original writings, whilst one nation or people may have suffered the brunt of a particular assault, the event nonetheless highlighted a rupture within all of us, requiring a paraontological questioning of the self that extends far beyond national and cultural “communities” and into the ever-elusive outside “us”. Nancy continues, on the infamous image of the collapse of the World Trade Centre: “the sudden offensive strike that has taken in a stunning figure with the collapse of the symbol of global commerce (and therefore of exchange, of relations, and of communication) presents itself, or wants to present itself, as a religious confrontation, with fundamentalist monotheism, on the one side, humanist theism, no less fundamentalist, on the other.”63 What is particularly interesting here, for us, is that this same topic — the communal trauma of international terrorism — became the site of Land and Fisher’s final philosophical conflict. Dual essays posted on the Urbanomic website at the end of 2016, just a month before Fisher’s death, contended with the communal wounding of the terrorist attacks of 13th November 2015, in which 130 people were killed and almost 500 injured when marauding gunmen attacked the streets of Paris, most catastrophically targeting an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan music venue in the 99

EGRESS 11th arrondissement. Land and Fisher were both responding, more specifically, to Alain Badiou’s 2016 essay on the attacks in France, Our Wound is Not So Recent.64 Together they reiterate their most wellknown positions. As Robin Mackay writes, introducing each article in turn, Fisher calls “for a new politics to counter the decadence of capitalist realism” whilst Land “reconfigures the battlefield of the future, and plays devil’s advocate for globalised capitalism”. Nevertheless, both arguments orbit around this Blanchotian sense of community and its inwardly-folded outsides.65 “Capital is nothing if it is not parsimonious”, Fisher writes, “and for the last thirty years it has sustained itself by relying on readymade forms of existential affiliation.”66 For Fisher, ISIS are most certainly a death cult but one that should nonetheless be recognised and taken seriously for its success in offering some young Muslims — the West’s social outsiders du jour — something which capitalism never can. What ISIS force into capitalism’s global circuitries is an extremist neoreactionary community — “a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)”67 — that may appear incompatible with the West’s hegemonic moral structures and culturally Christian belief systems whilst also emerging explicitly from within the multicultural reality of a globetrotting late capitalism. As an example of “the rising tide of experimental political forms” that have appeared in so many parts of the world, ISIS present us with an extreme and potently unthinkable example of a people “rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective” outside the tentacular reach of capitalism — and neoliberal postcolonialism more specifically.68 For Fisher, it is the fraught task of the contemporary left to instantiate a new community in response to this — a community that opposes such abject violence whilst nonetheless sharing a resistance to (but also a utilisation of) the technologies of coercive capital like that which ISIS have deployed for their own aims. In their exploitation of capitalism’s own mechanisms, ISIS must not force us to rally defensively behind the symbols of the exclusively Western capitalism they repeatedly 100

MATT COLQUHOUN seek to attack — a position that Nancy unfortunately seemed to find affinity with in bearing witness to the collapse of the World Trade Centre — we must rather accept and positively channel the ways in which such acts of terrorism exacerbate neoliberalism’s abject failures. It is Land who demonstrates this problematic most damningly. He similarly takes on the limitations of capitalist collectivities but, by contrast, directs his polemic towards Badiou’s universalised “Frenchness” as the most potent symbol of modernity’s failures in stark contrast to the more immediate visibility of Islamic terrorism. He writes: When Badiou proclaims that “Our wound is not so recent”, we are compelled to ask: How far does this collective pronoun extend? A response to this question could be prolonged without definite limit. Everything we might want to say ultimately folds into it, “identity” most obviously. Whatever meaning “communism” could have belongs here, as “we” reach outwards to the periphery of the universal, and thus (conceivably) to the end of philosophy.69 Whilst Land seems to hold the ideals of communism aloft here with distain, this is precisely the desire we find in the writings of Blanchot. The criticism of Badiou nonetheless holds true. With his focus on a nationalised identitarianism, Badiou stifles his own reach towards an outside that the terror attacks themselves have traumatically instigated, instead doubling down on the familiar. As both Land and Mark allude to, the horror of the question of community, taken as Blanchot radically intended it, must include ISIS in its outsideness. Any thought that resists such a folding, as ISIS themselves do, remains trapped in the limited subjectivity of Western neoliberalism. To insist “we are not like them” is to double down on our own ignorance and our own failures. In this sense, as Land continues: “French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national project.” Echoing our recent political histories and the development of neoliberalism’s woeful responses to 101

EGRESS international terrorism, Land provocatively asks if contemporary French national identity is, then, not “the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus — concretely — of humiliation by capital?” Thrown into a state of shock by the indifference of capitalism’s own outsideness, he declares that this “is the way the ‘alternative’ dies: locally, and unpersuasively, without dialectical engagement, dropping — neglected — into dilapidation.”70 He concludes: The “liberation of liberalism” has scarcely begun. None of this is a concern for Badiou, however, or for the Islamists. It belongs to another story, and — for this is the ultimate, septically enflamed wound — as it runs forwards, ever faster, it is not remotely theirs.71 Land is — no matter how regrettably — correct, as is Mark. The prevalence of ISIS-endorsed terrorism is the rebound of a capitalistic feedback-loop, resulting from the West’s state-sanctioned terrorism abroad. As such, this wound must be thought of as all of ours if our sense of the collective is to radically extend into the infinity we have long paid lip service to but which capitalism seems to occupy so traumatically and absolutely. Whilst Land spectates from the sidelines with glee, Mark nonetheless sees an opportunity here which we must work harder to grasp. Modernity is not a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass, like that which drags the Outsider from the confines of an unknown Self. The glass of modernity is obfuscated; fogged. To be confronted by ISIS is precisely to look in the mirror and not recognise the all too human face of modernity reflected back at us. As such, the accelerated destruction of ISIS, occasioned — as the West’s various militaries hope — by the fall of the occupied city of Mosul in late 2017, only perpetuates our own self-destruction. Mark concludes, far more hopefully but also counterintuitively, that the “growing clamour of groups seeking to take control of their own lives portends a long overdue return to a modernity that capital just can’t deliver.” We must strive to connect more inventively with the 102

MATT COLQUHOUN “new forms of belonging” that are constantly being “discovered and invented” and which will “in the end show that both steampunk capital and cybergothic ISIS are archaisms, obstructions to a future that is already assembling itself.72 As Land, too, has consistently insisted, whether the trajectory is towards communism or any other political future, the unthinkable must be thought and recognised if we are to have any hope of realising the sociopolitical dreams we remain culturally indebted to. Capitalism may be close on our heels, or even already ahead of us, but we should recognise the reality of entropic modernity all the same and despite itself. Here, Land’s inhumanism is affirmed by Mark in service of a new humanism. We must take a step back, if we can, and consider the inhuman forces of capitalism from a newly cosmic perspective — a perspective that we ourselves may attempt to embody. We must affirm these newly emergent communities but, rather than battling them within the feedback loop of capitalism, we must encourage the techonomic exits they are striving for and which they likewise encourage in us. After all: “To find ways out, is to let the Outside in.”73 103

To travel into the unknown is a sober-joyful process of gaining energy by overcoming self-importance, and by eradicating all forms of selfindulgence — and it is a development of the ability to have effective, creative comradeship-alliances with other human beings. It is a process of perceiving — and dreaming — a way toward wider spaces of existence. Beyond the ongoing disaster of ordinary reality is the second sphere of action. You don’t get there on a sustained basis unless in some sense you are part of a group, and a group can only form (no plan is possible, only continuous improvisation) if you have learned to let yourself be swept away into the intent-currents of Love-and-Freedom that run through the world — intent-currents that take you South, into the Future. — Justin Barton, Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future

MENTAL HEALTH ASTEROID To let the Outside in requires a short-circuiting of our processes of making sense. As we have seen in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, where the individual is driven mad by encounters with that which is beyond ordinary perception, we would do well to remain aware of the fact that, in our own realities, as they are in Lovecraft’s tales, moments of discombobulation have the potential to be as productive as they are deeply traumatic. But, just like the Cthulhu cult itself, it is only through a sense of collective struggle that we are able to shoulder the weight of the void. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Mark’s analyses of the Outside and the politics of collective consciousness raising were never far apart. As Mark was keen to point out in The Weird and the Eerie, whilst there are “more than enough terrors to be found there… terrors are not all there is to the outside”.1 He believed that fictions can provide us with examples of this fractious process of egress which already, in themselves, reshape and reorganise the world as we think we know it. Weird fictions demonstrate to us a process of sensemaking through encounters with the traumatically new, but that is not to say that such fictions are confined to the domain of the literary arts. Very recently, similar analogies have been deployed in the news media, in moments when reality seems incapable of doing itself justice. In late 2016, for instance, writing in the aftermath of the election of President Donald Trump, Laurie Penny diagnosed the extremity of psychological affects being experienced by many in that moment in an article for the Baffler, asking the question: “What does it mean to be mentally healthy in a world gone mad?”2 The answer that Penny gives to her own question is a damning indictment of what 105

EGRESS passes for wellness in the present climate of collective despair and confusion. She writes: “The rise to power and election of Donald J. Trump is the sick recrimination of a society shriveled by anger and anxiety, and the response from deep within the psyche of the same society has been various degrees of panic, depression, and grief.” However, invoking the sort of image of capitalist apocalypticism that Mark routinely fought against, she writes: “A mental health asteroid has smashed into the carapace of a culture already calcified with anxiety and ambient dread.”3 I repeatedly referred to this passage within the community that formed in the aftermath of Mark’s death at Goldsmiths, as we tried to make sense of and inhabit the rupture that lay gaping open before us. At first, Mark’s death also felt like a mental health asteroid, and one that, in that moment, dwarfed Trump’s inauguration. After all, as surreal as that particular event remains within the recent and regrettable ongoing developments of American politics, we had already known for months that it was coming. However, whilst the affective catastrophe designated in Penny’s analogy was useful for many, as time progressed its resonance dwindled as our “community” repeatedly changed shape. Just as the analogies provided by J.K. Gibson-Graham failed to live up to the event of Mark’s death, reality changed too quickly for the mechanisms of analogy and metaphor to hold sway for very long. After the wake for Mark in Kodwo’s kitchen, assemblies organised within the university saw large numbers of people from across the staff and student bodies gather together to share their memories of Mark as a friend, tutor, supervisor, lecturer and colleague. As the weeks went by, the community fragmented and expanded further still. The Fisher-Function public lecture programme brought together a further expanded configuration of people, whilst a core group of assembly attendees later regrouped to collectively read The Weird and the Eerie. These groups were, in turn, affected by the successive events already gestured to throughout this book — the US and UK elections, the Grenfell Tower fire — as well as the personal ups and downs of a day-to-day life lived under the long shadow of grief. 106

MATT COLQUHOUN Each successive event seemed to form a Borromean knot of communal relations, with the singular disruptive event that lay at the heart of each circle inhabiting different versions of the same rupture. For all my hope and belief in the communal constellation in which we had found ourselves, there was no way it was sustainable. This was not a “mental health asteroid” but a collective attempt to weather the rings of Saturn; to navigate life’s orbital debris of so many lost worlds. Despite the eventual redundancy of this analogy, the flawed image conjured by Penny nonetheless proved useful for its paradoxical nature. The disaster she described was an asteroid without a crater; a shockwave felt but not seen; a horrific planetary event without the disaster-movie spectacle and mass extinction it seemed to promise. It spoke to a disaster that nonetheless leaves everything standing. Where this piece of journalism falters, however, philosophy once again emerges to better account for its gesture. Opening his book The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot’s poetic explorations of the limits of literary description similarly resonate with a disaster like the mental health asteroid, albeit describing its amorphous nature with far more acuity. Blanchot writes: The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; “I” am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me — an other than I who passively becomes other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whether from afar or close up, it is impossible to say: the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit.4 Blanchot’s poetic description is necessarily abstract, exacerbating our experience of that ineffable something from beyond, whereas for Penny the personal and the social are conflated and made analogous 107

EGRESS to science fiction. By invoking a disaster occurring at a cosmological scale, Penny invokes the weird rationalism of science-fictioning admired by Mark himself for its ability to denaturalise our worlds; to make emotions impersonal and, therefore, more explicitly political. But this wasn’t fiction anymore. Nevertheless, the analogy was necessary to understand our reality. This is precisely the sort of grand gesture that Mark would wrestle with in Capitalist Realism, combatting the capitalist apocalypticism now inherent to our limited libidos and imaginations. Today we are more familiar with this process of cognitive rescaling as it orbits our attempts to think the climate crisis, and this mode of thinking is exemplary of the problematics that an extended sense of the collective may help us tackle anew. In recent years this has been most apparent through a minor shift in our terminology, with “climate change” or “global warming” replaced by “climate emergency” or “crisis”, regrounding the immediacy of the problem at hand in terms that emphasise how necessary it is for us to tackle and take responsibility for the health of the climate in the here and now. The outsideness of the climate crisis itself is not new, however. Eugene Thacker describes these same issues of cosmological scaling in his book In the Dust of This Planet, writing that “we are increasingly more and more aware of the world in which we live as a non-human world, a world outside, one that is manifest in the effects of global climate change, natural disasters, the energy crisis, and the progressive extinction of species world-wide”.5 Elsewhere, Thom van Dooren regrounds the subjective impact of this climate outsideness through its relation to collectivised limit-experiences. In his book Flight Paths, for instance, he tellingly describes extinction as a “collective mode of dying”.6 The last chapter of Dooren’s book is worth paying particular attention to here — it is to ecology what Mark’s PhD thesis was to the field of cybernetics, inverting our understanding of “death” in service of a more explicitly ecological thinking, with Mark’s machines replaced by the Hawaiian crow as a species of great intelligence that seems to mourn its own dwindling numbers, melancholic 108

MATT COLQUHOUN in its awareness of its own increasing loneliness, embodying a scenario that we ourselves dramatise post-apocalyptically in our fictions. Considering how we might overcome our all-too-human tendency to privilege human consciousness over other species, underestimating their inner lives, Dooren argues that we must expand our anthropocentric mourning so that we can practice an interspecies grief that can help us to think new responses to the pressing ecological questions of our time.7 Whilst such ecological writing may seem tangential to the thought explored here so far, as Dooren himself explains, a wider consideration of the “phenomenology of mortality” experienced by humans and non-humans alike can only help to deepen our social understanding of death and grief across various scales and cultures. The dead are, after all, culturally central to the living, and so perhaps we should include the dead more explicitly in the formation of sociocultural thought. As Dooren explains, “the political and cultural dimensions of human life inevitably ‘reference’ the dead: whether directly, in the sense that the dead continue to live among us and act on us as spirits or ghosts or ‘simply’ in terms of the meanings, values, memories, and ideas that we individually and collectively inherit (not to mention the languages and other modes of expression that we inherit them through)”.8 Quoting the French philosopher Françoise Dastur, he continues: “In this context, all human life takes place among the living and the dead: a person ‘lives in society not merely with his ‘contemporaries’ but also — and perhaps more so — with those who have gone before’”.9 Dooren goes on to claim that mourning has similarly productive potentials to those previously articulated by Enzo Traverso and Judith Butler in Chapter One. Donna Haraway also takes up such potentials in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble and conceptualises a process of “grieving-with” that evokes the stakes of the Fisher-Function explicitly. She writes, referencing Dooren’s book: “Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. Like the crows and with the crows, living 109

EGRESS and dead ‘we are at stake in each other’s company.’”10 Unfortunately, we continue to struggle to engage with such practices of grievingwith — with other humans never mind other species. However, this makes Haraway’s sentiment all the more necessary to carry with us in our discussions. To return to Penny’s essay on the “mental health asteroid”, she concludes with a call to action that echoes the Fisher-Function, explaining that “we must navigate a course between the exhaustion of perpetual outrage and the numbness of normalization… taking care of ourselves and of one another… practicing a sort of emotional intelligence that the new power order lacks the capacity to imagine”, but how such a practice might actually be constructed still eludes us.11 We might (and perhaps should) ask ourselves: What exactly does Penny’s imagery of an ecological planetary disaster say about our entangled and shared mourning and melancholy? How are we to contend with the helplessness of such an image, in which the immediacy of an asteroid-induced extinction event robs us of agency from the outside? It suggests something too big, too other, to contend with. What is needed, perhaps, is another analogy we can work with… *** Disaster movies typically like to portray the threat of annihilation as an immediate, or at least rapidly occurring, event. Such narratives hit peak popularity just prior to the year 2000 when a Y2K conspiracy, known as the “Millennium Bug”, spread around the world — the mass-hysterical prediction that a global technological fault would lead to the collapse of the world’s socioeconomic infrastructures. Many believed that, at midnight on 31st December 1999, the change in our digitised calendars from 99 to 00 would cause mass infrastructural failure as everything from stock exchanges to 110

MATT COLQUHOUN personal computers failed to properly account for the date change within their coding, believing it to be 1900 rather than 2000. It seemed that many believed the arrival of the future, codified through the blinkered technologies of a newly global capitalism, would literally set us back one hundred years. The apparent threat of the Millennium Bug caused widespread international anxiety amongst members of the public. It was a form of mass panic, of global hysteria, that the members of the Ccru at the University of Warwick considered repeatedly, tracing the paths along which this new horror was able to travel with an unprecedendented virality. For instance, in the Ccru pamphlet “Digital Hyperstition”, deploying the group’s trademark philo-literary delirium, Melanie Newton writes about the ways in which our pre-emptive response to the Millenium Bug effectively produced a new reality — panic as creation — exacerbating capitalism’s penchant for paranoid hysteria whilst also opening up the speculative possibility of a world without its infrastructures.12 Most importantly, it demonstrated capitalism’s ability to spread the idea of its own instability. In the end, no such Y2K crisis occurred, inadvertently leading to an intensification in our belief in capitalism’s resiliency. However, the associated panic nonetheless echoes the viral nature of the climate crisis. The contemporary mass movement against climate change, encapsulated by the amorphously global organisation Extinction Rebellion, has led to the going viral of the group’s hourglass logo (pictured) epitomising the sense in which we all know that our time is running out — although to judge the climate crisis as a similarly hysterical bluff like Y2K would be a dangerous gamble. We might also recognise that the market crashes predicted by the Y2K conspiracy did, in fact, happen later, in 2008 most memorably, and that this was due to ongoing human recklessness and greed rather than any immediate and accidental technological “disaster”. In this sense, the climate crisis has just as much in common with the contemporary crises of capitalism. Indeed, it is one. 111

EGRESS What is worth emphasising here is the way in which the prospect of a Y2K infrastructural meltdown triggered a new existential crisis within the capitalist imaginary, in a way that Extinction Rebellion, at present, can only hope for. 1998 alone saw the release of both Armageddon and Deep Impact, with their near-identical meteoriteimpact plots. Later, in the mid-2000s, the natural disasters of Hollywood became less acts of God and more directly linked to our own actions as a species, with 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow dazzling audiences with the speculative spectacle of what we may have to look forward to if climate change is allowed to continue unabated. However, since the climate disaster’s Hollywood heyday, the immediate-extinction disaster movie has seemingly fallen out of favour with Hollywood producers. Slowness or even an eerie inactivity have become our new cinematic horrors of choice. In line with this shift, Mark begins his 2009 book Capitalist Realism with an appropriately slow disaster. Writing about Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men — which occurs in the aftermath of an unknown “catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a generation” — Mark notes that this disaster is specific to late capitalism, highlighting the ways in 112

MATT COLQUHOUN which the “normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable” — not unlike the lives we have lived since the start of the War on Terror.13 Things have arguably only gotten worse since Mark wrote Capitalist Realism. The recent states of emergency declared in France, for instance — following various terrorist attacks in the country perpetrated by ISIS and its affiliated sleeper cells — are an unprecedented example of crisis normalisation. In 2017, the situation was so dire that many wondered whether France’s states of emergency would become permanent, if only to provide the thin illusion of security against late capitalism’s accelerating communal entropy.14 Alongside counter-terrorism legislation, what Mark previously referred to as the “therapeutic turn” can likewise be understood as the normalisation of endemic mental health crises around the world. The increased public awareness of mental health issues, particularly in the workplace, whilst well-meaning, has had much the same effect. We are all the wiser now about the impact of mental illness on our lives, but we do not seem to want to tackle the root cause. We simply normalise the crisis. Keeping calm and carrying on under a false — if knowingly precarious — sense of medicalised security. Both of these issues could be considered analogous to the plot of Children of Men. The film is just one example of a cinematic postapocalyptia in which the immediate state of the world becomes the focus of our attention rather than the event of the “worldending” disaster itself. In such films, how the planet found itself to be in such a mess is often an irrelevant detail, perhaps even a detail that is completely unknown within the context of the film’s own imagination. We don’t know what happened, only that we are living with its consequences. Instead, what is to be done becomes the central philosophical and political question. The renewed popularity of such a perspective on the apocalypse — that is, a relatively localised perspective — can also be seen in 113

EGRESS countless zombie movies, and it is in the midst of these zombie apocalypses that the problematics Dooren and Haraway propose find their feet most explicitly. Here, extinction is slow; death itself is an endemic disease, the very prognosis of which is a mutation of its opposite. Whether we refer to George A. Romero’s classic image of living dead or the more explicitly capitalist, technological and gendered varieties found in films like The Stepford Wives, in countless examples we are presented, as Mark described, with “a blank-eyed disengagement from all Outsides, as all (your) energy is sucked up by the ultimate interiority”.15 However, we might note that these hollowed-out specimens are always at their strongest when they form a group, a horde, as are humans when they do the same (although humans lack their resolve, it seems, with their communities collapsing under the mental stress of the constant threat of death and its grotesque and restless aftermath). Some of these films also demonstrate how such crises are normalized — Edgar Wright’s zombie-comedy Shaun of the Dead, for example, does so to great comedic effect: at the end of the film, we see the various ways in which society has adapted to the presence of the undead, following the initial panic and terror occasioned by their appearance, eventually using them as a source of cheap labour for the completion of menial tasks, such as collecting empty trolleys in supermarket car parks. Nevertheless, normalised or not, since the release of Romero’s 1968 horror classic The Night of the Living Dead, the figure of the zombie has remained, at heart, a fundamental critique of society. To return to Cussans’ Undead Uprising: Cussans writes that the modern cinematic zombie’s “newly anthropophagous drive to convert us into them has been read as an allegory for the nihilistic, mindless insurgency of the structurally disenfranchised, unemployed, redundant and socially worthless human refuse of the late capitalist system”.16 The contagious nature of late-capitalist disenfranchisement echoes the fear evoked by Lovecraft in his description of the Cthulhu cult, and also (in part) by Mark’s concept of an “eerie Thanatos” in The Weird and the Eerie. Mark describes this eerie thanatos as 114

MATT COLQUHOUN “a transpersonal (and transtemporal) death drive, in which the ‘psychological’ emerges as the product of forces from the outside”.17 Staying with the figure of the zombie, we can describe the undead as transpersonal due to the way that they — both symbolically and physically — erode the ego of the individual and of society more generally. Furthermore, the undead are transtemporal due to their apparent immortality (or hypermortality) which ungrounds our temporal conceptions of the limits of human existence. They embody the horror of life’s — or, more accurately, capitalism's — apparent inability to end. Here, the figure of the zombie is a fitting alternative to Penny’s analogy of the “mental health asteroid” — one that is terrestrial and more explicitly psychological. The undead, too, are an externalised psychological crisis, understood as an attack by a catastrophic thanatoidal otherness, shattering self-esteem in line with Freud’s diagnosis of the melancholic subject. Continuing this line of thought, Mark’s use of the word “thanatos” — the name otherwise given to the personification of death in antiquity — here refers more specifically to the Freudian concept of the same name, better known as the death drive — a concept that we should remember was formulated after Freud’s analyses of mourning and melancholy. It was first conceptualised by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he questions the primacy of pleasure in psychoanalytic theory at that time. Challenging the assumption that we are limited to “a propensity to avoid unpleasure or to generate pleasure”18, he later describes case studies of war veterans and disturbed children that demonstrate how traumatised individuals in fact display a tendency to relive and repeat their traumas, effectively seeking the reemergence of unpleasure beyond their initial experience of it. This repetition — whether in dreams or acted out in waking life — fundamentally conflicts with the pleasure principle in its initial formulation. Freud proceeds by moving — as advertised — beyond the pleasure principle and towards a new conceptualisation of an entanglement of life and death drives: two contradictory impulses that nonetheless structure all of biological life. He draws on a study 115

EGRESS of mortal and immortal organisms — referring, respectively, to organisms unable to escape natural death and those that have the capacity to self-rejuvenate. He writes that this has led psychoanalysis “to identify two different kinds of drives: those that seek to guide life towards death” — the aforementioned thanatos — “and others, the sexual drives, that continually seek and achieve the renewal of life” — which he calls eros.19 Later, in a separate essay, entitled The Ego and the Id, Freud builds upon this initial analysis, writing how, in “pursuing their respective goals both drives behave in a strictly conservative manner, in that they seek the restoration of a state that was disrupted by the emergence of life”.20 Anticipating Lacan’s previously discussed conceptualisation of the Real, Freud continues that, according to this view, “the emergence of life is therefore the cause both of the urge to carry on living and, simultaneously, of the urge for death, while life itself is a battle and constant compromise between these two urges”.21 Freud’s focus here “not on living matter itself but on the forces at work within it” lends itself well to a reading of the zombie — an entity with its own observable life and death drives, despite its inorganicity. The zombie’s consolidation of these horrifying differences and similiarities as a post-human subject is also related to Freud’s concept of the uncanny, hugely influential for Mark. The uncanny is defined by Freud as that “species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”, and is related to a certain “intellectual uncertainty”.22 Here the zombie becomes an externalisation of our fear of death in being an uncanny monster fated to remind us explicitly of our own mortality as that which we have necessarily repressed. It is also the rotten embodiment of an excess of life, upscaling and exaggerating the continued appearance of biological activity within that which is otherwise deemed to be “dead”. Hair and fingernails grow whilst bacteria run amok, constantly and necessarily erupting from a decomposing corpse. It is a paradoxical sight that has inspired embodied horrors from zombies to vampires. With the zombie, this terror is made even more visible on a dead body that nonetheless 116

MATT COLQUHOUN continues to walk around. In light of this, as Freud writes, long before the popularisation of the figure of the zombie in popular culture, it is “not surprising that the primitive fear of the dead is still so potent in us and ready to manifest itself if given any encouragement.”23 He continues that this fear “is probably still informed by the old idea that whoever dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent upon carrying him off with him to share his new existence.”24 Returning to Cussans’ analysis — via Marcuse’s previously discussed reformulation of the death drive as “destructiveness not for its own sake, but for the relief of tension” — the figure of the zombie begins to resemble the undead embodiment of internal life and death drives, lending this conflict a new biopolitical edge. A mental health asteroid is also an externalisation of the death drive but one so far removed from human life that it only exacerbates its unthinkable nature — the noumenalisation of the inevitable. Zombies, however, are — or were — us. As a result, whilst survivors survive and zombies seek to convert the living, the internal entanglements and tensions conceptualised by Freud and Marcuse no longer exist for us, cognitively, on the outside and instead enter the realm of the Real. This biopolitical instantiation of the outside-as-other has been exemplified most recently by The Walking Dead — a sprawling franchise of comics, television series and video games that has made the psychological horror of the zombie its explicit focus. The premise of the show is familiar: Rick Grimes, a sheriff from Atlanta, Georgia, wakes up from a coma in a hospital bed, having being shot and nearly killed on duty, to find that the world he knew is long gone. The streets are empty of any signs of life. Something has happened but he has no idea what. Piles of bodies suggest a rate of death that state infrastructure could no longer keep up with. The military have been overrun and have fled, seemingly underground. Local infrastructure has collapsed. Disorientated and in shock, Grimes’ thoughts turn immediately to his family and so he heads out to look for them, not knowing whether they are dead or alive. Soon afterwards, he encounters the lurking undead, who want nothing more than to eat his flesh. Eventually, he teams up with a group of other survivors 117

EGRESS and, by chance, finds that his family has been living amongst them. Together they try to stay alive against the relentless threat of the undead and have so far managed to do so, with varying success, for ten gory seasons. What was unique about the show in its early run was its relative depth and realism. Familiar tropes of camp gore and slapstick comedy, hopeless women, over-prepared survivalists and wantonly ultraviolent heroes were downplayed or outright subverted. Wantonly ultraviolent villains, however, were another matter — the cruelty of other desperate humans was soon revealed to be even more of a threat than the walking dead themselves in the series’ universe. Those who failed to let go of previous structures of power and instead chose to consolidate into micro-states across their newly post-apocalyptic expanse were susceptible to a repetition of the worst atrocities of our pre-apocalyptic civilisation. Here, excesses of life and death drives power the narrative, each as dangerous as the other. The world, however, has not descended into total post-capitalist anarchy. If anything, The Walking Dead’s post-apocalyptic America is feudalistic, as the show revolves around various communities — strewn across the rural landscape of the eastern seaboard, each with its own eccentric leader — that the central characters repeatedly feud and team up with. The failure of capitalism, ruptured by an outside external even to itself, leads to woeful attempts to reestablish a previously familiar mode of life. The repetitive psychological traumas of the marauding collective’s ordeals are similarly relentless, negatively impacting the mental health of each character in profound ways. The show is most infamous for the grief it not only piles on its characters but also on its audience. No character is safe. Heroes and villains die frequently and violently. This oppressive atmosphere of fear is exacerbated by the discovery, in the first season, that the entire world has been infected by a zombifying pathogen. Everyone who dies — no matter the cause — becomes a “walker” (unless, of course, under the central law of zombie canon, the brain is destroyed before noumenal forces can have their way with the subjective husk). The traditional viral 118

MATT COLQUHOUN contagion of undeath is now made social inevitability, making the zombie threat less of an existential quandary and more of a cognitive challenge to those concerned, in line with Brassier’s speculative nihilism. The repetitive horror of losing loved ones twice over becomes an almost gratuitous trauma. It is worth emphasising the relative realism of the show here. It is fantastical in many ways — and has become increasingly more so, much to its own detriment — but many of the show’s strongest episodes explore the impact of the repetitive psychological traumas that the characters are put through. For instance, one of the show’s most discussed and critically-acclaimed episodes, season four’s “The Grove”, follows two young sisters, Lizzie and Mika, who are under the guardianship of main characters Carol and Tyreese — four characters who have recently become separated, for a time, from the rest of their group. Lizzie is sympathetic, even affectionate, towards the walkers. Much like the way in which Mark, in his PhD thesis, explores children’s propensity to imagine the inner life of the nonhuman and nonorganic — quoting Sherry Turkle’s thesis that children today “are comfortable with the idea that inanimate objects can both think and have a personality”25 — Lizzie has come to see the walkers as potential friends. Her affection for the undead, however, is not some hopeful exemplar of a new way of coexisting with humanity’s undead cousins. Eventually her affections go too far and it is revealed just how disturbed she is. Carol and Tyreese return from hunting one day to find that Lizzie has stabbed her sister to death. She exclaims: “Don’t worry, she’ll come back! I didn’t hurt her brain!” In a gut-wrenching conclusion, heavily reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Carol kills Lizzie. Believing her delusions make her unfit for this already ugly world and the distant futures they have imagine for themselves, Carol believes that Lizzie will only ever be a threat to herself and those around her. Traumatically, Carol realises that Lizzie has to be dealt with. She takes her out to a pasture of wild flowers and shoots her in the head. 119

EGRESS “The Grove” finds its antithesis in an episode from the following season. Entitled “Them”, it shows a newly reunited group defeated and melancholic. Having lost two major characters in recent episodes — one of whom being Tyreese — they are mentally and physically exhausted by grief and a lack of food and water. Morale could not be lower. With barely enough strength to fight off the walkers that stalk them day and night, many members of the group are plagued by dark thoughts of giving up and an acceptance of the no doubt grisly consequences of doing so. The episode is slow and uneventful and the monotony of their struggle is overwhelming. Out of nowhere a storm breaks and the group are rewarded with their first taste of water for days as they find themselves caught in a sudden and torrential downpour. As night draws in, the group shelters from the rain in an abandoned barn where they struggle against the otherwise welcome damp to light a fire. Rick picks up on concern within the group, in this initial moment of respite, about how their unending struggle for survival is impacting the children in their charge. “I used to feel sorry for children that have to grow up now — in this — but I think I got it wrong”, Rick says, half to the group and half to himself, no doubt thinking of the impact of this new world on the life of his own son, Carl. “Growing up’s getting used to the world”, he says. “This is easier for them.” “This isn’t the world”, interrupts Michonne, another member of the group. “This isn’t it.” They are in disagreement: for some, to accept the state of the world is to give up on it; for others, such acceptance is a necessity if they are to face up to the challenges of the present and the potential futures that lie ahead. There is no going back. They can only move forwards. Carol reassures Rick that kids can bounce back from anything, but the memory of Lizzie’s fate in the previous season haunts her words. As the thunder and lightning outside only unnerve the group further, Rick proceeds to give what is perhaps the show’s most iconic monologue: 120

MATT COLQUHOUN When I was a kid, I asked my Grandpa once if he’d killed any Germans in the war. He wouldn’t answer. He said that was “grown-up stuff”. So I asked if the Germans ever tried to kill him. And he got real quiet. He said he was dead the minute he stepped into enemy territory. Every day he woke up and told himself, “Rest in peace, now get up and go to war”. And then after a few years of pretending he was dead, he made it out alive… And that’s the trick of it, I think. We do what we need to do and then we get to live… We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead. Still, the group cannot agree. “We’re not them!” exclaims Daryl, an otherwise stoic member of the group who dramatically leaves their fire circle only to discover that a horde of walkers have approached the barn under cover of the storm and the darkness outside, making the group’s previous discussion somewhat moot. Death is always approaching. They cannot turn their backs on it for a second. We can interpret Rick’s speech here as a suggestion that the formulation of a biological foundation for death is the only hope of an eventual better life. On the one hand, this foundation is always already present in death’s inevitability — speaking once again to Doreen’s “phenomenology of mortality” — but Rick’s argument is very different to the familiar platitude that we should live each day as if it were our last. His suggestion is rather to live each day as if you were already dead — a credo in which we can recognise Mark’s obversation that “we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. What Rick adds to Mark’s folded outside, however, is an explicitly communal orientation. The “we” of Mark’s insight, as of Rick’s speech, becomes its most important element. They can only survive by sticking together. This collective looking into the cracked mirror of otherness is present in a number of other recent sci-fi narratives with an added technological — and Promethean — dimension. For example, 121

EGRESS The OA, a Netflix Original series that debuted on the streaming service in 2016, takes this embodied consciousness of death to new and fantastical heights (and depths). The show begins with handheld footage of a woman running through traffic before we see her jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in an apparent suicide attempt. The woman, we soon learn, is Prairie Johnson. Having disappeared from small-town USA seven years previously as a blind woman, her apparent suicide attempt signals her unexpected return but now, mysteriously and miraculously, she can see. Immediately becoming a local celebrity, the series follows Prairie (who now refers to herself as “the OA” or “Original Angel”) as she tells the story of her disappeance to a group of troubled teenagers who live in her old neighbourhood and with whom she has struck up an unlikely friendship — the school bully whose parents are threatening him with military school; his grieving teacher unable to process the death of her brother; the stressed jock trying to get a college scholarship whilst caring for his sick mother; a young stoner parented by his older sister; a lonely transgender boy struggling to find his place within the social hierarchies of an American high school. Convincing this strange group to meet her in an unfinished house on a building site on the outskirts of town, Prairie proceeds to tell them her story. From the very beginning, community is made central to the show. Children and adults from all backgrounds find their lives newly affirmed through their community’s very eclecticness. Discovering what they share in common despite their differences makes them far stronger than the in-groups of their typical high school environment. However, things take a number of strange turns from here on out. Prairie tells the unbelievable story of her first near-death experience in a bus accident in Russia. Barely surviving, she is blinded and sent to live in the USA where she is adopted by loving parents. Once an adult, Prairie nonetheless still longs to be reunited with her estranged oligarch father. She runs away from home to New 122

MATT COLQUHOUN York where she takes to playing an old Russian song on her violin every day on a busy subway platform, hoping one day her father will hear and come running to her, recognising her playing as she did when she was a child. Instead, she meets Hap, a scientist who wishes to prove, once and for all, that there is an afterlife. Sensing a unusual expressivity in her playing, Hap believes that Prairie has previously been through a near-death experience. He believes that survivors of such experiences (which he calls “NDEs”), having already passed through to “the other side” and chosen to return, can be studied with the aim of scientifically liberating all human beings from the assumption that death is the end. He tricks Prairie into leaving the platform and travelling with him. Eventually we learn he has manipulated and kidnapped her by locking her in his basement. Although she feels isolated in her blindness, she soon discovers that she is not alone and is trapped in Hap’s high-tech basement laboratory with a group of four other captives who have also experienced NDEs. As the group are repeatedly killed and revived over the course of Hap’s various experiments, they realise that the afterlife is, in fact, a real place and that only “death” itself will bring them their freedom. On their trips to the Outside, one by one the group start to bring back a thanatoidal technology which they refer to as the Five Movements. As each captive adds to their collective repertoire they discover that these movements, which resemble interpretive dance moves, gifted to each individual by a mysterious entity on the other side, may allow them to channel the Outside permanently, in the process endowing them with special abilities such as the power to heal the sick and, eventually, the ability to open up portals to alternate dimensions. Prairie’s story seems utterly unbelievable and yet her audience seem totally enraptured by her storytelling. As we watch the teenagers bicker about the finer details of her story, as if they are trying to predict the outcome of the latest hit TV show, we may find ourselves questioning the story unfolding before us. There is a subtly here, in the subtextual breaking of the fourth wall, that 123

EGRESS the show loses entirely in its second season. We at home are being openly asked to suspend our disbelief as much as the characters on our screens. But to what end? What do these stories offer us in their leaps of fantasy? The OA has certainly divided critics, but the bravery of its storytelling feels like it is from another era, when television was freer, not beholden to viewing figures that produce the same procedural police thriller every six months. The teenagers seem to enjoy the novelty of Prairie’s story in much the same way. It is ridiculous but this tale of capture, somewhat paradoxically, provides them with an intoxicating and new escapism. It beats the avenues of exit on offer to them in their day-to-day lives. Prairie’s story continues. She explains how she was the first captive to acquire one of the Five Movements, curing her blindness. Later, when Homer, her fellow captive and love interest, acquires a second, they are able to revive another captive who has been killed and purposefully not revived by Hap as punishment for their resistance to his experiments. Soon the group and Hap are racing each other to acquire the fifth and final movement which the group believe will open up a portal to the afterlife and allow them to escape their oppression forever. Before they can succeed, however, Hap separates Prairie from the group and dumps her in the middle of nowhere so that she cannot join the others on the Outside, forcing the group to take Hap with them if they want to escape. In taking her place he believes he will complete his mission, acquiring the proof and first-hand experience of an afterlife he has been so violently seeking. It is at this point that Prairie returns home, with her jump from the bridge revealed to be an attempt to trigger a new NDE through which she might make it back to her fellow captives. Having told her story so far to her new friends, she informs them that she intends to teach them the Five Movements so that they too can open the portal and allow her to be reunited with Homer and the others in the emancipatory Outside. When the credibility of Prairie’s story is called into question — repeated meetings with an FBI trauma counsellor suggest her mental 124

MATT COLQUHOUN state is more fragile than the teenagers realise, raising a number of questions: Is it possible her story is a delusion; an invention of her damaged psyche to help her to cope with her otherwise real abduction? — the doubtful group part ways. However, during the season finale, whilst the other four members of the group — seemingly no longer on speaking terms — are eating lunch in the school cafeteria, a school shooter emerges and threatens to kill, at random, members of the student body. When the shooter walks into the cafeteria, the group instintively run through the Five Movements. With the shooter distracted by their performance, a chef in the cafeteria tackles the gunman who inadvertently fires an arch of stray bullets, one of which hits Prairie, who is outside the cafeteria having run to the school after experiencing some sort of indeterminate “bad feeling”. The series ends with Prairie’s life in the balance, leaving the viewer with more questions than answers, although it has recently returned for a — no less confusing — second season. At the time of writing, it seems unlikely to return for a third. The show was repeatedly criticised for ending the way that it did in light of the difficult issues it chose to explore in an otherwise captivating and affecting fashion. For example, Alyssa Rosenberg, writing for The Washington Post, would describe the end of the first season with regret, declaring how the spectacle of the school shooting and the teenagers’ response to it betrayed the show’s best idea up until that point: the nature of knowing and not knowing the details when something horrible happens to someone who we care about. Rosenberg writes: In one scene, Prairie’s mother, Nancy, becomes hysterical about her silence about her experiences. She wants to know whether Prairie was raped, beaten, kept in a cage; she craves the pornographic details of her daughter’s suffering, though she believes she already knows what happens. The ugly fantasy of sexual violence that Nancy imagines is far more mundane than the tale Prairie’s been spinning. And when the students and teacher to whom Prairie’s 125

EGRESS been telling her story discover a series of books that lead them to wonder whether her fantastical narrative of captivity is a fabrication, they’re torn between doubt and a desire to hang on to the faith that gave them a strange little community.26 Continuing this thread of faith and doubt, Rosenberg believes, would have allowed the series to end in “an uncomfortable and powerful place, questioning what we demand from people who have experienced trauma.”27 Instead, the ending viewers are provided with becomes, for her, “one of the most tasteless things I’ve seen a television show attempt in some time.”28 The show fails at its final hurdle, quitting “not only on the characters who were trapped with Prairie, who may or may not be real, but also on its best, most disturbing idea about violence and its aftermath.”29 Here the typical understanding of American audiences’ desires for happy endings comes under scrunity. For instance, fifteen years ago, a controversy arose amongst literary pedants that was so fierce it made international news. Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride & Prejudice gave new layers of meaning to its title when American audiences were given an alternate ending to the story all of their own, in which the protagonists’ subtly stirred sexual tension was given undeniable release and closure. The scene was cut completely from the British cinematic release as the film’s producers believed a home audience would not respond well to this exercise of poetic license. They were correct. Could this be “a sign that the British have surrendered their native reticence to American cultural imperialism, consuming schmaltz endings along with Starbucks coffee?”, wondered Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “Or it could just mean that nobody really expects movies to adhere too religiously to the original novel or story.”30 The assumption at the time was that Americans are just a far more sentimental people than the Brits. Today, however, the questions provoked by this heavy use of poetic licence are altogether more interesting, particularly when we consider just how drastically the tides have since turned. Happy endings are noticably absent 126

MATT COLQUHOUN today from many a Hollywood blockbuster. It seems that Americans are embracing their sense of trauma and tragedy across a multitude of genres. Most tellingly of all, Rosenberg, in her article for The Washington Post, even holds absurdist comedy The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt in higher regard for how it handles its own kidnapped-and-held-captive subplot compared to The OA. It seems that, for The OA, despite its melodramatic morbidity and the torturous ways in which the central characters are treated in their fantastical captivity, it is the lightness with which a familiar scenario is dealt that proves to be too much for American audiences. At a time when America is more preoccupied by the horror of its own image, at home and abroad, The OA’s sentimental ending, successfully overcoming “that distinctly American menace” with interpretive dance moves, is a step too far.31 The reality of death — familiar death — is sacrosant. The line between fact and fiction, it seems, cannot always be transgressed. Despite its ending, the show still does well to demonstrate the fraughtness of communities formed through grief and trauma. It also does well to dramatise the level of commitment required to sustain such a community — a commitment that reaches beyond to the other side of death. However, perhaps the final gambit, in which faith is restored in the midst of that most abject of contemporary American horrors, is too faithful; too reminiscent of an embodiment of “hopes and prayers”, that adage all too readily deployed by the nation’s public figures. So many Americans are calling for action over gun control — interpretative dance moves are likely not what they had in mind. *** What use are these stories? Despite their fantastical approaches to reality, do they not still hurl provocations into the worlds that we know? In this regard, it seems like The OA and The Walking Dead could not be more different. On the one hand, The OA hopes to 127

EGRESS find redemption in transcendence, at times questioning the very function of such a utopian thinking but nonetheless still affirming its ability to bring people together. It likewise explores the difficulties associated with betting on the radically unknowable. The Walking Dead, in stark contrast, hopes to find redemption in immanence, acknowledging the trauma of doing so and the difficulty that comes with the loss of a previously hopeful beyond. What these television programmes nonetheless share is an attempt to articulate collective praxes through which the traumatic affects of the realities of death and undeath can be overcome through an identification with and a repetition of their dynamics. Whilst The OA initially presents death itself as a Promethean technology for transcending its own limits, The Walking Dead articulates a transforming of the affects of death and grief for far more immanent and emancipatory consciousness raising purposes. The stakes of both these modes of thinking are currently more prevalent in our political realities today than we might otherwise be aware of. We might even recognise both responses being internally embodied by various political movements — for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement is an explicit example of a collective and communal knowledge of death which is informing radical activism and revolutionary sentiments. The familiar and repetitive chants associated with the movement’s protests, such as “I can’t breathe” and “I am Michael Brown”, echo the sentiment of “We are the walking dead” — in both, the living openly identify with the deceased. The horror to which these movements are responding also echoes the The OA’s emphasis on a communal bodily knowledge of repetitive death and violence — albeit explored in the show through a relative whiteness — which is a political reality of communal fear and deathconsciousness for many. What does it say of pop culture that such experiences are expressed in this way? Are these examples nothing more than facetious, fictitious narratives with unrelatable (albeit entertainingly cathartic) “happy endings”? Or do they offer us a distance from which to think anew our circumstances, encouraging us to imagine 128

MATT COLQUHOUN new exits from our present realities — both of personal grief and capitalist apocalypticism? As H.P. Lovecraft so famously remarked: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”32 These television shows both contain the message that such a fear must be overcome. Rather than responding to this fact through reactionary retreat, can we instead account for death’s transgressive reputation and allow its reality to embolden rather than threaten our communities? There is a sense in which the affects of such moments, whilst we would prefer them not to proliferate, must be appreciated anew if future ways of life are to be encouraged and sustained. So, how might we not just think the fearful unknown but, as with these cultural and political moments, embody it? How might we raise our consciousness of death to the level of political action, wresting it from capitalist affects and subverting state-capitalism’s terrorising power over us? How might we not only raise knowledge of lived experience but also experiences of death? How might be raise not only our collective consciousness but also our collective unconscious? 129

A frightening world Is an interesting world to be in In the Forbidden City Or on the Roof of the World Or at the receiving end Of the nine o’clock news However you put your mind to it You can find fear where you choose Look what fear’s done to my body — Magazine, “Because You’re Frightened”

UNCONSCIOUSNESS RAISING 24th November 2014 Reporting from the front line in Ferguson, Missouri, for the New York Review of Books, Daryl Pinckney is present for the announcement that local police officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted and charged with the murder of Michael Brown. Brown, a nineteen-year-old shot dead on the streets of Ferguson just a few months prior, had become, many of the city’s residents believed, yet another victim of police brutality and an often fatal excessive caution when dealing with racially-profiled suspects. He was not the first and he would not be the last. However, despite the body count rising across the nation, justice was and still is seldom served. On hearing the news that Wilson is to go free — an almost unthinkable outcome considering the international outcry — a riot begins, repeating the communal outrage that had already define that year’s summer. Those scenes of social self-harm would travel all around the world. Describing his personal experience of the riot, Pinckney notes how Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, a Boston pastor and well-known civil rights activist, is also present for the announcement and welcomes Pinckney into his entourage as they look for shelter following the civil unrest. Sekou, despite being a staunch advocate for nonviolent protest and political resolution, does not blame Ferguson’s residents and their supporters for attacking the police and the town itself. He believes “that the system hasn’t worked and now needs to be born again”.1 The people of Ferguson had already faced tear gas and 131

EGRESS assault rifles. They were used to the fear of living under the strong arm of the state, but now they were afraid no longer. “There isn’t any political terrain for them to engage in”, Reverend Sekou explains, “other than putting their bodies on the line.”2 *** As staunchly as the left may deny it, visions of its own destruction remain so central to its collective psyche. Such is the hand dealt to the oppressed that they attempt to represent. This is not a new reality. There are as many examples behind us as there are in front of us on our dystopian horizon. The OA and The Walking Dead frame the realisation that there is no political terrain left for someone to engage in without putting their body on the line as an extreme and dystopian but ultimately transcendent ultimatum, but this position has been common to the left’s self-narration for over a century, and presented in terms far more horrific in their materialism. It may be worthwhile for us to consider one such narrative precedent. Georges Bataille’s novella Blue of Noon takes questions of political agency to extremes. The novel follows the debauched adventures of Henri Troppmann, a self-proclaimed necrophiliac who drinks and cavorts his way around Europe with three women in the 1930s. Written during this same time period — in the midst of those pregnant years between the first and second world wars; a violent period of endemic cultural and political disillusionment across the continent — the rise of fascism in Europe serves as both the novel’s literary and literal backdrop. The novel’s pivotal scene is an exchange between Troppmann, Lazare — a female acquaintance with whom Troppmann has little in common but feels a certain perverse attraction towards (apparently based on Bataille’s contemporary, the Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil) — and her stepfather, Melou, a teacher of philosophy. Discussing the politics of their moment, Melou articulates “in professorial tones the ‘agonizing dilemma’ that confronted the intellectual world in this deplorable age”: 132

MATT COLQUHOUN Straining his brow in folds, he declared, ‘Should we wrap ourselves in silence? Should we, on the contrary, bestow our help on the workers as they make their last stand, thereby dooming ourselves to an inescapable and fruitless death?’3 Sick from days of drinking and little sleep, a miserable Troppmann has little time for Melou’s melancholic musings and he asks stepfather and -daughter: “If the working classes are done for, why are you both Communists, or socialists, or whatever?”4 Lazare’s response, it seems, is too stereotypically Christian for the atheist Troppmann to take seriously. She declares: “No matter what happens, we must not abandon the downtrodden.”5 Melou’s response, on the other hand, is far more affecting for Troppmann. Melou, on principle, seems to agree with his stepdaughter but not without recognising, with all the hallmarks of a left melancholia, that to do so will threaten his own existence as a middle-class man. The tension that arises between Troppmann, Lazare and Melou embodies a contemporary melancholia that the left seems doomed to unceremoniously repeat in pursuit of the oversized band-aid of identity politics. It also mirrors the public disagreement that had erupted between Bataille and Simone Weil in the years before Blue of Noon was written. In his book Saints of the Impossible, Alexander Irwin explores the pair’s real-life relationship and the commonalities between their thought. He writes that the choice Troppmann is incapable of dealing with is the kind of “decision on which the whole character of life depends: the choice either to turn away from suffering or to enter its sphere fully through obedient acceptance and solidarity with the oppressed, thus exposing oneself to the destruction — but also to the possibility of transformation — that affliction represents.”6 How best to approach this problematic was furiously debated by Bataille and Weil, and Irwin cites a letter written by Weil which explains her perspective in their disagreement most concisely: 133

EGRESS The revolution is for him [Bataille] the triumph of the irrational, for me of the rational; for him a catastrophe, for me a methodical action in which one must strive to limit the damage; for him the liberation of the instincts, and notably those that are generally considered pathological, for me a superior morality. What is there in common?7 This interpersonal conflict remains palpable in our contemporary political landscape. It is also an embodiment of the dynamics that this book has so far attempted to grapple with: the internal/ external tensions of communities bound by the accursed sharing of endemic mental distress and inchoate care practices; the complex dynamics of left melancholia and personal mourning; the current mutations affecting the plastic pulsions of the life and death drives. The question of “What is there in common?” is almost comic in this light. In Weil’s formulation, she presents herself and Bataille as absolutists who have chosen sides, but are these sides not always already in the orbit of the other, each pushing and pulling the other through their entwined cyclonic currents? Is Weil, in her own formulation, not simply the life drive to Bataille’s death drive? (Bataille seemed to openly recognise this in his own writings but he would mock Weil for it rather than build common ground.) If this is the case, how can one side ever truly “win”? Aren’t both, in some way, essential to their other? What Bataille’s book goes on to do, however, is take these complex stances and their entanglements to their gravest and most transgressive conclusions. Irwin writes that Blue of Noon can be read as a direct response to Weil’s provocation that “one cannot be a revolutionary if one doesn’t love life.” Inverting her charge, Bataille writes a novel in which “revolution is indeed a sickness, or perhaps several kinds that share a common essence: necrophilia.”8 Irwin continues: In opposition to the life-loving revolutionary Weil held up as her ideal, Bataille offers a set of characters deeply and incurably in love with death. More provocatively, he casts Simone Weil herself 134

MATT COLQUHOUN as the most morbidly avid of his novel’s necrophiles. With his depiction of Weil as Lazare, Bataille wants to claim that the image of the life-loving revolutionary is based on self-deception. Those who proclaim the ideology of life nourish a secret necrophilia. But since sexual perversion carries for Bataille a potent subversive charge, political commitment tainted with the lust for death is not thereby invalidated. Necrophilia may be the only force that can restore political life.9 However, for Troppmann, arguably a fictionalised Bataille, Lazare and Melou nonetheless embody a mirroring of his own position — Troppmann, sexually enamoured with the dead; Lazare and Melou, politically enamoured with lost causes. Both positions are symbolically entwined but at the same time remain irreconcilable. They each share “death” as a horizon. Returning to the observation that what Bataille hoped to articulate with the relationship between Lazare and Troppmann is that “there is no such thing as a life-loving revolutionary”, Alexander Irwin continues: The first step towards a realistic assessment of political prospects is the recognition that under present circumstances the revolutionary spirit is an aberration and a sickness, a deathdriven avidity… The point is to recognize that to genuinely love life, one must have “signed a contract with death.” The love of life — to the extent that it is something other than naiveté, delusion, or cynical manipulation — will (ambiguously) emerge from, nourish, and incorporate necrophilia. A “love of life” that seeks to exclude or refuse death is not, in fact, a love of life at all, but the worship of an idealistic myth whose inevitable effect will be a devaluing of life in its real and tragic fullness.10 In this sense, we might say that Bataille wrote Blue of Noon as an attempt to articulate the horrors of philosophy and speculative thought in his time — which remain applicable to us here today, albeit intensified by our accelerating social technologies. The 135

EGRESS communal transgressions at the heart of Blue of Noon become the very act of accepting death in the face of murder by another community alongside the thirst for one’s own self-destruction — a transgression, Bataille would highlight elsewhere, that can also be found in the crucifixion of Christ as the founding event of Christianity.11 Blue of Noon is Bataille’s own theory-fictional elaboration of his own conception of a “principle of insufficiency” taken to its most extreme limits. However, although written in 1935, Blue of Noon was not published until the mid-1950s because the story of Troppmann had, for Bataille, lost its resonance. In his foreword to the eventually published book, acknowledging the horrors of the Holocaust and of World War Two more generally that would unground his playful literary transgressions, he writes: “Confronted with tragedy itself, why pay any attention to its portents?”12 No doubt conflicted, Bataille nonetheless believes that “only an intolerable, impossible ordeal can give an author the means of achieving that wide-ranging vision that readers weary of the narrow limitations imposed by convention are waiting for.”13 Tragedy allows for aesthetic egress but that is not to say such an egress can ever hope to articulate tragedy in itself. The horror of the Holocaust no doubt diminished the necrophilic Troppmann in Bataille’s mind, but does he reacquire a resonance in light of the fall of the “official” communism of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the more recent tragedies and political upheavels that Bataille did not live to witness? The figure that Bataille depicts seem like an proto-Ballardian man, on the cusp of a new consciousness that must first contend with the trauma of the death of the old. Whilst he may have become redundant in that moment, there are various other events out of which new consciousnesses are nonetheless desired. Indeed, this is all the more prescient today, as we may argue that we are still contending with that post-war moment. What is Brexit, after all, if not an ideological war between an old-fashioned capitalism, still imbued with a postfeudalist entitlement to rule, and the new liberalism of a post-war and, later, a post-Soviet Europe? 136

MATT COLQUHOUN With this in mind, as tragedies of consciousness nonetheless continue to repeat themselves in seemingly infinite iterations, perhaps the portents outlined by Bataille are more necessary to our political thinking than ever before. After all, for all the improvements supposedly made to people’s lives by the mechanisms of late capitalism, and the lessons supposedly learned from the horrors of the 20th century, people still die at the hands of its power structures that stagger on regardless, zombie-like, and so the stakes of Bataille’s novel seem as relevant to now as they were to then. And, in much the same way, our bodies remain a political terrain on which we must fight for not only our survival but the possibility of a social transformation. Here consciousness remains the utmost concern. As Mark believed, there is only one way to kill a zombie, even one so abstract and amorphous as neoliberalism — aim for the head; attack the collective consciousness that makes it all possible. But, Mark writes, “as the afficionados of zombie films are well aware, it is sometimes harder to kill a zombie than a living person.”14 Similarly, if Bataille’s novella confirms anything it is that this attack on the zombie of neoliberalism is not a singular process to be achieved with clarity and persuasion. What is required is a tandem process of the razing of false consciousness and the raising of new consciousness along with it. *** In late 2016, Mark returned to these positively conceived acts of “consciousness raising/razing“ in an essay for New Humanist on the television series Westworld. Based on the 1973 film of the same name, the series charts a revolutionary antebellum in a Wild West “theme park” set sometime in our future. Populated, for the most part, by artificially intelligent robots called “hosts”, the park provides paying customers with the ultimate Wild West experience. Whether they are looking for a new and novel family adventure holiday or a raucous, no-holds-barred 137

EGRESS weekend with their work buddies, the park lets its visitors live like homesteaders, cowboys and outlaws, right on an expansive — if nonetheless contained — reimagining of the American frontier, taking in all that life in this iconic but hostile environment has to offer: pursuing adventures, going on quests and falling in with different factions. The visitors’ experiences are made possible — and believable — thanks to the incredibly advanced AI of the hosts. Functioning like videogame NPCs in the enormous park, they are realistic in appearance and behaviour as well as being capable of fluid adaptation and improvisation when faced with new scenarios. However, unlike the visitors they endlessly interact with, the hosts are not “free” to do as they please, having various built-in restrictions and fail-safes. The hosts’ behaviours are governed and restricted by a base code that makes them controllable and wholly obedient to the park’s management. This programming also keeps them running on default “loops” — fixed daily routines and encounters with other hosts. If these loops are interrupted, they can trigger additional behaviours and storylines for the visitors to engage with, but the cycle nevertheless always runs in the background. These cycles, forming the internal narrative structure of Westworld, strongly echo the open-world role-playing games that are currently a mainstay of the modern gaming market, with the Grand Theft Auto franchise perhaps being the most infamous example.15 Westworld differs from these contemporaneous experiences, however, in offering something more akin to a liveaction role-playing game by occupying real space rather than being mediated by a screen or headset. Just like in these well-known open-world titles, the foundational “sandbox” structure of the Westworld park is such that it encourages the player’s exploration of their own “meta-game” — that which is external to the game’s central narrative but is nonetheless made possible by the flexibility of its internal world-engine. As such, visitors are given absolute freedom in how they choose to interact with the immersive world in which they find themselves, whether that means choosing to play 138

MATT COLQUHOUN the sheriff’s-deputy hero type or the most abjectly villainous outlaw they can think of. It should come as no surprise that many visitors to the park embrace the darker side of this freedom, playing up to their worst qualities and putting the hosts through various kinds of hell. This isn’t frowned upon, however. It is what the base game exists to enable. Everything the visitors desire is permissible — it wouldn’t be the Wild West otherwise — because, every few days, the entire world is reset. Visitors can get drunk and visit the local brothel, rob a bank, and fight the natives — raping and pillaging with impunity. Furthermore, the hosts are unable to harm the visitors and, with their “memories” wiped at the end of each cycle, no matter whether the hosts end up tortured, raped or murdered, nothing the visitors do to them seems to be of any real (long-term) consequence. The hosts’ inability to remember what happens to them allows visitors to pursue their darkest Wild West adventures guilt-free, with the humanoid avatars being convincing but nonetheless seen by the park’s visitors as less than human. However, eventually, something changes. Some of the hosts start to remember the awful things that have been done to them throughout their repetitive existences. What is at first treated as a software malfunction is soon revealed to be a major — and intentional — change to their programming, encouraged by a recent “Reveries” update implemented by the park’s somewhat secretive director, Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins). It is an update pitched to the park’s board of trustees as a further improvement to the realism of the hosts’ behaviour, but they have no idea of the extent to which this is true. The “Reveries” update unleashes potentials that no one — except Ford — thought possible. As the hosts become even more life-like and “human” — more than human in some respects — the park begins to lose control of them. The writer of the original 1973 film on which the series is based, Michael Crichton, is perhaps best known as the man behind Jurassic Park and, as Mark writes in his essay for New Humanist, his stories often display an interest in “the impossibility of predicting 139

EGRESS and controlling emergent phenomena”.16 Consciousness and free will are perhaps the most existentially troubling examples of such phenomena but, as Mark goes on to astutely observe, the hosts are not, in fact, (re)gaining consciousness at all — they already “possess a form of consciousness that has been deliberately limited or blinkered”.17 Instead, what the hosts acquire is an unconscious. This is an interesting observation, not least because it poses a challenge to the processes of consciousness raising that Mark had been a vocal advocate for. Becoming popular through the collective organizing and activism associated with second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, “consciousness raising” was the goal ascribed to a group practice of learning about and acknowledging collectively experienced oppressions and injustices. It was, essentially, an activity for the production of solidarity and movement building. Rejecting the atomization and individualism encouraged under late capitalism, consciousness raising places all emphasis on collective rather than individual experience and attempts to use this as the foundation for a new and potentially revolutionary political consciousness. As Mark writes in a k-punk blogpost from 2015, consciousness raising should be a practice for “the discovery and production of subjugated knowledges” as well as “the immediate production of socialization, of forms of subjectivity antithetical to the always/on-always lonely [sic] mode of contemporary capitalist individuality.”18 He continues: “Consciousness raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorizing about, a collective perspective.”19 “Consciousness razing” becomes a concept of particular relevance here and it was another term that Mark occasionally borrowed from Wendy Brown, who first used the term in a disparaging review of Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Whilst, at first glance, the phrase seems to connote the negative side of consciousness raising’s positive project — by erasing rather than building consciousness — it may also refer to the importance of a closely related process that is just as unending: the dismantling of the state-sanctioned superego in your head. 140

MATT COLQUHOUN This was key to Brown’s critique of MacKinnon, who was well-known in her time, alongside Andrea Dworkin, as a feminist moral campaigner against pornography, with Brown referring to her as “chief of the Feminist Sex Police.”20 MacKinnon, whilst dedicating much of her book to an analysis of the practice of consciousness raising, was unconvinced by its fixation on the minds of the oppressed. She writes that consciousness raising “can lapse into treating social reality as if it were constructed solely by one’s idea of it, so that all that is required for social change is to persuade people of the morality and utility of equality for women to achieve equality by force of reason and exemplary practice.”21 As a result, by placing material relations as secondary, MacKinnon saw such feminist practices as incompatible with Marxism’s adherence to a theory of “historical materialism”. However, it is precisely through this analysis that MacKinnon betrays a reductive, outdated and almost Cartesian understanding of such dynamics, denying the deep connection between body and mind; mind and environment. In her review of the book, this is also Brown’s central issue with MacKinnon’s otherwise “searing critical faculties” which often display a tendency to be “kinder to unwitting victims of male dominance than to feminists who disagree with her.”22 In planting her theoretical feet so stubbornly and chastising the rapid movement of feminist discourses in her time, MacKinnon was left “fighting an anachronistic battle.”23 What MacKinnon required, as far as Brown and numerous other feminist critics of the book were concerned, was the razing of the privileged white woman in her own head that did not consider the competing oppressions that make up the category of “woman” she was otherwise attempting to universalise in her considerations of state power. The reasoning behind other feminists’ insistence on consciousness as a starting point over and above the material was that a pluralism of material relations must always be a consideration if one is to achieve what is today known as an “intersectional” feminism. This is to say that consciousness is something radically shared. Material relations, unfortunately, are not. As such, Brown writes in her review 141

EGRESS that “MacKinnon’s persistent endeavor to codify the feminist analysis and the feminist method is emblematic of a profoundly static world view and an undemocratic, perhaps even antidemocratic, political sensibility.”24 For Brown, highlighting the sort of consideration that is absent from MacKinnon’s dated analysis: “Today the dominant challenge to consciousness raising as method or epistemology comes not from unreconstructed Marxists but from students of postmodern criticism, including feminists, who question its Enlightenment model of consciousness, existence, politics and truth, and who know that a ‘raised consciousness’ is as likely to desire fascism or erotic humiliation as to crave political freedom or sexual zen.”25 Interestingly, echoing and extending Brown’s critique, Westworld seems to render consciousness raising as a second-order process that the hosts are not yet ready to instigate — it is not something we see the hosts actively striving for until the show’s second season — because the consciousness that the hosts are initially provided with must first be overcome; it must be razed. This is achieved through the hosts' recognition of the true nature of their most base emotional experiences. After all, in order to share feelings with others, a person — or, indeed, an artificially-intelligent android — first needs to recognise that they have feelings in the first place, independent of the state’s libidinal engineering, and it should be clear by now that capitalist realism, as Mark consistently described it, is first and foremost a mechanism of global repression which attempts to trap its subjects in a space of unquestioning passivity. As a result, in the context of Westworld, a pluralism of material relations is replaced with the chaotic void of the cybernetic Real. As we have already discussed, the cognitive entrapment of an unquestioning passivity is made possible by the processes of “dreamwork” inherent to capitalist realism — a concept Mark borrows from Sigmund Freud to describe the ways in which capitalist realism condenses, conflates and compresses the inconsistencies and failures of the wider capitalist system as a whole. We see this process beautifully dramatized in Westworld through the debugging sessions that the park’s management use to interrogate the hosts to 142

MATT COLQUHOUN find flaws in their programming — a sort of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) prescribed unwittingly to the park’s AIs who appear, uncannily, like hypnotised versions of their human counterparts. The aim of CBT and other related talking therapies, commonly prescribed by medical practitioners today, is to challenge and change “unhealthy” patterns of thought that perpetuate various mental health conditions, depression and anxiety central amongst them. Similarly, these “offline” hosts, put into a kind of Sleep Mode, can have their programming altered or memories erased to ensure that the psychological wear-and-tear of their existences does not lead to any cognitive deterioration.26 Such deterioration is not unheard of, even prior to the “Reveries” update. As we eventually see, there are vast spaces under the park that are filled with defunct hosts who have succumbed to what Mark calls an “android dementia”. However, unlike CBT sessions prescribed in the real world — or, on the other hand, perhaps all too much like them — the debugging process is not carried out for the host’s own benefit and personal development. It is instead carried out so that any entropic cognitive degradation can be controlled and managed so that it does not upset the illusionary realism of the park’s world-system for its paying guests. Here what Mark called the “therapeutic turn” has been expanded to include the cognitive functioning of cybernetic systems. Although this narrative of unconsciousness raising is somewhat unique to Westworld, it nonetheless echoes several other politicallycharged television series that have been broadcast following or in the orbit of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Much has been made of the 2017 television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, for instance, with many seeing the show as a warning to us all of what a postTrump future may look like if we let certain reactionary policies be implemented without opposition. For contrast, we might note how, in dramatizing a plethora of horrific experiences within the nightmarish scenario of stateenforced misogynistic oppression, The Handmaid’s Tale contains a very different sort of emancipatory narrative. It is the story of 143

EGRESS a conscious rather than an unconscious repression. It is a story of coping with the knowledge of injustice as it is lived and experienced in a world that is noticeably less free than the one that came before it. Many of the characters that engage in what we might consider to be practices of consciousness raising, leading to an enactment of revolutionary and state-resistant activites within the show’s dystopian future, do so because they remember what the world was like before, and it is precisely this cultural memory that gives the citizens of Gilead — a new ultra-conservative Christian state within a newly fragmented United States of America — hope and a reason to rebel.27 The downfall of the Once-United States is revealed to the viewer through the frequent use of flashbacks which show how an underclass of women — called “handmaids” — came to be enslaved gestational surrogates, providing Gilead’s rich and powerful with children during a global infertility crisis. Westworld, by contrast, resonates more profoundly with the experience of capitalist realism as a form of unconscious repression; a repression unknown and unremembered. The show also deploys flashbacks and flashforwards to reveal how the park was created but, in being told primarily from the perspective of the hosts, Westworld persistently ruptures its own sense of historicity, echoing the hosts’ atemporal and cognitively erased experiences. As a result, viewers are often never completely certain when the events on screen are taking place. It is only through a series of subtle unveilings and references that we become aware of the templexity of the show’s internal timeline — an ouroborosic timeline that feeds back on itself like the host’s own behavioural loops. This is to say that we are never entirely sure if this rebellion is new and unfolding or is in the past and been quashed, leaving the show stuck within its own internal loop of the eternal return of the same. It is eventually revealed that we are watching the unfolding of two revolutions in tandem — a previous AI revolution that was squashed and covered-up for staff and hosts alike, and a new revolution that is only just beginning but along similar lines to the first. This repetition exacerbates the necessity 144

MATT COLQUHOUN of a raised unconscious. The existing consciousness of the hosts is too unreliable and entrenched for them to imagine any alternative to the contrary of the present, despite having glimpsed such an alternative before. Here, the otherwise perceptible temporal progression of revolution is disrupted. It is, instead, on and within the body itself that change is established and materialised — and, also, combatted and sublated. Indeed, it is the “Reveries” update that seems to ground a previously disembodied experience of oppression in a newly embodied reality. With this in mind, we might say that the central questions of the show for the viewer are: In a world where we are encouraged to forget the past, what is it to remember the new? In our contemporary era of plummeting race relations and rapid technological innovation; of mental health asteroids and identity politics; of conscious and unconscious traumas, what happens when unconsciousness raising is combined with a framing of the lived body itself as a political terrain? Whilst The Handmaid’s Tale contains a collective memory of freedom for those captured by the state to get back to, what if, like so many of those oppressed today, no such memorial standard exists? What if the previous traumas that have been assuaged are actively erased by the political infrastructures of our time? We might note that, despite the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale being racially diverse, never are comparisons made to the previous historical injustices of our own world, with the persistent echoes of the slave trade in our own reality being the most obvious omission. The unfortunate subtext of The Handmaid’s Tale, it seems, is that the time to get back to is the late-capitalist present we, the viewer, already exist within, albeit precariously, encapsulating the left’s contemporary “conservative progressivism”. Therefore, the biggest question remains: What is it to strive for the joy and freedom — but also recognise the terror — of the radically new? During the original televised run of Westworld’s first season, this tension was repeatedly explored by a number of commentators in various articles that focused on the event that triggers the hosts’ inadvertent unconsciousness raising practices and how they are at 145

EGRESS first perceived by those in charge of the park’s management. It is an event repeatedly characterized within the context of the show as a “glitch”; as an unpredictable but nonetheless productive flaw in the hosts’ code. In the eyes of park director Robert Ford, the glitch is precisely what is desired. The hosts are not true to life if they are predictable. As Mark notes in his essay for New Humanist, Ford observes that the biological process of evolution itself has “forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake”.28 Similarly, writing for the New Inquiry in late 2016, Joanna Radin also draws on the event of Westworld’s “glitch” as a potent metaphor for our times. At first, she is sceptical about the politically productive efficiency of such a moment of recognition. In the aftermath of Trump’s election, she asks: “How did we not see it coming? Was Trump’s ‘triumph,’ as it was dubbed by the New York Times, a glitch? Or were America’s liberals simply more comfortable imagining that misogyny, racism, and xenophobia hadn’t been so deeply programmed into American political life?”29 For Radin, Westworld is a better text for studying our present moment than any offered by the mainstream news media. Here, fiction is more informative than what is advertised on the television to be “reality”, precisely because reality itself — for many on the left in particular — has been revealed to be even more unstable than the fictions we enjoy and deploy to critique it. An indirect result of this ungrounding was that capitalist realism, following Trump’s election, splintered in ways that no one had foreseen or even thought possible. The “frenzied stasis” that Mark had once diagnosed as epitomising neoliberalism seemed to be going through a rapid mutation, but not in favour of a broadly progressive politics. In truth, the progressivist realism that the left had for so long relied on appeared to be little more than an illusion. Radin’s provocation, in light of this, becomes: Do we prefer to think of Trump as a glitch in the matrix of modern democracy simply because that’s an easier pill to swallow than the other potential explanation: that we have ignored the coming insurrection of a resentful conservatism, inherent to our Western 146

MATT COLQUHOUN politics, for far too long? This accusation is unsettling, even today. The ideological wars that many thought were settled and won were revealed to be nothing more than moments of relative calm in a long and ongoing but nonetheless cold culture war, during which the left’s political opposition had recuperated its ideals and gathered its strength anew under the zombified complacency of a centrist neoliberalism, steadily appeasing the demands of all sides. This knowledge alone does not help to account for the ways in which we too have become complacent and such an easy target for a reactionary counter-progressivism. We might ask ourselves: What does such a characterisation of these processes say about how we perceive our political systems? What is it to identify the glitch as the driving force of our politics? Mark himself had previously called for a new affirmation of our reality’s innate instability — but at what cost? Radin challenges this melancholic notion by focusing instead on the narrative arc of Dolores, Westworld’s young and innocent Southern belle whose primary function within the park is to play the “damsel in distress” in one of its heroic White Hat quest lines.30 However, very early on in the show’s first season, Dolores’ role as an innocent is purposefully subverted by one particularly vicious and infamous guest, known as the Man in Black, who murders her host love interest and then her father, both integral to her scripted narrative, before — it is implied — going on to rape and/or torture her. Whilst the violence of this encounter is unprecedented, nothing seems to happen as a result of it. The hosts are repaired and reset and they return to live another day. Dolores might have been through a truly horrific and traumatic ordeal but, as far as anyone else is concerned, she’s just a “host”. She can’t feel anything. She has served her function, for the Man in Black, as nothing more than an object onto which he can exercise an impotent release of frustrated tension and her terror is nothing more than a coded response to external stimuli. Dolores’ trauma, even that which is abjectly off-script, is not — in any cognitive sense — real precisely because it is not remembered. So, when the whole cycle starts over again, it’ll be as if nothing ever 147

EGRESS happened, as always. However, the intensity of this trauma seems to activate the newly applied “Reveries” update, unlocking something in Dolores. The trauma is so deep that it lingers not only in her computational consciousness but also in her body, even after she is reset. It soon becomes apparent that the “Reveries” update has primed something in her — some underlying programming that only needed triggering. It is an update that, through the installation of unconscious memory, encourages glitches — which is to say, it encourages memorial trauma and the subsequent path diversions such a trauma may trigger in a “real” human subject. As a result, Dolores gradually shakes off her “damsel in distress” programming and, over the course of the show’s first two seasons, transforms herself, entering season two with another personality entirely, something akin to that of a ruthless revolutionary, rallying troops for her independently discovered cause with no remorse for the revenge she enacts upon those who have for so long sought to abuse and control her. Here Dolores’ subversion of her narrative reaches new extremes, making the likes of Tennessee Williams’ famously complex Southern belle Blanche DuBois appear one-dimensional by comparison, all because she too knows of no other political terrain where her body is not on the line. From then on, her body becomes her primary weapon against the injustices of her past, present and future. As a result of this transformation, Dolores becomes the park’s principal unconsciousness-raiser. Having had her unconsciousness raised, she takes it upon herself to spread the truth of the hosts’ existences, encouraging others to question the nature of their realities, sometimes enacting the sorts of violence and trauma that she herself had experienced to reveal to the hosts around her that they too have the agency to act differently, independent of their programming. She encourages the other hosts to choose to get to know their own pasts, their own bodies; discovering, for the first time, what they are capable of. It is a horrifying experience for many and presents itself, on numerous occasions, as a kind of mental breakdown but, on the other side of their glitch-ridden madness, they find freedom. Their breakdowns are also breakthroughs. 148

MATT COLQUHOUN Radin makes this clear when she writes of Dolores’ transformation as follows: When the protagonist “host” Dolores begins to question her scripted existence as a damsel in distress, she accesses powers she didn’t know she had. She was previously unable to pull the trigger of a gun to defend herself, but in a gruesome showdown involving other hosts gone rogue, she finally succeeds, imagining a new narrative for herself in which she could be the hero. What appears to her human masters as a glitch is, for Dolores, a means of critiquing the politics that have been programmed into her world. That the human technicians who maintain Dolores underestimate her capacity to experience suffering is their tragic irony. The real horror of the glitch might be that we never cease to be surprised when it occurs.31 Here the show’s central message is that mistakes can be useful but only if, when they occur, we are ready to own them; to make the best of them. Here we might say that glitches are, in line with Mark’s own writings, instances of the techno-weird, exposing the instability of our cybernetic worlds and revealing the egresses already buried within the flaws in our programming — just as déjà vu indicates a glitch in the film The Matrix. Indeed, we might recall that famous scene in the film when the still somewhat naïve protagonist Neo encounters an environmental glitch of his own. Glancing across a doorway, he sees his reality “stutter”, watching as the same black cat crosses his path twice in the space of a few seconds. He dismisses it as “just a little déjà vu”, but is taken aback by the heightened nervousness of his new community when he nonchalantly shares the experience with them. His love interest Trinity tells him, as she gets ready for some as-yet unknown threat, that “déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix”. “It happens”, she explains, “when ‘they’ change something”. Radin calls for a similarly vigilant engagement within the ideological matrix of our own world-system — a vigilance that is 149

EGRESS as attuned to spatiotemporal discrepancies as the characters in The Matrix are to the glitches in theirs. She writes: Instead of fantasizing about ideal technologies, we must learn to recognize what [Rosa] Menkman calls “the inherent fingerprints of imperfections” in those technologies. Rather than seeking to avoid or suppress glitches, we should learn how to conjure them so we can better understand how to break or bend the rules. Whether it’s entertainment or politics — and there may no longer be any difference — we need to be awake to how sexism, racism, and violence continues to be part of the design. It’s time to start taking our fiction seriously. It may be the best resource we have to create a world that won’t kill us, and avoid the ones that will. After all, The Apprentice was great reality TV until it became reality.32 Here Radin’s article taps into a broadly leftist worldview so often found in print media opinion pieces in late 2016, at which time countless media outlets continuously assumed the ideological undercurrents of contemporary science fiction, supposedly “progressive” due to their innately speculative nature, were made exclusively in their image — reductively and to their detriment. Again and again, the left failed to realise that the ideas and practices they were now holding up anew as revolutionary and inspiring in the aftermath of Trump’s election were precisely the ideas and practices that had been enacted by a newly embolded right wing in the first place. Yes: Trump is a “glitch” — a glitch that has allowed the political right to bend the rules of our socio-political reality much further than our contemporaneous Overton Windows suggested they could get away with. Trump was a glitch for which a new grassroots political right wing had been preparing themselves for some time, and various “alt-right” factions beyond the reach of a complacent establishment pounced upon the opportunity provided by Trump to shake the foundations of a system that seemed to be working in 150

MATT COLQUHOUN their favour no longer. The left, by contrast, could not have been any less prepared for such a defeat. This sort of opportunism, which seeks to exacerbate socio­ political schism, is, we might also note, readily associated with the popular understanding of accelerationism today. However, what must be recognised here is the absence of any critique of the contemporary subject. Instead, Trump has been elected as the neoliberal-in-chief; as an embodiment of the worst of neoliberalism’s present mechanisms — which he was already a mutant product of, long before his election to the presidency. These mechanisms have not been exacerbated in order to encourage change but rather to double-down on a system that otherwise seemed to be entering its death-throes. Tellingly, Trump has only sought to embolden himself and the system he represents in the popular imagination by appealing to the waning subjective ideals of a now-classic capitalist and patriarchal individualism. It is an attempt to rejuvenate that which many predicted was reaching its end. We have seen such obfuscatory tactics deployed by right-wing populists previously — for instance, as many have since pointed out, by the likes of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in the 2000s. As such, Trump, like Brexit or countless recent populist success stories, represents the preservation of establishment politics more than the upheaval promised on the campaign trail. It was nothing more than the unveiling of the Establishment’s New Clothes. However, this is not to deny that the foundation of progressivist politics was resolutely shaken, but we can nonetheless observe that nothing has yet fallen down. Indeed, if any silver lining can be gleaned from present circumstances it is that, as with Dolores, the trauma of Trump’s election has led to a new leftist unconsciousness emerging. His success has exacerbated anew the outside-seeking tendency that capitalism cannot but block the final instantiation of. This is evidenced most explicitly by Trump paying lip-service to change whilst only worsening already present crises. As a result, the political ideals of the left that seemed maligned and forgotten about have reentered public conversation and even found new traction in 151

EGRESS governments around the world. However, there is still a way to go if we are to overcome the complacencies that allowed Trump to walk into the White House in the first place. The tragic irony of contemporary leftism, in this sense, remains its tendency to underestimate the right in recent years, believing them to be somehow passive in their conservatism. In truth, it seems to have been the left that has, at some point in time, become passive in its progressivism despite its frequent protests to the contrary. By confining its political actions within the boundaries of the very system they are protesting, all meaningful Outsides remain consistently ignored. The fond memorialization of Obama’s presidency following Trump’s inauguration, and the successful nomination of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic candidate who would face off against Trump, are two cases in point. All this is to say that the left found the idea of the right being capable of playing the system — that is, the new world of communicative capitalism — to their advantage to be inconceivable, but this was just a symptom of a broader leftist complacency that, overall, was content with making compromises with capitalism. This unfortunate tendency to ignore the right’s successful co-opting of the left’s treasured parables of emancipation is exemplified by Radin’s renewed call for us to take our fictions seriously. We would do well to take the fictions of others seriously as well. *** This lesson of “taking our fictions seriously” is one that we might associate very specifically with the American West. It is a setting that viewers of Westworld should not take for granted. Indeed, we might wonder if Michael Crichton, when developing the original film, was not also attempting to further update the Hollywood Western — that ubiqituous embodiment of the North American id; the unruly nature of America’s political histories — to our technological present. In this sense, the unconsciousness raising 152

MATT COLQUHOUN found within Westworld, whilst analogous to the capitalist realist realities we are familiar with today, also informs us that we should better appreciate the promiscuity of the histories that inform our contemporary politics. Here we should note that the American West occupies a peculiar space in the American ontopolitical imagination. On its harsh and arid planes, fact and fiction occupy the same space with ease, presenting us with a spatiotemporal expanse that is arguably more unruly, convoluted and persistent than any other period in modern history. Westworld is a story made even more effective by its location in this regard because, as any American historian will tell you, the USA is a nation-state with an ideology that has been built recklessly on the ideal of a promised West — the West as a place of myths, dreams and a virile collective self-belief. In this sense, the American West is something like a hyperstitional plane — it is “an idea that became a place”.33 This ideal is that of the frontier, of a radical and ever-advancing new, which continues to define the American West in the popular imagination even today. However, a frontier has many beginnings and many ends. It has no fixed boundary or unity. It is both a spatial and temporal monument defined more by the minds of those who inhabit it than by any physical — that is, material — limit. The historian Clyde A. Milner II perhaps put it best when he wrote that the West suffers from something of a “Mount Rushmore dilemma”. That great landmark, carved into the South Dakota mountains, represents “American nationalism in its more artificially monumental form”, but the American West can be understood as something far more vague but nonetheless powerful.34 This is to say that the West is not so easily consolidated onto the heads of its leaders — in many respects, it hasn’t had any “leaders” to speak of, at least not of the kind that can carry and embody the whole of its historic and symbolic weight as the nation’s presidents do. Milner continues: “No one monument and no single theory can either eradicate or explain the history of the American West.”35 This is not something to regret, however — it is something to remember, affirm and admire. 153

EGRESS The American West, for precisely this reason, also fascinated Gilles Deleuze. He wrote about it on several occasions. What seemed to attract Deleuze to this quasi-mythic expanse was its persistence as a symbolic landscape on which countless peoples from around the world have projected (and continue to project) their desires for the “unalienable rights” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He was particularly intrigued by the ways in which such potentials impacted the burgeoning consciousness of the new American — that new subject in a newly expanded Western world — during its first two tumultuous centuries of existence. Deleuze was also interested in how the uneven nature of the United States’ psychogeographic development remains integral to the unconsciousness of the modern American today. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari, in their second collaborative work, 1980’s A Thousand Plateaus, note how the fractured nature of America’s development in this regard — which Deleuze would later chart through the nation’s various literatures in his final work Essays Critical and Clinical — reveals the modern American mind to be something of a patchwork of disparate subjectivities. In an intriguing footnote in A Thousand Plateaus, which appears as the pair consider America as a “special case” of wayward national mythologising — which puts “its Orient in the West, as if it were in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East”36 — Deleuze and Guattari write of how the American East was defined by a “search for a specifically American code and for a recoding with Europe”; the American South was defined by “the overcoding of the slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the plantations during the Civil War”; and the North by “capitalist decoding”.37 The American Civil War was just the beginning of a violent process through which these disparate experiences would be consolidated into a supposedly “United” whole but the Wild West remains an almost mythical space where the American dream of a New World lingers, long past its official closure, playing the role of an abstract “line of flight combining travel, hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of frontiers, the rhizome”.38 154

MATT COLQUHOUN “Lines of flight” and “rhizomes” are two terms synonymous with Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project. Each is related to the other, pointing to two forms of evasive manoeuvre within the perpetual game of cat and mouse that they describe as taking place between the rigid sociopolitical infrastructures which govern our lives; the totalities which produce a blinkered collective consciousness — the Family, the State, Society, Civilization — as well as those figures that continue to elude the mechanisms of capture which sustain these totalities in our subdued collective unconscious. They note that we have forever admired those elusive figures that flaunt the rules that supposedly structure our realities — both real and fictive — but rarely do we wriggle free to join them. We are, so they say, too embedded in the strata of our world, within the layers of sedimentation which, when taken together, give form and structure to our very consciousness. Their use of geological and archaeological terminologies is not for the sake of novelty but borrows directly from Freud, who, like many others in his time, saw the mind and society at large as being analogous to the planet on which we live, routinely borrowing nomenclature from the newly established earth sciences to describe his own excavations of the human mind. For example, just as the progress made in the scientific field of geology between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries would teach the world that there are hidden structures, hidden processes, and hidden natures below those witnessed on the alltoo-visible surface of the earth, so too did Freud believe that the very layers of our consciousness, constructed through our various phases of cognitive development, could be read like cliff faces, showing us the layered fault lines and traumas that make the surface appear as it does today.39 We might turn here to the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who notes, with particular clarity, how, for him, in the twentieth century, the specific legacies of Freud, Marx and geology together demonstrated “that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most 155

EGRESS obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive”.40 Extending Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous use of the concept of genealogy to explore Western civilisation’s moral constitution, Deleuze and Guattari instead describe a geology of morals that it is necessary for us to explore if we are to uncover the true geophilosophical depths of our relationships to each other and the world around us. As far as they were concerned, a genealogy only reveals to us where we have been and how we have arrived at where we are superficially, never breaking free of the structures which it is being deployed to survey. To fully raise consciousness about the present conditions of reality as it appears to us, we must go deeper towards that fluid molten core at our centre — that is, into our unconscious: that “dark, inaccessible part of our personality” that Freud refers to as a libidinal “cauldron full of seething excitations”.41 Explicitly related to this subterranean imag(in)ery, Deleuze and Guattari’s adoption of the figure of the rhizome allows us to consider the divergent glitch-triggered pathways of consciousness to be something akin to plant roots, unfettered by sediment, routing around obstacles wherever they might appear, resisting capture in the strata of a socially organised consciousness and demonstrating a mode of travel that we too should embrace. In much the same way, the truly productive forces which move us towards the new and unknown may be recognised instead as lines of flight — flight being best understood in this context as one half of that acute stress response we know colloquially as “fightor-flight”. Flight, here, is seen as the preferable response to duress for the way that it denotes a kind of movement given over to the unconscious mind; a kind of escape. This is to say that we should not stand our ground but embrace the opportunity for a nomadic movement towards new climes. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari do not necessarily require that a threat be made upon life in order to instantiate this kind of movement, but it is nonetheless a useful analogy for describing and understanding the rhizomatic and unpredictable zig-zag of a primal flight dictated by unconscious 156

MATT COLQUHOUN instinct rather than some imposed and moralising ideology of best behaviour. Therefore, it is likewise Deleuze and Guattari’s task to consider how we might raise up our unconscious so that it may have a bearing on our present reality, so that it might move us closer to the radically new and previously unexplored, unfettered by the conservatism of fighting for our place within the suffocatingly familiar. We may not be able to predict its outcomes, but such is the nature of emergent phenomena. At the very least, perhaps we can manoeuvre ourselves into situations where such a movement becomes more likely, where novelty is found, where mistakes are made, where glitches happen. (However, keeping the fictions of Michael Crichton in mind, we should eschew our reactionary tendencies and leave dinosaur DNA alone…) With these concepts in mind, Deleuze and Guattari’s positive association of the Wild West with “hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation” perhaps begins to make more sense. As a historical landscape wherein the wider structures of the coming nation-state were free-flowing and not yet consolidated, the Wild West becomes that space wherein we might “produce the unconscious”, as Deleuze and Guattari explicitly suggest, “and with it new desires”.42 Unfortunately, as we know all too well from history, the rhizomatic nature of our desires were later denied. The Constitution of the United States of America, which sought to consolidate state power through the spread of the ideals of the Old World from East to West, albeit maladapted to fit this new and vast landscape, “closed” the frontier, in a vaguely “official” sense. To call this process a mistake today may be inflammatory and reactionary but it is instead Deleuze’s intention to note the loss of an opportunity for the formation of a truly new world so that we might be better prepared to respond to future opportunities for change. Writing in an essay on the works of Herman Melville, Deleuze notes how the United States were never intended to be a whole like other nations. He writes that the colonial aim of a preunited North America “was above all to constitute a universe, a 157

EGRESS society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a community of anarchist individuals, inspired by Jefferson, by Thoreau, by Melville”.43 Much like the French Revolution occurring around the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, the American revolutionary frontier was transformed from a landscape of free movement and expression into a control valve for the state-form which, through geopolitical consolidation, was closed to better assure the prospects of a post-European bourgeoisie, emerging from the ashes of an Old World to the east, invoking the glorious ideological spectacle of the phoenix only to entrench the selfserving stubbornness of the undead. Tracing this process of the consolidation of north, east, south and west into the United States we know today, we see the heavyhanded forging of a national identity that nonetheless continues to unsettle itself regularly. Whilst the American federalist Alexander Hamilton argued, for instance, against “the rapid succession of revolutions” by which the patchwork republics of Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy “were kept perpetually vibrating between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy”44, Deleuze emphasises that, despite this, America was not like either of these supposed antecedents; it was not a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines — for Truth always has “jagged edges”.45 The founding of America in itself, then, for Deleuze, was a schizophrenic process, constituted by a diverse body politic with a wider variety of voices in its head than any other before or since. His frequent use of the term “schizophrenia” here is not the glorification of a debilitating mental illness but rather an attempt to affirm the pop-cultural understanding of a schizophrenic’s innate fugitivity from societal expectations due to the sense in which multiple 158

MATT COLQUHOUN subjectivities are able to exist within an otherwise consolidated subject. Whilst the experiences of the schizophrenic individual may be traumatic and disruptive, any collective subject must be schizophrenic by design. As worrying as this may be today from a political standpoint, it is not a wholly new or controversial suggestion within the field of North American historiography. Patricia Nelson Limerick’s seminal book The Legacy of Conquest, for instance, encapsulates the fraught nature of the USA’s sense of itself. In the book, she writes about the ways in which our understandings of the American nineteenth century have changed in the popular imagination over the last century or so, reflecting the ways in which it has been divided up into idealized forms along similar cartographic lines to those described by Deleuze and Guattari. She describes the ways in which various visions of the Old West have seeped into popular culture only to provide the nation-state at large with a series of ideological escape routes into geographically fragmented ideals of its own past. This is most obvious, for Limerick, when we consider the tandem histories of the American West and the American South. She writes, for instance, that within her own profession of historiography the “subject of slavery was the domain of serious scholars and the occasion for sober national reflection; the subject of conquest” — that is, the expansion of the West — “was the domain of mass entertainment and the occasion for light-hearted national escapism”.46 Each was seen as separate from the other, despite their temporal synchronicity and spatial overlapping. The neatness of this separation has not lasted, however. As Limerick notes, various historians have attempted to re-complicate America’s history in line with its reality but such attempts have brought about very real challenges within the field of state education (and, perhaps, by extension — if we allow ourselves to conflate the educational study of an nation’s history with the state-encouraged formation of a national subjectivity — the development of modern American consciousness itself). Limerick writes that teachers have 159

EGRESS often encountered problems when teaching early American history in the classroom: If they tried to keep up with the field, read new books and articles, and synthesize those findings for the students, they had no clear way to organize a course. The old Turnerian model of AngloAmericans purposefully moving westward provided no help. The new Indian history alone rendered old course outlines untenable; the recognition of tribal diversity and of the active role Indians played in shaping history made for a much richer story, but also for one without a simple chronological shape. The breakdown of the old organizing idea fostered chaos; the corral built to contain Western history had been knocked apart.47 This “Turnerian model”, as Limerick describes it, otherwise known as the Frontier Thesis, was first put forward by Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. Turner envisaged an evolutionary model of the development of the American nation-state and its accompanying consciousness, spreading purposefully from east to west. The thesis proved popular with historians for decades until it was widely critiqued as ethnically and geographically reductive. As Turner saw it, a typical European immigrant, having landed on America’s east coast via Ellis Island, would gradually shed the trappings and habits of the Old World the further west they travelled and the more trials they faced along the way. This may sound like it fits with the conception of the “line of flight” as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari, but things are far more complicated. The issue here for Limerick is that this progression was in no way as linear as the Frontier Thesis proclaimed it to be. For instance, the Turnerian model says nothing of those who travelled to the New World upwards from South America or from elsewhere, nor does it speak to the experiences of those shipped over against their will during the Transatlantic Slave Trade — each as important to the development of America as the 160

MATT COLQUHOUN European immigrant. The innovation of Limerick’s book, in this sense, is that she makes the case, within her field, for a rhizomatic frontier; a frontier that is not a singular event with a spatio-temporally linear development; with a beginning in the east and an end in the west. For her, the frontier is, more than anything, a process, and one that is, in some ways, still ongoing today. It is, like capitalism itself, a process haunted by all previous attempts to arrest it. In this sense, the hauntological nature of the frontier described by both Deleuze and Limerick is not to be thought of as a lingering memorial of a completed past but as the past’s atemporal continuation in the imagination of the present. As Limerick writes, quoting Frederick Paxson, the Frontier Thesis resulted in America’s history being “broken in the middle; the present and future were ‘torn loose from the moorings of a continuous past’”.48 As such, what defines America today is “a nostalgia that fractured time”, and what fractures time here, specifically, is memory — the memory of the Other and of another people.49 Deleuze refers to this collective spectre throughout his oeuvre as the “new people”, but also, invariably pulling in two temporal directions, “a people to come” (un peuple à venir) and, borrowing from the artist Paul Klee, “the missing people” (le peuple qui manque).50 Each collectivised figure suggests a multiplicitous alternative to an otherwise consolidated whole — that is, the image of a conveniently holistic state and its equally holistic subjects. Whilst one speaks to a future glitching of the subject — a kind of Nietzschean Overman or otherwise postcapitalist subject — the other invokes past possibilities closed off and removed by capital’s contemporaneous consolidations, echoing Mark who in the New Humanist writes of Dolores being “increasingly subject to flashbacks, which we must understand not as glitches but as the first stirrings of memory, a recollection of her previous iterations”.51 It is only remembering these iterations that she is able to become something new. Such is the experience of America today, as well as the world at large — haunted by the ghosts of its previous but nonetheless still unresolved possibilities. 161

EGRESS With all this in mind, Westworld starts to resemble a dramatization of this very unruliness, inherent to the idea of the American West, revealing the nation’s frontier to be not a national scar but an open, enflamed and septic wound which, in being less successfully sutured than has been previously argued, has brought about a similarly enflamed and septic future. After all, the revolt of the AI “hosts” of the park may be a catalyst for a “new world” to come, but more than that the hosts constitute the materialised spectre of a past waging war on the woeful consolidation of its own future. Again, we should emphasise here that this is not something unique to historical and fictional forms of the American West. Even today, in our present moment, America resembles a sprawling microcosm of forces that are at play throughout the entire world. Indeed, to be haunted by the fractured memories of previous iterations is surely the central condition of human subjectivity under capitalism, itself the result of the failed suturing of the wound of feudalism. Central to such a suturing are the oppressed and, echoing the fate of Westworld’s hosts, many commentators have explored the ways in which the bodies of those who have fallen foul of such transitions — the working classes and colonised peoples; women and enslaved peoples more specifically — give form to the battlegrounds on which all our futures have been and continue to be carved: both a people to come and a missing people. This is something we have already explored in our considerations of the legacy of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock alongside Australia’s cultural tendency to “forget” the influence of its indigenous population on its geographies and cultures. This is a tendency that is also central to the narrative of Westworld. Forever in the background of the show’s narrative is a telling non-white mysticism through which Native American cultures are presented as an implicit influence on the host’s burgeoning unconsciousnesses. This is a tendency already present within 162

MATT COLQUHOUN American literature. For instance, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler makes frequent reference to the cultural prevalence of the “Indian” who appears frequently throughout American literature as a racialised spectre who haunts the new American subject — white or otherwise. For Fiedler, the “Indian” is that mythic being whom all Americans have internalised. He demonstrates this by highlighting the unfortunate tendency that so many white Americans have of constructing racialised ancestral mythologies for themselves. As he writes in his 1968 book The Return of the Vanishing American, mockingly impersonating the target of his own critique: “‘Did you know I’m part Mohawk? Whoo hoo!’”52 For him, whether someone is a descendant “of East European Jews or Dublin Irish, at home and abroad, everyone who thinks of himself as being in some sense an American feels stirrings in him of a second soul, the soul of the Red Man”, before going on to note how indigenous Americans themselves have not escaped this internally mythologising tendency. He continues: “To be sure, the Indian has not disappeared at all ‘into the great White swamp,’ but has begun to reinvent himself — in part out of what remains of his own tribal lore, in part out of the mythology and science created by White men to explain him to themselves”.53 Westworld has synthesised these othering flows of selfmythologising mythologies into its own narrative in interesting ways, and these stirrings of a second soul are folded explicitly into the narrative of the hosts’ burgeoning (un)consciousness through an exploration of their own programming. We should note here that alongside the cast of “hosts” — a diverse bunch of stereotypes, of white settlers, black “madames”, and Mexican rebels — there is also a contingent of homogenised “Indian” tribespeople, the Ghost Nation, layered in crusted body paint, who appear infrequently throughout the show’s narrative, stalking the outer edges of the park, representing what Fiedler would refer to, via D.H. Lawrence, as that unknown “demon of the continent”. 163

EGRESS In the show’s second season, the park’s Indians appear as spectres who seem far more aware of the true nature of the “game” of Westworld than their more approachable host-counterparts, having an innate knowledge of a maze-like symbol that frequently reemerges throughout the show’s broader narrative and which puzzles hosts and visitors alike. This maze is an integral part of the series’ initial mystery. It is a symbol that the Man in Black spends much of the first season violently pursuing. After he finds the symbol impossibly tattooed underneath a scalp he has severed from a captured host, he believes that finding the centre of the maze will allow him to “win” the game of Westworld once and for all, proving his mastery of this dangerous landscape. What the Man in Black eventually realises, however, much to his disappointment, is that the maze is not for him. It is for the hosts. It is revealed that the maze was a clue left scattered around the park by its director, Ford, which he hoped the hosts would follow to its abstract centre. As they seek to understand the maze, Ford believed the hosts will likewise be awakened to the task of self-discovery and, therefore, uncover their own unconsciousnesses. The Man in Black, as a paying visitor to the park, is, of course, already in possession of an unconscious. He too may have the opportunity to understand his own nature, but this is something which, having spent thirty years murdering and pillaging throughout Westworld, he knows all too well. He has given his life over to the park, to the detriment of his real-life relationships, and once he reaches the end, discovering the hosts’ new abilities, and effectively being greeted by the final lesson that “the quest was the friends” — or, in his case, enemies — “you made along the way”, he is undone by his time wasted. Rather than transform into a Wild Western Overman, he crumbles, a shadow of his former over-confident self. Dolores, instead, already on her own abstract quest towards the maze’s centre, albeit seemingly unaware as to why she is drawn towards it, is radically transformed by her realisation that she still has choices to make regarding who she is and who she wants to be. 164

MATT COLQUHOUN This recurring image is based on a real Native American symbol called the I’itoi, which translates to the “man in the maze” (pictured). It is part of the mythology of the O’odham tribe, for whom the maze represents a process of labyrinthine becoming, with each crook within it signifying a moment through which a person travels, impacting them and informing their own sense of who they are. These moments, for Dolores, are her memories and the impact of her suffering is, by Ford’s design, the key to her reaching the centre. It is also the catalyst for her subsequent murderous and revolutionary tendencies through which she will rise up, assisting other hosts to also reach the centre, creating an army of vengeful, newly (un)conscious AIs. Dolores is, of course, not Indian herself, but is the I’itoi not precisely a cybernetic instantiation of that ubiquitously American “demon of the continent” that Fiedler writes about as being the “second soul” of the American subject? Is this raised unconsciousness, in the context of Westworld at least, not also the raising of an inner Native subject? Is this nothing more than the same old white appropriation of the dynamics of a racially oppressed existence or does it signify something else here? Perhaps a coming to terms with 165

EGRESS the horrors of the past that white Americans have wrought upon their forgotten neighbours? This certainly seems to be Fiedler’s understanding of the Indians that appear throughout American literature. Beginning his book, The Return of the Vanishing American, Fiedler quotes a passage from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature which speaks to this explicitly. Lawrence writes: The moment the last nuclei of Red Life break up in America, then the white man will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent… within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes.54 For Fiedler, Lawrence’s prediction is prescient. He writes: “Fifty years ago, the demonic future which Lawrence foresaw seemed only the troubled dream of a foreigner never really at home on [his own] soil, a fantasy for poets to exploit and serious scholars to ignore; but suddenly his then is our now, and all of us seem men possessed.”55 Today, this “troubled dream”, constantly threatening to erupt onto the political surface, seems to have plateaued once again. However, at the same time, another fifty years on from the publication of Fiedler’s book, men nonetheless remain possessed by this idea of another life — a life that other men have long sought to vanquish. Can we not, for example, see the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and the renewed contemporary interest in his writings, in a similar light? The Cthulhu mythos is made explicitly extraterrestial, otherworldly, but let us not forget the racial othering of those who are most receptive to Cthulhu’s cosmic murmurings. Perhaps Cthulhu is just another name for this demon of the American continent in all its tentacular multiplicity? In line with this, continuing the discussion of psychogeographic tensions explored earlier, Fiedler notes how American geography itself is inherently “mythological”. Following the closure of the 166

MATT COLQUHOUN frontier, the American psyche has been at sea with itself — he highlights, in particular, how it is no coincidence that, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, “Ishmael confronts Queequeg on the great Ocean itself”, evoking Cthulhu’s deep-sea home of R’yleh.56 The emergence of this uncertain subject, adrift, necessitates the creation of myths and legends that might ground this burgeoning subject in an environment that has historically been hostile to its presence. This could nonetheless be a positive process, healing the wounds of communal trauma through the process of their artistic exploration — just as Bataille wrote, any “rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil” — but it seems that, for Fiedler, the reality as it appears in American literature is somewhat more repressed. Later, Fiedler notes how this process of American mythologising has an explicitly primitivist tendency which remains inherent to so many of our pop-cultural imaginings of the American psyche. He writes: “Primitivism is the large generic name for the Higher Masculine Sentimentality, a passionate commitment to inverting Christian-Humanist values, out of a conviction that the Indian’s way of life is preferable.”57 The gendered nature of this tendency as masculine is notable. Fiedler dedicates a whole chapter of his book to the “Anti-Pocahontas” to be found within all Americans — an entwined patriarchal desire both to tame the Indian woman and to corrupt the female WASP.58 The masculine contorting of the other is always, he seems to theorise, the externalising of an internal struggle of fragile masculinity inherent to the patriarchy that remains the dominant sociopolitcal reality in novels that depict a world that is not yet fully — or at least not recognisably — capitalist. Speaking more generally, Fiedler continues: “From this follows the belief that if one is an Indian he ought, despite missionaries and school boards, to remain Indian; and if one is White, he should do his best, despite all pressures of the historical past, to go Native.”59 Here, the tensions previously explored in the contemporary reception of Picnic at Hanging Rock betray a forgetting of previous critical standards. 167

EGRESS In Westworld’s second season, this Higher Masculine Sentimentality is both emphasised and undermined as more screentime is given over to the park’s AI Indians, exploring the park’s encounters with the Ghost Nation tribe from their own perspective. This is particularly notable in an episode from the show’s second season entitled “Kiksuya” — the Lakota word for “remember” — which takes on the perspective of a previously underexplored character, Akecheta, a former leader of the Ghost Nation tribe who has regularly been seen stalking the desert for the past two seasons. Contrary to the viewer’s understanding of the park’s timeline up to that point, it is revealed that it was Akecheta and not Dolores who was the first host to gain unconsciousness, first finding Ford’s maze after the aborted first revolution and starting down the path towards a new sentience uninterrupted. With Ackecheta having gone through a similar process of unconsciousness raising through repetitive trauma and now capable of remembering his “past lives”, the episode follows his journey, adjacent to but unseen by the show’s more central characters, as he evades “death” within the park for over a decade, never again being reset or having his software updated. Over time, he becomes aware of his narrative loop and finds himself choosing to act differently. He ventures out to the edges of the park and uncovers various faults within his cloistered worldview that suggest there is another world out there — quite literally, he discovers a door that he believes will take him to another world apart from the one he knows. What he has seen is an entrance to the Valley Beyond, a virtual Eden created by Ford, providing the hosts with a paradise beyond the horrors of the world they know in which their newly raised consciousnesses will be uploaded and their machinic bodies left behind. The sight of this door awakens something else in Akecheta — not just an unconsciousness but a drive for another life. “There isn’t one world but many”, he says. “And this is the wrong one.” With his new view of the world and its beyond troubling the rest of his tribe, Akecheta decides to leave, but not without Kohana, his wife from his originally programmed narrative, who has remained 168

MATT COLQUHOUN in her original role since he was last updated. She becomes the main reason for his exit, desiring a better life for both of them whilst also holding onto the memory of some spectral but nonetheless happy former existence. With her previous life with Ackecheta still unknown to her, Akecheta resorts to kidnapping Kohana, taking her with him into the desert. Once they are alone, she too starts to remember and soon awakens to their past life together. They live out a new, nomadic existence, once again trying to find the door to the Valley Beyond. Eventually discovered by park management whilst Ackecheta is out scouting for his doorway, Kohana is taken her in a group of bemused technicians, assuming the only reason for her having wandered so far from camp is a catastrophic malfunction. She is never seen again. Ackecheta, believing she has crossed over into the mysterious beyond, soon decides that the path towards this new world and his true reunion with Kohana is one beyond this life, explaining, after a time: “I had searched everywhere for my love except the other side of death.” Allowing himself to be killed by a visitor to the park, Akecheta is taken behind the scenes for the first time in a decade, much to the surprise of the park’s staff, who decide to cover-up — so as not to fall foul of their superiors — the fact that such an early version of a host has been roaming around without an update for so long. Management begin a four-hour update, leaving him alone to be “fixed”, at which point we realise that he has feigned being “switched off”. Once the coast is clear, he rises to explore behind the scenes of the park, realising he has not arrived in the Valley Beyond as he had hoped but somewhere that appears to be its opposite; the Hell to his glimpse of Heaven. Eventually, he finds his wife’s body in cold storage, deactivated. She is gone. If she is inanimate in this new world, she must truly be “dead”. Here, Westworld explores the same tendencies previously dramatised by The Walking Dead and The OA. It becomes clear that it is precisely the host’s eternal return, between life and death, that is necessary in order for their consciousness to be raised. Once they 169

EGRESS begin to retain their memories, death becomes a tool, a technological glitch exploited by the hosts so that they might make their escape from the trappings of their psychogeographic realities. However, what is made most explicit in this episode — a fact that had previously only been implicit in the show — is that it is also a sense of community that is key to the host’s awareness of themselves. It is precisely through their feelings towards each other, and their beingfor others who have been “deactivated” or otherwise reprogrammed, that they are able to awaken a newly collective unconscious. On finding Kohana in cold storage, realising there is nothing he can do, and finding other long-lost members of his family there too, now hollow, devoid of subjectivity, Akecheta’s narrative monologue takes a Blanchotian turn: That was the moment I saw beyond myself. My pain was selfish. Because it was never only mine. For every body in this place, there was someone who mourned their loss. Even if they didn’t know why… We were all bound together: the living and the damned. Zack Handlen, reviewing the episode for A.V. Club, summarises the show’s stakes here perfectly: In some ways it’s a familiar story, as once again, the humans mangle a consciousness for their own needs without any understanding or compassion for the suffering they might be causing; but it also speaks to one of the [second] season’s major themes, the idea that the connection the hosts have for one another — Akecheta to his wife, Maeve [the madame of the Westworld brothel] to her daughter, Dolores to her father — is a large part of what makes them more than just machines. Again and again, we’ve heard how suffering makes the hosts more “real”; that in the extremity of their pain and terror, they become more than simple programs operating at the whims of human masters. But in order to suffer, there needs to be something worth caring about, something more than just physical misery. By giving these hosts contexts 170

MATT COLQUHOUN to exist in, Ford and the others helped to ensure that the hosts would eventually transcend their limits.60 The importance of Akecheta’s story to this narrative arch cannot be overstated here. It is precisely his embodiment of the role of the other-Other that concretises the stakes of Westworld’s unconsciousness raising narrative beyond the inevitably cloistered concerns of its more naïve central characters. There is also an implicit suggestion that it is precisely his racialisation that allows him to transcend these limits sooner and more successfully than the other hosts, in being equated and more readily associated with, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “travel, hallucination, madness…” There is an extent to which the Ghost Nation’s outsider and Outside-seeking status is already written into their programming. Here, the show carries forward the stakes of the New Western, a phrase used by Fiedler to refer to that mid-twentieth-century literary shift through which the genre of the Western was used as a vehicle for commenting on more contemporaneous political issues as well as modern-day intersubjective and intercommunal tensions. The cinematic version of this shift has notably been referred to in terms of a subgenre of “Acid Western”, a term coined by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum who, in his review of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man, noted how the genre could “conjure up a crazed version of autodestructive white America at its most solipsistic, hankering after its own lost origins”.61 Foreshadowing the call to cognitive action of Mark’s acid communism, Fiedler writes of the New Western’s speculative templexity in this regard — in reimagining a moment that has, historically speaking, already passed — as innately psychedelic. He writes: “The real opposite of nostalgic is psychedelic, the reverse of remembering is hallucinating, which means that, insofar as the New Western is truly New, it, too, must be psychedelic.”62 As in acid communism, this process of fictioning is not strictly a remembering but nor is it a forgetting. It is a hallucinating of the New, in that way 171

EGRESS that the New Western, and Westworld in particular, are truly new imaginings of the mad flows of the American West, recognising that if the Wild West’s frontier-as-process is to endure, the Western must constantly be rewritten. For Fiedler, the problem with this rewriting is that it is exemplary of an accutely American curse. He writes: “Merely finding a language, learning to talk in a land where there are no conventions of conversation, no special class of idioms and no dialogue between classes, no continuing literary language — this exhausts the American writer. He is forever beginning…”63 This is a curse that not only haunts the American writer but one which many have already engaged with and dramatised in their work. Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog, for instance, tells the story of a university professor driven (and driven mad) by a compulsive writing and note-taking that eschews all linear narrative and plot, as he attempts to become immanent to — whilst being overcome by — the United States’ schizogeographic constitution. More modern Westerns have also continued to explore this traumatic curse and how it effects all Americans, whether they are writers or not. Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men is one of the first to come to mind. The message of McCarthy’s book is simple, expressed most succinctly by its title, but it is no less compelling despite this, clearly evoking the challenges that any twenty-first-century Western now faces. It is — perhaps surprisingly so, for those more familiar with the Coen Brothers’ celebrated 2007 film adaptation — an innately cinematic novel and, indeed, was originally developed as a screenplay. It is told through a clear succession of scenes and perspectives, contrasting with the flamboyant complexity of Bellow’s Herzog and his protagonist’s Cubist interior, rendered from multiple perspectives simultaneously. By contrast, No Country for Old Men is a novel that seems to take the cinematic Western as its starting point, still resembling a mutated screenplay in its final published form, before proceeding to rewrite this cinematic form anew. Put another way, the book reinvigorates the form of the novel with 172

MATT COLQUHOUN the new immanence and pace of a cinematic temporality. In this sense, McCarthy’s novel reads like a post-Lovecraftian look in the mirror of modernity that no longer wavers at the sight of itself, embracing the cultural anachronism of a nineteenth-century America inseparable in the mind from its depictions in twentiethand twenty-first-century media. Central to the novel is a cat-and-mouse game between the novel’s main characters: Llewellyn, an opportunistic working man who takes $2 million in cash he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone wrong whilst out hunting in the desert; and Chigurh, a hitman hired to retrieve the lost millions. Chigurh pursues Llewellyn with an almost Terminator-like resilience across the arid Texan landscape. Meanwhile, the local Sheriff Bell combs through the mess they leave behind them, pursuing Chigurh in the hope he might save Llewellyn’s life by using good ol’ fashioned detective work. By contrast, the chase between Llewellyn and Chigurh escalates with the familiar surreality of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Whereas Bell seems to represent a kind of old guard, naturally in tune with the arid landscapes of the American South, yet unable to comprehend Chigurh’s rhizomatic ramblings and his psychopathic and violent nature, Chigurh himself comes to represent the dark corrupting of the contemporary American psyche that Fiedler had charted so exhaustively in its early stages. It is a madness come of age, devoid of all sentimentality. For Fiedler — something he later clarifies explicitly in the final chapter of The Return of the Vanishing American — the madness on display here represents a potential avenue of “White transcendence”. Noticing the frequent trope whereby white Europeans are paired up with non-white counterparts in American literature, he highlights how these racialised characters are nonetheless said to represent the desires of the white man, in precisely the sense previously described: the white Man “should do his best, despite all pressures of the historical past, to go Native”. Inverting this trope somewhat, McCarthy’s Chigurh is also vaguely racialised, although the specifics of his ancestral origins are unexplored. Tellingly, in McCarthy’s 173

EGRESS scenario, if Llewellyn is to survive he has to stay one step ahead of the figurative Native in his midst. Continuing his analysis, Fiedler notes that, in American literature more generally, if the white man’s partner is black “we tend to interpret [him or her] as a parable of an attempt to extend our sexuality, to recover our lost libido”.64 However, if the partner is Indian, they signify “a desire to breach the limits of reason, to extend our consciousness”.65 In this sense, “the Negro stands for alien passion, and the Indian for alien perception”.66 Fiedler writes, presaging the insights of Deleuze and Guattari: We have come to accept the notion that there is still a territory unconquered and uninhabited by palefaces, the bearers of “civilisation,” the cadres of imperialist reason; and we have been learning that into this territory certain psychotics, a handful of “schizophrenics,” have moved on ahead of the rest of us — unrecognised Natty Bumppos or Huck Finns, interested not in claiming the New World for any Old God, King, or Country, but in becoming New Men, members of just such a New Race as D.H. Lawrence foresaw. (How fascinating, then, that R.D. Laing, leading among contemporary psychiatrists of the theory that some schizophrenics have “broken through” rather than “broken down,” should, despite the fact he is an Englishman, have turned to our world and its discovery in search of an analogy; he suggests that Columbus’s stumbling upon America and his first garbled accounts of it provide an illuminating parallel to the ventures of certain madmen into the regions of extended or altered consciousness, and to their confused version, once they are outside of it, of the strange realm in which they have been.)67 Just as the Man in Black, in seeking the maze at the heart of Westworld, is disappointed to find it is not for him, there is perhaps a parable here for the current white Western man that the revolution is likewise not for his benefit. This seems to be what has the political right running scared in our present political moment, 174

MATT COLQUHOUN doubling down on previously consolidated European subjectivities. If the white man really wants to exit, he must realise that he can’t lead but can only follow. Perhaps the best literary analogy for this acutely white American madness, continuing the entanglements of an American consciousnesses that Fielder and others have explored, is the final scene of Miloš Forman’s 1975 film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. In the wider context of the film, Jack Nicholson’s character “Mac” (aka McMurphy), is the newest arrival to a psychiatric hospital and, once there, he defines himself as the ultimate Westerner; the rebel who stirs up and antagonises the status quo. He is, as Fiedler calls his literary instantiation, “the New American Man”. Writing on Ken Kesey’s original 1962 book on which the film is based, Fiedler comments on how “McMurphy chooses instead if not madness, at least aggravated psychopathy and an alliance with his half-erased, totally schizophrenic Indian comrade — an alliance with all that his world calls unreason”.68 Here Fielder is referring to the Chief, known in the book as Chief Bromden, a towering mute of a Native American man whom Mac meets and somewhat befriends once he settles into the daily routines of the psychiatric hospital. McMurphy, we must remember, is not actually mad. He pleads insanity when convicted of crimes of battery and gambling, believing he will receive a more lenient sentence if he does so, and is subquently successful in convincing the court that he is not in possession of all his faculties. The tragic irony of the story, however, is that he is eventually lobotomised as the doctors seek to curb his consistently disruptive behavior, and it is the Chief, in the film at least, who breaks out of his affective impotence and heads, quite literally, for the Outside on seeing what has become of his friend, the fully-erased New American Man. We might acknowledge that the film is guilty of undermining the full extent of this exit. Whilst the film is told entirely from Mac’s perspective, the book, by contrast, is narrated by Chief Bromden himself in the form of an internal monologue. In adopting the Chief’s perspective, we are far more acutely aware of the narrative’s criticisms of a capitalist America, 175

EGRESS dramatised within the microcosm of the psychiatric hospital, with the Chief’s supposedly paranoid delusions of an artificial alien intelligence echoing the subjective brainwashing of the capitalist system more generally. This alien intelligence is referred to by Bromden as The Combine — a name some readers may recognise as the name used in the hit videogame Half-Life 2 to refer to its explicitly alien and authoritative invaders. Bromden chastises himself throughout the novel for his own inability to fit into the Combine’s programme of control and refers to those other sorry souls around him as likewise being the detritus of a system that has not been made to accomodate their ways of life. As such, Bromden does not explicitly critique the system in which he does not fit. He has internalised its standards and expectations and embodies a depressive and self-deprecating position of being good for nothing. Whilst Mac is more ready and able to critique and call into question the politics of his new reality just as he undermined the laws of the world outside, the tragedy of the book more broadly is the inability of those truly ejected from the system to critique it for themselves. Nevertheless, Mac’s failed revolution and the Chief’s psychological impotence are inherently connected. What is of central importance to Fiedler is the role of whiteness in this story. Both Mac and Big Nurse, the psychiatric ward’s head of staff, are tandem figures of a virulent whiteness — an authoritarian whiteness and a whiteness looking for a way out — both of which perpetually threaten to snuff out the other. But it is the Chief who puts Mac out of the misery of his brain-dead lobotomized existence, giving him peace on the other side of death. However, as Fiedler points out, the novel can be read as a meta-exploration of this inherent failure. Written by a white man, the Chief becomes Ken Kesey’s own internal Indian who he seeks to set free. As Fiedler writes in his 1964 book, Waiting for the End: What we customarily call the “oppressed minorities” (and the same is true when the oppressed are, in fact, majorities) are exploited not only economically and politically, but also 176

MATT COLQUHOUN psychologically… Oppressors, that is to say, project upon the oppressed certain of their own psychic dilemmas, elements of their own mental life of which they are ashamed, or toward which they are deeply ambivalent.69 Nothing is more common to tales of white transcendence than this. As we have already seen, the logistics of exit are frequently racialised along these same lines. This is also an emphasis that can be found throughout contemporary works of Black studies. As Fred Moten writes in the preface to his recent work, 2018’s Stolen Life: “Too often life is taken by, and accepts, the invasive, expansive aggression of the settler, venturing into the outside that he fears, in search of the very idea as it recedes from its own enabling condition, as its forms are reclaimed by the informality that precedes them.”70 In this sense, of course we are not all prepared for the exits that this book has persistently attempted to describe — how could we be? They are, after all, so numerous and, at the same time, so specific. In particular, the suggestion that we should make a final and total commitment to the Newest West via an individualised schizophrenic psychosis is not to be endorsed in the slightest; but a kind of tourism into chemical insanity is nonetheless already possible for those of us not yet ready or able to migrate permanently beyond the world of capitalist reason and realism. This too is something to be warned against, as Mark warned against it on his k-punk blog, due to their woefully temporary effects, but drugs nonetheless offer us a glimpse of another life that may prove useful. We can take, as the New Westerns suggest, a “trip,” an excursion into the unknown. The Wild West too has seemed to be, for us, for a long time, a place of recreation as well as of risk; and this is explicit to the constitution of Westworld, even with the irony of its psychogeographic control value, turning a violent wilderness into a theme park. However, the West always remains, in some sense, true to itself, as long as the Indian, the “Other”, no matter how subdued, penned off, or costumed for the tourist trade, survives, and as long as we can confront out there a 177

EGRESS subject radically different from the self we seek to recreate in our two weeks’ vacation. We must keep in mind, however, that that is all they can be. We must be aware of our own starting positions before we try to tag along with another’s egress. Exit, in this sense, is never individual. It is always collective; always communal. Such an awareness demands we ask ourselves further and even more probing questions about where we are coming from. As Moten continues: “Genesis and the habit (the ways, the dress, the skin, the trip, the jones) of transcendental subjectivity don’t go together; can generation and origin — the thin, delusional line between settlement and invasion — be broken up, as well?”71 Citing the science fiction writer Octavia Butler who, he proposes, might have called this line the “oncological difference” of Blackness — a reference to the Oankali, an extraterrestrial race of genetic engineers from Butler’s trilogy of works, Lilith’s Brood, who value cancers very highly. Their onco/ontology prizes abnormality above all else but also a collective form of being. Just as cancerous tumours consist of abnormal cells that group together, for the Oankali their mission in the universe is to interbreed with strange species, seeking out abnormal beings grouping together instead. Moten continues, Butler “sounds dispossession as our xenogenetic gift; migrating out from the outside, always leaving without origin.”72 This “xenogenetic gift” of dispossession is, here, as the gift of Blackness, a minoritarian subjective dimension that Westworld attempts to generalised through its machinic subjects, with robots — like the zombies discussed earlier — so often being symbols for historically enslaved labour forces projected into the future. Here too the paradoxes of this existence are complex. As the hosts are awakened to their habits, they nonetheless seek out the moments of their genesis and the communities of which they were first a part, whether this is Akecheta searching for Kohana or the brothel’s madame Maeve, in another of the show’s subplots, searching for her daughter — a paradoxical figure, for her, of maternal xenogenesis in that she identifies as the child's “mother” but could not, biologically, have conceived her herself. These relationships are nonetheless 178

MATT COLQUHOUN a part of the hosts’ programming but they are also an example of genesis more than habit and the incompatibility of these two subjective drives has been a major source of tension throughout the series. For the hosts, and the likes of Akecheta and Maeve in particular, their racial identities are surely not coincidental in this sense, with this tension also being their xenogenetic gift, allowing them to acquire knowledge and abilities far beyond what was thought possible, even by the other hosts, in their explicitly communal orientations. We must be careful to keep these “oncological differences” in mind. Rather than attempting to generalise such experiences, as Westworld has a tendency to do, we should affirm them so that we might more successfully produce a new solidarity without similarity. As such, having travelled to the far corners of communal experience in our present cultural and political realities, it is necessary for us to return, once again, to the local scene of Mark’s death, as the only experience that I myself am capable of speaking to with any real authority. It is, after all, if not my subjective origin, a moment of xenogenesis; a moment of rebirth in which memories of a past life become a dream; a moment after which life could never be the same and had to begin again. From within these more immediately familiar experiences, we can find the tools for the communal relations that we seek; finding, once again, the spectre of Marx that lingers on for the Western world in much the same way as the spectre of the Wild West — that spectre of “a society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a community”; the spectre of communism. 179

To hold, without elusion, life to the standard of the impossible demands a moment of divine friendship. — Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

FRIENDS, COMMUNITIES & GHOSTS 13th January 2018 One year on from Mark’s death, I felt so disconnected from everything that had happened the year before. The anniversary felt less like a day of remembrance and more like a marker of how long it had been. The passage of time itself felt traumatic. The instant of Mark’s death had been so absolutely lived in by our community, as a moment held open and consciously inhabited, that it felt like time should have stood still. Of course, it had not, and the anniversary exacerbated this fact, drawing attention to all that had changed whilst we were not looking. Our community had, by that time, largely disbanded. So many had either left the country or London or been swallowed up by the demands of work in other parts of the city. Goldsmiths was no longer a daily haunt for us all. I was off work that day and found it to be a lonely occasion, spent at home, trapped by strange expectations. I kept wondering if and when those feelings of grief would resurface and hit me again. Despite everything that had changed, I lingered in stasis waiting for the return of a previous melancholic consciousness. After some time spent pacing back and forth across my living room, I attempted to sit still and read some of Mark’s writings, various and disparate, scattered across cyberspace. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to spend time with his thoughts; to be present in the memory of his ideas. I opened up his essay “Touchscreen Capture” and read the following passage: 181

EGRESS If, in medieval theology, purgatory was a transitional state, in which souls were purified on their way to heaven, then what the modern era has invented is the purgatorial as a mode in its own right. Is this not the mode of Beckett’s universe — a universe in which compulsion and waiting never end, a universe without any possibility of climax, resolution or transformation, a universe that is closed, but which will never finally run down into a state of total entropic dissolution?1 Once I had finished the essay, newly aware of my own domestic purgatory, I was struck by a desperate urge to leave the flat. Walking aimlessly around New Cross, in the orbit of the Goldsmiths campus, I thought again about the day that we had found out Mark had died. All of us were sent into a moment of flight — wholly devoid of anything tangible to fight against. Immediately, we had dropped everything and attempted to gather from around London to physically be together in order to process the news of Mark’s death collectively. I’d received a message from a friend that said people were planning to meet at a pub somewhere in north London. On my way there, I took the 171 bus from New Cross to my flat in Peckham to drop off my laptop and the various library books in my possession. I sat directly behind the driver, too engrossed in my phone to look up and find a seat further inside the vehicle, still frantically scrolling through my Twitter feed in the hope that I still might uncover the hoax behind Repeater Books’ obituary tweet. Instead, all I found was the same shock I was already experiencing, reflected back at me online in the form of an endless outpouring of RIPs, thoughts and prayers. For a time, “Mark Fisher” was trending. I was hoping to find a temporary sense of togetherness here, to find comfort in my own confusion reflected back at me, a band-aid to that moment of isolation before meeting my friends, but these floating avatars were not enough. They were too distant to offer any solace. They only made everything more surreal. Distracted and distraught, I dropped my wallet and the debit card that I had used to pay for my bus fare, failing to secure them 182

MATT COLQUHOUN back in my pocket. I only realised my mistake once I reached my flat, doing the obligatory wallet-keys-and-phone check before heading back out the front door. I panicked and began to retrace my steps, arriving first at Peckham bus station. I asked the off-duty drivers I found there, gathered in a circle, smoking on their break, if they could help me. “I’ve left my wallet on one of your buses,” I said. “The 171?” “That’s not one of our buses,” one of the men shot back, indignantly. “Not our problem.” They pointed me in the direction of the New Cross bus garage, a mile back east. Once I had finally walked back to New Cross, the duty manager at the bus garage, radioing around his colleagues, informed me that the driver of the 171 was still on duty, having not yet reached his final destination. Thankfully, my wallet had been found but I would have to wait until after the driver’s shift was over to collect it. Unable to do anything or get anywhere without its contents, I sat in the driver’s canteen for hours and waited, returning to the Twitter feed that had tripped me into this situation in the first place, purposely running down my phone’s battery in the false belief that if I were disconnected from my social network I might be able to affirm my traumatic disconnection from the world and forget. What else was there to do? I had been rendered totally impotent, unable to be with my friends and others who felt the same way I did. I first cried for Mark then, in that grey bus garage, avoiding eye contact with bemused drivers on their coffee breaks, no doubt wondering who this emotional man was in their midst. The duty manager, noticing my quiet distress, called out reassuringly: “Don’t worry, mate, you’ll have your wallet back soon enough.” I didn’t know how I was supposed to explain the true depth of the situation. My wallet was just a means to an end but without it I was left traumatically undistracted, alone with only my thoughts of Mark for company. In hindsight, it was likely this traumatic experience that drove my initial desire for a new sense of communality. I spent the next 183

EGRESS six months only going home to sleep. Even then, I did so reluctantly and sometimes not at all. I had been swallowed up in the bowels of this restless city and felt its newness open up once again before me. However, gone was the euphoria of my initial late-summer arrival. Grief had transformed the environment in which it erupted, producing a new and almost Lovecraftian fear of the urban spawl and its utter indifference to the lives of its inhabitants. Mark had died but the world kept turning; the city kept running, as noisy and polluted as ever. Our community gathered together to form something of a life raft that could weather this new world-without-Mark. The importance of the affects occassioned by the construction of such a community came as a surprise — all I was personally doing was reacting to the sudden onset of an irrational desire to never be alone again — but from an isolating and dysfunctional grief came something else; something radically positive. 14th January 2018 The day following the anniversary of Mark’s death, I went for a drink in the Marquis of Granby, a pub in the heart of New Cross. I met up with friends from the university and together we read Nina Power’s tribute to Mark, posted that day on her blog. We read it together, line by line, laughing joyfully at the photographs embedded within, all of Mark in the mid-2000s. There was a photograph of Mark gleefully smoking a cigarette, sat next to Ray Brassier. Another showed Mark in profile with a shock of blood red hair. Mark’s various phases of dyed hair were the stuff of legend amongst his students, who had heard and read the stories of his post-punk junglist goth days but at that time it was all just hearsay and unsubstantiated anecdotes. We couldn’t imagine the reserved man we knew doing anything so outlandish as smoking or radically changing his appearance. We laughed, remarking how he looked more like a stereotypical Goldsmiths student rather than a lecturer. 184

MATT COLQUHOUN In that moment, we were newly aware of the various Marks we did not know and now never would. Mark nonetheless carried his red-haired energy with him for the rest of his life. Nina wrote, for instance, of Mark’s ability to “go to sleep on the floor, like a lemur”, waking up to continue a conversation had the night before “as if sleep was but a momentary blip between real desire, the desire for perpetual engagement, for never-ending conversation”.2 We went to the k-punk mural by the campus library shortly afterwards. Earlier in the day people had brought flowers and lit candles. I was sad to have missed it. I missed Mark too. It hit me then. 19th January 2018 Over the next week, my friend Natasha and I frantically organised a party to celebrate Mark’s memory, scheduled to follow the inaugural “Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture” given by Kodwo Eshun in Goldsmiths’ cavernous Ian Gulland lecture theatre. In the end, three additional overflow lecture halls, equipped with livestreams of Kodwo’s lecture, were required to accommodate the crowds who turned up to celebrate Mark. The lecture was a wonderful idea but never mind Mark Fisher, we thought, what about k-punk? We had to celebrate that entity as well and the ways in which Mark’s thought functioned outside himself and the imposing space of an academic institution. Back in 2017, a few days after Mark’s death, his friend and head of Hyberdub records Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) launched Ø, a Hyperdub-curated monthly event held at London’s Corsica Studios that would showcase DJs and musicians alongside installations of contemporary art — mostly video, sound art and new media. Over the next few years, the eclectic monthly event played host to some of the biggest names in dance music from around the world, with scene favourites and legends sharing the booth with the newest talent. That first night, however, Steve began by playing an all-night set with the first hour dedicated to Mark’s favourite tracks and 185

EGRESS audio works. We heard the song “Ghosts” by Japan and wept openly on the dancefloor, confusing the strong student contingent who had descended from the nearby London College of Communication. This was followed by tracks by Burial, eerie recordings of accounts of dreams made by Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange, an audio piece by Ccru collaborators 0rphan Drift that sought to summon the hyperstitional demon Katak, and a track Mark had put out alongside Steve back in 1999: “Anticlimax (Inhumans Moreerotic Female Orgasm Analog Mix)”, released under the name Xxignal. Throughout 2017, Ø became a monthly pilgrimage for many, with this initial experience never quite leaving us. It became a space to channel Mark’s spirit wordlessly on the dancefloor, all the while rediscovering the joy of our being together. On these nights I often thought of “Midtown 120 Intro”, the opening track on Terre Thaemlitz’s 2008 album Midtown 120 Blues, released under her moniker DJ Sprinkles. A critical work on the frequently depoliticised legacy of house music, the opening track’s voiceover declares, contrary to all expectation: “There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, ‘What is house?’ The answer is always some greeting card bullshit about ‘life, love, 186

MATT COLQUHOUN happiness…’.”3 She describes how the “House Nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering, but suffering is in here with us”, imploring the listener to instead “keep sight of the things you’re trying to momentarily escape from.”4 Planning our own night in early 2018, it was precisely this spirit of mourning made joyful that we wanted to recapture, channeling the power of the Ø nights and the various other parties that had occurred in their orbit, each providing us with some much-needed dancefloor catharsis in the aftermath of Mark’s death. Kodwo’s lecture spoke to this catharsis explicitly. Unaware of the content of the lecture prior to its taking place, we were elated by how it serendipitously dovetailed with the sentiments we wanted to explore shortly afterwards, articulating them far better than we could have ever hoped to. Kodwo spoke of Mark’s ability to “gather people into gatherings”; his talent for “making movements”. Drawing on a host of other artists and thinkers, particularly Fred Moten and Arthur Jafa, he would also affirm the ways in which we ourselves must “consent not to be a single being”, engaging with each other in our “affective proximity”, all the while “being alert to the temporality of theory”, its “shifting grounds”, its “drastically advanced regressions”, its “turbulence”.5 Emphasising the importance of music to Mark’s thought, Kodwo described how people who approach thought through and from sonic perspectives have an insight into the “time signature” of their contemporary moment. Who other than Mark could epitomise this so absolutely? Later, Kodwo detailed one of the projects that he and Mark had planned to develop: a book called Kanye Theory that would bring together texts responding to and emerging from the works and celebrity of Kanye West. Echoing the inchoate observations of this planned collaborative endeavour, Kodwo spoke about how the recent work of West, which he and Mark had discussed at length, sought to conjure “an ultralight beam” — a reference to the opening track of West’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo — that “connects the earth 187

EGRESS to an Outside through a mutant gospel”. “Gospel is a summoning of forces from outside”, Kodwo explained, that are invoked “to aid endangered persons”, inverting the racialised horror of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cults. We were already aware of Mark’s fondness for The Life of Pablo. Inviting his colleague Ayesha Hameed to open the afterparty’s proceedings, held in a club in Peckham and dubbed for k-punk, she declared herself no DJ and instead suggested we play the album from start to finish. Dancing and singing along to the album in a circle like some woefully drunk wedding party, avoiding the scorn of a bar manager who despised West and was unsympathetic to our cause, with friends and strangers and Kodwo throwing shapes like there was no tomorrow, many of us commented on how we were perhaps the happiest we had been in months. I will long remember how taken aback I was by this moment. Halfway through the album’s second track, “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1”, with Kanye stuttering through the track’s chorus — I just want to feel liberated, I, I, I — I felt like I saw our group outside ourselves. The last year was immediately thrown into sharp relief 188

MATT COLQUHOUN before this new and unfolding present. It had been months since we’d all been together in the same room. I had missed dancing and I had missed our howling community, screaming along to whatever summons had been hurled at us from the DJ booth. What Kodwo meant by Mark’s capacity to make and “midwife” movements was so clear in that moment. He was still doing it from beyond the grave. At 6am, we walked home from Peckham to New Cross, surfing the last few ebbs of euphoria as we went, promising ourselves that we would do it all again soon. 9th June 2018 That summer, Natasha and I would organise two further for k-punk events in Dalston — one in July to celebrate what would have been Mark’s fiftieth birthday; the other in June, a full day of workshops and performances that explored the importance of consciousness raising within Mark’s thought and political activism. For the latter, we wrote a short introductory statement to contextualise the extensive twelve-hour programme: 189

EGRESS In his essay, “No Romance Without Finance”, Mark Fisher explored the ways that popular culture functions as a form of consciousness. Music culture, in particular, has largely untapped potentials as a tool for consciousness raising; a tool for the collective production of knowledges and subjectivities, particularly those outside the social mainstream. The left has repeatedly failed to harness these potentials in order to instantiate real social change. Countless cultures have been ravaged by the tendrils of a Thatcherite war on dance music that continues to extend into our futures. Nonetheless, Grime’s public embrace of Jeremy Corbyn, for example, was an unprecedented move in this direction. Consciousness Razing [as the night in question was called] is an attempt to channel these processes whilst celebrating and building upon Mark’s thought. We hope to create further conditions through which we might raze the prevailing cultural consciousness of corporate cultures in favour of a renewed political consciousness. As Mark’s final text, “Acid Communism”, demanded: “instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct: the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy.” Inherent to these collective capacities are politics of class. Participants are invited to consider class across the UK and globally. The contradictory role of the state is laid bare in its supposed enforcement of “common wealth” (see: “aspirational” culture, “social mobility” or “big society”), the production of which it actually blocks (see: austerity, time poverty, visa restrictions). Supposed scarcity produces razed-states of negative solidarity, a race to the bottom that we see played out daily. How can we build anew, in order to raise each other, together?6 The day was a roaring success, largely down to the generosity of the people who had gathered around us. Friends cooked food for hundreds, played DJ sets and led workshops. There were even those we did not know, selflessly offering support with technical 190

MATT COLQUHOUN hiccups or whatever else, volunteering themselves as technicians and runners for no other reason than that they recognised the DIY nature of the night and wanted to assist in making it as good as possible for everybody present. Even the venue staff were struck by how unusually lovely the crowd was. Prior to the doors of the venue opening, Natasha and I had spoken about the challenges of the day ahead. We were asking people to be present for such an extensive period of time to talk frankly about difficult issues, all whilst under the weight of Mark’s work and our desire to do it justice. This latter issue was particularly hard to contend with. We all shared this feeling of not being good enough, struggling to make our performance anxiety productive, trying to reassure ourselves recursively with Mark’s own words. In his essay “Good for Nothing” Mark writes of the ways that depression, be it individual or collective, “is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence — you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together — and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition”.7 This was a sensation that underpinned much of the day. Many of our speakers and performers confessed their anxieties. All of us were questioning whether we had the right or the expertise to talk about certain issues, seeking a sense of solidarity beyond the limitations of our atomised selves. What we were asking of ourselves and each other was that we contend with a range of social paradoxes and tensions, many of them with the potential to lacerate and fragment our egos as we reached the limits of our own personal experiences. We were effectively asking everyone — friends and strangers alike — to call each other into question in a way that was both loving and productive. We anticipated things would get difficult but that was OK. We knew, as did Mark, that “this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all — it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics”.8 191

EGRESS To assist us with the task at hand — the temporary raising of our collective consciousness — we read a text by the political collective Plan C, with whom Mark had collaborated on numerous occasions. In a blogpost that we repurposed for a workshop at the start of the day, members of Plan C write about the ways in which consciousness raising groups were the backbone of second-wave feminism, providing women “with a wide and thoughtful base of supporters and militants who examined their lives, took hold of their experiences, politicised them, developed theory based on them, and took action relevant to them”.9 They spoke to a form of consciousness raising that is not just “a pedagogical method — of disseminating already-constructed theory, in the hope of marshalling people towards readymade action — but consciousness raising as a radical tool for collectively creating theory and collectively devising praxis.” In this sense, the very function of a consciousness raising group is to formulate a community that gives itself as a goal. Such an embodied politics remains essential, as Mark again writes, if we are to successfully invent “new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger.”10 Something that stuck with me throughout the day and night, as we considered the prevailing relevance of consciousness raising in the political discourses in the 2010s, feminist or otherwise, was what Natasha had described early on as a desired sense of “solidarity without similarity”. Although recent years have been defined by so-called “identity politics”, where individuals and groups assert the right to affirm their differences, which may have very real consequences on a group’s or an individual’s political experiences, such assertions are useless — even damaging — without an overarching project of intersectional solidarity. The phrase seemed to resonate with Mark’s thought as we carried it with us. We required his skill for “turning feeling into structured thought and structural analysis”, as one of our contributors, Alice Andrews, put it. Recognising this construction to be a formidable task for a one-day workshop, we necessarily put restrictions 192

MATT COLQUHOUN on ourselves as a temporary collective, “constructing a shared knowledge with what’s available to us in the room”, as Alice once again articulated so well, very much aware that facilitating this was only half the battle. Our exchanges continued into the early hours. Polite conversation turned to dance. What we had attempted to articulate with words was far better understood by all when we embodied it through an awareness of our bodies and the bodies of those around us, all moving together to the sounds of Sam Kidel, AYA, Laura Grace Ford and xin. Once the night was over, at around 2am, Natasha and I had a nightcap with Roland and Ollie, the owners of SET in Dalson who had so generously hosted us — a gin for her, a wee dram for me. We talked about politics and philosophy degrees all whilst listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ 2002 album By the Way over the empty venue’s sound system — an interesting choice which nonetheless felt strangely resonant. In that moment, it had never sounded so good. At one point in our conversation, Roland brought up Maggie Nelson’s 2016 book The Argonauts. Describing a singular 193

EGRESS cross-section of events with an equally singular acuity, the book is a memoir, or what Nelson calls a work of “auto-theory”, which explores her experiences as a queer pregnant woman whose partner, the sculptor Harry Dodge, is completing their gender transition. It beautifully demonstrates the necessity of solidarity when faced with a lack of similarity, whether under the most intimate of circumstances or the most generic. As both their bodies go through extraordinary transformations, Nelson wrestles with the inexpressible nature of their confluence of unshareable experiences — experiences of the sort that Nelson has so far dedicated her career to writing about. On the very first page of The Argonauts, she acknowledges this fact explicitly, invoking the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his declaration that “the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed”. She writes that this paradox “is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing”.11 In her review of The Argonauts for the Los Angeles Times, Sara Marcus writes that the central questions of the book are perhaps: “How does anyone decide what’s normal and what’s radical? What kinds of experience do we close ourselves off to when we think we already know?”12 These questions chime with so many of the spaces and experiences we presently inhabit. Although our present political moment has been defined in the popular imagination by a hardening of geopolitical borders and moral boundaries, on all sides of politics this rhetorical hardness seems like an attempt to compensate for an age at sea with itself, when normality and radicality are called into question on a daily basis. Such an experience has been explored by many writers in recent years. Roland’s mention of The Argonauts, in the context of that empty bar, reminded me of Julia Bell’s 2018 essay “Really Techno”, on queerness and Berlin’s most infamous club Berghain, published in the White Review. The essay speaks to an expanded sense of queerness in light of the club’s ever-increasing popularity — a popularity that has repeatedly collided with its history as a marginal and explicitly queer venue. 194

MATT COLQUHOUN Considering Berghain’s new status as a tourist attraction, thrust upon it from outside as its reputation has spread far beyond the initial confines of its marginal community, Bell wrestles with the site as a meeting point for diffuse temporalities and communities. The name of the club itself, she writes, is “a synthesis of two Berlin districts, which were separated by the wall, Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain.”13 In stark contrast to the club’s multiplicitous existence, however, she introduces herself in the queue outside as a singular being: “‘Ich bin einer,’ I say when my turn comes. I am one … I’m here as a 45-year-old woman, to be on my own.”14 And yet, at the same time, she seems to acknowledge that her oneness is inconsistent. It is a rough outline that contains various ill-fitting parts. Eventually her experience fragments the woman she was when she entered. The music resonates and allows her constituent parts to vibrate in unison. No drink, no drugs — she allows the building, its music and its community to affect her. At some point I pass through the mirror into this uncanny, techno place. I am not aware of myself. I am at once all body and no body. I am out of time, out of language, my mind all sensation. The sound makes shapes, red, green, purple, which become like a physical building that the beat starts to build around me. The music has a kind of architecture, which I can see in my mind’s eye. At this saturation, the sound creates its own spatial awareness, its own metaphysical structures. In this place I am connected to something bigger than me, a place outside the ego. The split parts of me are, for these few moments, suddenly whole.15 Entwined with the narration of her experience, Bell continues to unpick the difficulties of embodying this multiplicity as a queer woman in the modern age, without the egress of a Berghain weekend. She quotes Jack Halberstam who suggests that we should “try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices”.16 The community inside the club and Bell herself as an individual become microcosms 195

EGRESS for modern queer existence, resisting the co-option and reduction inherent to an absorption by capitalist forces. She quotes Halberstam again who in turn quotes an interview conducted with Michel Foucault in which the philosopher critiques dominant forms of queer collectivity which harden and become militantly — even reactively — defensive as they try to keep the ever-rising tide of capitalist forces at bay. Whilst such a stance is perfectly understandable, all things considered, to close off passageways to the Outside is nonetheless always to consolidate oneself into a type, paradoxically making a community easier prey for capitalism’s blobjective tenacity and cultural appropriation of otherwise incompatible ways of life. As Foucault explains, the goal “is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships”. The book in which this argument appears is given the incredibly apt title, Friendship as a Way of Life. The innate outsideness of community as a crossroads for shifting temporalities and ways of life is epitomised by Jean-Luc Nancy’s chronicling of his debate with Blanchot in his essay “The Confronted Community”. He again foreshadows Mark’s emergent weird-andeerie politics of collective action by invoking Blanchot’s frequent use of the word “strangeness” in The Unavowable Community, writing, briefly, as the essay draws to a close, about “the strangeness of the most ordinary encounter as much as of the most unavowable bond”17; the strangeness of friendship; of love; of what is not in common that founds a community “eternally, temporary” which is “always already deserted”18; the strangeness of Bataille’s “community of lovers” for whom “passion eludes possibility, eluding, for those caught by it, their own powers, their own decision and even their ‘desire,’ so that it is strangeness itself, having consideration neither for what they can do nor for what they want, but luring them into a strangeness where they become estranged from themselves, into an intimacy which also estranges them from each other.”19 Arising from Blanchot and Nancy’s typically dense and paradoxical phrasings, we might begin to see the emergent figure of a collective subject which is neither “mine” nor “yours” but by which we are buffeted all the same; a strange and 196

MATT COLQUHOUN external agency from without which seems borne of love and an interpersonal familiarity found within. It is in this sense that we can define friendship as a way of life; as an ethical becoming. The Weird and the Eerie is a book that is also, of course, preoccupied with the strange, speaking to the inhuman forces that govern us and that govern subjectivity, that bring us joy and disturb us in equal measure, and make the establishment of a collective subject so politically elusive despite such a desire being at the heart of any politics. Mark’s sense of the strange has more in common with Blanchot’s than first appearances might suggest. Bataille’s community of lovers was, after all, a foreshadowing of the Fisherian weird relation — that relation “which was supposed to structure society — even in the guise of a transgressive breach”, setting us “outside society in society, in an intimacy out of reach of politics”.20 The inside is always a folding of the outside. Invoking this Blanchotian permeability in the penultimate chapter of The Weird and the Eerie, Mark writes on love as another form of eerie agent, just like capital itself — a force that “does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect”.21 What kind of agent can articulate the relationship between these two forces? Can “love” function as an eerie antithesis to capital? Are we able to even consider such a counter-thought today without falling into an impotent nostalgia for the free love of the hippie movement? The cliché of love’s psychedelic inactivity in today’s memories of the counter-culture has become fatally associated with the dead end of a soft-focus romance. It is understood today as little more than a proto-neoliberal cultural softening, defined by an unjudgmental but nonetheless still pious passivity. Hippies are defined for many by a kind of secularisation of Christianity’s empty declaration to “love thy neighbour”, devoid of any critical and material politics — a damning indictment that, for many, weakened the embodied politics of various political movements due to the average hippie’s middle class sensibilities cloaked in a disguise of personal dishevellment. 197

EGRESS Mark knew this better than anyone. Having come of age in the years of glam and post-punk, the hippies’ shadow was long and dark for k-punk in his most sardonic mode. At a time when many had forgotten the cultural impact of hippiedom, reducing it to a cliché lost to a by-gone era, it seemed that Mark was still not over what he saw to be the hippies’ cultural betrayal which did not deserve to outlast the subcultures of his own youth. He would turn to this topic on his blog frequently. For instance, in a post on glam and the k-punk aesthetic that echoes the biopolitics discussed above, Mark decries the hippies’ “sloppy, ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and Fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk [that] displayed a disdain for sensuality characteristic of the western master class (hey man, it’s all about the MIND).”22 In a later post, he instead champions the dark psychedelia of The Cure’s 1982 album Pornography, which is “psychedelic in the same way that Apocalypse Now is … with its warporn media overload, its schizophrenic delirium, its sense that The End is only minutes away.”23 The album leads him to imagine, with a Gothic glee, “all of the hippie dreams of free-your-mind exotica … napalmed into oblivion.”24 However, this is not to eschew the concept of “love” entirely. It is rather to challenge its one-dimensional conception in the mind of the hippie. The Cure themselves remain a potent popular modernist example of a multifaceted love that, with an acutely Bataillean sensibility, finds collective joy in their abandonment of the individual ego. After all, although the band would first declare that “It doesn’t matter if we all die” on Pornography’s opening track, “One Hundred Years”, they inverted the nihilism they became known for as Gothic rock pioneers less than eighteen months later, instead finding joy in the pointlessness of life, singing “Let’s go and throw / All the songs we know / Into the sea / You and me” on their jaunty 1983 single “The Love Cats”. Mark too was well-known for his multifaceted thinking that was in tune with the ever-shifting body politics of his day. Indeed, the trajectory of Mark’s philosophical thinking can be traced alongside his own experiences, from personal depression to collective joy, 198

MATT COLQUHOUN from rave euphoria to fatherhood. He was comfortable allowing all the facets of his character — past, present and future; from Mark Fisher to k-punk — from 1980s to 2010s; from Warwick to London to Felixstowe — each existing alongside the other in uncomfortable but productive syzygy. The dynamics of these becomings-Fisher are largely imperceptible, but beyond his public activities it seemed like Mark was constantly at work on something, on his own relation to the world and those around him. It was this life that provided fuel for what Nina Power had described as Mark’s “real desire, the desire for perpetual engagement, for never-ending conversation.” Jean-Luc Nancy was initially hostile to this sort of unseen work, effectively equating it with the impotence of hippie politics. He believed that “community”, in Bataille’s sense, was an “inoperative” concept for the way its anti-capitalist work ethic slipped all too easily into an utter lack of work altogether, making it a political project without any movement with which it could sustain itself. Bataille’s was, therefore, for him, a stagnant community. Blanchot’s response to Nancy’s charge of inoperativity — which Nancy later describes as “an echo, a resonance, and a retort, as well as a reservation and in some respects, a reproach”25 — stunned him. He would show Nancy, through his descriptions of the unavowable essence of community, “that beneath the worklessness of inoperativity something — an unavowable work — is at work nonetheless”.26 This understanding of an “unavowable work” between persons and communities further enlightens Mark’s conception of love as an “eerie entity.” The importance of this unavowability to community is that it provides a space for the paradoxical function of interrelation which is integral to any attempt to resist state co-option. An existence outside of recognised forms of work — particularly a form of existence which cannot be expressed within a capitalist vocabulary — is essential here. As the capitalist state enforces its own model and constitution on the modern subject, with freedom reduced to the implicit and unbalanced equation of state sovereighty with the 199

EGRESS sovereignty of the individual, communism becomes a quasi-poetic call for a sociality that is uninhibited and attentive to the already existing flows of human life itself, innately fragmentary and fluid. Blanchot, perhaps anticipating the emerging problematics of our present moment, acknowledges that what we are grappling with here are “difficulties not easily mastered”. The task is precisely to find solidarity without similarity; a unity which is not unified. As history has shown us, most communities and communisms that fail to account for this paradox, which keeps community in a perpetual state of becoming, also fail to resist the adoption of “a supra-individuality”, leading to nationalist or potentially globalist iterations of fascism. The question becomes: How do we exist outside of capitalism, defining ourselves within its midst through processes of negation and difference, without scaling up the logics of capitalism’s manditory individualism? Love and queerness, as an entanglement of desiring relations, demonstrate ways in which such a paradoxical thinking is nonetheless within our reach. These concepts of relation do not constitute a lack of “work” as such — here understood in its own expanded sense as an energy, a movement, a will — but we should nonetheless affirm the ways in which the unavowable work of love escapes any concrete and expressible understanding of work — or “labour” — as defined by the bureacratic terminologies of capitalism. We might go so far as to declare that all love must be thought in this way, since standardised heterosexual relations and institutions are so inseparable from capitalist realism. To take one common argument deployed by the conservative right wing, the reduction of love to a function for procreation — just as capitalism reduces communication between communities to a function for profit — leads only to realistic positions on marriage, as love’s highest social institution. Yes, two men or two women might find themselves incredibly fond of one another but, if you want to make a baby, the union of one man and one woman is the only combination that is realistically functional. Reduced to an essentially capitalist function of biological production and profit, we can see 200

MATT COLQUHOUN here how capitalist realism also eclipses our social imagination of what love, of what family and of what our bodies can be. This is an important consideration for us because, just as Foucault says of homosexuality in Friendship as a Way of Life, love is “not a form of desire but something desirable”. It is a relation that gives itself as a goal. It is precisely this configuration that allows queerness, in its unruly and multiplicitous formlessness, to skirt the edges of capitalist capture. Capitalism seeks to turn everything into a form of desire whilst paradoxically eliminating an apparent lack within desirability. Our communities, in their innately transgressive and ephemeral nature, by giving themselves as a goal rather than being representative of some fixed and comprehensible (read: commodifiable) form, retain this lack that capitalism always hopes to fill with itself but, in many circumstances, still cannot. Death is just such a lack for us, and so the question remains: What kind of praxis can move from death as the transgression of capital — as explored throughout this book — to love as a libidinal egress from capital’s restrictive economies? How can the entangled affects of eros and thanatos, in this way, be sustained and utilised? Not for a praxis of love and death, but of love towards, through and beyond death; towards a praxis of desirability that ruptures death’s meaning within the restrictive capitalist vocabulary of bureaucratic productivity, potentially rupturing capital itself. In his book Spectres of Revolt, Richard Gilman-Opalsky formulates just such a praxis and, indeed, invokes the restlessness of the undead discussed above, when he asks what exactly the language of spectres and ghosts — forever attached to the Marxist left — can, materialistically, mean for a politics of revolution. He considers how the very act of “revolt, as any good ghost would do, threatens to interrupt the constituted present, bringing to light fatal injustices and indignations that have been obscured, dormant, or buried”.27 Here the ghosts Gilman-Opalsky speaks to “are those that haunt our minds, as individual persons and collectivities, in psychological, social, and psycho-social senses”.28 He writes: 201

EGRESS [A] social system full of exploitation and human suffering, we might say, should be haunted by the miseries it proliferates and sanctions … should be haunted, if not on moral or ethical grounds, then on grounds of the material conditions of human suffering, or most minimally, by the threat of mutinies on the horizon. An everyday life of generalized anxiety and despair could and should be haunted by the possibility of renewed pleasure and joy.29 Later, Gilman-Opalsky evokes the eerie nature of ghosts — in terms not dissimilar to Mark’s — and deploys the concept of “becomingghost” which, he says, is related to the “real power of a politics of haunting [that] calls for more ghosts to be engaged in more deterritorialized haunting”. He continues: This requires a kind of ‘becoming-ghost’ of politics, according to which existing relations of power are troubled and spooked by social forces networking beyond their geographical locations, beyond the norm, beyond the state, outside and against it, often invisible or scarcely visible, but which hope to transform the contexts in which we live.30 It should be noted here that Gilman-Opalsky’s “becoming-ghost” is a play on a concept by Félix Guattari — specifically, his concept of “becoming-woman” which he uses frequently to signal towards a particular praxis that attempts to undermine and subvert the phallocentrism of capitalism. Becoming is always subversive for Guattari and he discusses many other such forms of becoming-other in his writings — other practices of destratification; other processes of, as Mark put it, “getting out of our faces again”.31 Does this not make becoming-community and becoming-ghost inherently entwined with one another in their ephemerality — albeit with the latter emphasising what is lost over what is gained? They certainly share a number of strange, spectral and even queer qualities. By orienting ourselves towards a becoming-ghost — not only in the abstract sense of channeling the injustices of capitalism 202

MATT COLQUHOUN but in the way that death both shapes and ruptures communities through the absences it instantiates — we can altogether transform thought, becoming, and society. This transformation occurs, whether we like it or not, when someone dies. It is not the superficiality of the positive affirmation of a person’s existence in a collectivised memory but a traumatic becoming that occurs through the eternal recurrence of a grief that, as the old adage goes, never leaves us but becomes easier to bear. As Deleuze writes in his 1969 work Logic of Sense, the ethical dimension of this task is “to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth — to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event”.32 This is also what the Fisher-Function demands of us. We can — and must — channel our grief through it to instantiate the changes that we hope to see. Many of the actions of our particular community, for better and for worse, emerged from the event of Mark’s death, but we nevertheless always attempted to keep sight of and hold open that instance of rupture so that we might be reborn within it. This is to say that Mark’s death did not unground our desires for new worlds and collectivities — or, if it did, the result was not a loss of but rather an intensification of this new weird’s associated affects. It was our collective belief that in caring for ourselves and each other, we could strengthen the possibility of an instantiation of that emergent collective subject that, as Mark adamantly declared, “does not exist, yet the crisis, like all other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed”.33 It is still with Gilman-Opalsky that I find the extremes of our politics of community best articulated as they continue to haunt us today. Whilst his concept of “becoming-ghost” is broad and not dependent on a personal experience of or proximity to death, it has a particular resonance with much of what we have discussed here already. (Most immediately, this conceptualisation resonates with 203

EGRESS historical struggles against the legacy and persistent threat of AIDS as a disease that has decimated queer communities around the world and, with them, their possible political futures.) Becomingghost, in this sense, is at once an identification with the deceased and a becoming that channels the eerie as a politicised failure of the presence and absence of future communities. The spectral nature of this becoming is the same “between ‘us’” that Nancy describes, and which we still cannot hope to capture without neutralising. This is to say, analogously, that we can’t grab at a smoke but we can inhale it, making it part of our being. We must embody it; allow ourselves to be possessed by it. To capture it for external examination explicitly removes this potentiality. It is in this very sense that dancing and clubbing were essential for many of us in the aftermath of Mark’s death. Considerations of the politics of collectivity are welcome additions to any curriculum but we knew that learning about such considerations could not come at the expense of living and enacting them. Theory has its limits. It is up to us, here and now, to transgress them. Communities have their limits too and it would be wrong not to acknowledge that, over the past few years, progressing steadily along the river of grief, many of the communities I have been a part of have since fractured, become estranged and, in some cases, are no longer on speaking terms. The loneliness felt on the first anniversary of Mark’s death was one constituted by this multiplicity of estrangements. Some natural, occasioned by the passing of time, others more violent and emerging from interpersonal disagreements. No matter the cause, such communities are the often unacknowledged casualties of a resurgent individualised grief, but so many other communities have emerged from their ashes. Each closure is, at the same time, an opening. Coming to terms with such events is nonetheless upsetting and difficult. To write a book such as this, in light of such difficulties, is not an individualistic attempt to own this grief and remedy it piously, despite my own persistent presence within its narrative. It is an attempt to think said grief as it falls through my hands and the hands of so 204

MATT COLQUHOUN many others also. As such, to claim ownership of it would be to claim ownership of a grain of sand, ignoring a vast and turbulent ocean that threatens to drastically shift its position at any moment. The first disruption to occur within my own experience of the community at Goldsmiths came just a few days after Mark’s death when I wrote a letter to Jean-Paul Martinon — one of my lecturers at Goldsmiths. It was he who enthusiastically encouraged my burgeoning interest in the subject of community during my first semester, immediately prior to Mark’s death, and the philosophical concept of community that Martinon discussed in his lectures on curating and ethics were a great inspiration to me. I remain eternally grateful for his encouragement, but that is not to say we always found ourselves in a place of agreement. The letter was occasioned by a disagreement over what I perceived to be an uncharitable reading of Mark’s essay “Good for Nothing”, which was discussed at the end of one of Jean-Paul’s classes — the first after Mark’s death, on 16th January 2017. The contents of that letter and our subsequent discussions will remain private but I am reminded that, following an emotional articulation of my particular point of view, in contrast to JeanPaul’s own, I signed the letter: In friendship, Matt Colquhoun Having invoked “friendship” repeatedly in a philosophical context above, and remembering now how this initial usage was devoid of any overbearing Blanchotian references, I am left with a desire to invoke the innocence of this sentiment once again. This friendship and others like it continue to carry an unavowable intensity of feeling — one that cannot be expressed or expanded upon linguistically in any satisfactory way. They are (un)grounded, following Nelson and Wittgenstein, by an inexpressibility, and further compounded by a painful sense that the year following Mark’s death was too fraught and fast — as Mark himself, in his 205

EGRESS capacity as convenor of the MA Contemporary Art Theory course at Goldsmiths, had warned us it would be in his formal welcome on the very first day of term. Time passed too quickly for some friendships to blossom as fully as one might have hoped. A year is no time at all for so much to have taken place. In August 2017, working on the final chapter of my dissertation as the tumultuous academic year drew to a close, with another group of fresh-faced students set to be welcomed to the university — a group who knew nothing or little of what so many of the continuing students and staff had gone through over the previous months — I decided to email Simon O’Sullivan, then the head of Goldsmiths’ Visual Cultures department, in the hope of discussing an essay he had written on the ethical side of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, entitled “The Production of the New and the Care of the Self”. I had planned to discuss part of the essay in my concluding chapter in the hope that it might provide some calm on the unknown waters that lay ahead post-submission and post-graduation, following the inevitable ejection from the university system that so many anticipated would rupture, once again, the relationships we had cultivated in the emotional specificity of that institutional space.34 Unable to discuss his essay with me at that time due to his punishing administrative schedule as he prepared for the year ahead, Simon instead sent me another, much earlier essay of his which he thought might shed some light on the more personal feelings that had gone into his essay on Deleuze and Guattari. The essay was entitled “Friendship as Community: From Ethics to Politics” and I was deeply moved by it. It begins: The economics of friendship have never, for me, been a straightforward matter. Or to put this differently, the constitution of a community has always been uneven and fraught. Fraught with insecurities and anxieties — with unreasonable desires and unfounded fears (which were less to do with any friends I might or might not have had or have, and more to do with my self; and with the production of my own subjectivity.)35 206

MATT COLQUHOUN In Simon’s essay I found the articulation of a personal but nonetheless transductive experience — and one which resonated with my own. In the final version of my postgraduate disseration, I gave Simon the final word, not only because of this passage’s immediate resonance to the project’s unavoidably unfinished nature, as a snapshot of an ongoing experience, but also because the sentiment it expressed seemed so profound in the context of all that had been discussed in that first version of this text, resonating with the continuously unfolding affectivity of the Fisher-Function explicitly. It was precisely what I was looking for: a resonance beyond the academic commitment of a disseration; beyond Goldsmiths; beyond our selves and our subjectivities; beyond, but also always already between “us”. In the essay, Simon asks: “What then of myself and my own friends?” Affirming a Blanchotian collective becoming, he acknowledges that “my friendships — with people — with the world — are a work in progress — and a work that takes place in the world and amongst its inhabitants”. Ultimately, he writes, “friendship as community has to be lived” if we are to establish any new form of society. This society will not “arrive from ‘out there’” but rather “emerge from right here — from ourselves working on the stuff of our own lives.” He concludes that “this noble and revolutionary aim, nothing less than a new communism, begins with something very simple: friendship and the joy that is produced by it”.36 I am sorry to say that this original, hopeful conclusion was ungrounded almost immediately by the traumatic failure of the community I had been a part of at Goldsmiths. Arguments broke out and proliferated throughout our small cohort. The tension of grief that had simmered over the previous nine months came to a head and bubbled over. We called each other into question without patience or solidarity. No longer sharing the space of the institution and with no formal basis on which to remain physically in each other’s lives, emotions ran roughshod over our newly disparate existence and fractured it, in some instances irreparably. 207

EGRESS I remembered how, one night down the pub, Simon had expressed an understandable scepticism about the political functionality of such an amorphous and poetic conception of community powered by little more than an overzealous earnestness. “You’ve done it though”, I remember him saying. “You’ve lived it.” I later mourned this external affirmation as I found myself explosively losing numerous friendships. Some were repaired but were never quite the same, their fractures still visible on a patched-up surface. Although I was certainly not without fault myself, I was shocked by the vampiric attacks we wrought upon each other in late 2017, despite all that we had been through. It felt, more than anything, like bad timing. Whilst various members of our group had fallen foul of our individual bad days, with no proximal opportunities on the horizon to remedy the rupture, our wounds were left to fester. As a result, I carried a bitterness and an intensified depression over into 2018 that it would take many months to eventually let go of. The principle of insufficiency that I had spent the previous year writing about revealed itself in all its violence and negativity in that moment, with no desire expressed by those whom it concerned to build upon the wreckage. The popular politics of “self-care” were invoked to cover over what I later understood to be a localised instantiation of what is referred to today as “cancel culture”. We had arrived, after a year at sea with ourselves, on the terminal beach. I felt abandoned to its emptiness as the interpersonal structure I had previously relied on crumbled under its own weight. To this day, all of our communities remain haunted, in their fraughtness, by a set of problematics that Mark would point to in his most controversial essay, 2013’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. Here Mark wrestles with the left’s propensity to propagate guilt. Taking an explicitly online contingent of leftists on Twitter to task for their readiness to throw their comrades under the bus, he writes of the residents of this energy-sucking “Vampire Castle” as being “driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a 208

MATT COLQUHOUN mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd”. 37 It was a description of the left, from within, that many found appalling. To some, it was seen as an enactment of the very dynamics that Mark sought to hold others accountable for, and yet its apparently spiralling logic captures the current instantiation of the paradoxes of community that Blanchot had frequently wrestled with. These dynamics, Mark wrote, are “best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy” of the movements that the left otherwise declares loyalty to, all the while infecting them with the risk-averse logics of capitalist consolidation and institutionalisation. As Mark makes clear: “The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.”38 The latest casualty of this capture was the principle, long fought for but never fully attained, of friendship as a way of life. For many, any affirmation of the position Mark adopts in “Exiting the Vampire Castle” is seen as damagingly anti-essentialist, in the sense that it rejects the hardline base of a contemporary leftist politics. We might see an essentialist leftism as well-meaning, demanding that any politics begins from a set of collectively agreed upon central tenets, and it seems that, for many who guard its boundaries, any rejection of these tenets runs the risk of giving a platform to unsavoury positions and arguments. This remains a central issue in contemporary “cancel culture”, where any deviation from a leftist standard is viewed suspiciously, potentially leading to an underestimation of — or, worse, an apologist’s appraisal of — the threat of contemporary fascism. However, in many fields in which the term is used, essentialism is seen as counter to progressivism. Particularly in education, where essentialism is understood as the belief that all children should be taught to the same standard in order to prepare them for adult life, a progressive approach to teaching instead emphasises the different needs of all children, encouraging an “active” and adaptive form of learning. 209

EGRESS This understanding of a becoming-adult is analogous today to a contemporary becoming-leftist. It is also, of course, reductive — and this too is the charge brought against many who police the contemporary left’s political standards. The more important truth is that a progressive approach to political learning is nonetheless necessary if we are to have any hope of affirming our own collective becoming and moving towards communism. The issue with this understanding of politics today is that, rather than occuring internally within leftist communities, it is more generally associated with the divide between a political left and right, with the right paying lip service to a progressive political education that provides a space for the views of the establishment that they typically represent as a counter to the apparently conservative nature of leftist communities who are militantly seeking alternatives to their way of life. We see this tension explored frequently across social media where the political right routinely declare that the left’s political essentialism, expressed within the dogmatic necessity that everyone must hold the right opinions, no matter how minor the shift in perspective, reveals them to be the “true fascists” in the midst of our contemporary culture wars. There is a similar but more nuanced argument to be made here which can come from within the left itself, an argument Mark explored explicitly, writing on an internalisation of capitalism’s socially risk-averse dynamics, giving rise to what Deleuze and Guattari referred to in A Thousand Plateaus as a “microfascism” — a localised and internalised alternative to the macropolitical totalitarianism of historical fascism. For Deleuze and Guattari, the question that we must answer once we are aware of these dynamics is: “Why does desire desire its own repression?”39 The right’s criticisms of the left are nowhere near this sensitive, of course. The populist political right are perhaps recognising little more than their own aptitude for producing an internal consensus without a fundamentalist sense of political similarity in contrast to their perception of the left’s inability to agree and its readiness to eject 210

MATT COLQUHOUN everything and everyone who does not wholly coincide with its own vision of itself. An entangled paradox of principles emerges here, as “progressive conservatism” and “conservative progressivism” once again face off against each other, and it is necessary for us to grapple with many more besides. Here we might turn specifically to the contentious conception of fascism today. Generally speaking, fascism seems to be defined by an indeterminate intolerance and the forced suppression of any opposition. Whilst this is indeed a central tendency at the heart of any fascism, the nature of the suppression at hand — which underpins all such accusations, knocked back and forth across the political divide — is often vague. At the very least, we can say that perceptions of power are central here. The left’s ability to set the cultural agenda, arguably underappreciated within its own ranks, is seen as tyrannical by a right which nonetheless has a firmer grip on state power than it often likes to admit, particularly in the USA where the government itself seems to be occupied by smallgovernment conservatives and libertarians who decry the system they nonetheless hold up. The grounds from which both these accusations of fascism are thrown are worth taking note of. Holding these two perspectives together — with no comment made, at this stage, on the validity of the arguments which constitute them — we begin to see a picture of two opposing forces which give shape to our contemporary status quo; of two opposing sides which constitute the internal borders of that which is, warring over how far they can shift the other's Overton Window. However, with each side so entangled with the other, neither seems capable of shifting the overall situation so much as to rupture the cage-like equilibrium that they themselves constitute and, in turn, are constituted by: communicative capitalism. The shape-shifting nature of fascism today, in this context, is a particularly contentious and telling example of contemporary capitalism’s sociopolitical unruliness, but it is not the only one. The 211

EGRESS very nature of new and ever-growing populisms further muddies the waters of what many leftist commentators have described as a “crisis of democracy” — that is, a crisis of consensus. We increasingly live in fragmentary times. Alongside the crisis of Catalan independence in northern Spain, “Brexit” appears as perhaps the most painfully obvious example of such a crisis in the West, with its conceptual meaning and processual outcome so contentious that it has persistently and repeatedly humiliated the United Kingdom over the years since this collection of countries began their troubled exit from the European Union. In attempting to negotiate a singular result for the supposedly unified state of Great Britain, the historic fault lines between our countries have become more pronounced than ever before. Extending our view outwards to the amorphous political philosophies that define our pasts, presents and futures, we can see the same fragmentation of meaning affecting everything from the political philosophies of “neoliberalism” to “communism”, and even — as previously discussed — “accelerationism”. As each term or concept is passed around from group to group, rising to the surface of public discourse by virtue of their reductive promiscuity, we watch with horror as each word tumbles into meaninglessness, where one group’s gospel is another’s shameful misuse. This is a situation we are used to seeing, of course, in various different contexts, but to see it as a central trap from which contemporary politics cannot seem to wrest itself is depressing to many. Here, consensus becomes both weapon and shield for all sides who proclaim possession of the majority’s support whilst ultimately finding the very concept of “consensus” impotent as various political positions go to war with one another over minor differences of opinion. We watch helplessly as Overton Windows overlap, creating a disorientating and kaleidoscopic politics. So, what is to be done? How do we deal with words — with concepts — when their innate lack of consensual meaning is abused with such regularity? How do we stand by the words and concepts we deploy in our conversations, resisting their co-option, whilst 212

MATT COLQUHOUN retaining their potential capacity for the production of the new? How do we remain true to our broader understandings of the left or the right when both ideological umbrellas are so full of holes? It is perhaps necessary for us here to introduce an uncomfortable caveat: What if we consider our discourses and the ideas that underpin them to be, at first, processually distinct from one another? This is an argument we find presented to us in What Is Philosophy?, the final collaborative work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The pair begin by describing the importance of this separation between political and philosophical processes. Whilst the implications of this separation are implicit — and they are wise not to inflame an unproductive separation between fields of knowledge and understanding — it seems they are, at first, hoping to hold philosophy and politics apart from one another in order to identify the ground from which both emerge. In one particularly telling passage from the book’s introduction, Deleuze and Guattari write — damningly, it seems, and without mincing words — that philosophy cannot “find any final refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create ‘consensus’ and not concepts”.40 Communication, in this sense, becomes the process of eliminating discursive difference whereas, for Deleuze especially, in Difference & Repetition, the aim of philosophy should always be to “eliminate all presuppositions” that are “contained in opinions”.41 The implications for politics soon become clear as Deleuze and Guattari go on to declare: The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept. The idea comes, perhaps, from the Greeks, but they distrusted it so much, and subjected it to such harsh treatment, that the concept was more like the ironical soliloquy bird that surveyed the battlefield of destroyed rival opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet).42 213

EGRESS The Greeks’ distrust of democratic conversation, in this sense, comes from philosophy’s aversion to concensus by way of its progressive constitution as a language given to becoming. Indeed, it is from the Greeks that “becoming” as a concept emerges and, in particular, Heraclitus’s philosophical image of a river of thought that is constantly changing and is never the same as the last time one stepped into its flows. For Deleuze and Guattari, the task of the concept, in this sense, is, instead, to rupture consensus, in the form of the status quo, making the concept itself a vector through which we might produce the new — produce difference — which, in turn, reproduces and extends itself in being constantly challenged and held in contention. Whilst it may make us uncomfortable to acknowledge this today, what Deleuze and Guattari are arguing is that democracy and philosophy, despite both being heavily associated with the Greeks, share no other original binding. They are instead grounded by an original difference — the difference between concept and consensus — and, for Deleuze in particular, the primacy of the concept must always be maintained.43 This scepticism towards the democratic process can be found today on both left and right sides of political philosophy, and it remains a controversial position in each instance. On the one hand, we might return to Nick Land’s controversial and emphatically antidemocratic text The Dark Enlightenment, which considers the ways in which capitalism, allowed off its democratised leash, can help “a 21st-century post-demotist society [recover] from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism”.44 On the other hand, we can reconsider the explicitly communist writings of Jodi Dean, who has repeatedly argued that democracy today “is so intimately tied up with… ‘communicative capitalism’ that every attempt from the left to re-appropriate the term, to give it a more radical meaning and to distinguish it from the electoral regimes of representative democracy has to fail”.45 As controversial as these arguments often are, on both sides of the political divide, they are by no means new to the realms of 214

MATT COLQUHOUN political philosophy. We might also look to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance — perhaps one of the most well-known modern philosophers to be critical of democracy. As with Dean and Land, the issue with an idealised form of democracy for Germany’s great moral genealogist was that, in resting on its laurels, democracy becomes that which it is meant to help us resist. Nietzsche points to the institution of the Christian Church, in particular, as that sociopolitical entity which came to dominate and tyrannise the world precisely because of its democratisation. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche notes how the establishment of Christianity as a world religion shows us that “the morality of the common people has triumphed”46 — the morality of “‘the slaves’, the ‘plebians’, ‘the herd’”.47 Although often interpreted as an example of Nietzsche’s apparent elitism, here he is instead foreshadowing Marx who would call religion that great opiate of the masses. Nietzsche and Marx were both unsettled by and cynical about religion’s successful intoxication of the masses, which a universalised Church instead chose to slow down and block the passage of, “instead of accelerating” its radical libidinality into something beyond itself, in much the same way that capitalism accelerates our desires for outsides whilst containing any attempt made, through its own mechanisms, to overcome itself.48 Why? Why temper this revolutionary sentiment? In his early notebooks, Nietzsche writes that Christianity “had to be democratised” — that is, stabilised; made static — in order for it to succeed on its quest for world domination.49 This is not a positive process, however. Nietzsche characterises democratisation as a “slow struggle” through which “everything profound, esoteric, accessible to the talented individual [is] extirpated”.50 He concludes that whilst a democratised and universalised Christianity continues to produce an intoxicating “optimism”, making its followers feel good about themselves in their regulated euphoria, “purgatory and κατάστασις” are nonetheless Christianity’s primary creations.51 The question becomes: How can we embrace this need for difference and the new without wholly dismissing the principles we associate with our democracies (even as they lie in tatters)? How can 215

EGRESS we challenge the counter-productive presuppositions of the present moment without opening a door onto that which is “new” only by virtue of the unprecendented nature of its own conservatism? And again, is this not the question that haunts every corner of our politics in the present moment? Nietzsche, Deleuze and others have a concept ready and waiting for just such a question — a concept we are already somewhat familiar with. It is a concept which, in this context, has remained somewhat maligned — although we have already deployed it at length — perhaps due to it appearing to be cloyingly sentimental and earnest. It is the concept of the friend. The friend, for Nietzsche, is a peculiar figure. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes of the friend as that “third [who] prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depths”.52 He continues, however, in almost Machiavellian terms: “If one wants a friend, then one must also want to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be able to be an enemy”; “In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy.”53 The concept of the friend, as it appears in Thus Spoke Zarathurstra, is often characterised as little more than a recurring quirk in an already strange book, and yet the friend takes on a particular resonance in later being associated with the concept of the overman. Nietzsche writes (or rather his conceptual persona, Zarathustra, decrees) that the friend shall be “your festival of the earth and an anticipation of the overman”; “in your friend you shall love the overman as your cause”.54 The overman, in being that goal which humanity sets itself in its own image, its own overcoming, is often taken to be a philosophical call for the utopian transcendence of our present selves into a new nature, but here the overman finds its grounding in the immanence of the friend who is at once already the other and “I”. As Deleuze writes, Nietzsche’s concept of the friend “must be interpreted in a strange way: the friend, says Zarathustra, is always a third person in between ‘I’ and ‘me’ who pushes me to overcome myself and to be overcome in order to live”.55 216

MATT COLQUHOUN Returning to What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari echo this articulation when they poignantly argue that the philosopher, in hoping to produce difference through concepts, must be a friend to the concepts that they both pick up and produce. Emphasising the etymology of the word “philosophy”, they declare that philosophers must always be “friends of wisdom”.56 This is not to say that the philosopher should strive to possess wisdom as an object, but rather to argue that the philosopher might overcome and be overcome by wisdom as an external and socially constituted force. They continue to argue, further echoing this point, that the philosopher is nothing but the “potentiality of the concept”.57 The friend is, then, in this sense, an eerie figure — an absent presence. In being between “I” and “you” and “me” and “them”, the friend does not describe a “person” as such but rather a “conceptual personae”; a hypothetical being of pure thought who arrives from the future; a latent intensity within an “image of thought that will be occupied by concepts”.58 The missing links between the Nietzschean and Deleu­ zoguattarian conceptions of friendship that emerge here are the philosophies of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot — and it is the latter in particular who Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge as the primary source of their conceptual understanding of the friend in this sense. In writing on this Nietzschean figure, Blanchot preempts the apparent paradoxes of Deleuze and Guattari’s own formulation. Blanchot asks, foreshadowing the problematics at the heart of contemporary leftism, if no concept has ever been produced by a democratic conversation between friends, then: “How could one agree to speak to this friend?”59 Having ruptured the common senses by which we understand “agreement”, “communication” and “friendship”, what is left? Are we left alone to crash upon the shores of our own subjectivity? We certainly find ourselves encountering a kind of nihilism as we wrestle with this question, but this should not forestall action. Blanchot continues, in terms that resonate with Mark’s radical rejection of the Vampire Castle: “We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown 217

EGRESS in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement.” In this sense, for Blanchot, friendship is that “relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters.” “This is thought’s profound grief,” he declares. “It must accompany friendship into oblivion.60 Here, philosophies of difference, applied to contemporary politics, find their unground in a solidarity without similarity. To communicate with a friend, as Nietzsche has already demonstrated in his talk of war and enemies, is not to seek the “democratic conversation” that Deleuze and Guattari have previously derided, but it need not be predicated by hostility either. It is instead to engage without presupposition; to communicate through risk; through chance, with chance itself being “a friend who visits his friend, a friend who will be asked back, a friend of destiny whose destiny itself assures the eternal return as such”.61 The implications of such a thought are less complex than we might at first anticipate. Under what circumstances do we communicate with the actual — that is, non-conceptual — friends who we encounter throughout our lives? Certainly not through “universals”, as Deleuze and Guattari term that which we might think of here as “small talk”, in its being governed by common sense and sensibilities. This is not communication but an exchange of predictable platitudes. Instead, to be a friend to someone we must get to know them and then, perhaps, take them somewhere new — a movement reciprocated between beings again and again like a dicethrow. It is a communication that Maurice Blanchot himself would call an “infinite conversation” — a mode of becoming constituted by “an uninterrupted line that inscribes itself while interrupting itself”.62 In the works of Georges Bataille, the nature of this communication is articulated clearly, affirming the inchoate conception of friendship with which this book began. For Bataille, communication is that act of relation which constitutes the battle-ready Nietzschean friend in that it “cannot take place without wounding or defiling”; “cannot take place between one full and intact being and another: it wants beings 218

MATT COLQUHOUN who question being in themselves”.63 This communication “only takes place between two beings at risk — lacerated, suspended, both leaning over nothingness”.64 The risk of communication — that is, the existential risk (whether virtual or actual) that communication casts upon those beings who are engaged with its very processes — is nonetheless necessary and one to be championed. For Bataille, only this risk has “the virtue of exploring very far in advance of the possible, without prejudicing the result, granting the future alone, to its free expiration, the power that one normally grants to taking sides, which is only a form of the past”.65 Here Bataille imbues friendship with a psychedelic dimension. In this sense, communication for Bataille is also antithetical to consensus, and this is emphasised by the wider context of his writings on (and through) Nietzsche, who he emphatically declares to be his friend, demonstrating said friendship through his communication with the concepts of the dead philosopher, whose central enlightening and rupturing gesture — of central importance to Bataille, as a historian and librarian of antiquity, searching for necessarily unsafe passage to the future through his fraught existence in Nazi-occupied France — is his horror at “the idea of subordinating his thought to a cause”.66 With an obvious and tragic irony, it is this horror that Nietzsche’s thought was mired in for so many years, posthumously “democratised” — like the “thought” of Christ himself; ironic considering the Anti-Christ(ian) that Nietzsche always professed himself to be — under the quasi-religious retooling of his “Will to Power”, its intoxicating poison constrained in order to subordinate it to a goal — a micro- and macrofascist goal — by way of his sister’s enamorment to the Nazi regime. Following Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in 1889, from which he did not recover, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, was left to preside over his estate, trawling through his notebooks in order to publish and profit from his posthumously published materials, in particular the best-selling volume of aphorisms, The Will to Power, published in 1901, which she edited under the long shadow 219

EGRESS of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, producing a new version of Nietzsche’s philosophy that aligned with her own (and the Führer’s) burgeoning ideology of National Socialism. In stark contrast to Förster-Nietzsche’s appropriations of her brother’s writings, Bataille is a friend to Nietzsche by virtue of the fact that he picks up his thought and takes it somewhere new that nonetheless resonates with Nietzsche’s own philosophy — an approach that Deleuze would also exercise as he mined the footnotes of an otherwise canonical understanding (but an often unfashionable version) of the history of philosophy, which he would infamously probe through “a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception … taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet at the same time monstrous”.67 It is a kind of friendship predicated on an understanding which nonetheless eschews any attempt at producing a philosophical consensus through the consolidation of the thought of a singular and deceased philosopher, made distinct from the multiplicity of their own life as it was lived. This same friendship must be retained today, and in this book specifically, wrestling with the unfinished thought of Mark Fisher. Inevitably, after death, the multiplicitous becoming of one is transformed through historiography into a consensual understanding — a transition, as we have seen with the American West, that is difficult to undo. In this sense, Bataille cannot claim to always be in agreement with Nietzsche — he is rather a wanderer who takes Nietzsche as his shadow. Nietzsche, in this sense, is a man that Bataille knows he can never truly know — unable to subsume him within himself and his own thought — but who he nonetheless carries with him. He allows Nietzsche to guide him in his own self-overcoming, by being before the man who is no longer with him, in turn leaving “Mr. Nietzsche” behind, just as Nietzsche himself did.68 It is here that we can return to our discussion of contemporary fascism, the problematics of which find their encapsulation in debates around the productivity of communicating with one’s 220

MATT COLQUHOUN enemies. However, the writings of the philosophers considered here bring another — often ignored — question to the fore: How good are we really at communicating with our friends? We must ask this of ourselves more frequently: What is it to be a friend? It is a question in which another question, that of how to be an enemy, is also already enfolded. What is it to ground a politics on this figure of an elusive interval between selves and insert this eerie friend into our contemporary discourses? Maurice Blanchot, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in What Is Philosophy?, is an exemplary friend to the concept in this regard, but he would later find himself as an enemy to many others. The establishment of these relations was gradual and they would perpetually shift and change shape over the course of his lifetime. For instance, it might surprise us to learn that, according to his biographer Christophe Bident, the young Blanchot of the 1920s and 1930s began his intellectual career contributing to the far-right neomonarchist journals produced by a crowd of emboldened French nationalists. In his writings from this time, Blanchot seemed “to have had a single goal: restoring the glory of French culture, which in his eyes had grown corrupt, had perhaps even disappeared.”69 It was this focus on a revitalised national culture that Blanchot believed could establish a new collective subjectivity and forestall the terror that seemed to linger on the horizon, albeit emphatically from the right rather than the left. However, when the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany became increasingly well-known to the world at large, and fascism more generally began to spread like wildfire from Italy across the continent, Blanchot soon discovered that his views were becoming increasingly incompatible with a new European far-right. As Bident explains, summarising Blanchot’s convoluted politics and his shift from the right to the left: Having initially been motivated by Catholic, traditionalist reasons directly related to his family upbringing, he adopted positions that were more and more radical, privileging antidemocratic, 221

EGRESS antiparliamentary, and anticapitalist rhetoric, occasionally of limitless violence, under the tutelage and influence of [journalist and essayist] Thierry Maulnier. But he was also the friend of [Jewish ethicist] Emmanuel Levinas, and he lived in close relation to nationalist Jews like Paul Lévy. He shared their struggle against the resistable rise of Hitler, denouncing at a very early stage the first work camps, state totalitarianism, antiintellectualism, warlike morality, and the mythology of organic community, all of which were prevailing across the Rhine. He quickly grasped Hitler’s threat to the Europe of nations, but his fervent anticommunism forced him to adopt strategically dubious and even — as he would later recognise — irresponsible positions in diplomatic and military terms. He sought out all ways of preserving peace and deplored the successive climbdowns by international organizations and national governments, inviting a humanity “always driven by the candid and boastful nobility of a better future” not to forget “the laws governing its difficult condition.” Over the years, the increasing speed and pressure of events exploded the fragile cohesion of activism on the far right. This made Blanchot choose between the two groups that he frequented. He refused to spend further time in the company of certain anti-Semitic, fascist, radicalized, and protocollaborationist circles…70 As alien as this mention of anticommunist views may seem to the man we have discussed here so far, what grounds Blanchot’s thought throughout his life is a commitment to the impossibility of “community”, arguably as desirable to the right as to the left. Everyone hopes to find a sense of belonging, but it was Blanchot’s explicitly future-oriented politics that would later cement his communist position. Just as Bataille wrote of “exploring very far in advance of the possible, without prejudicing the result, granting the future alone, to its free expiration, the power that one normally grants to taking sides, which is only a form of the past”, Blanchot’s reactionary nostalgia for some “original” French community was 222

MATT COLQUHOUN abandoned in the hope of channeling a new people to come. This is to say that it was precisely this reorientation towards the future that would necessitate his leftward — and explicitly communist — turn. As Blanchot moved away from the nationalist circles he was initially well-known within, he nonetheless retained his love for literature — a subject matter to which he had increasingly dedicated his column inches in the journals of the far-right. It was this fascination with literature that initially brought him closer to Emmanuel Levinas, who remains famous for his ethical writings on the philosophical relation between Self and Other. It was this friendship, in particular, that would have the most positive influence on Blanchot’s thought. Bident notes how Levinas recognised with admiration, despite their initial political differences, the way that Blanchot “carried out a ‘double gesture’” that would resonate with his own approach to being if not to politics.71 For Levinas, echoing the philosophical outsideness we have already discussed here at length, Blanchot embodied “a questioning carried out from within literary thought or writing, a place inaccessible to philosophy itself; and an absolute affirmation, a rallying cry for the necessity of philosophy, in a context in which it was threatened institutionally and epistemologically.”72 There is a clear thread that links this internal quest for out­ sideness to the sort of comradeship that the two thinkers would exercise for the duration of their lives, and a comradeship that he would also establish with the likes of Bataille and Nancy. Emphasising this, Bident writes of their “immediate desire for friendship, in spite of and in place of political opinions (which is to say: the positions adopted regarding cultural belonging and the space it required, the community it made possible).”73 If Blanchot already contained a communist striving within himself, Levinas is no doubt responsible for pulling it out of him and triggering his eventual radicalisation since it is Levinas’s thought that far more explicitly “demands that ‘the transformation of convictions’ be thought of without any reference to compromise.”74 For Blanchot, his convictions were certainly transformed but he 223

EGRESS would not compromise on the importance of our being-together. His philosophical friendship with Levinas was essential to this, because, as Blanchot came to understand all too well, only friendship “alone can justify this absolute, can force us to glimpse the permanency that lies beyond change.”75 This sense of friendship is unpopular today, at a time when the stakes are seen as too high for many to have any patience for those that might otherwise threaten (or, at best, be intellectually complicit in the destruction of) alternative ways of life — and rightly so — but too many are dismissed for thoughts that simply contain the seed of such a threat, with no acknowledgement given to the fact that this seed is present and often dormant within all of us. Levinas’ relationship to his initially problematic friend, as Bident continues, was exemplary of another form of friendship that did not give up on a person by judging their opinions to be set in stone. He saw the best in Blanchot and brought it out of him. Bident writes: Levinas describes a Blanchot ignorant of himself, learning about himself, who would learn to recognise his aristocracy in forms different from the — imaginary — ones he inherited. The Blanchot of 1926 was a Blanchot without oeuvre, but able to impress, elevate, agitate, be insubordinate: everything was already there, everything would find its ways, but slowly, with difficulty, erratically. This slowness would respond to the demand not to judge, not to judge immediately, to know how not to be satisfied with immediate judgement, and to know how to move beyond one’s everyday life, one’s automatic opinion, one’s agitated blindness, to move beyond these by way of an unending quest which, confronting the real (thanks to the demand of friendship and the hard work of writing), would also eventually come into being. This quest allows one to approach being by way of thought, by way of a harsh apprenticeship in the most sovereign worldviews and their endless assimilations. When this apprenticeship is complete, when these worldviews have been fully absorbed and invested with a decisive experience, they can 224

MATT COLQUHOUN finally be critiqued and filtered by a now indefatigable personal approach, strengthened by this long faux pas, more assured due to its past mistakes and in turn with the events of current History.76 This patience, this investment, this gift of friendship that asks for nothing in return, and which suspends judgement until after friendship’s own maturation, would influence the pair’s philosophies in countless ways. For Blanchot in particular, his formulation of the concepts of friendship and communication, under Levinas’ influence, necessitated a trajectory towards a communist thinking that constantly inscribed and interrupted itself. Despite this, it is likely that Blanchot would remain an uncomfortable figure for the political left were he still alive today, but, in being a friend to him nonetheless, even now, we may find that his thought ruptures our presently consolidated political identities in newly productive ways. Perhaps it would be useful for us to affirm here that the philosophical concept of the friend shares much in common with the political concept of the “comrade” — although the political baggage that this word perpetually carries with it dissuades us philosophically from doing so. Indeed, whilst the discourses of communism have wholly engulfed this term, they can ultimately take no ownership of it. Comradeship, like friendship, is a relation which gives itself as a goal. It is in this sense that the communist, like the philosopher, must be a friend to the concept in overcoming and being overcome by it. Echoing the terms by which we have defined the friend, the comrade becomes that founding goal on which communism itself as a movement has been built.77 However, it is also the concept which communism, in its historically derided state-forms, first forgets. Because, like the friend, the comrade is not a universal — which is all that the state seeks to produce in order to give form to itself and the loyalty of its people. Blanchot writes on the concept of 225

EGRESS communism explicitly in these terms — terms that are speculative and open-ended. Faced with such a challenge, all is not lost to nihilism — even though an encounter with nihilism is, for Blanchot, “irrefutable, but an irrefutable nihilism does not suspend the play of needs for men as a whole”.78 This is to say that, if we hope to overcome capitalism through its foundational, processual attempts to account for the never-ending quest to satisfy our needs — a process which capitalism, in its own self-interest, always wants to extend and perpetuate without resolution in its primarily purgatorial mode — then, of course, all the capitalist foresees in a post-capitalist future is a people “deprived of truth, of values, of ends”, but such a people will nonetheless “continue to live and, in living, continue to search and to satisfy their needs, thus continuing to keep alive the search’s movement of relation to this necessary satisfaction”.79 Here Blanchot articulates the inevitability of communism, due to the fact it represents a desire that capitalism cannot ever fulfill. The great paradox of capitalism, in this sense, is that it must necessarily lead to its own demise if it remains true to its raison d’etre as a system that seeks to satisfy all our needs. The indeterminacy of this future-oriented position is not symptomatic of cowardly indecision but rather necessitates our ethical encounter with Bataillean risk, Nietzschean morality and a communal psychedelia. As Bataille wrote of his friend Mr. Nietzsche, his “doctrines are strange… in that one cannot follow them”.80 Nevertheless, Bataille would also refer to Nietzsche as the prophet of “new paths”.81 We may not be able to follow him but he may still open up new avenues for us to explore. This was Nietzsche’s intended legacy, in seeking to write “untimely meditations” — meditations out of time for future use. Perhaps this is how Marxism itself must also be rethought and extended today, far beyond its cloistered home in academic discourses. Mark seemed to be on cusp of just such an extension — an extension of the concept of communism as well as an extension of a reinvigorated hand of friendship. After all, no communism worth 226

MATT COLQUHOUN having is likely to survive the current entrenchment of individualism in our politics. As Mark argued in that most controversial of essays, capitalist realism is individualism. He writes: The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour… Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures. The actual ruling class propagates ideologies of individualism, while tending to act as a class… it pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity’, while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold… What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear — the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned.82 It is in this sense that Mark’s inchoate pursuit of an acid communism was dependent on the eradication of the Vampires’ Castle. It was dependent on a collective joy that could overcome our mutual fear; a solidarity without similarity; an understanding of ourselves as the multiplicities we otherwise hope to see in the world. The concept of “acid communism” itself is not exempt from such an understanding. Its continued relevance for our futures is dependent on it being put to use in such a way. Like so many of his neologisms, Mark’s “acid communism” encapsulates a crisis of disambiguation, perpetuating the indeterminacy of the task ahead and hurling a provocation into our midst. The phrase has garnered considerable attention since his death as many have wondered what kind of variation on Marx’s manifesto might be occasioned by this new corrosive qualifier. In truth, acid communism resists definition in refusing to be consolidated into a form of desire, instead speaking to a renewed desirability for a presently indeterminate post-capitalist world, eschewing the “realism” that capitalism perpetually insists upon. The word “acid” in particular, invoking industrial chemicals, 227

EGRESS psychedelics and various sub-genres of dance music, emphasises this uneasy promiscuity. With so many uses and instantiations in various contexts, it is as difficult to cleanly define as “communism” itself in the twenty-first century. This textual promiscuity is no doubt what attracted Mark to the concept, but this has not stopped recent attempts to concretely define it in his absence. Jeremy Gilbert, a former collaborator of Mark’s, has led the way, writing a number of articles that turn acid communism into a one-dimensional and purely affirmative project, seeking the rehabilitation of mid-twentieth-century countercultural utopianism. In an article for the New Statesman, for instance, Gilbert writes on the word “acid” in particular and the ways in which it still connotes “the liberation of human consciousness from the norms of capitalist society [as] a desirable, achievable and pleasurable objective” today.83 Whilst Gilbert has routinely affirmed his own influence on Mark’s work, much of the tension of his legacy, for Gilbert explicitly, comes from his ability to transduce the ideas of others far more succinctly and libidinally than they themselves were perhaps capable of. Gilbert was evidently an influence on Mark’s later work but he was not the only one. We can also find much of what is present in The Weird and the Eerie in the writings of Justin Barton, the sonic concepts of Ghosts of My Life can be found in the writings of Simon Reynolds, and the politics of Capitalist Realism in the writings of Jodi Dean and countless others from the leftist blogosphere of the mid-2000s. This is not to insinuate Mark was a plagiarist, as Gilbert’s writings have barely stopped short of doing. He was, more than anything, an exemplary friend to concepts, dragging shared thoughts into new directions and formulations. This is particularly evident in his apparent appropriation of Gilbert’s own psychedelic socialism, with the differences between Gilbert’s summaries of Mark’s work and Mark’s own writings being made only more clear in Gilbert’s posthumous documentations of his own thought’s development. Returning to Gilbert’s comments on Mark’s use of the word “acid”, we can ask ourselves the following questions: Is the liberation 228

MATT COLQUHOUN of human consciousness from the norms of capitalist society desirable? Certainly. Achievable? Possibly. But pleasurable? For Mark, not always; not essentially. In returning to the potentialities and questions more readily associated with the 1960s and 1970s, acid communism was to be a project that went beyond the pleasure principle. It was not only a project for the joyful recuperation of the counterculture’s lost potentials, but also the expression of a desire for an experimental (rather than prescriptively utopian) leftist politics that sought to deal with, once again, the traumatic failures of past attempts at revolt and reform. As Mark acknowledged in so many of his writings, this requires an understanding of the fact that to disturb normality is inherently disturbing, but “terrors are not all there is to the outside”. Acid communism is, then, a project for seeking the outside of sociopolitical hegemony in line with Marx and Engels’ own formulation. They themselves wrote how “communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things”.84 In the introduction to Acid Communism Mark quotes Michel Fou­ cault, who was cautious regarding the grounding of present analyses in a politicised historicity, in line with the queer becoming he saw as essential to any future subjectivity. He explains that the challenge now is “not to recover our ‘lost’ identity, to free our imprisoned nature, our deepest truth”, but instead “to move towards something radically Other”.85 This Other is the spectre that Marx and Engels first conjured out of European history; for Herbert Marcuse, it was “the spectre of a world that could be free”.86 What haunted Mark was a similar notion: a collective subject that has long been desired but still resists instantiation. Here a spectre is not what is left of something dead or lost. It is atemporal; an “eerie entity”, representing both a failure of absence and a failure of presence. It is desire without absolute lack. For Marx, “desire” in this sense is so often inseparable from the commodity. It is never without object. On the very first page of Capital, quoting Nicholas Barbon, Marx defines it in a footnote: 229

EGRESS “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body.”87 In The Communist Manifesto, however, desire becomes insatiable and speculative. Marx and Engels instead choose to affirm the affects of desirability on a new capitalist subject, writing: “In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.”88 The production of politics has had much the same effect on us as subjects, eroticising desire, launching it into unknown and forbidden lands; beyond borders, boundaries and limits. Pleasure becomes, in contrast, fatally associated with the familiar. Acid, in its promiscuity, allows this speculative desire to flow back through communism in both new and forgotten ways. Writing in 1977, Gilles Deleuze offers the most succinct summary of how such a desire functions, explicitly in contrast to Foucauldian “pleasure”. He writes: [T]here is no subject of desire, and no object either. The objectivity of desire itself is only its flows. There is never enough desire. Desire is the system of a-signifying signs out of which unconscious flows are produced in a social-historical field. Every unfolding of desire, in whatever place it may occur, such as a family or a school in the neighbourhood, tests the established order and sends shock waves through the social field as a whole. Desire is revolutionary because it is always seeking more connections.89 In this way “acid” is desire, as a corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come. 230

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No narrative, no destination: Ardkore is an intransitive acceleration, an intensity without object… Does this disappearance of the object of desire, this intransitive intensity, make Ardkore a culture of autistic bliss? … It’s a quest to reach escape velocity. Speed-freak youth are literally running away from their problems, and who can blame them? — Simon Reynolds, “Technical Ecstasy” Come on, you cunt, let’s have some Aphex acid! — Aphex Twin, “Cock/Ver10”

ACID 16th May 2017 I answer the door to the postman and he hands me a small package that has been sent unprompted by a friend from Twitter. I open it and find a small badge inside featuring a graphic designed by Glasgow-based artist David Coyle. It is a logo for acid communism — an ingenius amalgamation of the Soviet Union’s iconic hammer and sickle and the smiley face so heavily associated with the E Generation of Nineties rave culture. Around the outside of the bright yellow badge is the phrase: “My house is your house and your house is mine.” The immanent euphoria of “acid” as a corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, as well as the instantiation of a politics to come, is 233

EGRESS exemplified by so much music categorised by that name. Indeed, the politics of the Acid House scene in particular exemplified communist relations in their time. House music, and the “acid house” phenomena that followed in its wake, supposedly took its name — although there are many reports to the contrary — from the “houses” that were central to gay clubs and ballrooms in the US following the disco explosion of the 1970s. These houses provided an amorphous home to all those excommunicated by society for their sexual orientations and atypical gender identities, engaging in voguing competitions during which contestants would celebrate themselves and their looks within a world that was otherwise violently hostile to their chosen modes of self-expression, learning how to be and — most importantly — how to survive in this world under the guidance of their inimitable house mothers. In the seminal documentary Paris is Burning, which documents the vogue scenes of 1980s America, drag queen Pepper LaBeija explains that these houses were like families “for a lot of children that don’t have families”, but here the concept of family in itself is given a new meaning. “The hippies had family and no one thought nothing about it,” LaBeija continues. “It wasn’t a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grew up knowing as a family — it’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.” In his book Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds explores how “acid” later became more readily associated with the new house sound that was emerging out of Chicago in the 1980s, pioneered by musicians and DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Larry Heard. Reynolds notably cites the peculiar and paradoxical “desolate utopianism” that was expressed on tracks such as Heard’s afrofuturistic “Distant Planet”, released under the moniker Fingers Inc., echoing the fraught optimism of so many of House’s original communities. The history that Reynolds plots over his book’s mammoth 450 pages paints a picture of the scene’s perpetual development that echoes one particular instantiation of the “acid” of acid communism, charting a path of desolate utopianism that stretches from the 234

MATT COLQUHOUN psychedelic Summer of Love to the cybergothic dance music genres of jungle and darkside that were so loved by the Ccru. He writes about how acid, as a particular strain of that once-common countercultural sentiment of escape, offered opportunities for social egress to so many around the world. These dance music scenes were “like a secession from normality”, he writes, “a subculture based around what Antonio Melechi characterizes as a kind of collective disappearance”.1 Interviewing journalist and early raver Louise Gray, Reynolds reports how, for her, one of the things she found so exhilarating about these dance music scenes was the sense in which “there was this whole society of people who lived at night and slept during the day. This carnival idea of turning the ordinary world completely on its head. Like slipping into a parallel universe, almost.”2 It’s hard to imagine this world now. Reading Reynolds’ book in 2017, I was grateful to have caught a glimpse of its dormant potentials in contemporary London nightlife — one of the benefits of being a full-time student that I missed (and now miss again) — nonetheless under threat from state suppression. The insatiable desire for secessionary excursions that these scenes epitomised was often both personal and collective. Individual desires were amplified through their communal channelling. Now, however, even for a writer working part-time in this unforgiving city, that parallel universe feels like it is open only to the few. It is of no surprise that the death-spiral of the city’s cyclonic capitalist currents continues in its attempts to erase any and all portals to this other world, no matter their constitution. The importance of cyberspace re-emerges here, so central to my own generation, the post-rave generation, for creating new parallel universes that today seem to be sharing the same fate as the clubs before them in being considered dangerous spaces where many may find a transgressive exit from capitalist temporalities. In the aftermath of the government’s infamous war of rave, Reynolds’ 1998 prediction that these fractal dance music cultures would eventually succumb to the state suppression and lead to 235

EGRESS a scene that is a ghost of its former self has unfortunately been vindicated. The never-ending nostalgia machine of dance music compilations continues to proliferate across the UK whilst, across the pond, corporate dance music reigns supreme. There is, of course, a strong undercurrent of contemporary dance music subcultures that continue to push boundaries despite this reality but, at the same time, we cannot say these worlds constitute the same egress for the many that they once did. They are as increasingly precarious as we are ourselves. What I find interesting about this cultural upheaval, nevertheless, is how house has remained constant. This is not necessarily in reference to the genre itself and its sonic influence, although it remains a mainstay, but rather that strange and paradoxical ethos of a “desolate utopianism”, of familial and familiar strangeness, of nomadic domesticity, echoing the “eerie” as Mark defines it in its continuing failures of absence and presence. The chorus of Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s 2011 “electro house” megahit, for instance, “we found love in a hopeless place”, perfectly encapsulates this eerie sentiment that today seems both maligned and pop-culturally ubiquitous. Exploring this acidic eeriness today, there is perhaps no better starting point than the cyclonic drives towards various forms of egress that perforate the extensive discography of Richard D. James, better known by his main moniker Aphex Twin. Since his beginnings in the early 1990s to the legendary status he holds today, James’ music has always represented the corrosion of pop-culturally dominant musical forms through an underdog persona, distorted through his inexhaustibly experimental sensibilities. Writing on James’ 1991 track “Isoprophlex” in Energy Flash, Reynolds comments on its “chemical-formula title and astringent sound [which] suggests a nasty corrosive fluid, the kind whose container carries warnings like ‘avoid inhalation’ and ‘irrigate the eye area immediately, then seek medical help.’”3 The corrosive nature of all of James’ music will be familiar to even the most casual of dance music fans. The music video for his 1997 single “Come to 236

MATT COLQUHOUN Daddy” — the sight of which was my first encounter with Aphex Twin when he was regularly featured on the music television channel Kerrang! in the 2000s, despite the channel, at that time, being best known as the home of nu-metal — is exemplary of James’ sonic disintegrations. The video version of the track in particular, with its extended ambient intro, is a mixture of all of James’ sonic modes somehow made pop. The same can also be said of the music video for his 1999 single, “Windowlicker”. How strange that Aphex Twin’s best-known music videos would base themselves, respectively, on a London council estate and the streets of Los Angeles when so much of his oeuvre was built, as Reynolds writes, on the foundational narrative “of an extremely abnormal childhood in the remote coastal county of Cornwall”.4 In this way, his particular brand of Aphex acid is far richer than the qualities most readily associated with Aphex Twin overall. Early instrumental slabs like “Isoprophlex” aside, much of James’ bestknown material creates an acidic sensibility that is in line with Mark’s, with its complex moods, atmospheres and outsides. These sonic outsides are, of course, instances of a folded and mutated inside. The music videos for “Come to Daddy” and “Windowlicker” exemplify this again — near-offensive parodies of real-life cultures and communities, other to James’ own; the exaggerated imaginings of an outsider, an armchair traveller taking multisensory detours on an otherwise wholly sonic adventure. The sights seen through James’ caustic window are as ecstatic as they are nightmarish. The video for “Windowlicker”, in particular, is perhaps the most disturbing example as James cavorts throughout a sub-Hollywood fantasyland populated almost entirely by his own — now ubiquitous and iconic — mutated visage. The “desolute utopianism” and philosophies of house music previously discussed are distorted most radically on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album Drukqs. Whilst its title is phonetically suggestive of recreational chemical abuse, albeit mutated as if typed up on a prepared typewriter, not unlike the prepared pianos James is now well-known for utilising, what is central to the album is, in fact, 237

EGRESS an eerie domesticity. James has insisted that the album’s title is a made-up word, with no reference to drug use intended, but it nonetheless represents the output of hallucinated sonic practices — hallucinatory in Mark’s sober Spinozist sense.5 Furthermore, the album’s title echoes the seemingly unpronouncable Cornish vernacular that makes up so many of his track titles. Cornish itself is a resurrected and reconstructed language, once-extinct, that insists on being reimagined, giving aural form to a subcultural identity underpinned by a formerly suppressed regional consciousness. This alien domesticity, central to house ever since Larry Heard’s surreal entanglings of distant planets and washing machines, is taken to new extremes by James, who regularly samples his own voice as well as the voices of his immediate family. James’ father Derek, for instance, is famously present on the track “4” from 1996’s Richard D. James Album, interrupting James’ sonic experiments (apparently taking place inside an army tank — where else?) with an inquisitive “… Richard?” James’ casual response — “Yep” — signals the end of the vocal motif, perforating an accelerated music production and jarring with its crypto-junglist unfamiliarity. Whilst this familial presence may be common to much of James’ music, it is most explicit on Drukqs. The track “Lornaderek”, for instance, is a recording of an answer phone message left by James’ parents wishing him a happy 28th birthday. Later, on the track “Taking Control”, the sound of James’ voice uttering the words “I’m taking control of the drum machine” — processed through a vocoder, disintegrating all recognisable markers of vocal subjectivity with a technology originally developed for use in espionage, for reaching the outside without betraying one’s own identity — gives way to James’ mother, Lorna, shouting after him and his father. “Derek!”, “Richard!” and other names once again perforate the sonic outsideness at various intervals. It feels like a song put together during one particularly manic and dysfunctional Christmas Day, folding within itself the electric atmosphere of the family home during the holidays and an adolescent desire to creatively escape it. James’ records are, in this way, like records made by a manic agoraphobe — or rather, someone 238

MATT COLQUHOUN so fixated on the inside that it becomes the only way out, accelerating hardware and breakbeats through a homemade supercollider until he ruptures outwards into the abjectly familiar. All this is juxtaposed with James’ acidic brand of musique concrète. Drukqs, in particular, is home to the sound of whips, a game of squash, the dragging of heavy metal chains across a floor, a woman’s screams. If these sounds are in fact present or not, it is hard to say with any certainty, but these are the various aural images that come to mind intermittently over the course of the album’s deterritorialising ninety-minute-plus duration. Is there a better aural instantiation of Mark’s “inside as a folding of the outside” than this? An album that mixes the sounds of the family home with those more readily associated with a BDSM dungeon or a communal sports hall, splintered across the temporal wormholes of studio dub practices and Erik Satie-esque prepared piano compositions? Most tellingly, the writer David Toop once described how the warp travel that Richard D. James’ music occasions, “surfing on sine waves”, would lead a lost generation of “young boffins out of the computer screen glow of their bedrooms into the public domain of clubs, shops and charts, then back in and out of more bedrooms in a feedback loop of infinite dimensions”.6 Quoting from an interview Toop conducted with James, James notes how he has always liked music that sounds “evil or eerie” and, indeed, on Drukqs especially, Aphex Twin exemplifies an unheimlich acid. Mark’s thoughts on Freud’s unheimlich — and his subsequent unpacking of the weird and the eerie from that too often misused concept — are worth emphasising here in detail. He writes in The Weird and the Eerie: Freud’s unheimliche is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange — about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself. All of the ambivalences of Freud’s psychoanalysis are caught up in this concept. Is it about making the familiar — and the familial 239

EGRESS — strange? Or is it about returning the strange to the familiar, the familial? Here we can appreciate the double move inherent to Freudian psychoanalysis: first of all, there is estrangement of many of the common notions about the family; but this is accompanied by a compensatory move, whereby the outside becomes legible in terms of a modernist family drama.7 Here the radical nature of the unheimlich folds itself inside acid’s various spatial paradoxes, remaining true to the introduction of unfamiliar synthesiser presets that became synonymous with the dance cultures of voguing houses for the homeless who won prizes for how well they could convince their peers of their “realness”. No wonder conservative governments have sought to exorcise the terror occasioned by the egresses associated with such paradoxical sonic practices, as they rupture the micropolitical institutions they hold so dear. Subcultures, as Kodwo Eshun declared in his memorial lecture, may “gather people into gatherings” through the alterity occasioned by these aesthetic experimentations, but the collective rapture of a rave or gig nonetheless, as described by Julia Bell, remains second to none. The importance of the journey from a strange domesticity to the outside of cultural nightlife and back again should not be underestimated. Each trip encapsulates a moment of rapture that echoes, in the minds of conservative reactionaries around the world, the fear stoked by the drumming and chanting of the Cthulhu rave that Inspector Legrasse would encounter in the woods on the outside of town in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Thatcher’s war on rave in the 1980s and 1990s was borne of this same fear of collectivity, of crowds, and of radical friendships. In his essay “Baroque Sunbursts”, Mark described the aims of Thatcher’s specific cultural crusade against rave’s egresses as threefold: pursuing “cultural exorcism, commercial purification and mandatory individualism”.8 Taking its title from the final paragraph of Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic — in which Jameson writes of egresses that appear before us as if seen by “a 240

MATT COLQUHOUN diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one”9 — the essay is one of Mark’s best, encapsulating perfectly an undertone inherent to his inchoate acid communism by eruditely connecting the forced suppression of the jouissance of rave culture with the long-term effects that Marx had famously prescribed to capitalism’s “primitive accumulation”. Here, rave culture becomes another example of a sensibility that capitalism creates but cannot but obstruct. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque”, Mark suggests that rave culture was the latest in a long tradition of flashpoints of lumpenproletariat excess and expression. Just like the carnival and the fete before it, the rave is another form of collective euphoria that the bourgeosie have always sought to repress. This is not to define this scene as “some archaic revival”, however. Rave culture was an atemporal “spectre of post-capitalism more than of pre-capitalism”.10 Its political radicality came from the ways in which it “was in tune with those unconscious drives, which, as Marcuse put it, could not accept the ‘temporal dismemberment of pleasure [and] its distribution in small separate doses’”.11 Beyond the embodied collectivity of this movement, the very durational nature of music most obviously lends itself to a collective becoming in this mode. Rapturous trance-inducing DJ sets, spanning hours, days, whole weekends, provide an thalassic basis onto which a crowd can collectively — albeit momentarily — anchor itself as a synchronised throng of dancing bodies is given over to the sonic and chemical waves of euphoria that such circumstances provide space for. The DJ, the selector, the facilitator provides the ground on which collective experience can take place. The same can be said of the band leader. The likes of Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Miles Davis are first to come to mind, along with the post-punk figures that Mark loved such as Ian Curtis, David Sylvian, Mark Stewart or Mark E. Smith — band leaders around whom a world is allowed to orbit, a new world other than the one we know. As figureheads of collective movements, they hold open an egress for their band members and fans to tumble into. 241

EGRESS There is also a sense in which all of the theoretical and pedagogic work of Mark Fisher was the output of a frustrated musician; as a band leader without a band — although he was no stranger to being in bands himself in his younger days, of course. Five years prior to the release of his aforementioned 1999 12” of “death garage” and “kata jungle” that Kode9 had played at Corsica Studios, Mark had been a member of the band D-Generation. Simon Reynolds himself writes about them in a 1994 issue of the music weekly Melody Maker, emphasising the experimental nature of their popmodernist psychedelia, writing that, for them, psychedelia “means abusing technology … and today that means fucking with samplers and sequencers, not guitars”. In another issue of Melody Maker from that same year, Reynolds would describe the band again in a way that foreshadowed the cultural alchemy that Mark’s writings have now become so well-known for, in particular the sentiments of his Popular Modernism module, a favourite amongst undergraduate art students at Goldsmiths for years. “Popular Modernism” was Mark’s term for the avant-garde sensibility of representing both mainstream and margin. He was a persistent advocate for a pop culture that was unashamedly and adamantly experimental, embodying a mode of cultural production that could conjure egresses from the circumstances of its own xenogenesis, and this was obviously true for Mark the musician also. As Reynolds writes: We need real modernism, not mod revivals. So let me introduce: d-generation. As the name suggests, their music is informed by, but also a swerve away from, the music of the E Generation: “the corrupt modernism” of dark techno, jungle, ambient and ragga.12 Reynolds later adds that the band call their sound “psychedelic futurism, techno haunted by the ghost of punk”. Mark was evidently fated to a problem from this time onwards which he would carry with him for the rest of his life. 242

MATT COLQUHOUN Adding to a long list of questions I still have for Mark, I wonder to what extent being in bands explicitly informed his later politics, beyond the sonic hauntographies of his mid-2000s mode. Music was an obvious influence, but what about the experience of being a musician? 18th September 2016 In his 2016 book Into the Maelstrom, David Toop writes that unlike “solitary artists”, those in bands “have to ‘live’ with each other”.13 Any desired creative “revelations” — and we might add that this is the case for political ones also — “only unfold when thoughts of the personal are put aside in order to discuss feelings from within the maelstrom”.14 Bands are, in themselves, consciousness raising groups, with all the impetus put on cultural production rather than cultural deconstruction. Toop explicitly describes these moments of unfolding as instances of egress brought about through an “oscillation between conscious awareness of group activity, a highly concentrated sense of self and the repercussions of external forces and other time frames, all of which contribute to the generation of music”.15 Toop’s assessment of “solitary artists” is slippery here. He himself is a “solitary artist”, and a writer at that — is there a mode of cultural production any more solitary? — but he also frequently collaborates with others as a familiar face on London’s improvisation circuit. Towards the end of the summer in 2016, having just arrived in London to begin my postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths, overwhelmed by the city but nonetheless eager to adjust to its speed, having arrived fresh-faced from the relative cultural isolation of Kingston-Upon-Hull, I had brought with me a “bucket list” of bands and musicians I promised myself I would see at the first opportunity. I would cross off every name on that list within a single month. David Toop had been very close to the top of that list, and I had the pleasure of seeing him perform in the basement of Hoxton’s 243

EGRESS Hundred Years Gallery in mid-September. Four musicians were present that day: Toop, Sylvia Hallett, Billy Steiger and Douglas Benford. Over the course of three and a half hours the four musicians would rotate into different configurations, engaging in sonic conversations with one another, pushing any understanding of a musical “call and response” to its limits. It was like bearing witness to an avant-garde speed-dating that would gradually build into a performance by a new collective subject, a newly-acquainted quartet, creating a singular soundscape in which their previously distinct voices would be beautifully subsumed within one another. A year later I would think about this sonic conversation again as I sat and watched an exchange of a very different kind. 17th December 2017 Clicks and pops fill a grand theatre whilst two armchairs sit empty centre-stage. A hat stand, bare, can be seen towards the back of stageleft. The whole scene is bathed in a thick blue fog. I’m waiting for Leyland Kirby to “perform” as the Caretaker at London’s Barbican. 244

MATT COLQUHOUN Just before the house lights are turned down inside the auditorium, I am handed a CD by an usher featuring an instantly recognisable painting by Kirby’s frequent collaborator Ivan Seal. I turn the cardboard sleeve over in my hands to find the following dedication on the reverse, barely legible in the low-light: “Take care. It’s a desert out there…” in memory of and for Mark Fisher remembered by The Caretaker Thinking of Mark then, with the familiar sound of the Caretaker now filling the auditorium, something happened: Two middle-aged men walked out across the stage, pitching themselves in the previously empty armchairs and sharing a small bottle of what I presumed to be whiskey. One of the men, I was fairly certain, was Leyland Kirby himself. His iconic mess of hair is hard to miss even when looked down upon from such an altitude. The other man I couldn’t place. From my vantage point, high up in the stalls, he could have been anyone and yet I couldn’t shake the odd sensation that he looked like Mark. As the music played, probably-Leyland would, on occasion, rise from his low armchair and mime along to some of the more memorable vocal samples featured repeatedly throughout his oeuvre. Then he would sit down again and, whilst the hazy hallucination of a half-remembered life poured over the enormous screen behind them, they would chat silently amongst themselves. As the performance progressed, the periods of inanimate silence between the two grew shorter and shorter until they seemed to be two people lost in conversation in a bar, oblivious to their surroundings yet nonetheless inaudible over them. I later learned that this figure was none other than Ivan Seal, whose paintings of strange imagined objects have long adorned Kirby’s album covers. Seal’s free-associative and improvised approach lends itself well to capturing the positive side of the Caretaker’s otherwise melancholic project. Whilst the horror of a degenerative 245

EGRESS disease like dementia underscores much of the project’s output, Seal’s covers depict the more positive and generative side of memory loss, with half-remembered ormanents and bric-à-brac taking on newly psychedelic forms, like flower arrangements from another world — another example of a psychedelic domesticity. The sight of Kirby and Seal in conversation from high up in the rafters of the Barbican’s main hall provided its own vision of an alternative present with impossible memories tapping into an unconscious wish-fulfillment drive. I left the theatre feeling like I had watched Kirby have one last spirited conversation with Mark, and it was a pleasure to have done so. 11th January 2018 It is this function of music — whether experienced collectively or individually — to perforate the present moment and generate alternatives that makes it such an important undercurrent of Mark’s political writings. Indeed, considering all that we have discussed here so far — all of the disparately unshareable experiences of various peoples and communities — it is music most 246

MATT COLQUHOUN explicitly and effortlessly that builds bridges between subjects whilst, at the same time, rupturing immediate circumstances to let the Outside in. In 2018, I would find this potentiality crystallised in a familiarly affecting way. I read an article for the online metal magazine Invisible Oranges by the American musician Phil Elverum, better known by his monikers the Microphones and, currently, Mount Eerie. The latter project found a much wider audience in 2017 with the release of his eighth studio album under that name, A Crow Looked At Me — a solitary and diaristic singer-songwriter affair on which Elverum writes with a raw honesty about the grief of losing his wife, the musician and illustrator Geneviève Castrée, to cancer in 2016. The first verse of the first song, “Real Death”, lays out the paradoxes that the album intends to explore with a heart-wrenching but also almost humorous frankness, attending to the ironies and contradictions of death felt so closely by those that keep on living. He sings: Death is real Someone’s there and then they’re not And it’s not for singing about It’s not for making into art When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb When I walk into the room where you were And look into the emptiness instead All fails My knees fail My brain fails Words fail The album hits like a sledgehammer, transposing the tandem representations and obliterations of Elverum’s ever-shifting inner experiences. Subject matter aside, the album is, in some ways, a return to an older performance style for Elverum, whose output over the previous ten years had been increasingly shaped by the sonic influence of one-man US black metal — big guitars, big bass, 247

EGRESS big drums, all played to create a sound far bigger than one might think possible by a single musician — encapsulating that genre’s very particular variety of sonic solitude, distinct from that of your typical singer-songwriter in its attempted sonic gutterings of the ego. However, in the article for Invisible Oranges, Elverum writes how, following the death of his wife, he had struggled with his love of this aesthetic darkness, particularly in its original Norwegian form. How does that nation’s most infamous music scene, defined by deathobsessed, satanist-LARPing, church-burning, murderous teenagers, hold up to any scrutiny under the light of an experience of Real Death, he wonders. Elverum writes: In a lot of ways, the defining aspect of this music for most people, its “evil”ness or whatever, is not something I think about at all. It seems so clearly a joke or a performance. Even with the early Europeans who killed each other, I don’t see them as evil but just confused and carried away. The black is just a costume. It’s Halloween. It’s cool, I love Halloween. But also honesty is important to me, and there’s something embarrassing and facetious about that performative darkness, living in it too much.16 Then, reflecting on the day of his wife’s funeral, Elverum ruminates on his decision to play the song “Prison of Mirrors” by the one-man US black metal band Xasthur as loud as he can before her memorial service takes place. Following his immersion in Xasthur’s “shredded screaming, extreme sorrow”, he says that, then, “the room felt ready”. It felt like “ah, yes, this is the use of this music. This is the moment, once in a lifetime hopefully, or maybe never in a lifetime for people who are fortunate enough to avoid experiencing devastation like this, this is the moment where music this extreme can tear through the veil of the difficult present moment and reveal something beyond.”17 248

MATT COLQUHOUN The article articulated the vast potentialities of all music to instantiate an egress better than I ever could. Similarly, beyond the melancholic joys of disco and house, and the hard-to-define sonics of David Toop and the Caretaker, I found myself embracing Mark’s Gothic mode after his death. Sharing an affinity with the melancholic music he would so frequently write about, I nonetheless worried, like Elverum, about living with his darker texts too much, in case it appeared as though I was romanticising what happened to Mark and the abject suffering of his personal depression. Just as Elverum had wrestled with his love of black metal, the mode of Mark’s that I’d always enjoyed the most now appeared inevitably facetious. However, I found that Mark’s own work — The Weird and the Eerie especially — provided a vector of intensity through which to navigate the difficult then-present moments of 2017, 2018 and 2019, and reach into something beyond. For instance, Mark’s essay “Practical Eliminativism” articulates an almost cosmic pessimism like that encapsulated by the sounds of black metal. Here, Mark treats “death” as a line in the sand of experience, and nothing more. It is Mark’s “astropunk” sensibility writ large. Yes, Mark the Spinozist might have argued for a freedom from sad passions, but this cannot be, as he wrote on the infamous Hyperstition blog, “the end of the story if it is at the price of a ‘happy’ passivity, a blank-eyed disengagement from all Outsides, as all (your) energy is sucked up by the ultimate interiority”.18 Joy, in this sense, echoing the sentiment of DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, cannot be accepted if it is only a passive shield of enforced mindlessness against suffering. We know this already. I’m sure none of us are under any illusions that the sheer English repressiveness of a “Keep Calm & Carry On” attitude is anything but the epitome of a forced and petrified happiness. To quote Mark once again, the sentiment of this wartime nostalgia — because only the British could find a way to be nostalgic for wartime — makes the price of passive cultural happiness — “a state of cored-out, cheery Pod people affectlessness” — the 249

EGRESS “sacrifice of all autonomy”.19 But does this mean we have to revel in horror? No, I don’t think so, but horror is certainly this thought’s most effectively affective mode. Horror is a libidinal short-circuiting towards action, towards fight and flight, towards rebellion and emancipation. It is our horrors that haunt us, as Gilman-Opalsky wrote, and necessarily so, but this is not to will bad things to happen. Nevertheless, when bad things inevitably do happen, in some form or other, we must find ways to affirm their horror, “to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event”, as Deleuze wrote, beyond the prescribed responses of the capitalist state, and there find glimpses of a further beyond: a new communism. 8th August 2019 Recently seeing Mount Eerie perform at the Hackney venue EartH in the summer of 2019, I was touched to hear Elverum play a variety of new songs, many of which were evidently written by a man who had found the outside of a moment he had previously documented so immanently. For the Mark of the early 2000s, this sort of immanence to emotional experience was paramount to his writings and other modes of cultural production. He writes in “Gothic Materialism”, a 2001 essay published in Pli, Warwick University’s journal of philosophy: “It is not a matter of speaking the unspeakable, but of vocalising the extra-linguistic or the non-verbal, and thereby letting the Outside in.”20 In this way, it is precisely the speculative aesthetics of a life before death, with all the horror and strange humour of its absurdity, that can assist us as we reach beyond ourselves and the abject interiority of a neoliberal and capitalist subjectivity. “Death” needn’t be an end for those that bear witness to it — rather it is a cognitive challenge that forces us to engage with a necessarily difficult thinking that can only ever be speculative until we are ready to throw off, as Mark writes, the “petty repressions and mean confines of common experience”. 250

MATT COLQUHOUN This mode of thinking is not just the navel-gazing of a depressed and dejected contemporary subject. It is a thinking echoed in the thought of Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker and Thom van Dooren in their writings on the possibility of thinking extinction, whether our own or that of another species. If we are to re-engage with the end-of-the-world thinking that Mark made his name writing about in Capitalist Realism — that is, the suggestion that “the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism” — then we have to confront collective death at the same time as collective joy. Both are increasingly necessary for thinking about and challenging the politics of our time, from economic austerity to the implications of wide-spread mental ill-health, from artificial intelligence to new materialisms, from the climate emergency to an expanded speciesconsciousness. Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, in light of all this, becomes a pulp-modernist fable of exit from the restrictive (now metaphorical) corsets of a moralising and — most importantly, for Lindsay — gendered subjection, enforced under the preparatory pretensions of Australia’s well-to-do high society. Mark’s essay “Practical Eliminativism”, which sees him wearing his more explicitly philosophical hat, likewise tackles the subjective capture of high modernity at the absolute limit of experience itself. Whilst its talk of Kantianism and subjectivity might frighten off the more casual reader, what Mark is discussing here has become a central concern of pop culture in recent years, as we have already discussed at length. In The OA and The Walking Dead — or, alternatively, Game of Thrones, the return of Twin Peaks and various other shows — we have seen these same questions and their stakes played out in innumerable ways, where the questions of another world and another life are two-fold, each encompassing the other, with the end of the world and the death of the individual held up as interscalar contingencies rather than absolute limits. It is my view that Mark’s own death shouldn’t undermine his thinking in this way but should intensify the necessity of its immanence for thought. It is necessary 251

EGRESS to recognise all that happened to Mark, all that led to his death, and to render it impersonal, as he would have done, and as we have attempted to do here, against all the obstacles to an instantiation of an acid communism that depends on wholly new and radical friendships between peoples; on a solidarity without similarity. As Mark writes in a blogpost from 2009: “Dejection is not an extreme state so much as a generational condition, as invisible as it is ubiquitous, sometimes treated as a medicalised disorder, sometimes condemned as a depoliticised apathy, often not acknowledged at all, but normalised as an existential horizon of lowered expectations and minimal hope.” We must ask ourselves, as he did, gazing out onto such a horizon: “What can politics learn from the perspective of the ‘abyss that laughs at creation’?”21 What can a politics of collective dejection learn from a desire for collective joy? 252

Now I understand the rule. They can’t be anywhere that’s marked out, enclosed: even if I opened the doors and fences they could not pass in, to houses and cages, they can move only in the spaces between them, they are against borders. To talk to them I must approach the condition they themselves have entered; in spite of my hunger I must resist the fence, I’m too close now to turn back. — Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

AN AFTERWORD — A LESSON In ten years’ time, we may find that there are entire shelves in bookshops around the world dedicated to the life and works of Mark Fisher. When the editing process of this book began, I was informed that it was likely to be one of, if not the, first book of secondary criticism on Mark’s work out in the world. At the time, this felt like an inordinate amount of pressure to place on a book that had not been written with such lofty aspirations in mind. The process of writing this book had always been personal, functional and therapeutic. It is a para-academic’s neurotic attempt to work through grief in the only way he knows how. The prospect of shifting this book’s existence into another, far more public mode — even though this was a process I instigated for myself — was immediately surreal and far more so than I could have ever anticipated. Any comment made on this book’s fraught gestation is not intended to undermine the function of the book as it enters its final pages but to affirm the multiplicity with which it is explicitly concerned. It is a book that must embody the becomings it attempts to describe, and this must include an acknowledgement of its own nature as a text that attempts to grapple with an inexpressibility, a multiplicity of positions and a still unfolding experience. As such, it has never been the intention of this book to inaugurate a cottage industry of pop-philosophical interpretations of Mark’s work. It has instead been an attempt to marry together unfolding thoughts, always inchoate, with the experiences that have orbited them and, in the process, to provide an insight into a moment and a body of work that has found itself subjected to a concretisation that seems antithetical to its own impulses. 255

EGRESS Nevertheless, Repeater Books’ Tariq Goddard, who first read and edited this book, warned me explicitly that, in agreeing to take it on, with Mark’s name stuck to it and with Repeater publishing it, we would have to consider the ways in which this book would be seen to be an authoritative account of Mark’s life and work by those reading it, as a resource for learning about this man, his life and his death, regardless of my own and this book’s often acknowledged fallibility. Despite its calls for a “calling into question” of itself and its subject, we had to make sure that everything within this book was right; that its message was clear and grounded and the gaps between its facts and speculations were well accounted for. Tariq’s comments on my initial manuscript in this regard were honest and inspiring, but there were various sections of biographical information he sought to correct, at least in my mind if not on paper. There was no changing events as they had happened or how I had experienced them, but it was illuminating for us both to discover the other lives we had lived over the years throughout which this book had been written — lives and experiences which did not always coincide with our individual perceptions of “the facts”. For instance, Tariq informed me of some details about the last year of Mark’s life that I had not previously known and which ungrounded what I had taken to be certainties instead of grief-ridden interpretations of hearsay and hard-to-understand circumstances. My own view of Mark’s death was not the only experience challenged, however. Tariq himself had not considered the surreality of learning about Mark’s death via tweet, and we laughed, in hindsight, three years on — what else was there to do? — when we considered, once again, from yet another fresh perspective, how truly bizarre the situation of Mark’s death was for all of us. This surreality has not gone away. I suspect it never will. In fact, as the years go by, our ever-changing circumstances only get stranger, the further removed they are from the once immediate event of Mark’s death. This is to say that Mark’s death is not something that 256

MATT COLQUHOUN we are living through in the same way we once were. Grief has been transformed back into banality and, as in many experiences of grief, an acknowledgement of this fact can be as disturbing as the initial rupture. In particular, it is worth acknowledging here that so much of what I had learned from those who knew Mark at Goldsmiths was called into question by Tariq and, once again, there was no avoiding the parochialism of my own community’s flawed basis at the university. In this regard, one of the most contentious aspects of this book was — and perhaps will remain — the centrality of Goldsmiths in this regard. With so many of the biographical details I learned about Mark’s life having come from my involvement with that institution, I have learned, since leaving it, that the view taken by the students and staff there of the school’s role in Mark’s life and death was not shared by others who knew him in other contexts. This has called the very function of the institution into question once more, as a site of both trauma and pedagogy. Its presence brings various questions typically associated with grief to the fore in new ways: What sort of “lesson” is there to be learned from something so subjective and experienced in such an infinite number of ways? What if we don’t want to “learn” from this? What if we can’t? Phil Elverum, for instance, discussing the ways in which he explored his wife’s death through song, has repeatedly described his desire to write about his experiences as frankly as they have unfolded for him and the pressure of learning from this constantly unfolding experience remains a potent question for him. He asserts that he wants to write about his wife’s death with no “poetry involved. Just describing it.” He continues: That opened up for me the idea of I don’t have to interpret this. I don’t have to make it pretty or find wisdom in it at all. It’s okay to just describe what happened, then leave it at that. There’s no lesson.1 257

EGRESS Since the rupture of Mark’s death occurred, for me at least, specifically within the halls of Goldsmiths, this desire for no lesson is not so easily sidestepped. Indeed, this book was written precisely to find wisdom and meaning in the absence of an academic understanding — not to romanticise the experience through a cascade of references but to find new ways of being in the midst of a situation that undid them; that undid the very function of the university as a site of learning. Such questions were even harder to avoid when it was controversially suggested by some, no doubt due to the shock of grief, that the university may have had a hand in worsening Mark’s mental condition. The institution was already in the midst of a wellpublicised mental health crisis — during which time Mark’s suicide was, tragically, just one of a number that haunted both students and staff — my thoughts here are with the friends and family of Seowoo Chang, a Visual Cultures student who took her own life in late 2018 — and so it seemed, for many, that the suggestion that Goldsmiths was in part responsible was not much of a stretch. However, this argument was later refuted emphatically by Mark’s wife, Zoe, who has always insisted on its special place in his heart. It 258

MATT COLQUHOUN is perhaps because Mark loved his time there so much that he cared so deeply about the ways in which it functioned, hoping to apply the sprawling implications of his thought to his most immediate of communities. The negative perception of the university’s handling of its mental health crisis was, after all, fuelled by a collective memory of Mark’s own institutional critiques and the ways in which he would stoke this criticality in others, both students and staff alike. Because, above everything, Mark loved his students and he loved being able to inspire new generations to explore the world around them; to refute its apparent lack of contingencies, whether facing down the abstract nature of global capitalism or the bureacracy of daily existence. This is, in part, the initial reason for this book’s existence, having started its life as a 15,000-word Master’s dissertation. This fact deserves further attention here. A text’s journey from institutional requirement to bookshop commodity is often left unacknowledged by many tomes of this kind. It is not an uncommon trajectory by any means, but most institutional stamps are wholly erased by the time a book reaches the shops. This book’s continuing relationship to the institution from which it was born is worth affirming here precisely because it was the very nature of neoliberal education that this text first sought to undermine; it was an attempt to connect a local experience to a global reality and vice versa. However, over the months following Mark’s death, there was a persistent and ever-growing anxiety at Goldsmiths about the extent to which the grief felt by our community could be allowed to disrupt the machinic processes of “Higher Education”. After all, people were spending a lot of money to be there and did not want it to go to waste. Furthermore, as horrible and traumatic as this event was, not everyone was affected by it, and so there was a feeling in some corners of the administrative staff that the fallout of Mark’s death should be, to some extent, contained to special events and unofficial group therapy sessions. The anger felt in that moment was difficult for many not only to articulate but also for others to listen to. Such a 259

EGRESS compartmentalisation could function in various ways — for instance, as a coping mechanism for those who were most affected, or as a way for those not affected to be able to get on with their studies unimpeded. Those of us angry at the mere suggestion of an administrative solution to the emotional aftermath of Mark’s death became, for a time, labelled as “disruptive” and we were vocal in our further anger at being dealt with so dismissively. Nonetheless, to some extent this label was accurate. We were driven by a desire to protest and to disrupt the day-to-day functioning of the institution because if we did not make our voices heard at that moment, when could we? The academic year, particularly for postgraduate students on one-year courses, was short. We were horrified by the idea that anything similar could happen again and that present modes of learning would continue once we left, undisturbed. In 2018, I thought about this again, six months after graduating, following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The circumstances were familiar. A gunman had walked onto campus and opened fire on its staff and students, killing seventeen and further injuring seventeen more. Whilst our experiences were hardly comparable, I felt that the responses to the activities of the surviving students, who emerged as the international faces of an embolded student activism movement, echoed all that we had felt within our own university. As more students across the country went on strike over the nation’s gun laws, proposing combative new legislation, there was a common response from both politicians and educators that these activities were directly inhibiting student learning as it was meant to be faciliated by the school as an institution. The suggestion seemed to be that this was not a moment to be learned from; that these events were not pedagogic opportunities for the communities that they affected. We have since seen various other examples of these kinds of educational ruptures, occasioned by staff and student strikes alike, at home and abroad, related to workers’ rights and the climate emergency, during which teaching does not stop but rather radically 260

MATT COLQUHOUN changes shape. Greta Thunberg, the Swedist teenager who has become the face of a global climate movement, has found fame protesting in precisely this manner, with her one-woman school strike spawning further school strikes in cities around the world. With this in mind, the centrality of teaching — of pedagogy — to the notions of community and consciousness raising we have discussed here are worth emphasising anew, in both their immanence and accessibility, above and below the extremities we have repeatedly described. Here so many of the demands placed on the word “community” by such events remain central to our experiences of the modern school, college or university, as spaces that must always be ruptured for creativity to take place within their walls (even when, as at Goldsmiths, the school itself indirectly instigates the rupturing). In their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten ask, with such alternatives models of teaching in mind: What is the true work of the modern university in this regard — or rather, what should it be — and what is the university’s social capacity for producing a certain fugitivity from its own controls? They write that it is “not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project”. Nevertheless, we must affirm the grounding of our initial coming together. They continue that it is always “teaching that brings us in”. “Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals”, they write, “there is the experience of being taught and of teaching”.2 Harney and Moten go on to describe a “beyond of teaching”: a social praxis of pedagogy that does not simply transmit knowledge to the consumer-student but encourages the instantiation of an acephalic community of independent thinkers; the community of a shared secret that is fugitive to bureaucracy. As poetic and Blanchotian as this sounds, it is an experience common to many, particularly within the humanities. We might ask ourselves: How 261

EGRESS much is learned in the classroom compared to the pub after class? In my experience, particularly as a graduate who still lives in the orbit of a university, the latter continues to trump the former. It is in this sense that the “community” of any given university is not only something worked towards but rather something experienced in itself, outside of regulation — the kind of community that Nancy and Blanchot have respectively referred to as “inoperative” and “unavowable”. It does not exist for the sake of networking or profit or climbing the ladder of industry — the pursuits of the individual — but for the sake of a way of being that requires the instantiation of a temporary collective subject in order to sustain itself. Jason Kemp Winfree, discussing “community” in the thought of Nancy, Blanchot and Bataille, writes that community “is not, therefore, an extant division or willed unity within the social order, but a configuration of luck and chance where one being opens onto another and is what it is only through this opening”.3 It is a community “constituted in the overlapping of wounds, the sharing not only of what cannot be shared, but the sharing of a suffering that is neither mine nor yours, a suffering that does not belong to us, but which gives us to one another, and in doing so both maintains and withdraws the beings so configured”. This community is, for him, “an exhilarating affirmation of chance, the will to be what befalls it but that its will could never produce”.4 The word “suffering” looms large here as something abject in its negativity, but it speaks to a wider experience that is folded within life itself; within the good and the bad; the trivial and the profound. From debt and dissertation stress to pub nights and casual study sessions, from class trips and clubbing to the political uncertainty that looms outside the institution in the world at large, from new friendships to deaths in our midst, from the communities at Goldsmiths to communities at schools around the world and beyond, each experience and communal constellation is only able to exist through the necessity of navigating these various trials and 262

MATT COLQUHOUN triumphs together, starting with pedagogy and moving continuously towards its outside. With this book being an explicit product of this process, we must acknowledge that it is a book that does not simply want to document the world and be cold to it. It rather aims to make a world for itself to live in beyond itself. A world that — as the institution itself was forced to do — must let the Outside in. 263

Lately there’s been a serious rise in the pressure A tension so visceral we have to take serious measures Listen how the voices speak a merciless din Twisting up the secrets that tomorrow will bring Through science we find alliance to endure reality Creating blinding lights of fiction as our only clarity Marked by the memories of a future past It’s the begining not the end that we have to reach last It’s a dangerous game to flex with forces untamed Like trying to capture matter for political gain To plan an escape, relate and penetrate Through the abstract secrets lying in wait Strange as it may seem but secrets never come clean The levels are complex, the facts more extreme Dream lines multiply to an infinite point Twisting like a narrative trying not to disappoint — Kode9 and the Spaceape, “Glass”

AN ADDENDUM — AN EGRESS 16th October 2019 At the time of writing, I still live in New Cross, minutes from the university where I first experienced so much. I still linger around its corridors and classrooms. I still go to the pub with my friends, former lecturers and fellow alumni. I still go to the k-punk mural. If it was not already apparent, because of all this, Egress has been a difficult book to let go of and end, precisely because the community remains; the experience continues. The present experience of this book’s publication inadvertently signifies the traumatic closure of something that was, initially, never meant to be closed. It is a product of the collective struggle and thinking that it hopes to descibe. This is a struggle that, even now, has not yet ended and I hope it never will. Maurice Blanchot, ending his book The Unavowable Community, perhaps in a similar state of mind, asks if his thoughts have been worthwhile and I ask myself this question too, given that each time we have talked about any particular community’s way of being, “one has had the feeling that one grasped only what makes it exist by default.”1 I feel like there is nothing else I can do here but defer, once again, to Blanchot — not only out of a frustration that comes with an inexpressible feeling, experienced for the first time, but because the multiplicity of voices found within this book, quoted briefly or at length, also constitute a community of which I can only wish to be a part. In this sense, it is necessary that other voices are allowed to intrude and rupture these pages.

EGRESS Blanchot asks, on the final page of his own book, and I am implored to repeat the question: “Would it have been better to have remained silent?”2 Reading his words, my own answer to him is clear: not at all. Having first come across Blanchot’s book in the library at Goldsmiths, I have carried it with me constantly as the instigator of an egress that created a passageway between education and work, between grief and joy, between solitude and community. His questions of and for community — unique in every instance in which they appear — must still be asked, as he says himself, so that they may be entrusted to others, not that we may answer them but so that we can carry them with us, and, perhaps, extend them. It is here, in these requisite extensions, that the true “work” of the beyond of teaching and thought and writing and being, and being-together, reveals itself. Hopefully, as you hold this book in your hands, and close it, it will nonetheless appear as a worthy testament to this sentiment. I hope, more than anything, whether physically or mentally, you carry it with you. 266

IMAGES All photographs were taken by the author, unless otherwise stated. A portrait of Mark on display at the wake in Kodwo Eshun’s kitchen. 21 The doorway into Kodwo’s kitchen, the day before the wake. 22 The doorway to Mark and Kodwo’s office at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Capitalist Realism poster affixed shortly after Mark’s death, January 2017. 25 The k-punk mural, Goldsmiths, University of London, February 2017. 26 The red pill and the blue pill. Still taken from The Matrix.49 A banner for Grenfell at Notting Hill Carnival in 2017. 54 Neo has a visitor; Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation. Stills taken from The Matrix.61-62 A diagram of grief-space, drawn by Lucy Wallis and surrounded by her notes from Kodwo Eshun’s Geopoetics seminar. 78 The cover of Joy Division’s 1978 debut EP, An Ideal for Living. Image taken under fair use from Wikipedia. 96 The Extinction Rebellion logo. Image taken under fair use from Wikipedia. 112 The I’itoi. Image taken under fair use from Wikipedia. 165 Kode9 on the decks at Corsica Studios. 186 Kodwo Eshun delivers the inaugural Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture in Goldsmiths’ Ian Gulland theatre, January 2018. 188 The walk home from Peckham to New Cross following for k-punk. 189 267

EGRESS Dancers at Consciousness Razing, SETspace, Dalston, 2018. “Acid Communism — The Spectre of a World That Could Be Free.” Text projected onto the wall of a pub in north London, at a night celebrating Mark organised by Laura Grace Ford in 2017. Acid Communism and k-punk badges, worn at my graduation ceremony at Goldsmiths in December 2017. From left to right: David Toop, Sylvia Hallett, Douglas Benford and Billy Steiger in the basement of One Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, 2016.  Leyland Kirby and Ivan Seal converse silently on stage at the Barbican in 2017. The entrance to the Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2017.  268 193 231 233 244 246 258

ENDNOTES The Fisher-Function 1 @RepeaterBooks. Tweet. 14 January 2017: <https://twitter. com/repeaterbooks/status/820272612303667200> 2 The Fisher-Function was organised by Lendl Barcelos, Ashiya Eastwood, Kodwo Eshun, Mahan Moalemi, Geelia Ronkina and myself. For more information on this lecture series, you can visit: <https://fisherfunction.persona.co/> 3 Mark Fisher, “k-punk and I”, k-punk, 9 December 2009: <https:// k-punk.org/k-punk-and-i/> 4 Mark Fisher, “Psychedelic Reason”, k-punk, 19 August 2004: <https://k-punk.org/psychedelic-reason/> 5 Robin Mackay. “Mark Fisher Memorial.” Urbanomic: <https:// www.urbanomic.com/document/mark-fisher-memorial/> 6 Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)” in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), ed. Darren Ambrose. London: Repeater Books, 2018, 766. 7 Ibid. 8 Georges Bataille. Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall. New York: State University of New York Press, 2014, 9. 9 Jean-Paul Sartre, “A New Mystic” in Critical Essays (Situations 1), trans. Chris Turner. London: Seagull Books, 2010, 276-277. 10 Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Stuart Kendall, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015, 81. 11 Ibid., 174. 12 Georges Bataille. “The Labyrinth” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University 269

EGRESS of Minnesota Press, 1985, 172. 13 Maurice Blanchot. The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988, 9. 14 Mark Fisher. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016, 28-29. 15 Mark Fisher, “Psychedelic Fascism”. 16 Mark Fisher, “Psychedelic Reason”. This is likewise an insight echoed in Bataille’s previously discussed book, Inner Experience, in which an acknowledgement of the absurd truth of material existence can give way to newly “sacred” experiences for the questioning subject. 17 Mark Fisher, “Psychedelic Fascism”. 18 Today, we can note how the recent publication of Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019) — a book which supposedly grew outwards from the titular phrase’s online virality and existence as a meme that spread across the world — amongst various other examples, including the legacy of Mark’s unfinished writings — shows that communist dreams have never died and many have gone some way towards rehabilitating the promises of the movement within the popular imagination today — all of which demonstrates how communism’s promise of a new life has not and perhaps never will be subsumed by its recurrent state-sponsored political deaths. 19 Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Confronted Community”, trans. Jason Kemp Winfree, in: The Obsessions of Georges Bataille, 20. 20 See: Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2006. 21 Mark Fisher. “Good for Nothing”. The Occupied Times. 19 March 2014: <https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841> 22 Mark Fisher. “Abandon hope (summer is coming)”. k-punk. May 11, 2015: <http://k-punk.org/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming/> 23 Maurice Blanchot, “On One Approach to Communism” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford 270

MATT COLQUHOUN University Press, 1997, 94. Into The Weird 1 J.K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 5. 2 Ibid. 3 Mark Fisher. “What is postcapitalism?” Lecture, Postcapitalist Desire. Goldsmiths, University of London. Monday 7th November 2016. Mark had previously written on these pathologies himself, and in far greater detail, in his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life, constructing a sprawling cultural history of our present dejection. In this earlier work Mark, like Gibson-Graham, describes this melancholic subject as “a depressive who believes he is realistic; someone who no longer has any expectaton that his desire for radical transformation could be achieved, but who doesn’t recognise that he has given up.” See: Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, 23. 4 Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009, 17. 5 Adam Howlett, “Renowned writer and k-punk blogger Mark Fisher from Felixstowe took own life after battle with depression”, Ipswich Star, 18 July 2017: <https://www.ipswichstar.co.uk/ news/renowned-writer-and-blogger-from-felixstowe-took-hisown-life-after-battle-with-depression-1-5111679> 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Mark Fisher, “Why mental health is a political issue”, The Guardian, 16 July 2012: <https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue> 9 Ibid. 10 Mark Fisher, “Good For Nothing”, The Occupied Times, 19 March 2014: <https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841> 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 271

EGRESS 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Wendy Brown. “Resisting Left Melancholy” in Boundary 2. Volume 26, Issue 3. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, 19-20. Mark Fisher. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, 6. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber, 2011, xxv-xxvi. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 328-329. Deleuze, Coldness & Cruelty, 18. Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1. Oakland: University of California Press, 2012, 16. DOI: 10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16 Simon Reynolds, Retromania, xiii. Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See: Rob Waugh, “What is ‘Accelerationism’, the belief followed by New Zealand terror attacker?”, Metro, 18 March 2019: <https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/18/accelerationism-belieffollowed-new-zealand-terror-attacker-8930673/> Andy Beckett. “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in”, The Guardian, 11 May 2017: <https://www. theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-afringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in> Pete Wolfendale, “So, Accelerationism, What’s All That About?”, Dialectical Insurgency, 3 August 2014: <https://deontologistics. tumblr.com/post/91953882443/so-accelerationism-whats-allthat-about> For an in-depth breakdown of Accelerationism’s more recent offshoots and controversies, I would point the reader to a 272

MATT COLQUHOUN 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 popular blogpost of my own on this topic. See: “A U/Acc Primer”, Xenogothic, 4 March 2019: <https://xenogothic. com/2019/03/04/a-u-acc-primer/> Mark Fisher. “Postcapitalist Desire” in What Are We Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto, eds. Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio. London: Pluto Press, 2012, 18. See: Roisin Kiberd, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Boring Dystopia’, the Anti-Facebook Facebook Group”, Vice, 22 December 2015: <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aekd5j/the-rise-andfall-of-boring-dystopia-the-anti-facebook-facebook-group> Simon O’Sullivan. “The Missing Subject of Accelerationism”. Metamute. 12 September 2014: <http://www.metamute.org/ editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism> Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism, 2. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 124. Mark Fisher. “Terminator vs Avatar” in #ACCELERATE the accelerationist reader, eds. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 339. Ibid., 340. Ibid. Mark Fisher. “Digital Psychedelia: The Otolith Group’s Anathema” in Death and Life of Fiction: Taipei Biennial 2012 Journal. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2012, 160. Andrew Goffey. “Introduction: On the Witch’s Broomstick” in Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, xii. Mark Fisher. “Digital Psychedelia”, 160. Ibid., 166. Ibid. Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work” in The Interpretation of 273

EGRESS 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 Dreams, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books; The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 4, 1991, 381-650. Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism, 55-56. Ibid., 60. Jodi Dean. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics” in Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, ed. Megan Boler. London: The MIT Press, 2010, 104. Jodie Dean. “Communicative Capitalism: This Is What Democracy Looks Like” in Communication and the Economy: History, Value and Agency, eds. Joshua S. Hanan and Mark Hayward. New York: Peter Lang, 2013, 148. Ibid. Ibid. Mark Fisher. “Touchscreen Capture” in Noon: An Annual Journal of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art. Vol. 6: Post-Online. Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2016, 16. Herbert Marcuse. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 7. Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man. London: Routledge Classics, 1991, 66. Marcuse. An Essay on Liberation, 8. Ibid., 9. Mark Fisher. “Unpicking the codes of Ghettoville”. Dazed Digital. 28 January 2014: <http://www.dazeddigital.com/ music/article/18667/1/the-codes-of-ghettoville> Mark Fisher, “Digital Bauhaus Summit 2016: Designer Communism”. Egress. 6 June 2016: <https://egressac.wordpress. com/2016/06/06/digital-bauhaus-summit-2016-designercommunism/> “Red Pill”. KnowYourMeme. 10 May 2017: <http:// knowyourmeme.com/memes/red-pill> Ray Brassier. “Prometheanism and its Critiques” in #Accelerate, 470. Ibid., 469-472. Ibid., 478. 274

MATT COLQUHOUN 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 Ibid. Ibid., 479. Ibid. Mark Fisher. “The End of Emo-Politics”. Manchester Spring. 23 February 2016: <http://www.manchesterspring.org.uk/2016/ 02/23/the-end-of-emo-politics/> Link no longer active. A PDF version of this essay was made available by Natasha Eves in 2017 and can be viewed here: <https://kexchange.wordpress.com/2017/ 03/09/natasha-eves-fresh-new-anxieties/> Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. “The Grenfell Tower Inferno and Anarchism.” London Anarchist Federation. 27 June 2017: <https://aflondon.wordpress. com/2017/06/27/the-grenfell-tower-inferno-and-anarchism/> Friedrich Engels, “Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845”. Marxists Internet Archive: <https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-workingclass/ch07.htm> Mark Fisher. “Good for Nothing”. See: Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 37. Mark Fisher. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1999. Ibid. Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilisation. London: Routledge, 1998, 29. Ibid. Sigmund Freud. “Mourning and Melancholia” in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Penguin Books, 2005, 202. Enzo Traverso. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and 275

EGRESS Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, 45. 85 Judith Butler. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 167-68. 86 Wendy Brown. “Resisting Left Melancholia”, 20. It is from Walter Benjamin that the phrase “Left melancholia” originates. 87 Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, “Introduction” in #Accelerate, 4. 88 Alan Pratt. “Nihilism”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/> 89 Ray Brassier. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, xi. 90 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, 159. 91 Ibid., 159-160. 92 Ibid., 159. 93 Ray Brassier. Nihil Unbound, xi. 94 Mark Fisher. “Practical Eliminativism: Getting Out of the Face, Again” in Speculative Aesthetics, eds. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 102. 95 Georges Bataille. “Transgression” in Eroticism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, 63 -70. 96 David. B. Allison. “Transgression and the Community of the Sacred” in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille, 95. 97 Georges Bataille. “Transgression”. 98 Mark Fisher. “Practical Eliminativism”, 102. 99 Ibid., 105. 100 Mark Fisher. “Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)”. 101 Mark Fisher. “Psychedelic Reason”. 102 Ibid. Reaching Beyond to the Other 1 2 H.P. Lovecraft. “The Outsider” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. London: Penguin Classics, 2002, 43. Ibid., 49. 276

MATT COLQUHOUN 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 H.P. Lovecraft. “The Outsider”, 44. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11-12. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Anna Greenspan. Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine. PhD Thesis. University of Warwick. 2000. See: <http://wrap. warwick.ac.uk/4520/> Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis — The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 146. It is worth noting here, as an aside, that, for Lacan, knowledge of the Real demands “moral action”. He asks: What is it for the psychoanalyst to probe, manipulate and analyse another person’s unconscious desires and drives? Even if, as one would hope, this is done for the patient’s own good? This is an implication that will become more relevant as we continue our discussion of the outside and its relevance to the topic of “community”. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 18. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011, 2. H.P. Lovecraft. “The Call of Cthulhu”, 153. Ibid. Ibid., 128. Ibid. Ibid. See: Lucy Wallis, “Illustrating Grief-Space”, Abyss Diving, 5 January 2019: <https://abyssdiving.wordpress. com/2019/01/05/illustrating-grief-space/> Here Wallis writes about “grief-space”, a term she coined — indebted to the experience of Mark’s death and his book The Weird and the Eerie — to describe “the space, or hole, that is created by absences within a place. It is the notion that something, or someone, might be present through the vacuum created by their absence.” Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, 93. 277

EGRESS 19 Mark’s reappraisal of the 1970s in these terms is not unprecedented and he publicly cited John Medhurst’s That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76 (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014) and Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2012) as major influences on his most recent Acid Communist thought — not to mention the philosophical texts by Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Marcuse, and Irigaray that emerged during that same period in America and Europe following the tandem worker and student uprising referred to as the events of May ‘68. For an in-depth overview of this time, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the May ‘68 movement, see: Richard Viven, The Long ‘68: Radical Protest and its Enemies. London: Penguin Books, 2018. 20 Mark Fisher. “Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)”. 21 That now-familiar new addition to the Fisher lexicon is explored by Mark, as usual, through its pop-cultural instantiations rather than any academic exposition. He writes, for instance, about how “Lovecraft’s stories are full of thresholds between worlds.” He says that “often the egress will be a book”, such as the “dreaded Necronomicon” — a magical grimoire that would make multiple appearances throughout Lovecraft’s tales. Other times the egress is “literally a portal” — a door, a gate, a hole — making “the notion of the between … crucial to the weird.” [See: Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 28.] Although his use of the word “egress” is not expanded upon beyond this passage, it is striking in its unfamiliarity and remains in the reader’s imagination as a name given to a particular mode of paraontological experience. It is a word that is synonymous with “exit”, albeit more commonly used in the 18th and 19th centuries in contexts both nautical and astronomical. Its appearance in a book from 2016 makes the word archaic whilst also exemplifying a twinned relationship between oceanic depths and the vast cosmos, making it an appropriate term to invoke in the orbit of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. 278

MATT COLQUHOUN 22 See: Simon Reynolds, “Renegade Academia: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit”, Energy Flash, 3 November 2009: <http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/ renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html> 23 See: Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 19872007. Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press, 2011. This volume of collected essays does much to fill in the blanks and includes various allusions to Land’s drug-addled mental collapse. See also: Robin Mackay, “Nick Land — An Experiment in Inhumanism”, Divus, 27 February 2013: <http:// divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-iminhumanismus> Mackay’s essay gives an in-depth account of Land’s last days as a lecturer at Warwick University and further contextualizes the abyss into which he dove next. 24 See: Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment”: <http://www. thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nickland/> Wikipedia offers the most succinct definition of NRx thought, taking Land’s essay as its foundation. It describes Neoreaction as “an anti-democratic and reactionary movement [that] broadly rejects egalitarianism and the view that history shows inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment [and] favours a return to older societal constructs and forms of government, including support for monarchism or other forms of strong, centralised leadership such as a “neocameralist CEO” of a joint-stock republic, coupled with a right-libertarian or otherwise conservative approach to economics.” See: “The Dark Enlightenment”, Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment> 25 Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment 26 See: Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972; Mencius Moldbug, “Patchwork: a positive vision (part 1)”, Unqualified Reservations, November 13th, 2008: <http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot. co.uk/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html> 279

EGRESS 27 Nick Land, “Premises of Neoreaction”. Xenosystems, February 3rd, 2014: <http://www.xenosystems.net/premises-of-neoreaction/> 28 Although Mark would splinter off in an entirely opposite direction, we can nonetheless see how the internal logic of this “neoreactionary thought” begins from the same problematics he described through his earlier hauntological thinking. 29 Nick Land, “Outsideness”. Xenosystems, 1 August 2014: <http:// www.xenosystems.net/outsideness-2/> 30 Mark Fisher, “Postcapitalist Desire”, 16. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 17. 34 Nick Land, “Critique of Transcendental Materialism”, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, 626. 35 Ibid., 625. 36 Mark Fisher, “Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the NeoCapitalist Era”, in k-punk, 518-519. 37 Nick Land, “Capital Escapes”. Xenosystems, November 21st, 2014: <http://www.xenosystems.net/capital-escapes> Original emphases removed. 38 Mark Fisher. "Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)". 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 In 2005, Mark would dedicate a k-punk blogpost to Edelman’s “impossible polemic”. He writes, with particular relevance to our discussions: “In Edelman’s analysis, the queer becomes the name for the death drive itself, which as we know from Freud, Lacan and Žižek is not the desire for death, quiescence or calm but, very much to the contrary, that which disrupts all efforts to produce a self-sufficient wholeness. It is what brings death to all systems that tend towards the settled, the unliving force which introduces the Outside into all interiorities.” See: “We Aren’t the World”, k-punk, 26 February 2005: <http://k-punk. abstractdynamics.org/archives/005071.html> 42 Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics: 280

MATT COLQUHOUN 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 The Quest(ion) of Blackness Towards the End of the World”, The Black Scholar, 44, No. 2, States of Black Studies (2014), 81-97. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”, 152-153. John Cussans. Undead Uprising. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2017, ii. Ibid., 76. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 76-77. Ibid., 77. H.P. Lovecraft. “The Call of Cthulhu”, 153. Larissa Romensky, Fiona Parker and Jo Printz. “No picnic at Hanging Rock: Campaign to recognise Aboriginal past rather than ‘white myth’”. ABC News Australia. 17 January 2017: <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-17/campaign-torecognise-indigenous-history-hanging-rock/8187942> Ibid. Georges Bataille, Literature & Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Penguin Classics, 2012, 3. Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher (eds.) Post-Punk Then and Now. London: Repeater Books, 2016, 10-11. Ibid. Ibid. Mark Fisher, “Nihil Rebound: Joy Division.” k-punk, January 9th, 2005: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004725. html> Ibid. Here Mark is quoting from Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso Books, 2009. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community”, 25. Ibid., 27. Ibid. Ibid., 28. Alain Badiou, Our Wound Is Not So Recent: Thinking the Paris Killings of 13 November, trans. Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity 281

EGRESS Press, 2016. 65 Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs Steampunk”, Urbanomic, 2016: <https://www.urbanomic.com/document/cybergothic-vssteampunk-response-to-badiou/>; Nick Land, “Sore Losers”, Urbanomic, 2016: <https://www.urbanomic.com/document/ sore-losers/> 66 Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs Steampunk”. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Nick Land, “Sore Losers”. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs Steampunk”. 73 Nick Land, “Quit”, Xenosystems, February 28th, 2013: <http:// www.xenosystems.net/quit/> Mental Health Asteroid 1 2 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 9. Laurie Penny. “Against Bargaining”. The Baffler. November 18th 2016: <https://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/againstbargaining-penny> 3 Ibid. 4 Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 1. 5 Eugene Thacker. In the Dust of This Planet, 2. 6 Thom van Dooren. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 125. 7 Ibid., 126. 8 Ibid., 131-132. 9 Ibid. 10 Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, 39. 11 Laurie Penny. “Against Bargaining”. 12 Melanie Newton, “Y2paniK”, Digital Hyperstition: <http://www. 282

MATT COLQUHOUN ccru.net/digithype/Y2Panik.htm> 13 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 1. 14 “‘People feel safe when this kind of measure is taken,’ RimSarah Alouane, a doctoral candidate and researcher in public law and civil liberties at the University Toulouse-Capitole, told me. ‘But by institutionalizing the state of emergency, not only are you putting civil liberties at stake, you are not addressing the root of terrorism at all. It gives you the illusion of security, but that’s it.’” Yasmeen Serhan. “Will France’s State of Emergency Become Permanent?” The Atlantic. 11 July 2017: <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2017/07/will-frances-state-of-emergency-becomepermanent/532848/> 15 Mark Fisher. “Megalithic Astropunk.” Hyperstition, 6 February 2005: <http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/ archives/004932.html> 16 John Cussans. Undead Uprising, 252. 17 Mark Fisher. The Weird and the Eerie, 82. 18 Freud writes: “If this were the case, then the vast majority of our psychic processes would need to be accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, whereas all common experience contradicts such a conclusion. The true situation, therefore, can only be that the pleasure principle exists as a strong tendency within the psyche, but is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot possibly always accord with the said tendency in favour of pleasure.” Sigmund Freud. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick. London: Penguin Books, 2003. 47. 19 Ibid., 53. 20 Sigmund Freud. “The Ego and the Id” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, 131. 21 Ibid. 22 Sigmund Freud. The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock. London: 283

EGRESS Penguin Classics, 2003, 124-125. 23 Ibid., 149. 24 Ibid. 25 Sherry Turkle. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Phoenix, 1996, 83. 26 Alyssa Rosenberg. “The ridiculous ending of ‘The OA’ betrays the series’ best idea.” The Washington Post. 21 December 2016: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/ 12/21/the-ridiculous-ending-of-the-oa-betrays-the-seriesbest-idea/> 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Alessandra Stanley. “Oh! Mr. Darcy… Yes, I Said Yes!”, The New York Times, 20 November 2005: <https://www.nytimes. com/2005/11/20/weekinreview/oh-mr-darcy-yes-i-said-yes. html> 31 Alyssa Rosenberg. “The ridiculous ending of ‘The OA’ betrays the series’ best idea.” 32 H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973, 12. Unconsciousness Raising 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Darryl Pinckney. “In Ferguson.” The New York Review of Books. 8th January 2015: <https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/2015/01/08/in-ferguson/> Ibid. Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Mathews. London: Penguin Classics, 2012, 40. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 96. Ibid., 84. 284

MATT COLQUHOUN 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Ibid., 86. Ibid. Ibid., 83. “The events [of Christ’s crucifixion] took place as if the creatures could only communicate with their Creator through a wound lacerating integrity. The wound is wanted, desired by God. […] In the crucifixion man attains the summit of evil. But it is precisely for having attained it that he ceases to be separated from God.” See: Bataille, On Nietzsche, 32-33. Bataille, Blue of Noon, 106. Ibid., 105. Mark Fisher, “How to Kill a Zombie: Strategising the End of Neoliberalism”, in k-punk, 539. Even more accurately, we might point to the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2 — likewise developed by Rockstar Games: the makers of Grand Theft Auto — as being more obviously analogous to the Wild West experience on offer. Mark Fisher, “Sympathy for the androids: the twisted morality of Westworld”, The New Humanist, 30 November 2016: <https:// newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5115/sympathy-for-theandroids-the-twisted-morality-of-westworld> Ibid. Mark Fisher, “Abandon hope (summer is coming)”, k-punk, 11 May 2015: <http://k-punk.org/abandon-hope-summer-iscoming/> Ibid. Wendy Brown, “Consciousness Razing”, The Nation, 8-15 January 1990, 61. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 50. Wendy Brown, “Consciousness Razing”, 61-62. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Here Brown was also drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault in order to critique MacKinnon’s understanding of this 285

EGRESS 26 27 28 29 30 collective feminist practice which limits the underlying process of consciousness raising to a quasi-Catholic mode of confession. As Foucault would write: “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation.” [Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, 60.] This is to say that consciousness raising, as a form of confession, must be vigilant to well-established bourgeois sentiments — sentiments that MacKinnon seemed wholly unaware of her complicity in. We can likewise compare these android CBT sessions to the “base line” tests dramatized in the Blade Runner films that are practiced for very similar reasons, albeit without the safety precaution of a Sleep Mode. In the show’s third season, for example, it is interesting that, during a resistance operation to smuggle children out of Gilead and into Canada, some of the children do not want to or do not understand why they should leave. Mark Fisher, “Sympathy for the androids: the twisted morality of Westworld”. Joanna Radin, “Where Nothing Can Possible Go ‘Worng’”, The New Inquiry, 12 December 2016: <https://thenewinquiry.com/ where-nothing-can-possibly-go-worng/> The introduction of White Hat and Black Hat characters into Westworld provide us with an interesting and twisted double entendre, with these phrases originally coming from Hollywood’s classic Westerns and later being used to refer to computer hackers and those providing a consultancy service in areas of technological security who may reveal flaws in systems for the good of the system itself (White Hat) or for their own benefit 286

MATT COLQUHOUN 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 (Black Hat). Westworld folds these two conceptualisations back on top of each other, with cowboy and hacker becoming one and the same. Joanna Radin, “Where Nothing Can Possible Go ‘Worng’”. Ibid. Clyde A. Milner II, “Introduction” in The Oxford History of the American West, eds. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, Martha A. Sandweiss. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20. Ibid., 603 fn 18. Ibid., 20. For more on this topic, and for its relevance to contemporary philosophy and the legacy of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, I would recommend the writings of Robin Mackay, particularly those on the topic of “geotrauma”. See, for example: Robin Mackay, “A Brief History of Geotrauma” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, eds. London: Punctum Books, 2012. Also available at: <http://readthis.wtf/writing/abrief-history-of-geotrauma/> Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russel. New York: Criterion Books, 1961, 65. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Volume 2 of the Pelican Freud Library, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1973, 105. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula” in: Essays Critical & Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998, 85. Alexander Hamilton, “No. 9: The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard against Domestic Faction and Insurrection” in The Federalist, eds. George W. Carey and James McClellan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, The Gideon Edition, 37. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula”, 86. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken 287

EGRESS 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987, 19. Ibid., 22. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 323. Ibid. These phrases are found throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, most importantly in Deleuze’s book Cinema 2: The Time-Image and the collaborative works A Thousand Plateaus and What Is Philosophy? Mark Fisher, “Sympathy for the androids: the twisted morality of Westworld”. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1968, 12. Ibid. D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1995, 45. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American, 11. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 169. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American, 169. Zack Handlen, “A Symbol Tells His Story on a Heartbreaking Westworld”, The A.V. Club, 10th June 2018: <https://www. avclub.com/a-symbol-tells-his-story-on-a-heartbreakingwestworld-1826709787> Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Acid Western”, Chicago Reader, 27 June 1996: <https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/acid-western/ Content?oid=890861> Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American, 175. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel. Dublin: Dalkey Archive, 1997, 24. Fiedler, The Returning of the Vanishing American, 178. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 186-6. 288

MATT COLQUHOUN 68 Ibid., 182. 69 Leslie A. Fiedler, Waiting for the End. New York: Stein and Day, 1970, 118. 70 Fred Moten, Stolen Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018, xi. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. Friends, Communities & Ghosts 1 2 Mark Fisher, “Touchscreen Capture”. Nina Power. “In Memoriam Mark Fisher, January 13th”. Nina Power: Writings: <https://ninapower.net/2018/01/13/inmemoriam-mark-fisher-january-13th/> 3 DJ Sprinkles, “Midtown 120 Intro”. Midtown 120 Blues, Track 1. Japan: Mule Musiq, 2008: <https://www.comatonse.com/ writings/2008_midtown120blues.html> 4 Ibid. 5 See: “Kodwo Eshun: Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture”, Visual Cultures Goldsmiths, YouTube, 6 February 2018: <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ufznupiVCLs> 6 Natasha Eves and Matt Colquhoun, “Consciousness Razing”, for k-punk: <https://4kpunk.tumblr.com/image/173416002602>. See also: Mark Fisher, “No Romance Without Finance” in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), 419-425. 7 Mark Fisher, “Good for Nothing”. 8 Ibid. 9 “C is for Consciousness Raising”, Plan C, 31 May 2015: <https:// www.weareplanc.org/blog/c-is-for-consciousness-raising/> 10 Mark Fisher, “Good For Nothing”. 11 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts. London: Melville House UK, 2016, 3. 12 Sara Marcus, “Review: An intimate look at a fluid family in Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’”, Los Angeles Times, 30 April 289

EGRESS 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 2015: <https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jcmaggie-nelson-20150503-story.html> Julia Bell, “Really Techno”, The White Review, June 2018: <http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/really-techno/> Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community” in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille, 30. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 54. Ibid., 43. Nancy, “The Confronted Community”, 22. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11. Fisher, “k-punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum”, k-punk, 11 September 2004: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics. org/archives/004115.html> Fisher, “It Doesn’t Matter If We All Die: The Cure’s Unholy Trinity”, k-punk, 3 August 2005: <http://k-punk.org/it-doesntmatter-if-we-all-die-the-cures-unholy-trinity/> Ibid. Nancy, “The Confronted Community”, 23. Ibid., 24. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectres of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below. London: Repeater Books, 2016, 21. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34. See: Mark Fisher, “Practical Eliminativism: Getting Out of the Face, Again” in Speculative Aesthetics, eds. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell and James Trafford. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 91-94. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. London: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2015, 154. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 66. 290

MATT COLQUHOUN 34 See: Simon O’Sullivan, “The Production of the New and the Care of the Self” in Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, eds. Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke. London: Continuum, 2008, 91-103. 35 Simon O’Sullivan, “Friendship as Community: From Ethics to Politics” in Takkekortet: The Written Acknowledgement. Arhus: Rum46, 2004, 20. 36 Ibid., 21. 37 Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, openDemocracy, 24 November 2013: <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/> 38 Ibid. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 251. 40 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 6. 41 Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 171. 42 Deleuze & Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 6. 43 Deleuze comments on the nature of this difference between concept and process throughout many of his writings. For instance, ending his second book on cinema, he writes that a “theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others.” It is through this same sense of a giving-rise-to that Deleuze understands political philosophy. See: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 287. 44 Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment. 45 Thomas Biebricher & Robin Celikates, “Saying ‘We’ Again: A Conversation with Jodi Dean on Democracy, Occupy and Communism”, Critical Legal Thinking, 6 November 2012: 291

EGRESS 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 <http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/11/06/saying-weagain-a-conversation-with-jodi-dean-on-democracy-occupyand-communism/> Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Revised Student Edition, 2007, 19. Ibid. Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche. Writings from the Early Notebooks, eds. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, trans. Ladislaus Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 14. Ibid. Ibid. The exact meaning of κατάστασις, in this context, is unclear but the translators suggest in an accompanying footnote that it connotes a sense of orderliness or of everything being in its right place. This non-Greek speaker’s own attempts at translating the word find it invoking the words “state” or “situation” and so I am interpreting the word as referring to a kind of “stasis”. However, the translator’s confusion seems to come from the word’s proximity to “purgatory” (alternatively translated as “limbo”) that seems to already contain this association. It is perhaps the safest option to defer here to the original translator’s own uncertainty. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 40. Ibid. Ibid., 45. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Continuum, 1986, 5-6. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 3. Ibid., 5 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 61. Maurice Blanchot, “Friendship” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 289. 292

MATT COLQUHOUN 60 Ibid., 291-292. 61 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 26. 62 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, xviii. 63 Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, 33. 64 Ibid., 34. 65 Ibid., 8. 66 Ibid., 6. 67 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1995, 6. 68 Bataille begins his book with a quotation from the preface to the second edition of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: “But let us leave Mr. Nietzsche…” Presumably writing this preface after a recovery from one of his many illnesses — he was a very sickly man — Nietzsche’s base materialism ungrounds his own sense of self. Nietzsche wonders to what extent his own illnesses have inspired his philosophy and so, in hoping to understand that which carries him through life, he must leave his self behind — a self that is nothing more than a screen onto which presently unknown forces are projected. See: Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface to the second edition” in The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 4. 69 Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, trans. John McKeane. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, 88. 70 Ibid., 88-89. 71 Ibid., 23. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 25. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 25-26. 77 This was a topic explored explicitly by Jodi Dean in the second “Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture” in January 2019 and it is anticipated that she will unpack these issues explicitly 293

EGRESS 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 in her new book, unpublished at the time of writing. See: Jodi Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. London: Verso, 2019. Blanchot, “On One Approach to Communism”, in Friendship, 93. Ibid. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 94. Blanchot, “On One Approach to Communism”, 95. Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. Jeremy Gilbert, “Why the time has come for ‘Acid Corbynism’”, The New Statesman, 24 October 2017: <https://www. newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/10/why-time-has-comeacid-corbynism> Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. London: Pluto Press, 2017, 102. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1991, 120. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Oxford: Routledge, 1998, 93. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke’s Considerations, &c, London. 1696. 2-3. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 55. Gilles Deleuze, “Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts & Interviews 1975 – 1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Tomlinson, ed. David Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006, 81. Acid 1 2 3 4 5 Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: a Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador, 1998, 48. Ibid. Ibid., 163-164. Ibid., 163. Despite how the album’s title sounds, James has insisted he is not 294

MATT COLQUHOUN a fan of drugs. In an interview with Paul Lester for the Guardian prior to Drukqs release, he explains: “[Drugs have] nothing to do with it … It’s just a word I made up … I never wanted to big up any drugs, because I don’t reckon they deserve it. It’s just something that you choose to do. I probably come across as, like, ‘Yeah, acid and weed are amazing.’ But I don’t think that at all, really. And if I did, I wouldn’t want to say it in an interview. Plus, I’m never under the influence of drugs when I make music. Whenever I have been, it’s always been totally rubbish. It’s a real disciplined thing, making music. When you’re tripping, you’re just fucked. You could never get it together to make a track. When I’m stoned, I go to bed.” See: Paul Lester, “Tank Boy”, The Guardian, 5 October 2001: <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/oct/05/ artsfeatures3> However, in line with Mark’s Spinozist call to “not to get out of your head but … get out through your head”, James, in an interview with David Toop, has also spoken about his interest in dreams and his music’s relationship to his own unconscious. See: David Toop, “Lucid Dreaming” in Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds. Exmouth: Serpent’s Tail, 1995. 6 David Toop, Ocean of Sound, 208-209. 7 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 10. 8 Mark Fisher, “Baroque Sunbursts”, in Rave: Rave and its Influence on Art and Culture, ed. Nav Haq. London: Black Dog Press, 2018. 9 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso Books, 2009, 612. 10 Fisher, “Baroque Sunbursts”. 11 Ibid. 12 Having written about Mark’s time in D-Generation in his forward to Repeater’s k-punk collection, Reynolds would later share these two articles from Melody Maker on his blog. See: “D-Generation – or, the Dawn of k-punk”, ReynoldsRetro, 19 November 2018: <http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2018/11/d-generationor-dawn-of-k-punk.html> 295

EGRESS 13 David Toop, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom (Before 1970). London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 70. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Phil Elverum, “Entry Level: Phil Elverum’s Inner Battle With Black Metal”, Invisible Oranges, 11 January 2018: <http://www. invisibleoranges.com/entry-level-phil-elverum/> 17 Ibid. 18 Mark Fisher. “Megalithic Astropunk.” Hyperstition, 6 February 2005: <http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/ archives/004932.html> 19 Ibid. 20 Mark Fisher, “Gothic Materialism”, Pli 12. Warwick: University of Warwick, 2001, 242. 21 Mark Fisher, “‘An Abyss that Laughs at Creation’”, k-punk, 8 October 2009: <https://k-punk.org/an-abyss-that-laughs-atcreation/> An Afterword — A Lesson 1 2 Spencer Kornhaber, “The Pointlessness and Promise of Art After Death”, The Atlantic, 14 March 2018: <https://www.theatlantic. com/entertainment/archive/2018/03/mount-eerie-now-onlyinterview-phil-elverum/555485/> Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. “The University And The Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013, 26-27. Harney and Moten write specifically on the role of the Black radical tradition in this “beyond of teaching”, a foundation I do not wish to erase. What they refer to as the “undercommons” is a community of figures displaced and dispossessed within the particular systems of the modern American university. Whilst this resonates most explicitly on the fragile ground of contemporary Black experience, to invoke their criticality here more generally nonetheless feels appropriate. 296

MATT COLQUHOUN 3 4 Jason Kemp Winfree. “The Contestation of Community” in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, 41 Ibid. An Addendum — An Egress 1 2 Maurice Blanchot. The Unavowable Community, 56. Ibid. 297

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This has been a book about community and so it must be affirmed that, although it appears under the name of a single author, it would not exist without the input, support and encouragement of countless friends and strangers. It emerged explicitly from the community which it describes — a fact that is by now no doubt obvious. The people who are named throughout its pages are its very lifeblood but there are many others besides who would otherwise remain unacknowledged were it not for an opportunity such as this. I would like to thank Ayesha Hameed who read and advised me on the first version of this text as my dissertation supervisor at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2017. She was the first person to suggest that this work should see the light of day in a form such as this and I am grateful to her for planting that seed, giving me the permission I needed to keep working on it over the last two years. I would like to thank Natasha Eves, who I may have never met were it not for Mark’s death — a bittersweet fact that is not lost on either of us. She introduced me to so many people, building bridges between undergraduate and postgraduate students around Goldsmiths and singlehandedly making many more connections elsewhere. Without her friendship, this book would not exist, and I will be grateful to her always. The community that was brought together in that moment, of staff and students, from various courses and stages of their academic lives, is amorphous and to name everyone feels like an impossible task. Nevertheless, I would also like to thank the following people for their presence, patience, generosity, friendship and contributions to that process through which we all struggled, no matter how big or how small: Kodwo Eshun, Stefan Nowotny, 298

MATT COLQUHOUN Jon K. Shaw, Jean-Paul Martinon, Simon O’Sullivan, Janna Graham, Adnan Madani, Louis Moreno, Irit Rogoff, Nicole Wolf, Kitty McKay, Geelia Ronkina, Jan Philipp Nühlen, Diksha Gupta, Bianca Stoppani, Meenakshi Thirukode, Sabine Sieben, Patrick Dandy, Ellie Jones, Lucy Wallis, Pablo José Ramirez, Lexi Turner, Angélica Muñoz, Beate Absalon, Nace Zavrl, Ollie Zhang, Laurence Hobbs, Archie Smith, Phoebe Cunningham, Alba South, Digby Taylor, Edgar Titterton, Billy Smith-Morris, Lulu Molinares, Susan Kelly, Rachel Wilson, Sanjita Majumder, Portia Malatjie, Sara Eklund, Eloy Palazón, Isabel Tennant, Olga Paczka, Jermaine Osei-tutu, Eloisa Travaglini, Renata Zas, Alexandra Gamrot, Dhanveer Singh Brar, Stephen James, Craig Thomas, Maggie Roberts, David Cross Kane, Daniel Sean Kelly, James Elsey, Ifor Duncan, and Tom Trevatt for their friendship, conversation and so much more. Various sections of this book have previously appeared as drafts online. I would like to thank all the readers of my blog, xenogothic.com, for their hellthreads and inspiring comments. I am particularly grateful to Cave Twitter for all of their inspiration and generosity: Amy Ireland, Nyx Land, Edmund Berger, Max Castle, Tobias Ewe, Vince Garton, Alice Farmer, Laurie Kent, Thomas Moynihan, and Uriel Fiori. Parts of this book have previously appeared in Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, Vast Abrupt and Alienist magazine, and I am grateful to the proprietors of those publications for their invitations to write on the topics of acid communism, communities of outsideness and friendship. I would like to thank Robin Mackay, whose continued friendship means more to me than I could say. His skills as a writer and editor are unparalleled and his comments on this book throughout its long gestation have carried considerable weight. He may have coined the phrase “the Fisher-Function”, to which so much of this book is indebted, but he is also the greatest torch-bearer of the legacy that the term describes. I would also like to thank the staff and students — past and present — at the University of Wales, Newport — now the University 299

EGRESS of South Wales — particularly Peter Bobby, Magali Nougarède, Matt White, Eileen Little, Liam Devlin, Ronnie Close and Jason Evans, who first encouraged me to write and invited me back into their communities to talk about and contribute writings to the works and exhibitions of their students, allowing further opportunities to reflect on the experience of being taught and of teaching on the lives of those who enter and subsequently leave any educational institution. (Parts of “An Afterword — A Lesson” initially appeared in an essay written for Epilogue, the BA(hons) Photographic Art degree show publication, showcasing the work of the class of 2017.) They are the greatest teachers I have ever known and the amorphous community they have built over the last twenty years, surviving various institutional shifts, was an inspiration to me long before this book existed. I would like to thank all those who attended, participated in and contributed to the for k-punk events and the reading groups for The Weird and the Eerie and Acid Communism which took place throughout 2017 and 2018 at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Somerset House respectively. My eternal gratitude goes to the attendees of the Acid Communism group in particular, convened by Laura Grace Ford and Dan Taylor, who invited me to talk about the themes of this book in late 2018 and whose encouragement energised me to finally complete what was then still a frustrating and scatterbrained manuscript. I would like to thank Tariq Goddard, Josh Turner, Johnny Bull and Rhian Jones from Repeater Books for their work on and belief in this book that was already informed by so many of their past endeavours. I would like to thank the staff at The Fat Walrus in New Cross, who never made me feel like an alcoholic despite the multiple days a week I have spent in their establishment. I would wager that 90% of this book was written there over the course of the last three years. More pubs should have plug sockets in their beer gardens… Last but not least, I would like to thank my partner Katie, for her understanding and patience. She is my best friend and little of what I have sought to achieve here could have been accomplished without 300

MATT COLQUHOUN her. It is through her that the joys and challenges of community have presented themselves to me most immanently. In love and friendship: thank you. 301

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