Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 68
August 31, 2020
This Great Society is Going Smash: A Lesson to be Learned from Accelerationism
Trump is using an age-old tactic of white supremacists called “acceleration.” Rubin quotes @BrookingsInst: This phenomenon — reveling in violence from racial divisions they stoke — is part of the white supremacist playbook, specifically the phenomenon known as “accelerationism.”
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) August 30, 2020
Shout out to Geoff Shullenberger for pointing out this tweet. I’m used to seeing these by now — who isn’t? — but I think there’s a further point to be made with this one.
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August 30, 2020
August 29, 2020
“Exiting Left”: Geoff Shullenberger on ‘Egress’ for Athwart
Many thanks to Geoff Shullenberger for writing this essay on the work of Mark Fisher and my book Egress.
It’s a thorough and very intriguing perspective that does an excellent job of pulling together the book’s various theoretical threads. However, I’m not sure its grounding of the term “egress” as a variant on Hirschman’s “exit” is strictly accurate — and that assumption might be my fault anyway — but it is an interesting suggestion nonetheless. This is partly what the book (and this blog, i...
August 28, 2020
Nihilism Without Negativity (in 2020)
An excellent response to some predictable Twitter snark has me feeling quite inspired going into this weekend.
Kevin Rogan recently tweeted the following:
mark fisher’s legacy is complex. was he an interesting writer? yes. did he write way too much about how bad music evidenced something called ‘libidinal’ this or some shit? yes. but most importantly, has he led to an insufferable cadre of online ‘theorist’ dipshits? extremely yes [1]
It proved a popular shitpost, and it is easy to appr...
August 26, 2020
Last Nights
As the summers get hotter, I swear London loses a little bit more of its collective mind. August is the month things happen. People snap or let loose. Year on year, this is the month we end up having weird encounters with weird people. The consequences are sometimes shocking but never not entertaining.
Within the last month we’ve seen two police hard stops in the neighbourhood and this week there was a huge party that got shut down on the block. Ten police cars showed up. And a dog. I fe...
August 25, 2020
The Moebian Intensity of Mourning and Melancholy
I can’t stop thinking about a very old series of tweets — old reading group notes from June 2017, predating the blog by four months. They resonate so much more intensely with me now than they did then (if only because, back then, we were inside something that has now started to develop holes).
These tweets were brought to my attention because someone retweeted the last one out of the blue. Their power is only further intensified by the fact I have no recollection of writing them.
The effe...
August 24, 2020
Gaming The Aftermath — Coming Soon
In just under two weeks, on September 5th, I’m going to be presenting my recent post-Western research and talk about the “deframing power” (via Deleuze and Guattari) of The Last of Us Part II.
Follow the Diffractions Collective on WordPress, Twitter and elsewhere for more info closer to the time. Read their introduction below:
Gaming the Aftermath
Featuring: Reza Negarestani, Alexandre Monnin, Matt Colquhoun
September 5th 18:30 CET Online and Link Will Be Shared and Distributed
Surveying...
August 23, 2020
August 21, 2020
Thinking About Writing, Writing About Thinking
I wanted to enter 2016 with a blank slate. On 28th December 2015, I wrote the following on my photo blog, before abandoning it forever — a blog onto which I had posted 642 times since June 2011:
New Year, New Blog
A lot has changed in the past two years and this blog, as much as it pains me to say it, is starting to feel redundant. It was never going to last forever, but a change of heart has gradually been gaining momentum.
In a week or so, this blog will become password protected. Friends and...
August 20, 2020
Egress — Coming Soon from Caja Negra
Matheus Calderón‘s Spanish translation of my old blogpost “The Capitalist Realism of ‘Capitalist Realism Is Ending'” has been published on the Caja Negra blog to coincide with the publication of volume two of the K-Punk anthology into Spanish.
There’s also a little announcement tucked away in an image caption:
Egress… Futura publicación de Caja Negra Editora.
I’ve been very excited about this. It is always an honour to be translated and especially in such great company. Caja Negra not...
