Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 76

The “Accelerationist” Subject of Modernity: A Stray Thought

let us recall the formation of national identity through resistance to colonialist domination: what precedes colonialist domination is self-enclosed ethnic awareness, which lacks the strong will to resist and to assert its identity forcefully against the Other; only as a reaction to colonialist domination is this awareness transformed into active political will to assert ones national identity against an oppressor anti-colonialist national liberation movements are stricto sensu generated by...

Spinoza and Kubrick: From the Exo-k-punk Archive

I feel like I should make clear that I dont have anything to do with the k-punk Twitter bot. I think, given my predilection for Twitter bots (Ive owned a few), some people assume it to be one of mine, but its not. Its a very useful tool nonetheless, always digging up some choice pull-quotes from the k-punk archives that warrant revisiting. It is a top-notch k-punk aphorism generator.

The synthesis of Spinozas Ethics with Lyotards Libidinal Economy is peak k-punk. https://t.co/R0SBEP5BDh

Who’s Driving?: A Fragment on Freud, Ballard and Accelerationism

This was something necessarily culled from a work-in-progress that I liked but which is too much of a tangent to be worth keeping. Clipped and posted here for posterity.

Explaining his theory of the unconscious mind in his 1923 work, The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud deploys an analogy of a man on horseback to describe the relationship between his titular arenas of the mind.

The functional importance of the ego is manifested, he writes, in the fact that normally control over the approaches...

PlaguePod Live Day 53

I was last on the Urbanomic PlaguePod on day 9 of lockdown Day 9

Last night I jacked in for day 53. I feel like Ive been chewed up and spat out the other end since then. Anyone else experiencing some hard mood swings since about day 25?

Anyway, it was an honour to do a bit of chatting with Agnès Gayraud and Mark Fell last night. Just like the shea hand cream in the drawer by the bed, PlaguePod remains the softening moisturiser applied generously to my cracked, dry and over-scrubbed...

Egress and the Vampire Castle: A Letter to The Wire Magazine

To whom it may concern,

Please find below a response to a review published in your most recent issue (May 2020, issue 435), considering two books on the work of Mark Fisher. Considering the inaccuracies and mischaracterisations present in this review, I would appreciate its inclusion in the letters page of your next issue.

Your review of my book Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher and Macon Holts Pop Music and Hip Ennui was not a review of two books but an excuse to attack a...

“Solidarity Without Similarity”: ‘Egress’ on Review 31

Niall Gallen has reviewed Egress over on Review 31. Its a genuine thrill to read someone write about your work who really gets what youre trying to do. Huge thanks to Niall for taking the time and writing something so thorough.

Check it out here and read a passage below that following a few weeks of quite grumpy onlineness made me punch the air like the grump at the end of The Breakfast Club.

One way of considering Egress is as outsider literature. Colquhoun is following Fishers example...

Rep for the Living Room

If youll allow me a momentary simping, back in February, before all this happened, Robin was in Melbourne giving a lecture at the MSCP. Theyve just put the audio up online and I spent the morning listening to it.

At the start, Robin makes the case for doing philosophy in our own way right now whatever that is. Philosophy has not yet attained its contemporary form, he says. The old style is too encoded in a bourgeois leisure time that is not afforded to the rest of us, so rather than ape...

Did We Ever Leave Behind The Bicameral Mind?

A stray thought had during the Westworld season 3 finale. Dont read if you dont want any spoilers or wild speculation.

It turns out that Serac, our cunning French villain, had Rehoboam in his ear the whole time. The super AI predicting the behaviour of the world was feeding him all his lines.

Its another weird deus ex machina moment in this series, where a peek behind the curtain of the shows internal machinations feels, simultaneously, like a subtle nod to a table of increasingly...

Pondering My Navel

Im struggling with how to make this blog a space to share new research, so here I am writing about that, in the hope that doing so might loosen up my present bloggers block. [1]

Im moving on from previous concerns at a rate of knots. Theres a few more Mark Fisher things in the pipeline that Im excited to announce some polemic, some productive but, for my sanity, I think its best I put critical engagement with Marks writing to bed for a while after this is all over. Ive made my case and had...

Further Notes on an Ethics of the Dialectic

Im in research mode at the moment and going in deep on the relationship of psychoanalysis to philosophy. Its been fruitful so far, although it has led me to read more closely a few thinkers who Ive never previously paid too much attention to specifically Lacan and Žižek.

Id sort of skim-read Žižeks The Sublime Object of Ideology a few years ago and really enjoyed it but rereading his preface to the book tonight I found the notion of dialectical conversation previously just waffled about to...