Imagine a sphere. Think about it hovering in the space in front of you. What you observe, from your perspective, is it’s outside. Now imagine that you are on the inside of the sphere. Even though you cannot see the outside, you can infer that one exists. Logically and definitionally, a sphere must have an outside (I am sure some mathematician of note has proven that spheres topologically have two sides, an inside and an outside). Imagine now that the sphere that you observed was a hologram, an illusion of a 3 dimensional image created by projecting light onto a rapidly moving flat plane or screen. The fact that it is an advanced technological images does little to change its fundamental properties, a sphere is still a sphere and it still has an inside and an outside. Now imagine a glitch, the holographic machine begins to break down and as it does so, the surface of that holographic sphere begins to persistently and perpetually undulate, rotating and tessellating in on itself in defiance of geometry, seeming to bulge, tremble, reverberate and repeat as though it has neither inside nor outside, only an infinitely shifting topology of peristaltically undulating folds created by the flickering of the rapidly dying lights.

When I say that capitalism has no Outside, I want you to understand that I am not making a benign depressive or pessimistic comment or indulging in some kind of “capitalist realism”. I am suggesting that by design, an exterior surface is not possible. There is no breaking through or breaking out; anything perceived as such is done in error. To suggest this is not to ignore the other forms of political and economic organization that have existed before or since Capital’s genesis, but rather it is to suggest that Capital has always been with us. A fundamental force. A kind of will or drive; an impetus to endless connections, proliferations, and growth that has always been a part of the human experience, we simply didn’t have a name for it or know yet fully what it was like to be, think, and dream like Capital. Capital’s spectral haunting extends thus infinitely into both past and future, it simply needed the right conditions in order to realize itself.

What we are witnessing now in real time is the shifting of the folds. As Capital schizms and wriggles it “captures” more possibilities that might be mistaken to be Outside itself, yet the rippling of its body is little more than an adjustment, a stretch to reorder what was already its own. This rippling now takes the form of a kind of self-awareness. In his Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism, Nick Land argues that “accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)” Yet one might ask what it means to intentionally seek to accelerate Capital’s overcoding and terratorializing dynamics, given that Capital is always already exceeding these, producing new hyper-velocities of capture and colonization, of which it is impossible to keep track? What does it mean for Capital to have become self-aware, for it to understand its own processes?

I have been thinking about this question after seeing the finale of Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. I wrote about the show’s first season on this blog in the context of a very tame reflection on the question of whether we would know if we were living in a dystopia. What struck me this time around was the self awareness, the lucidity, and reflexive quality of the jokes and marketing which I observed to be part of or associated with Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. The show makes a point to poke fun at the crude and at times grotesque rationales of contemporary marketing practices and discourses. It has always done this, existing as a rebuke of the kinds of crass and uncritical worship of superheroes that we see in so much of our popular culture, particularly the kind of woke-branded imagery that we see from the Marvel cinematic universe.

Yet, Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime takes this a step further. For example, one of the characters, Queen Maeve, is outed as bisexual during the events of the season, and we watch a grotesque scene in which Maeve and her partner have to sit down with Seth and Evan from Marketing and talk about her coming out story, her new image, and what it means for the brand. As we go through the season we see glimpses of adverts for “Brave Maeve Pride Bars” or “Brave Maeve’s Vegetarian Pride Lasagne” in the kind of crass and tasteless attempt to co-opt a person’s sexuality that could only be dreamed up in the insipid discourses of contemporary marketing that sees any demographic as a potential for growth and wealth generation, in the same kind of move that impels brands to co-opt Pride or in the same way that we saw Nike do with Colin Kaepernick. In presenting this do us, Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime is asking us to laugh and join them in mocking how “cringe” this kind of blatant marketing and commodification is, but this lampshading is fickle.

Perhaps the definitive example of this is Starlight’s costume. In Season 1, we sat through another uncomfortable scene with Seth and Evan from Marketing who tell Starlight all about her journey, her transformation, and her newfound acceptance of herself, as she sits there appalled and confused. The culmination of the scene is them unveiling her new costume which is much more revealing than her current one.

Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime makes fun of this new costume by having another character, Stormfront, engage in some facile lampshading of its own fetishized presentation of its female superheroes. She says: “Vought won’t let me have pockets in this. You can see every crease in my ass. You can practically see up Starlight’s uterus. You want to talk about girl power, let’s talk about getting some pockets!” Yet at the same time, the show uses this costume in the promotional material for Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. This frequently occurring PR image, for example, features Starlight’s uterus in all of its glory. 

The reason that I keep thinking about this self-awareness is that I wonder not whether the show is somehow hypocritical of its mockery of marketing, but because I can’t help but think about whether its marketing material is doing a kind of “anti-marketing shtick” on purpose. What convinced me to write this post was a sponsored video on Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime done by the Youtube content creator, Michael Reeves. I could not say how I started watching Michael Reeves’s videos – I think that it was through association, a recommended video around the time when another creator in the Youtube maker-space, Simone Giertz, was trending because of her brain tumour – but his sense of humour is dumb, dark, and juvenile(much like my own) so I kept watching his videos.

As Michael explains in his video, the marketing team for Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime, asked him to build a “Laser Baby”, like the one that appeared in Season 1 of the show, as a piece of sponsored content. As he explains, however, the pitch sent to him by the marketing team is “cringe” and as such he has to openly mock it throughout the video, making fun of the asinine storyboard that they sent him or openly ridiculing their attempt to make him add “Do not try this at home” disclaimers or caveats to the crude jokes that he makes about shaking babies. Throughout the video he weaves in mentions of Amazon Prime, The Boys, and Season 2, that is, the SEO or other key words that have probably led some algorithm to find this blog-post because of how many times I’ve said “Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime”. One wonders that this is not a more effective strategy, mocking marketing and corporate legal hand-wringing as a way of marketing more effectively. One wonders that this was not the plan all along. At time of writing the video has 7.5 million views, so even ignoring all of the other Youtubers and influencers that they got to promote the show, it’s safe to say that Amazon got their marketing message across, while being openly mocked for trying to do so.

Anti-marketing is marketing. There is no outside to Capital. Even me pointing out all of Amazon’s crude stratagems is successful marketing; generating buzz, creating talking points that leads to clicks, engagement, and other metrics that Capital can measure. 

One thus wonders whether anti-marketing is the future of marketing. Forget the false conjurations of emotionality and sincerity that used to be a part of marketing campaigns targeted at your mom and dad and embrace a new politics of making fun of emotions and even the concept of marketing because we’re all so cynical and jaded that it’s the only way that we won’t disengage from attempts to sell us something. In Michael Reeves’s video we witness the transmutation of the mocking of “cringe” marketing ideas into marketing strategy. This is not ridicule or critique, it was Capital finding new ways to stimulate desire.

What monstrous futures await us as Capital becomes more self-aware. Its meat-husks know how cringe and unsettling its perverse strategies for “growth” are, so the active mockery of these becomes colonized, becomes a unique selling point, becomes part of what is for sale. The Boys shows us this by being a show produced for an by one megacorporation, Amazon, in order to actively mock the saccharine and naive superhero fantasies of another megacorporation, Disney. 

What exactly can we accelerate here? Or put more bluntly, what can I inject into this machinic operation that the Business School is not already providing in spades as new strategies for connecting with consumers are dreamt up everyday by eager marketers. Nothing. The holographic sphere gives us a potent image of a undulating surface that has both and neither any inside or outside. There was never any outside, just a shifting of the folds, an optical illusion to make us believe that a way through was possible.

I’ve been listening to an alarming amount of Lo-fi hip hop, or “Chillhop” as some prefer to call it, in recent months.

The first time that I encountered “Lofi Hip Hop Radio 24/7 🎧 Chill Gaming / Study Beats” it was a Youtube stream that had a short clip of Hana, the protagonist of the inimitable Wolf Children, studying late into the night while dropping off to sleep. It is impossible for me to say exactly when I stumbled across it, but I can say which some degree of certainty how. I got into Chillhop though Nujabes, one of its great pioneers. Specifically I fell in love with the eclectic and captivating soundtrack that he designed for the exceptional anime Samurai Champloo (it is at this point that I fear that I have outed myself as a closet weeb) and then branched into his three main albums, Metaphorical Music, Spiritual State, and Modal Soul which in particular has occupied a special place in my playlists because of the ineffable affective quality of songs like “Feather” and “Reflection Eternal”.

Nujabes, and many of the best Lo-fi hip hop/Chillhop artists at the moment like j’san, Kupla, Aso, j^p^n, and also artists who fall slightly outside it in the trip hop genre, like Saltillo, Halou, Bonobo, Doctor Flake, and Neat Beats, are designers of affective aesthetic soundscapes, stitching and weaving together samples and pulling life out of contemporary recording and mixing software. Their craft lies in gesturing at a particularly difficult to quantify feeling, a kind of haunting nostalgia, like something is missing or has become absent, but one is not quite aware of what one has lost, how or when this loss occurred, or why this feeling seems to be so prevalent. The affect of the genre is one that discourages what some might call “presence”. It is designed to fade into the background, to colour a setting and give it some thing like a texture rather than to shape the lines of the experience in which one is embroiled. Saltillo’s A Hair on the Head of John the Baptist does this for me better than perhaps any other piece of music, draping Hamlet quotes over haunting violins and gloomy piano lines, the song is a collage of that very peculiar feeling of absence that is so prevalent in the genre. The Youtube channel Dreamy is currently one of the better compilers of music with such sensibilities, gesturing at them ineptly with compilation titles like “I can’t sleep. It’s 4am” or “Breathing dreams like air” – a signalling of a feeling that commits you to listening but once committed, there is a kind of tragedy in the realization that there is never going to be any kind of relief or climax of that feeling, one is simply suspended there indefinitely because it is on that unironically postmodern sense that something is missing that Chillhop trades.

Speaking about Burial, and to some extent the genre of Jungle music in general, Mark Fisher once argued that through its samples and rhythms the songs spoke to a kind of nostalgia for derelict and left-behind spaces of the UK rave scene, a wistful longing for something that the artist had never experienced, a mourning for something that had disappeared like the public spaces that characterized some version of modernity, and perhaps even a kind of sentimental reminiscence for the sounds of the industrialized factory – for the pulsing, grinding, crunching, and colliding that people lived and worked under for such a long time. It strikes me that Chillhop’s explosion across contemporary platforms like Youtube and Spotify speaks to something that we all want to hear in the now, a music that colours and textures the background of whatever it is that we’re doing (whether you’re at work with your headphones in or looking longingly out the window of a lengthy train journey) but doesn’t intrude or call attention to itself. It doesn’t demand anything from you, it simply shades the silence of the room. Indeed, for some, this is exactly what it is supposed to do. As Liz Pelly writes for the Baffler

“Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect.”

While trying to keep up with the frankly absurd number of things that I am trying to do this term, I have had their music running in the background, filling my ears with a kind of nostalgia and evocation. Chillhop might be the music for the present moment, one where we are not present at all, but rather are in some ways dissociated and schizoid while still being in some sense “productive”, in transit, reading, replying to emails and so on. It’s an experience of absence, a yearning for something(?), but one isn’t quite sure what and one listens always with a half ear that some artificial intelligence or algorithm of some kind might have produced this feeling to resonate with something specific to your experience with talented multi-instrumentalists as its puppets, a mass-produced affect just for you.

I’ve written about affect on this blog before, and it remains one of the concepts in Deleuze’s work that I am not quite sure that I fully understand. I recently re-read a paper by Simon O’ Sullivan that I think explains it well, by commenting that 

“affects can be described as extradiscursive and extra-textual. Affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter. We might even say that affects are immanent to matter. They are certainly immanent to experience […] by asking the question ‘what is an affect?’ we are already presupposing that there is an answer (an answer which must be given in language). We have in fact placed the affect in a conceptual opposition that always and everywhere promises and then frustrates meaning.) So much for writing, and for art as a kind of writing. In fact the affect is something else entirely: precisely an event or happening. Indeed, this is what defines the affect.”

An event. A happening. Perhaps my reading here is still stilted, but I see the affective as a kind of excess to the event. Something always capable of deterritorializing an experience, transmogrifying the body through the ecstasy of sensation. Yet how do we make sense of the affect of Chillhop whose affect seems to be absence, something(?) undefined that one believes is missing. The issue here is one of disentanglement. Trying to find out whether it is Chillhop that produces the affect of absence or whether the current socio-cultural milieu – from the anthropocene and our inextricably technologically-mediated lives to what Fisher called the “slow cancellation of the future” and the stagnation of popular culture coupled with the decay of all forms of human sociality that characterizes the market-centric logics of neoliberalism – is what produces this unidentifiable nostalgia for something, anything other than this.

Yet even if I am suspicious of Chillhop, and all of the comparable genres that Spotify keeps throwing at me, I won’t deny being affected by it. Indeed, even if I know that Spotify has quite likely identified me as someone who would like melancholic, nostalgic gesturing and not say, the upbeat and jubilant chill/trip hop of someone like Brock Berrigan, it doesn’t change how the music makes me feel. For example, in order to close their sophomore album, Sleep Cycles, trip-hop artist Neat Beats includes the following quote from Robert Oppenheimer in their song The Destroyer of Worlds:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Frisson. Every time is the first time. The slow and melancholic repeating piano loop gives me chills that make my hair stand on end and reverberate as though each were reaching out to affirm something(?) about my experience in the present but at the same time it is a kind of absent-affect, a benign and defanged background melancholia. Neither debilitating nor affirming. It is simply there, a colour in the background of my life, a partial connection, a fragment of an experience that reminds me that I am also a fragment of a thinking thing, a texturing to the office in which I spend most of my time.

With the new academic year about to start, I wanted to post something about what I’ve been up to over the last few months. Being an academic is never an easy job to describe and for me it always will have been a vocation, something that doesn’t turn off or dissipate with the seasons which I seem to spend ten to twelve hours per day doing. Recent events have encouraged me to reflect on what exactly it is that I supposedly “do”. There’s just been so much happening or so much that I’m responsible for lately that it all seems to start to blur together and I’m starting to have difficulty keeping track of it all… update a spreadsheet that contains all of the assessment deadlines for the BSc Management programme and in the process have to chase multiple colleagues all of whom are senior to you for the deadlines on their modules do a webinar with the title Becoming-manager: On the challenges facing managers in contemporary organizations (which the marketing team seem determined to repeatedly get wrong) in order to get new students excited about studying at KBS record induction videos for the incoming group of Stage 1 students in order to introduce them to studying at university and brief them on what’s going to happen work on assignments for PGCHE modules which helps you to learn more about how not to teach and manage a module than it helps you to develop as a pedagogue assist on the Clearing hotline for a lot longer than you expected but enjoy being able to speak to future students who didn’t think that they’d have a place and reassure them that Kent would take them and realize in the process that you’d never be able to do a job outside of academia because you were tremendously bored and inefficient on the Clearing hotline and then redouble your efforts at publication and research funding give in and make a Twitter page to try to augment your presence in the public eye but never post anything submit a paper on Traffic Officers and the “extreme” work in which they are often involved which is the product of a long collaboration between you and a colleague to a 4* journal with a great exasperated sigh of relief try to nudge another colleague to work on another paper on Accelerationism and Business School pedagogy to submit to another 4* journal notice that someone has not just cited one of your articles in one of theirs but they draw on it heavily in order to develop commentary on microfascism and feel so flattered that you think about emailing them but decide not to be so full of yourself instead start planning meetings for the teaching term with the team on the BSc Management programme as well as the team on the 550+ student Introduction to Management module and you’re going to be convening and have the distinct experience that everything is happening much too fast you your job becomes to slow it down so that everyone can understand continue to watch the University attempt to implement a large scale organizational restructuring with all of the competency and grace of a wrecking ball while still navigating a pandemic and observe the paranoia and politicking that sets in to your colleagues as they all start angling for ways to keep their jobs and avoid wider lay-offs keep looking for organizations who might want to collaborate on ethnographic projects keep planning blog entries that you never find the time to write and thus transforming your blog into a full blown academic cliché in the form of an academic project that gets left to languish as other projects come along keep running Twitter pages for your undergraduate and postgraduate modules by posting news articles about case study organizations or trade unions that you hope that students will read but are fairly certain that few will try to remember to exercise every morning wonder when you’ll be able to resume Scouting attend session after session on teaching online and watch as academics fail to discuss anything other than their own anxieties and misgivings for example in one session that was supposed to be about ways to get students to engage in an online class watch instead as a large number of confused academics ask basic tech support questions like how do I turn off notifications or how do I get my audio to not echo and wonder how they can have PhD’s and not be able to use Google keep participating in a weekly Reading Group of early career organizational scholars who get together to focus on ethnography and interesting developments in organization studies attend a even more meetings to prepare for online teaching start preparing for your own online teaching by setting up Moodle pages and designing assessments and activities continue to panic about having to teach a small module with a colleague because you have a hard time working with others realize that when multiple colleagues send you lecture clips, plans for assessments, or papers that they’re working on that people actually value your opinion finish writing a book with the cheerful title “The Mall at the End of the World” and send it to colleagues to get their thoughts and get unduly excited about it because it’s one of the few honest and frank things that your been able to write outside of your blog that isn’t dressed up in layers of sycophantic brown-nosing keep thinking about funding keep practising your bass and try to find time to record a heavy metal album spend an absurd amount of time trawling blogs, twitter pages, and forums for other accelerationists and tracing out this bleak line of thought which seems to be the most interesting and exciting branch of contemporary theory develop a weird obsession with reading about organizations that play a large role in our lives without being noticed like Serco or 3663 spend a lot of time reading emails spend a lot of time researching and writing lectures spend a lot of time preparing for the start of term notice that you’re grinding your teeth a lot more than you used to develop a curious habit of going for a walk shortly before bed to try to calm down and taking photos of the discarded disposable masks which will quickly become the new cigarette butt or coke bottle in terms of being an object of frequently observed detritus lingering on streets and in bodies of water everywhere and resolve to write something about that because it’s probably important but realize that you probably won’t get time to.

So this is the time of year when I’d usually write some kind of overly poignant piece that draws out themes from my last year as a lecturer in Higher Education. There are many things that I could write about so I started planning a long essay and was part way through picking out a pretentious alliterative list of themes like compassion, capitulation, complicity and critique or subversion, silence, scepticism, and self-destruction when I realized that there was only one thing that I really wanted to write about: ambivalence.

Ambivalent (adj) – “having simultaneous conflicting feelings or contradictory ideas about something,”

I think that I first encountered ambivalence as a developed concept in the work of Catherine Casey where she talks about individuals being acculturated into an organization incompletely, coming to both love and hate it – coping through jokes, sarcasm and humorous deprecation – saying for example that they love working at the organization, but also can’t wait to leave. There is something in the paradoxical duality of this kind of emotional double-bind that characterizes the last few months for me.

Permanent Contracts

As of the 7th of May, I am no longer a temporary member of staff at the University of Kent. I’m now on a permanent Teaching and Research contract and I’m also the new Director of Studies for the Bsc Management programme. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, I feel an otherwise inexplicable sense of relief that I am no longer facing the prospect of being unemployed in the middle of a global pandemic. Indeed, given that my contract for the current academic year only lasted until July 31st, 2020 and given that Kent has been having well-publicized financial difficulties, I’ve been applying for jobs whenever I could over the last year, operating under the assumption that my contract wouldn’t be renewed. In the spirit of the very first post on this blog, here’s a list of universities that I applied to who passed without inviting me to interview: Swansea University, University of Huddersfield, University of Nottingham, University of Glasgow, University of Leicester, University of Birmingham, University of Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, and of course the University of Manchester – my alma mater which didn’t invite me for an interview in the department where I did my PhD, even though they seem to be in dire need of someone to teach the compulsory management and organization studies modules on their undergraduate programmes after the mass exodus of critical scholars from the school in the last few years. I did get invited to Loughborough, Strathclyde and Exeter for interviews but they ended up not working out.

To say that I felt anxious and unsettled at the prospect that July would arrive and Kent would tell me that my contract is up would be a gross understatement. The last time that  I was unemployed my mental health deteriorated so drastically that to think about re-entering that psychological space is to confront a void of abject terror. Indeed, I recall vividly the profoundly uncomfortable and disquieting experience of watching colleagues on temporary contracts like mine from Bristol, Newcastle and Sussex getting laid off and not knowing if I’d be next. Finally having job security should have been a source of profound relief. Yet my response to it has been muted. I didn’t celebrate or do much of anything, I just kept doing exactly what I’ve been doing.

It is not lost on me that contractual flexibility as precarity is an incisive tool of corporate control, breeding certain acute forms of uncertainty and terror in the workforce in order to secure compliance and encourage enthusiastic self-exploitation. Indeed perhaps this is why I feel a curious kind of apathy about the whole process, as though the university had finally agreed to pay me for the job that I was already doing. Colleagues will know that I’ve been publishing, going to conferences, and participating in the research culture of the university (e.g. going to research seminars etc.) as though I was on a Teaching and Research contract for my entire time at Kent. It is a common enough story in which the protagonist has to prove themselves as virtuous (e.g. as dedicated, hard working, committed, capable and so on) in order to be accepted and accept themself as an individual. Yet now that it’s my actual job, I have a strange sentiment of ambivalence about it. As if to say: “OK … so I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing, shall I?”

The impossibility of moderation 

For those unfamiliar with academic work let me clarify that marking is never a one person job. On my 500 student Introduction to Management module there has to be a team of people doing the marking under my guidance. Readers of this blog who are familiar with my pathological control issues will anticipate how much I struggle with this. If there was enough time, I’d want to mark them all myself, that way I’d arrogantly be able to believe that they were “done properly”. Indeed, on my smaller modules I obsess over marking and split hairs over whether to award, say a 65 or a 68, but when you’re trying to direct others, you’re often just grateful if they can get in the same classification (2:2, 2:1, First and so on) as you. Indeed, fatigue even got the better of me this year and by the time I was 150 papers in, I was content to just get papers into the right classification. This became much worse once I started moderating.

At Kent, marks have to be moderated – a small sample has to be double-checked by a second marker before they’re sent to the external examiner to also be double-checked. In theory this is a useful bureaucratic system that ensures that marking is consistent, fair, and accountable. In practice, it’s highly flawed and subject to interpersonal politics. For example, on CB312, I ended up with a team of markers, all of whom were senior and more experienced colleagues. If a colleague awards a mark that you don’t quite agree with, what is the correct course of action for raising it, knowing how political academia is and that offending a particular colleague might be the difference between you getting a promotion in the future or not, and also because you think that your colleagues should know what the correct marks to award are (even if they aren’t subject experts) by virtue of their experience – when they don’t it creates self-doubt, uncertainty, and a profound sense of being uncomfortable, as though you had to explain how contraceptives work to your parents.  More pertinently, if a senior and more experienced colleague does a bad job, do you send it back to them with supportive commentary and tell them to do it again, or just do it yourself? I ended up remarking quite a few essays because colleagues didn’t pay attention to the plagiarism score of the essay and gave high marks to essays with significant plagiarised content, or because colleagues awarded marks that didn’t add up (e.g. Essay 1 = 78, Essay 2 = 72 but total mark awarded was 77), or a colleague delaying marking the essays until after the deadline had passed (so I just gave up and started marking them).

These are difficult questions and someone with more political skill than I would have had the sophistication to come up with better answers to them. Eventually, I think that I became ambivalent to the process and just capitulated, marking the papers myself to fix any errors, or just caving in to any proposed changes made by colleagues moderating my work – the supposed collegiate discussion that should be involved in negotiating marking, never really taking place because I was riven by this intense feeling of caring (and wanting to ethically ensure that my students get the grades that they deserve) and not caring and just wanting to be done with the politics of it all.

Much like my previous reflections on marking these are things that I am “not supposed to say”, because the human experiences of marking have to be scrubbed out in favour of presenting it as a neutral and “objective process” but I think that Higher Education would be a better place if more academics spoke openly about their experiences, so that’s what I’m doing.

There are more examples that I could give: ambivalence about my Scout Troop making a centralized decision to not even try to do any online Scouting, ambivalence about a paper that I’m working on which has now gone through so many revisions that I feel a sense of emotional and ethical detachment from it – not really caring about it’s nuance or whether it reflects my academic values – just doing and saying whatever I think will get it published, ambivalence about current events etc. etc. to the degree where I’m beginning to view ambivalence as pathological, as some kind of cultivated response to the current social milieu. As though, to return to Casey, I am being disciplined and acculturated in some way but incompletely and my unfinished character shows in my black humour, ambivalence, indifference, sarcasm, and so on. Who knows?

But what does Skittles think about systemic racism?

As every major political figure, pseudo-celebrity dog, and Instagram influencer feels compelled to say something about the dreadful injustices of racism and the disproportionate numbers of people of colour who die in police custody in so called “developed” countries like the US and the UK, even organizations are beginning to chime in. Ben and Jerry’s, for example, loudly proclaims that “Silence is not an option” in a definitive statement that suggests that the organization will not stand idly by as racial injustice continues. In response to this resurgence of “brand activism” we are encouraged to play a perverse game of “count the coloured people” on corporate boardrooms to determine if the activism is genuine or empty and performative. At this time of great social and political uncertainty, we look to great leaders like Seth Rogen (whose #Instagramactivism is covered in international newspapers) in the absence of satisfying action from our elected officials and ask the most pressing of questions: What does Ja Rule think?

I would like to take this opportunity to remind readers of this blog that I am most likely an idiot.

But what does Ja Rule think? The meme goes back to an old Dave Chappelle routine where he critiques celebrity-culture. He challenges us to reflect on why at a moment of national tragedy like the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001, or a moment of political import like the 2016 American presidential election, we would even begin to pretend to care what a celebrity like Ja Rule thinks. The filmed murder of George Floyd has become a much needed catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement but it has also led to every celebrity or person of vague public interest feeling compelled to perform their disgust as solidarity on social media or write overly poignant opinion pieces in The Guardian. Importantly for someone who studies organizations, it has led to a wave of similarly performative pronouncements from major organizations, decrying the horrors and injustices of racism and posting #BLM on their social media pages. Even Nike is on board. As though their care and concern, genuine or empty, matters at all.

This isn’t new. For years, LGBTQ+ people have been complaining about the co-optation of pride by corporations, as the radical nature of the event is lost and it is increasingly commodified by the presence of brands in the unfolding dynamics of ‘pink-’ or ‘rainbow capitalism’ which much more articulate people than I have tried to weigh up the pros and cons of. Even if some might see it as disrupting heteronormativity in the long term, that doesn’t make it any less disturbing, as the same corporations whose interview panels reflect biases against the LGBTQ+ community or invest in the economies of countries where being gay is a punishable crime, put rainbow flags all over the social media page and pass out rainbow themed merchandise at pride. This kind of transparent pandering is often unintentionally funny. Earlier this month, I laughed out loud to myself in the supermarket for around 10 minutes at the realization that Skittles had made an all white bag of Skittles to support the LGBTQ+ community, saying “During Pride only one rainbow matters” and had in the process accidentally made what could be called a white-supremacist bag of candy – a beautiful evidencing of the reality that, as it always has, capital will say and do absolutely anything that it thinks will maximize profitability.

While there are many ways to think about this problem of co-optation – from the pragmatist argument that says that this kind of public performance of solidarity as marketing-tactic is important as it lets marginalized groups know in what stores they’d be safe, to the critical argument that calls into question the moral decay under contemporary capitalism that leaves us so unable to reaffirm ourselves as “good people” that consumption decisions become less about function and more about constructing an “ethical self”, and even the odd argument that there must be LGBTQ+ people/BLM supporters in the organizations themselves who want to use their platform to vocalize support and solidarity – the one that I want to focus on is corporate personhood.

The moral and ethical implications of corporate personhood have been the subject of academic debate for some time with various iterations of it cropping up – most recently Ken Greenwood’s argument that if corporations are people, they should act like it. That is, they should be responsible and accountable to the same standards to which we would hold other people. People like Ja Rule. It is here that my personal comedy is apparent as after reading every tweet, every newspaper report of another organization affirming BLM, every gesture by an organization trying to show solidarity, I laughed to myself and thought yes, but what does Ja Rule think about this? A way perhaps of vocalizing the absurdity of a corporation which actively benefits from the colonialist histories and mores of capital, claiming to care about the lives of people of colour, but also because, I am apparently an idiot who thinks in memes.

But this is how Ja Rule thinks. Repeatedly throughout his oeuvre, Ja Rule extols the virtue of the pursuit and agglomeration of money as an end in itself rather than a means to happiness. In the hit song Always on Time, he reminds the listener that he lives by the credo of MOB or “Money Over Bitches”. In Race against time he says: “For every lock, there’s a key. The only thing that ever made me click was cash money”. Indeed, there is a certain religiosity to his preoccupation with money. In the context of the extended Christian imagery of Only Begotten Son, he proudly proclaims: “I won’t cry cause I live to die, with my mind on my money and my guns in the sky.” Capitalism itself is nothing more than the machinic multiplication of money through the processes of investment and the production of commodities. Infinite replication. Everything else is incidental.

While there is certainly more to Ja Rule thinking than just an obsessive pursuit of money, it is in this kernel of insight that we can garner understanding of why organizations try to insert themselves into activist conversations. Inserting yourself into a conversation that has nothing to do with you would be (if done by an actual person) rude and discourteous but  for a ‘corporate person’ it makes perfect sense that they should chime in on the discussion because their only desire for doing so could be monetary replication. The mythologies surrounding this are dense and convoluted. In fact, the corporate person believes their audience to actively wonder what they think and so chime in the belief that “the public care what they have to say” because of course we do. We’d be lost without the marketing machine. Many of us would have believed that white supremacy was perfectly acceptable until Ben and Jerry’s told us that it was bad. Indeed, even Ja Rule tweeted out his idea for reducing the incidences of police killing unarmed people of colour (one of the first replies is the Dave Chappelle clip).

Yet this is not done out of malice or ill will. Rather, there are a broader set of technosocial conditions that produce in the corporate person the idea that the audience cares what they have to say, produce in the news media the idea that what the corporate person has to say is worth reporting, and produce in the audience a desire to hear what the corporate person has to say, as though it could be anything other than a transparently shallow and calculated marketing tactic. Blizzard tweeting in support of BLM after their stance on the Hong Kong protests is the best example of this; Blizzard are here ‘clicking with cash money’ calculating that BLM support with net them fiscal gains, and angering the Chinese government with “Free Hong Kong” rhetoric would bring disastrous losses. Yet perhaps Blizzard does not even know that it is calculating this. Perhaps that’s what Ja Rule thinking actually is: a cynical calculation that is not even apparent to the one doing the calculating.

Does the corporate person know that it is just adopting the pretence of care in order to maximize revenues, or does it believe itself to be acting authentically? I wonder what Ja Rule would think about this?

The UK is still in COVID-19 induced lockdown.  I’ve been resisting writing anything about it because I didn’t want to contribute to the deluge of non-commentary and other “hot takes” that we can see about it on various outlets or say anything that might be understood to preemptively  critique the extensive array of publications that we’ll likely see in the next 12-24 months about the impact of the lockdown on work-life balance, identity work, human-technology relations, gendered work, and so on. I have however been interested to chart something over the last few months – various kinds of collective sentiments and iterations of shared emotional experience. Mostly in response to people not following the rules of the lockdown.

Recent news items have been filled with the “scandal” of people hoarding and panic buying or breaking the rules of the lockdown and failing to social distance. I have followed with great interest recent comment threads on Reddit and Twitter (see #lockdownuknow) which chronicle no small degree of hatred for individuals involved in such practices.

Lockdown outrage on r/britishproblems

At first I thought that these types of reactions were easily readable as what Tim Kreider called “outrage porn”. The intoxicating nature of anger, particularly when it’s collectively felt. As he says, “it sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.” We look at these “evil” people, going to the beach, hoarding toilet paper, buying up all the fresh fruit and vegetables, visiting their second homes, continuing to go out to parties, sunbathing, and so on, and we hate them. We are enamoured by that hatred, it excites us. At some point in our enjoyment of this vilification it occurs to us that it might be envy, that we wished that it was us still “out and about”, but the idea that we are actually just jealous is far too dangerous and self-reflexive a thought, so we have to quickly quash it.

While there are many great examples of outrage porn foregrounded by British newspapers recently (for example, the nerd community turning on Neil Gaiman for breaking lockdown and travelling internationally), let’s take the following example, which I wanted to include in case anyone ever asks me why certain newspapers are recommended on my modules at the University of Kent and others are treated as unreliable.

6th May, 2020 newspaper headlines (clipped from the BBC News’ newspaper blog)

Note which papers chose to have the Neil Ferguson story on the 6th of May and which ones chose to highlight that the UK now has the worst death toll in Europe. What is important and in “the national interest” is not the story of a potentially malicious degree of incompetence by a democratically elected government leading to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Britons, but the story of one professor who broke the rules in order to have a tryst with their a romantic partner. The titillation. The scandal. The cheap amusement and banal thrill. How could we not put that on the front page?

Lest I be accused of being a naive Guardian reader, the paper has certainly not resisted the temptation to have its share of outrage porn on the front page of its website.

Front page of the Guardian’s website: 23rd March 2020.

Look at these golfing bastards not social distancing when we have to. We hate them and that hate makes us feel good. It excites us in a way that we cannot quite describe. We get a particularly perverse joy from joining in the hating of them in comments sections and social media threads. How dare they do this? It is the thrill of outrage porn that I kept coming back to, the enjoyment of the hate.

The more that I thought about this peculiar thrill of stimulated outrage, the more that I  could see it connected to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “microfascism” which I’ve written about before on this blog and in print. Specifically, I remembered the following quote from A Thousand Plateaus (p.215).

“Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.”

The microfasist impulse presents itself most clearly when we not only want others to follow the same rules that we do, but we want them to want to follow the rules. It should not occur to them to question them or to challenge them; that thought should not exist in the horizons of possibility. In doing so, they pose a threat to the images of conformity, unity, and homogeneity which fascists always invoke in order to justify their palingenetic ultranationalism. Some part of us enjoys participation and complicity in these kinds of fascisized formations. As Deleuze and Guattari comment in Anti-Oedipus (p.29): “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism.” Desire becomes so perversely contorted that it comes to desire its own repression, seeking out fascist formations, seeking out (in this case) a simplified other to hate and the comforting voice of a trusted newspaper telling us who “the bad guys” are. We thus transform ourselves into judge, jury, and “neighbourhood SS man” in order to mobilize this feeling of hate for the other who doesn’t desire in the same way that the desire which constitutes us desires. Yet in so doing we showcase our own insecurity and lust for power. In breaking the rules, these others make us question whether we are following the right rules, their difference or deviance is itself a threat to us (Ian Danskin talks about this in his video series on “Angry Jack”), we become uncertain about our own choices at the same time as they are reaffirmed by the vitriol of a self-righteous and self-important anger that we can join in an be a part of. This is how microfascism aggregates and agglomerates itself creating a kingdom of petty fuhrers who all loathe the lockdown-breakers.

Edit:  25th May, 2020. I almost never edit these blog entries after the fact but rarely have I ever been proved so prophetic. Over the last few days Dominic Cummings has been dragged through the mud by both left and right wing presses for breaking the rules that he helped to set out. The horrible lockdown-breaker, it feels good to hate him. As I watch him become a scapegoat for all of the stored vitriol and anger that people have over the government’s handling of the pandemic, I reflect on the image of a magician doing a sleight of hand act. Owen Jones expresses my sentiments:

I love the word “frisson”. It’s one of my favourites. Like “denouement” and “emolument” it’s a word that we get from Latin via French and to my ears they all have some kind of intrinsic sonorous beauty. Because mine is a very specific kind of idiocy, whenever I think about the beauty of language I think about two things: A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. While I’m far too proudly disordered a thinker to ever be a Kantian, there is something that has always captivated me in the way that Kant describes the sublime by saying that:

“the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy […] aroused by the fact that this very judgment, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate.”

The experience of the sublime is of being a small figure on the shoreline staring up at a monstrous tidal wave; unable to perceive the entirety of it, afraid (and not afraid) of its power and destructive beauty. In my attraction towards the ineffable, I find myself drawn to the word “frisson” – “fever, illness; shiver, thrill” – a visceral embodied reaction, madness shooting through the limbs – again and again to describe what I feel when I listen to Sylosis. For example, when the vocal line in Altered States of Consciousness proclaims “Death is here and he’s been clawing at my thoughts again” I always get chills. A fever, a thrill. Something arrives or something leaves and you triumphantly celebrate or mournfully reflect respectively. Frisson.

Sylosis’ new album Cycle of Suffering was released earlier this month and, except for occasions when I’ve been listening to a particular piece of music to remember a particular set of texts or thoughts, I’ve had the album constantly on repeat. The songs are all infused with a curt brutality that announces itself proudly (I have arrived) all resplendently inflected with the speed and technicality that have always drawn me to the band. The songs are monstrously powerful when performed live and when I saw Sylosis at the Islington Assembly Hall a few days ago I could not help but reflect on why I am so fond of their work.

Sylosis on stage at Islington Assembly Hall – 13th February, 2020.

When asked to describe why Sylosis is my favourite band, I often comment that Josh Middleton writes the songs that I would write if I were a better musician. This is no slight praise because I write music that I like, in keys/scales that I like, at the tempos that I like, in arrangements that I like. To say that someone else can write exactly the kinds of music that I love, penning the songs that I wish that I was skilled enough to, is something not only significant but at least a little absurd, particularly because Sylosis’ compositions aren’t particularly complex. This isn’t free-form jazz or that particularly perverse form of prog that has many time signatures and tempo changes for the sake of it; it’s mostly 4/4, mostly high bpm, mostly minor scaled galloping and shredding. Yet, almost every Josh Middleton release has met me at a time in my life when I was trying to do the same thing that it seemed to me that the person writing the music was trying to accomplish, whether this is the robotically fast and precise musicianship of Edge of the Earth (my favourite album of all time), the dark atmospherics of Dormant Heart, or the heavy groove and complex sludge of the Passages project (Eternal Solar Flare has my favourite crescendo in any piece of music), each time I was trying to write something similar into my own music.

There is a kind of perverse(?) experience of parasocial relationship/kinship to Josh Middleton as a musician at work here which is at least a little ironic given my extant critiques of the subject. More broadly my fascination with the musicianship of Sylosis means that there is a redoubling of focus on the personhood and embodiment of the musician who must play compositions of at times absurd difficulty that test the boundaries of the possibility of skill, precision, and endurance. In my amateurism, Sylosis songs are physically painful to play because of their speed and as my fatigued fingers fumble over my fretboard trying to make it through just one, I can’t imagine playing an entire hour of it in a live show, to say nothing of the fact that I play bass (or bass as rhythm guitar – as any Not Above Evil song can attest) and the lead guitar parts (which I can’t actually play) are much more difficult. There is a feeling of a certain kind of shared sickness somewhere in the vicinity of an imagined mutual self-inflicted suffering – I write music that hurts to play, why would someone else do this to themselves?

Deleuzian writing about music tends to wax lyrical to the point of being incomprehensible (as I’ve been doing), the exception being the inimitable Ron Bogue, whose work on heavy metal remains exceptional. In Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Bogue describes the electric guitar as it appears in heavy metal as elevated to the level of “electric industrial machine” (p.40); entangled in the production  of all kinds of deliberate othering of the conventions of sound, the nature of the guitar deliberately distorted and rendered as a monstrous other to itself. Heavy metal as a genre has been analyzed to Death (ha) based on its transgressive nature (of gender norms, of musical convention, of aesthetics etc.) but few come close to Bogue when he describes “heavy metal” itself as aptly named:

“for both words convey something essential about the music. It is heavy in that it is emphatically percussive, “thick” in texture, and highly amplified in the lower registers. It is metal in that its sound is dominated by a particular gamut of high-distortion, low-frequency “grinding,” “crunching” timbres produced by amplified solid-body electric guitars.”

This description itself has a kind of beauty (and humour, imagining Ron Bogue, who I’ve always known as the kindly paternalistic figure of the Deleuze Studies community, nodding along to Cannibal Corpse with his notebook out, tracing the various musical becomings of a “Hammer Smashed Face”).

There is indeed a certain kind of becoming-sonorous, a resonance, an endless corporeal reverberation that is produced in the moments of a live heavy metal show when the sound is so loud that hearing stops, feeling is overwhelmed, sense is revealed to be inadequate and one simply becomes musical, an undulating part in an affect producing and agglomerating machine. I always find this difficult to describe. It is perhaps like being swallowed up by something that one cannot quite see, something thick and amplified, from the deeps of musical registers, grinding and crunching your body through a feverish sickness that one can’t quite make sense of as it occurs beyond the limits of thinking. Sylosis does this for me better than any band that I know.

I’ve been interested in an idea for some time: music as a concept, a tool for thinking, or a mode of engagement with thought beyond thinking. There are echoes (ha) of this in different places in Deleuze and Guattari’s work (e.g. the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus) but I’m still working on this. What is certain for me is that I’m going to think about it while listening to more Sylosis…

So 2019 is over and one of the most noteworthy things happening in the last month was the UK’s general election. While I’m far from a politics scholar and so won’t offer any stats or breakdowns of different voting demographics, the election results resonated very strongly with two things that I’m interested in thinking about at the moment and so (as an ongoing research log) I wanted to take the opportunity to pen my thoughts on them.

Ermahgerd muh leadersherp!

The first thing that came to my mind when the reactions to Labour’s defeat came pouring in was a clear aperception of a muffled voice crying “Ermahgerd muh leadersherp!!1!!” – thus further evidencing that I am an idiot who spends too much time on the internet. It was with a complete lack of surprise that I watched people articulate a sense of frustration and upset, targeted at Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn. The ire and frustration directed at Corbyn and solely at Corbyn resonated with a critique of our over-emphasis on the figure of “the leader” that I’ve been articulating in my classroom for some time. I have a guilty pleasure love of Reddit reaction threads to big events (elections, disasters etc.) and here are some of my favourite comments:

Unelectable. Worst leader in generations. With this much vitriol being thrown his way, you’d think that Corbyn had personally visited each home in Britain to insult and demean the public, not benignly offered socialism. Corbyn’s decision to refrain from giving a clear stance on Brexit was also the cause of much ire (things on Twitter were mostly the same).

The Guardian was also filled with opinion pieces, with everyone suddenly realizing that a socialist leader in an era where the Left as a whole has been losing ground across Europe was a problem. Even Polly Toynbee chimed in by suggesting that while the manifestos were magnificent, it was Jeremy Corbyn himself who caused the terrible election result and in the process “did this country profound, nation-splitting, irreparable harm”. Let’s set aside that this is a circuitous admission that electoral politics is purely a popularity contest – nothing to do with ideas or ideology, simply whether you’re the most likeable kid in the playground – because this is one of those thoughts that you’re not supposed to say out loud. Indeed, I staved that thought off when Richard Burgon was claiming: “People on the doorstep weren’t complaining about our policies, and we wouldn’t have had the policies … if it weren’t for Jeremy’s leadership.”  My (admittedly juvenile) reaction to this line of argument is to simply hear someone yelling “Eomergard muh leorderhshop!!!1!”

To me, all of these post-election ‘hot takes’ are reductive. To unironically quote the smartest person that I know: “thinking about which leaders are to blame and who should be scapegoated is wholly inadequate to apprehending the complexity of the social and political problems which Brexit reflects and of which it is the product”. Indeed, a shifting patchwork of proper names who accrue blame for Brexit and the current state of British politics, with JEREMY CORBYN emblazoned at the centre, is never going to be adequate to a full analysis that disentangles the complexities of the social, political, economic, and historic factors that produce something like a Brexit-focused election. But this is not something that many are willing to think about. That a problem may be unintelligible does not gel with our sensibilities. Instead we are more interested in trying to “find the right great leader”. Of course we don’t need to work all levels to undo the ideological overwriting of the class consciousness that was naturally allied to the Left through trade unions. No we need a phenomenal leader to stand behind. Only when this “Great Man” (for it is of course gender coded) or messiah comes can the Left be saved.

I was flabbergasted when George Monbiot suggested that it wasn’t Labour leadership but rather our collective immersion in social media where ‘truth’ has become unquestionably plastic and the collective agendas of the press controlled by the wealthy. A scandalous idea. What do you mean it wasn’t Daddy’s fault; I thought that I was supposed to show how grown up I am by crucifying Daddy? To be fair, Monbiot defers blame to ‘the oligarchs’ (i.e. not one leader but a few shadowy nebulous wealthier leaders), but still, progress of a kind.

If I was a betting man, I would guess that Labour is going to adopt the ill-fated strategy of focusing their critique solely on Boris Johnson, and his name will be their catchphrase for the next few years being as synonymous with everything that is wrong with British politics as “Trump” is for the US. And thus the overestimation of the potency and powers of leaders will go on and we will continue to use them as little more than unfortunate figureheads for collective successes and failures.

What if nothing changes? #Accelerate

Recently I’ve been getting back into the work of Nick Land, a fringe figure in Deleuze Studies. For a time in the 1990’s, Land was producing some of the most insightful and creative Deleuzian work in the English speaking world. The essays in Fanged Noumena – which I’m still slowing making my way through – are some of the most innovative in terms of developing Deleuze’s style of thinking and writing; a mad production and proliferation of concepts. Drawing on many of Land’s ideas, particularly his writings on capital, a number of critical scholars and philosophers, disenchanted and disillusioned with continuously failing modes and practices of resistance to the capitalist mode of production and enchanted by the trajectory and speed of technological progress, have begun to advance what has been described as Accelerationism, a belief that the best mode of resistance is an acceleration of capitalism’s dynamics. In their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Mackay and Avanessian (2014, p. 4) define Accelerationism as

‘the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding and abstractive tendencies.’

Drawing on the works of academic luminaries like Mark Fisher and other authors who find their inspiration in the Marxist traditions of Lyotard or Deleuze and Guattari, Accelerationism tells a rather bleak story that suggests that modes of resisting capitalist capture are futile, that capitalism cannot be ‘greened’, reformed, made to be benevolent, or made to serve broader social interests through the striking of a Faustian ‘new deals’. Rather, the most meaningful mode of resistance left is to accelerate capitalism’s destructive tendencies and see what comes next.

Many Accelerationists are fond of quoting the following passage from Anti-Oedipus, which obviously signposts my interest in it:

‘What is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? […] Is there one? – To withdraw […] Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough […] Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000, pp. 239–240)

That is to say, perhaps the way to resist capitalism is to push it to its limits, to pursue fully the logic of decoding or the axiomatic of extracting surplus value until they arrive at their most extreme conclusion, all surplus value extracted, all growth targets achieved, all possible labour rendered, the planet Earth reimagined as an uncommodifiable and unliveable plane. The Accelerationist position revels in the idea that we might seek to encourage capitalistic destruction as a mode of revolution and envisions various techno-futurist dystopias in which this might be possible.

There are certain aspects of Accelerationism that I don’t agree with. For example, I agree with what I read as Viveiros de Castro’s objection to its Prometheanism, and I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the turn to neoreactionarism that is a part of Nick Land’s later work. It also seems to me that many misinterpret Land’s essay Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production when he speaks about the potential limits of capital.

“All of which is to raise the issue of the notorious “death of capitalism”, which has been predominantly treated as a matter of either dread or hope, scepticism or belief. Capital, one is told, will either survive, or not. Such projective eschatology completely misses the point, which is that death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part.” (Land, 1993, p. 68)

Because to me this speaks less to the need to accelerate to catalyse the death of capital and more to the impossibility of there being any outside to capital. Capital will sell us the possibility of its death when that becomes the means by which to achieve its ends. Is this not the best explanation for “corporate environmentalism”? This is something that I’ve been thinking about often over the last few months. I raise it here because it made me reflect on the election results. The political Left in the UK now seems to me to occupy a position that is best described as “accidentally accelerationist”.

I make no secret of my love for Thomas Harris, and one of his most eminently quotable passages is the following in Hannibal: “There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.” The happy anticipation of being about to feel contempt. The Left seems to be currently actively expecting and verging on actively willing our society to collapse, for all to come to ruin so that it could say “I told you so”. See peasants, I told you to vote for Corbyn. Now the NHS is privatised, firms have taken their business to Europe, the gaps between rich and poor have increased and austerity is still ongoing. I told you so. Which is to say that the Left is currently hoping that some part of Accelerationism is true, that the tendencies of capital to privatize rather than seek public interest, to agglomerate private wealth, to consistently make the poorest and most vulnerable worse off, to exploit natural resources for its gains, spurs some kind of societal or ecological collapse.

The worst case scenario for the political Left is that nothing bad happens. We see that the Tories have already committed to raising the minimum wage. If the NHS doesn’t fall apart, if there isn’t mass unemployment, if Brexit doesn’t wreck the economy, if there isn’t mass homelessness, or spikes in violent crime etc. etc. then it is likely that those long-standing Labour seats that turned blue in December will stay blue with more to come and we will not see a Labour government again in my lifetime.

This to me is as interesting as it is perverse. Of course, most politicians are simply bureaucratic functionaries, bumbling along and doing what they think is in the best interest of the country. However it intrigues me, in a way that makes me reflect on the appeal of “Leadership”, to think about a Malcolm Tucker-esque figure, sitting in Labour HQ right now, realizing that the best political strategy may not be resistance but acquiescence. “At thy choice, then […] Come all to ruin.”

Anyone who knows me will recognize the notebook pictured above because I’ve been carrying ones like them around since 2012. They can usually be found sticking out of my back pocket or placed almost defensively on the table between me and the person to whom I am speaking in what I imagine must be the most curiously threatening non-threatening gesture: “Be interesting or I’ll start reading something that is.”

I started a new notebook recently. While the corporeality of a new notebook is both a gift and a curse (the enticing song of fresh pages turning versus the annoying sensation of sitting on a book that has not yet adapted to match the contour of my arse), in thumbing through the old notebook in a kind of farewell gesture I came across a number of fragments of ideas. These partial jottings, questions posed to no one but my future self, scribbled random thoughts and etcetera are of great interest to me because they always reflect an intellectual space that I previously occupied which is now irrecoverable. All that is left is the writing, what Artaud might see as the waste parts of the thinking and the self that did the inscription.

A few of these notes are short and stood out because of various things that I’m working on or thinking about at the moment. For example, the following note, which I wrote from a place of great frustration as I tried to write a paper explaining the heterogeneity of concepts.

“We already know that concepts are heterogeneous”

She says “I love you. “I love you too,” you reply. Neither of you mean the same thing.

When I explain why I chose to study Deleuze and Guattari for my PhD and why I’m still so fascinated by their work, it is concepts that I end up placing the most emphasis on and being most interested in. The concepts that we use to think are always moving and shifting around us. Nothing has any kind of fixity. Concepts are always changing, growing, and evolving. We already know this as it is an intrinsic quality of our language and our experience but it is often easier to pretend that we do not know, that the things that we say or the concepts that we use to think have a kind of permanence that lasts beyond the act of saying them. For Deleuze, this is a reflection of our collective entrenchment in the metaphysics of identity, a mode of thinking that privileges stable states and being over change and becomings. This is difficult to explain to people without a background in philosophy, so I am always looking for simple examples that get the point across.

Some notes, however, prompted longer reflections and I decided that one was also important enough to include here. For example: “You wouldn’t know a dystopia if you were living in it. Indeed, ours is the most boring dystopia possible.”

If you were living in a nightmarish and totalitarian dystopia, would you know? I wrote this question down with no context and can’t even recollect exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote it. I speculate that it may have been related to the fact that I recently binged the exceptional Amazon series The Boys. While my “nerd credentials” are severely lacking when it comes to comic-book fandom, I have always greatly enjoyed the proceeds of the dark deconstructions of the superhero genre like those of Alan Moore or Frank Miller (e.g. Watchmen or The Dark Knight). While I might be underqualified to make such an observation, The Boys seems to follow in their tradition. What interests me in particular about The Boys is that – at least in its filmed incarnation – it seems dystopian only because we see it through the lens of the directorial gaze which shows us the dysfunctions of the Supers as well as the corrupt and manipulative nature of the corporation, Vought International, which employs them for its own revenue maximization – embracing all of the most gross tropes of the society of spectacle in order to profit off of the value of the superheroes under their employ.

The character of Homelander particularly interested me as he functions as a critical reflection on what an impossibly strong, fast, and unkillable being would be like if it walked among us. Gone is the image of the benevolent image of the Superman as a messianic saviour, now Superman is a brutal tyrant who decides with absolute freedom who can live and who should die.

I reflected that what Homelander renders salient is the reason that I enjoyed the Snyder/Nolan take on Superman in Man of Steel. Christopher Reeve’s Superman was inherently a symbol of unwavering hope, whereas Henry Cavill’s explores the question of whether it is possible to be hopeful at all in a world that seems to offer nothing about which one could be hopeful. Its message is that there is no good in the world unless you make it for yourself; there is only loneliness and isolation. The film seems to propose that to maintain ones status as a shining beacon of hope in such a world is the act of a super-man, someone beyond human. To choose to be good when it would be so much easier, or so much more fun, to stamp out a human life like it were that of an unwelcome insect, is what it means to be an inspiration in the present. This is something that I (however problematically) try to explain to my students, virtue is not virtue when it is convenient or when being virtuous is your most profitable option. However, movie critics whose opinions I respect didn’t enjoy Man of Steel and in retrospect deemed it disappointing.

Back to The Boys. What I enjoyed about the show in the same way that I enjoyed Black Mirror and Hannibal, is that reflective of the contemporary milieu, it explores the dark, the horrible, the uncomfortable, the unwelcome. Characters are sexually assaulted/coerced, superheroes are murderers who cannot be stopped, overpowered, or harmed, characters die meaningless deaths, unfettered capitalism leads to the privatization of policing and then national defence. We enjoy watching this as it shows us not a fantasy, but rather, it renders salient a particular dynamic that we wish we could see within the present where there are evil men who do not die, who kill with impunity, profit off of the insecurity of others, and stand above the law – the unsettling ambiguity of contemporary life means that none of these things are easily observable and when they are, the feel like cheap spectacle.

Indeed, the show is at its most subversive where it gives us glimpses of a reality where everyday life looks almost exactly like ours. We follow “The Boys” in their fight against the Supers and we see how their quest is justified by the Supers’ brutality, but what we do not see is how life must be for the millions of people who are not victims of and have no reason to hate the Supers. They’re pretty happy watching the spectacle of a races, films, buying merchandise, and seeing criminals torn to shreds on the news. The little snippets that we see are deliberately evocative of contemporary superhero culture – in order to see it, one need only imagine that the characters in the Marvel movies were real and that we’d received the films in the same way, created the same fandoms, had their posters on our walls, and tucked ourselves into bed under Captain America duvets, all while the good Captain spent his private life enjoying kicking orphaned refugee children to death.

In this sense, we might reflect that we live in the most boring possible dystopia. There aren’t even jackbooted, masked fascists kicking ethnic minorities on my street corner. There is only a casual acceptance of state surveillance, death from overwork, hero-worship of leaders and politicians, and exploitation and mass ecological destruction carried out by corporations for profits, in ways that are too unclear to point to or hold to account. Much like the background characters in The Boys, we wouldn’t know that we were in someone’s dystopian nightmare and would likely ignore the realization if we were told. It’s easier to keep believing that everything is ok.

This reminds me of something that Werner Herzog said, regarding the fact that he encouraged a colleague to watch Wrestlemania: “You must not avert your eyes. This what is coming at us.” Herzog is suggesting that if a collective, anonymous body of us wants to see this empty spectacle of sweaty, oiled up male bodies contorting and writhing, then the poet, the filmmaker, the artist, the critic, must not look away. It’s hard to keep looking when things are bleak. I wonder if there is not an abdication of the pessimistic ethics of hopelessness. A resignation to continue to live even as things are not getting better and indeed, to live with the negative visualization that begins from the assumption that things will not get better. Nietzsche’s old quip about gazing into the void is here poignant because of its relevance. One cannot continue to stare; it takes a psychological toll. Indeed, the more that I read of Mark Fisher’s work, for example, the more that I wonder whether he looked too long at the existential void of capitalist realism. Even Accelerationism doesn’t offer much hope and it may indeed be difficult for many to live without it. However, I wonder if we do not have a responsibility to continue to look. To see and feel all of the social’s miscellaneous effects, to not avert our eyes as Herzog suggests.  In order to diagnose, critique, and make sense of the culture, you must, for Herzog continue to look at what is happening and see the dystopian. What this tells us about The Boys is something simple, we are currently living through a time that is so disparaging that it makes more sense to us to kill our gods than to believe that they still care about us. We are too reflexively cynical to allow ourselves to believe in kindly Superman, saving a kitten stuck in a tree, and instead find it easier to believe that the super-man is a brutal, self-centred, rapist who lives entirely in the service of capital. The latter is perhaps not only a more believable story, based on the stories that we see and hear every day, but it is the one that we want to be true as it also serves to render intelligible the reality in which we find ourselves – helping us feel that we understand what is taking place. We must keep looking at the social, political, and technical forces that produce a society unwilling to believe in a wholly and perfectly good superman.

What Herzog’s injunction means for the wider society in which we live, however, is more troubling. We need to keep thinking about the anonymous collective body whose desire is interested in the production of misery, of inequality, of suffering, as a spectacle that it can watch. So called instances of poverty porn, or films that feature the manipulative manager – are they acts of subversion and truth telling, or attempts to provide clear individuals for us to be outraged at and ignore broader systematic and structural issues.