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Drunken Marxist

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You were supposed to be getting Shabcast 18 this week… but it vanished into the ether, owing to a malicious and inexplicable failure of my recording software.  The Mailer Daemon collected it and conducted it to internet Hades.  It was great too.  I had Gene Mayes and (at last!) Jon Wolter in, and we chatted about Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, etc, in a podcast that was a lot sillier, funnier and more ribald than the subject matter really warranted.  But, as I say, it is lost forever, doomed to live on only in the memories of the three men who experienced it… which, in a way, makes it all the more precious.  One day, it will be the most sought of all lost Jack Graham-related media, and take on a near-mystical reputation, rather like London After Midnight, or Orson’s cut of Ambersons.  I actually remember very little about it, as I was somewhat drunk and we were recording in the wee small hours here in Britain, and I spent most of the discussion in a haze of fatigue and mild inebriation.  I seem to recall that we talked about the hip-hop musical Hamilton, which apparently at least one podcast listener is desperate to hear me talk about.  Well, that listener lost their one and only chance.  They’ll never hear what I said.  Not even the bit where the three of us imagined a hip-hop musical about Garibaldi, written by Umberto Eco, and I said I’d go to the theatre heavily armed and force the cast to perform for me at gunpoint.

So, as I say, this Thursday was supposed to be release day for the April Shabcast, which means I had no writing anywhere near ready.  Which means I had to either scrabble and really work hard, or fob you off with something I dashed off in another drunken haze the other night, and hope I get away with it. 

Guess which option I chose.

What follows is actually a revised and much-expanded version of something I wrote as a result of an online discussion I was having with Daniel Harper.  It is not a cogent argument.  It has become, to put it humblebraggingly, the outline of a groundwork of a personal theoretical position.  It is not meant to masquerade as an original and profound work of philosophy.  I am not an original thinker and I make no claim to be one.  I am not a philosopher and I make no claim to be one.  It is a semi-refinement of the outloud thoughts of a intoxicated man who, determined to embrace intersectional discourses while retaining the (to him) irreplaceably valuable core of Marxism, has been mulling this stuff over for a while and, even if he doesn’t fully realise this himself, needs someone tolerant to talk at.

Please feel entirely free to ignore everything below if Marxism does not interest you.  People interested in Marxism should, perhaps, feel even freer.

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Classical Marxism has basically nothing specific to say about human diversity, sex, identity, gender, sex, stuff like that. …

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Comics Reviews (April 20th, 2016)

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James Bond: Vargr #6

This really fell apart for me in the denouement. It’s hard to be surprised by how many times Ellis did “and now for a long action sequence” in this book; it’s one of his preferred tricks, and the subject is suited to it. But as a conclusion to a six-issue arc an action-heavy ramp-up to a mournfully ambivalent conclusion is, to say the least, unsatisfying. Always a pleasure to watch Ellis at work, and he’s right to say that Jason Masters is visibly improving over the course of the series, but this is unquestionably a minor work.

Cry Havoc #4

Starting to have some trouble keeping everything straight here, though it’s firmly in “reread the first arc when it’s done” territory and not “annoyed at this” territory. Or perhaps just to obey the still-brilliant “for more information reread comic” edict and better parse out exactly what happens in Afghanistan this issue, as it all gets a bit odd and dependent on a firmer knowledge of how the supernatural is meant to work in this story than I have. Interesting, but definitely a comic in a lull for me.

Karnak #3

Ellis in full-out “my reading list, let me share it with you” mode, the basic perversity of Ellis being that this is generally preferable to Ellis writing action sequences. This time we have an issue based heavily on the work of Eugene Thacker (a significant figure in Neoreaction a Basilisk) and also on Karnak literally screaming at people until their heads explode. This is a ridiculous comic in all the best ways, and the new artist is a strong choice as well. …

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“Reoccurring dreams”: Eye of the Beholder

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It’s always an event when I return to a story that left such an indelible impression on me it literally shaped my own visions. And there are few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or of anything, that are as deeply ingrained in my imagination as “Eye of the Beholder”.

I count up to the double digits, at most, the moments in media that were so primally formative they completely changed my life. Many of them are from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and at least five of them are from this season. We’ve seen two of them already and there’s another two to go, but “Eye of the Beholder” may well be the most momentous and personally meaningful. The degree to which the imagery and iconography of this episode have haunted me all my life, and haunted really is the only truly fitting term, is almost completely unparalleled. Why this episode stuck with me to the unbelievably powerful degree that it did, to the point rewatching it actually gave me chills due to how familiar it felt (even though, prior to this rewatch, I’d only seen it twice)…I have no explanation. Except for, perhaps, that it’s really damn excellent.

But it has, and watching it again was like reliving a dream from long, long ago buried deep within the recess of my psyche: I remembered, vividly and to the last detail, the nacelle control room that features prominently in the plot. The hallucinations of the psychic imprint that constantly replay themselves. the lingering single-take shots where the camera follows Deanna Troi as she pensively meanders through the Enterprise‘s corridors. And, above all else, the unforgettable image of Deanna standing on the landing gazing into the pulsing heart of the ship’s warp nacelle. I remember that the way I remember my first birthday, and the first house my family lived in when I was a young child. In fact, it literally was reliving a dream for me: After it was announced that TNN would start airing Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, which would be the first time in seven years I’d have the chance to see the show again, I got so excited the show started to infiltrate my real, actual dreams. As the date approached, I distinctly remember having an incredibly lifelike dream where I was onboard the Enterprise myself. I was accompanied by Deanna Troi, dressed exactly the way she was in this episode, who took me on a tour of the whole ship so I could reacquaint myself.

One of our stops was the nacelle control room from “Eye of the Beholder”. And, just as I had been reminded once before on TNN, as I watched this inexplicably powerful episode for only the third time in my life, I couldn’t help but notice that room looked exactly the way I saw it in my dream. The only difference is that now I can tell it’s a stage set.…

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Neoreaction a Basilisk: Excerpt One

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In preparation for the May launch of our Kickstarter for it, we’re running excerpts of Neoreaction a Basilisk. This is from quite early in the book while I’m introducing my three main characters of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land.

And yet at every turn in Moldbug’s argument, Marxism seems to lurk, indeed, haunt the text. Every argument he makes about the Cathedral’s insidious suppression of the obviously preferable alternative has, to an even vaguely Marxist-familiar reader, an immediate counterpart pointing inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

The most obvious symptom of this is how rarely Moldbug actually takes a swing at Marx himself, despite the fact that he’s self-evidently the biggest single villain of his philosophical system. It’s not a pattern that’s quite noticeable on the paragraph-to-paragraph level; it’s just that when you do searches on his blog you discover that in the more than one million words he published as Mencius Moldbug he’s mentioned Marx a mere hundred-and-thirteen, and that’s including his uses of “Marxism” as a generic term of derision. And none of them constitute anything like an extended engagement with Marx’s thought. Sure, you can argue that this isn’t so much an oversight as a demonstration of contempt, but the fact remains – there’s a confrontation that’s obviously waiting to happen that Moldbug endlessly deferred. (Hitler, by comparison, makes four hundred and sixty-nine appearances.)

Indeed, at one point late in his blogging career he proclaimed (not for the first time) that he was finally going to offer the red pill in a compact form before dramatically unfurling the statement “America is a communist country.” He even reduces it to an acronym. “AIACC can be interpreted in countless ways,” he proclaims. “All of these interpretations – unless concocted as an intentional, obviously idiotic strawman – are absolutely true. Sometimes they are obviously true, sometimes surprisingly true. They are always true. Because America is a communist country.” And then, as you’d expect, he begins to go through various interpretations to show how they are either obviously idiotic or true. And yet there is one interpretation that, astonishingly, never seems to occur to him: “America is in some meaningful fashion run according to the philosophical principles of Karl Marx.” In fact, literally none of the hundred-and-thirteen uses of the word Marx appear in the essay in question, “Technology, communism, and the Brown Scare.”

Moldbug posted five more times on Unqualified Reservations after that essay, and then retired the pen name.…

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Silhouettes and Shadows Watch the Revolution (Mega Man X)

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Yes, that’s really how it ends; the most secret of histories is always is the real one. That gnostic gap between what we know happened and what happened. The facts are these: Mega Man X, released in the US just past Christmas at the start of 1994, is the beginning of Capcom’s second line of Mega Man games. There are scads of these now, the franchise famously diluted past all sanity. But at the time, this was the only one. It wasn’t even a “line” at the time; just one game, a grimdark future timeline of the proper series (which was about to put out the baleful Mega Man 6 for the NES, 1994 being the last year of new releases for that console, by now redesigned as a slimline top-loader to resemble its successor, with a key bit of circuitry accidentally removed so that there’s a constant vertical striping effect on games).

The existence of such a game is in hindsight inevitable. Indeed, by 1994 it was in foresight inevitable – franchises in multiple media were doing self-consciously serious installments. In fact, it’s in some ways surprising that Mega Man is the first major video game series we’ve seen pull this trick. But the surprise is only that it got there first, not that it got there. The original NES series was clearly on the road to diminishing returns; a simple SNES iteration of its cartoon robot mayhem would visibly be out of step with the trends. With tastes veering towards Nemesis, the way to update the franchise would have seemed self-evident to literally anyone.  

In terms of master narratives, of course, this fits perfectly into the unpleasant and ugly turn that we’ve been tracking all project. The NES Mega Mans were charming family games. Mega Man X is unmistakably for boys. Less exclusionary than, say, Mortal Kombat, yes, but it’s still clearly got distinct opinions about who’s going to be playing, and its status as a revision of something that previously had a wider audience in mind makes it hard not to wince a bit at that.

But from my perspective there’s more to it – Mega Man X is the first game to exist on the wrong side of my Super Nintendo days.Simply put, there’s basically nothing from 1994 on that I actually played when it came out. A couple of games flitted at the edge of my awareness – both Mega Man X and Donkey Kong Country were definitely things I played other people’s copies of, along with, no doubt, a few others. And I was certainly aware that things like Super Metroid existed. But so far as I can tell I basically didn’t buy any Super Nintendo games after 1993, and indeed sold at least some of them off at recess for $15 a pop in the fall of that year.

But what replaced them? Again, I’m forced to reconstruct here, or rather, fail to. I had a PC gaming period in the late 90s, but there’s at least a year’s gap here.…

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“Goddess Remembered”: Playing God

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Attest to your goddess. In this form, she is the energy of life and creation embodied. She waits for you to realise that which you have always known about yourself.

Normally I write these at night. I’m a bit of a night owl by habit already, and I find that, when doing creative work, I perform far better at night. I’m much more focused during the evenings, whereas I tend to get distracted far too easily by the business and hustle-and-bustle of diurnal life. Today though I am breaking habit and writing this during the morning, but it seems to feel right. I am, after all, also very much a day person: Sunshine is a vital and fundamental part of my existence and I need to be around it and in it constantly or I get depressed. I am of the Sun and the Moon equally, which makes things annoying when I need to find time to sleep. I could say the same thing about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-This is a show that uses a great deal of dark cinematography and colouring, and it’s of course a space-based science fiction series. And yet a sizable majority of my memories of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine evoke feelings of openness, brightness and warmth because, as I’ll discuss in further detail in following chapters, much of my experience of it came through comic books and magazines, including most, if not all, of this season. I have extremely vivid place-memories of reading about this year’s stories in such magazines beneath the warm and welcoming summer sunshine.

It’s news to nobody that Jadzia Dax is my favourite character on this show. It is, in fact, typically a three-way race between her, Tasha Yar and Geordi La Forge for my favourite character in all of Star Trek. But of those three, it’s no contest who has the most consistent and unforgettable personality. Jadzia Dax is a goddess-woman, a divine avatar who exists in the space between worlds beckoning us to join her. And this is her definitive story. Jadzia is “Playing God”, that is, playing at being a god, but not in the expected Robert Oppenheimer sense. Though diegetically mortal, Jadzia Dax is dressed in the trappings of the divine, her initiate Arjin also her prospective pupil and the play’s stand-in for us. Jadzia plays a goddess of fertility, love and lust: Wild and vivacious, she tries to make Arjin get over himself in order to make peace with and accept himself. Because only someone conscious and mature enough to do that will be able to accept cosmic love and light into themselves. It’s in that moment of ego death where we find clarity and gain the power to channel our own truest selves. True confidence and identity lies in the moment where we shed the anxieties and self-consciousness of youth while retaining its vive.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 16th, 2016)

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The Super Nintendo Project is back on Monday! I’m excited at least. The first two entries are really fun, and I’ve high hopes for the rest of the run. It’ll be going through the 1994 games, which I think there are five of total (the list’s on the other computer), then probably doing another Cultural Marxism or two, then back to Brief Treatise. 

Anyway, the first two entries are posted to Patreon. Which is about $2 a week away from me reviewing “The Red Woman” next weekend, incidentally. So, you know, never a better time to start backing and all.

Also this week we’ll have the first of five excerpts from Neoreaction a Basilisk that we’ll be running to promote its upcoming Kickstarter. You can seem, um, some of the response it’s been getting over at Nick Land’s blog. (The Tweets aren’t his, to be clear.) And I pop into the comments on that one too. And soon I’ll be recording the first of a couple of podcasts I’ll be doing on the book, talking with a couple people who have gotten to review the manuscript. 

Now I just need to finish the backmatter essay for this Last War in Albion chapter and see if I can get Chapter Six to actually follow the week after Chapter Five ends.

So, what’re your bets on how the Hugos will turn out?…

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Mind That Until Now Thought of Continuity, Our Torch, Then Saw It Flicker (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-One: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The War was revealed to have certain similarities to the life and work of William Blake, whose mythology was built around the dualism of the creator Los and the tyrannical geometer Urizen.

Figure 954: Los recoils in horror from his work as Urizen’s body assembles itself. (By William Blake, from The Book of Urizen Copy G, written 1794, printed 1818)

As Blake’s dualism suggests, his instinctive mode of resistance to Urizen, both within himself and without, was creation. Specifically, in Blake’s case, the creation of art. As The Book of Urizen itself makes clear by depicting Los’s failure, the point is not that this resistance will “stop” or “defeat” Urizen, or indeed any other figure one wishes to inveigh against. Indeed, the point is often simply a matter of need or compulsion. Much like Watchmen is simply not a thing one writes if one is capable of avoiding doing so, the ornately realized illuminated prophecies that Blake creates – especially the late career ones such as the fifty page Milton a Poem and the hundred page Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion – are not works that people create incidentally. In many ways, this is far more true for Blake than for Moore. Moore, after all, may not have been capable of stopping himself from writing Watchmen, but equally, he wouldn’t have written it were it not for the existence of a major comics company that wanted him to do a prestige project. It was a lucrative gig and, for all Moore’s eventual misgivings about it, a savvily chosen project. Blake’s work, on the other hand, was ostentatiously non-commercial. The illuminated prophecies used printing techniques of his own devising, not fitting into any existing market or practice. After an early flirtation with the relatively sellable notion of a children’s book of poetry in the form of Songs of Innocence, his illuminated work moved quickly and decisively towards the obscure and difficult. His insistence that each copy must be unique and of his hand severely limited sales. In short, Blake’s illuminated prophecies eschewed essentially every form of commercial sense known to man.

This is not to say that Blake lacked all business sense. He supplemented his work as a prophet with more conventional commercial illustration, thus generally managing to make ends meet, although it was at times a bitterly narrow thing. But Blake often resented this work, and the degree to which he was constantly haunted by paranoia about his friends and associates made things harder for him. As a result, he could turn on his employers, as he did with his patron at the start of the 19th century, William Hayley, who gave him lodging in a cottage at Felpham and a series of portrait commissions that kept him busy and well paid. He found the work deadening, however, eventually coming to describe Hayley as “an enemy of my spiritual life” and moving back to London, where he quickly started work on Milton and Jerusalem.…

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“The Face You Wear”: Masks

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Does a mask hide a person’s identity or bring it out? Perhaps it does a little of both; emphasizing certain states of being while keeping others hidden.

We all wear masks. We switch between them every day as we go about our lives, putting on different face and playing a different role for everybody we meet. Rarely, if ever, do we find someone with whom we can share the full multiplicity of people inside us. Instead, we wear the mask appropriate to the encounter. I’m wearing a mask right now for you all: This is the mask of Vaka Rangi, which has come to symbolize certain familiar behaviour traits and tropish signifiers that you have come to expect following this blog for a number of years. As personal as I try to get in my writings, Vaka Rangi is not, has never been and cannot ever be a complete encapsulation of my feelings and my identities for many different reasons. It’s a caricatured facsimile meant to stand for specific aspects of it I felt were appropriate and workable enough to weave into a multi-threaded series of narratives.

(This is not, it should be stressed, by definition a bad thing: We always want to evoke different parts of our personalities in different contexts because we all have different skills, talents and experiences that are relevant to different situations. This is ultimately just a more roundabout way of explaining how we call upon and mobilize our positionalities when it’s fitting to do so. In this world, not everybody needs to know everything about everybody else all of the time. Think about me however you need to in order to help you get through your day.)

Deanna Troi claims Data is suffering from “android multiple personality disorder”. But she’s a psychologist and is trained to view things in terms of diagnoses and disorders. But Deanna Troi is also an artist, as is Data, which is an important point worth returning to. Either way, what Data is experiencing is something far more profound than what the medical terminology would have us believe. In many cultures, masks play a ritual shamanic role: The mask is supposed to embody the essence of a god, spirit or ancestor, so when a shaman adopts the mask he or she is attempting to contact the deity it represents, either through channeling, invocation or direct communication. As in all such rituals, there is a strong performative element-For the duration of mask ceremonies of this type, the shaman “becomes” the deity through a combination of staged artifice (they’re literally playing a role) and through magickal, spiritual identification and association. And who better to give a role like this than to Data, our “imitation man” who is defined by the way in which he self-consciously takes on different roles, and is himself played by impressionist Brent Spiner? Indeed, this episode is likely the defining moment where Spiner and Data are finally allowed to meld their respective skills in a way that naturalistically furthers the story’s themes.…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 6: Dress Modern

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We are now in an odd, reversed position when it comes to William Shakespeare and Richard III: all of a sudden, and for the first time, we seem to know where Richard III’s head is, but not where to find Shakespeare’s.

I’ve written in previous instalments of this series about the relationship between Richard III (the man), Richard III (the play), William Shakespeare, and history. 

Essentially, my argument is that William Shakespeare was, for various reasons to do with his class position, his family, his career, and the historical moment and social milieu in which he found himself, peculiarly well placed to dramatise social energies, feelings, anxieties, and vertigos, which still speak to us today.  He was writing at the dawn of modernity, during the years immediately following the end of the medieval, in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation… all of which is related to the fundamental fact that he was writing during the transition from feudalism as the dominant economic form of English society to capitalism.  We still live with the energies and dystrophies of modernity, since we still live in capitalist society.  Indeed, Shakespeare has in some ways only become more relevant as capitalism has become more predominant.  He dramatises some of its foundational myths, legends, conflicts, and anxieties.  He offers a still relevant interrogation of much foundational bourgeois ideology that has gone on, in mutant form, to become hegemonic.  His drama is based on people torn apart in social struggles, and though feudalism is long dead in Western Europe, we still today understand the feeling of being pulled between the imperatives of capitalist society and other non-capitalist instincts.  As I said before, I don’t claim that any of this constitutes any particularly original insight on my part… though I may be slightly original in claiming that part of why we continue to find Shakespeare compelling is because he wrote about life during the phase of ‘primitive accumulation’ and, at least according to David Harvey drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, primitive accumulation has never quite gone away.   Capitalism has always accumulated primitively, and this has only become more noticeable in the Western world with the rise of neoliberalism, which has cannibalised social wealth built up during the years of social democracy.  Moreover, Shakespeare is embraced and performed in many other parts in the world than Europe, including places wracked by even more violent and rapacious forms of present-day primitive accumulation, usually practiced via Western economic and/or military imperialism, and/or corporate extortion.

One of the ways in which theatrical performances attempt to express, mediate, or emphasize Shakespeare’s continued ‘relevance’ is through modern dress productions.  There’s an interesting irony about modern dress productions.  They are almost the rule rather than the exception these days, and yet you still hear people say they dislike them.  And yet it would be fair enough to describe what Shakespeare and his company did on stage at the Globe and the Blackfriars as modern dress productions.  It appears that they did not generally try to present the past as looking much different. …

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