Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 44

Post-Covid Horizons

A really great post on horizons and agency from Fat Worm of Error. I was very touched to get a pingback here. I feel a lot less open online these days, and I think a lot of that probably has something to do with the pandemic. A blogpost I wrote a year before lockdown, on […]

Postmodernism and Gender Realism

I was reading an old review of Fisher’s Capitalist Realism the other night. It provides quite a novel and precise interpretation of the book that I found really compelling in its forthrightness: Capitalist Realism is ultimately focused on … the ways that public institutions that haven’t and likely won’t be privatized have been forced … […]

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Rest in Power, Dawn Foster

Very sad to hear about the death of Dawn Foster yesterday. I did not know Dawn but genuinely loved her on Twitter. She was one of the most consistently entertaining and insightful people on the platform. It was fitting, then, that she was trending well into the evening. It was a bittersweet moment, and very […]

Children of /Acc: Waiting for a Post-Pandemic Politics

After the Great Deceleration; after Deleuze: The children of [acceleration], you can run into them all over the place, even if they are not aware who they are, and each country produces them in its own way. Their situation is not great. These are not young executives. They are strangely indifferent, and for that reason […]

The Tomorrow War

The Tomorrow War is an intriguing film. [Major spoilers below.] It is something of an amalgamation of World War Z and Edge of Tomorrow, but it is also a fun and dynamic alien invasion movie in its own right. It has also crystallised something for me that I’ve felt for years but never quite known […]

I Paint, Therefore I Am: On Painting, Patrons, and the Rise of Liberalism

← Narcissus in Bloom Understood in the most general terms as representations of ourselves, self-portraits are among the oldest art there is. The Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands) in Argentina, for instance, contains dozens of stencilled handprints that are almost 10,000 years old, and artists have been using themselves as models or tools […]

Learning and Trauma: The Sharp Object of Ideology

In a rare moment of insecurity, I deleted this post from last week in order to revise it. It felt undercooked and needed to simmer a bit more. Here it is again. I had an email recently from someone asking about Fisher’s various uses of the concept of “ideology” throughout his works. In Capitalist Realism, […]

Blogging as Infinite Conversation: Lately I’ve Been Feeling Like Arthur Rimbaud

← Preamble Mark Fisher opens his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life with a line from Drake’s “Tuscan Leather”, the opening track from his 2013 album Nothing Was the Same. “Lately I’ve been feelin’ like Guy Pearce in Memento.” The track itself is an atemporal collage, as Drake heads back to the future. Heavily treated […]

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