Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 7

Palestine’s Wounds are Not So Recent: On Hamas, ISIS and Consciousness-Raising

Mark Fisher’s final essay, “Cybergothic vs. Steampunk”, published shortly before his dead, is a short commentary on Alain Badiou’s Our Wound is Not So Recent. What Fisher takes from Badiou’s short text, which reflects on terrorist attacks perpetrated by ISIS in France and the West in general, as well as the West’s role in ISIS’s […]

No Dream Without Folly

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landowners across northern Europe developed a penchant for building follies. Having returned from their Grand Tours of more distant climes, they brought newly acquired visions of Romantic ruins home with them, populating country gardens with simulacra structures devoid of context or history, but seeking to evoke both. These structures […]

The Conspiracy: Day One on E

I had resigned myself almost immediately to its seizure at customs, but the bottle arrived from Oceania without a hitch, and quicker than expected. Three or four weeks ago, sick and isolating at home, I decided to shave off my beard in the hope it would change everything. Of course it didn’t. There was no […]

A Spurious Marketplace of Ideas: Online Ads and Consciousness Deflation

There’s an aside in Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures that I keep thinking back to at the moment, on the strange irreality of marketisation and consciousness deflation. Fisher is initially talking about “bullshit jobs”, or at least about the intensification of bullshit in jobs of all kinds, such that even jobs we might understand as […]

On Mark Fisher: XG in Metaxis VI

Our friends at Editorial Metaxis have just published the sixth edition of their fantastic webzine. The current issue explores Mark Fisher’s work in great depth, with essays from a number of students at the University of Barcelona, various interviews and other texts. It’s a very rich compendium! Alongside interviews with the team at Caja Negra […]

Narcissus in Autumn: XG in Dazed

It’s autumn, which means it’s nearly winter, which means days are getting darker, which means your day-to-day life is getting a little bit worse. But that’s OK, because we have a list of the best newly released books for you. Highlights include Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which is a scarily timely read on our uncanny political moment (read […]

Further Notes on Capitalist Surrealism

I have long thought about Mark Fisher as a surrealist. In many ways, it’s an anachronism. Fisher clearly had more in common with surrealism’s later progeny, such as the Situationists, and his early blogging (with the Ccru and solo) was more explicitly related to the automatic and fragmentary writing Ballard and Burroughs. But in my […]

Palestine and the Archive to Come

It is hard to know what to say. It is hard to know whether one should say anything at all. Forget “doomscrolling”, genocide-scrolling is how I’ve spent most of the last few days, retweeting people on Twitter who are far more eloquent, far better informed, far more personally affected than I. But what are tweets […]

Forthcoming Events in London, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Madrid

I’ve got a couple of events coming up over the next two months. Here’s a quick post with all the info and links to tickets, etc.: First up, I’ll be chatting to Bill Cashmore at Housman’s in London on 27th October to celebrate the launch of her new book, We Hear Only Ourselves. We are […]

Oneohtrix Point Never Again

In my teenage bedroom, I had a PC in one corner, on which I listened to all of my music. Two speakers sat on either side of the monitor. The wiring was bad and, although both speakers worked, all music came through in mono. Certain songs that heavily used panning were always one-sided. I learnt […]