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The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.

—Wallace Stevens

I hold my hands up: in last year’s roundup, readers may have noticed a glaring contradiction. Despite declaring from the outset that the works listed had “nothing to do with me”, despite rallying against “individual ego-fictions” and exalting “impersonal threads of connection”, in many of the sections I ended up talking about, well, myself. I told anecdotes, confessed feelings, gave opinions; all the telltale signs of the subjective. How was this possible? How could I so squarely contradict myself?

Now I put my hands down, in defence: I do not think this was a contradiction. In fact, no: there was a contradiction, but it was precisely the contradiction that defines books’ existence as such. For as much as they are undeniably objects with a particular form and content, the fact remains that much of the joy we get from reading books is that what we discover in them is ourselves, from a new vantage point. Works written decades ago genuinely seem to capture “our” unique essence, and allow it to be socially expressed. As such, books can neither be reduced to mere subjective feeling nor a fixed objective form, but rather must be thought as a mediation between the two: they allow the subjective to be expressed objectively, and the objective to be brought home to the subject. As Adorno stresses throughout Aesthetic Theory, art is simultaneously an object that is merely made like any other, as well as more than a made object; and it is this contradictory state that drives art’s self-development.

If I fell into “subjective” mode when discussing books last year, then, ironically it was because I was simply trying to be faithful to them as objects. I have been keen to maintain this dialectic in this year’s roundup; I have, however structured it slightly differently. Whereas last year I generally grouped texts according to genre, canon or tradition (for example “Psychoanalysis” or “Music and Post-Punk”) this year I have largely organised the works I have read this year through a set number of concepts1. This is to bypass a problem that can occur when grouping by canon or tradition, which is the deadening of particular works and their relegation to a familiar “home”. When too cosily seated in the canon, works ossify under an established set of signifiers. Works in this situation can only be approached from the outside: one must brush aside all the thick brambles of tradition, commentary and secondary literature before one can approach the work in-itself. My method here, however, has been to approach the books I read this year from within, starting from my experience reading them and developing concepts based on this. The benefits of this method are manifold: not only does one more faithfully communicate the “spirit” of particular works, but one also frees them from their established homes and puts them in dialogue with other texts. One thus sees works not as fixed points in a hierarchy of tradition, but as an intersecting mesh of lateral connections; one sees the works as alive.

We should therefore be very sceptical of the word “about”: the works listed here are not “about” these particular concepts, nor is what I have written “about” said works. Writing “about” things is generally very tedious. Instead, I have attempted this year to open myself up to the “inner life” of what I have read, and sought to only develop concepts and theories that remain immediately in contact with this pre-conceptual interior zone. The goal is a kind of radical immanence: the reaching of a level where it is not that I am writing “about” works, but rather that what I write is the works, which then are the concept. On this level, concepts harmonise with the work’s “inner life”; indeed, they allow it to blossom, to properly externalise itself. A process of blossoming: this is what the concept is, or should be.

There are certain thinkers, usually comfy academic philosophers, that scorn this approach to theory and criticism, an approach which Mark Fisher practiced most acutely. They class it as too “subjective”, too contrarian, too distant from any established canon to have any relevance. Let these thinkers have their undead labels which they tragically mistake for reality. They are oblivious to what they are missing: the brute, unnameable fact of life.


  1. Editorial notes: the below is a round-up of the many things I read and watched this year, including a mixture of books, poetry collections, short stories, essays, blog posts, newsletter entries, documentaries and films. A handful of things have been left out, some because I was largely uninspired by the work, others because, despite their quality, I could not honestly categorise. 

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I may as well begin this roundup with a frank admission: at the beginning of this year, I did not know how to read.

Sure, I knew the technicalities: I was familiar enough with the particular socially agreed match-up of phonemes, graphemes and meanings that constitutes the English language. Familiar and capable enough, in fact, to practically inhale vast quantities of the written word. But we should be clear in asserting that such an ability to automatically respond to linguistic cues is not the same as reading, thinking, or intellectual practice in general. While it is such a practice’s necessary precondition, it is not the practice itself, which maintains its own singularity and uniqueness. For it is one thing to inhale, quite another to extract from that inhalation the oxygen that nourishes our intellectual bloodstream.

Things are changing, though. Last month, all too late in the year, I started a reading diary as a place to log my preliminary thoughts about the stuff I was reading, which were previously transiently flowing through me only to get lost in the aether. Principally, the diary is an attempt at commitment: a practice of staying faithful to and honouring the transformative impacts that books have on me, of – in Badiou’s terminology – showing fidelity to the Event (of reading). In our first readings of books, all we are left with is an accumulation of (positive or negative) sense-impressions or thoughts (“that bit was cool” “this bit was boring” etc), and maybe a few notes in the margins. Our duty after this first reading is to almost immediately begin a second reading, which drills into those particular sense-impressions and tries to clarify them, work out what in the book caused them to happen, at a level detached from (yet immanent to) the immediate experience of reading the book. This is what the practice of keeping a reading diary allows one to do: to give ourselves up to the books, to fully and psychedelically follow the path away from our “selves” that they set in motion.

Taking its cue from the reading diary, then, the principle of this roundup is precisely the opposite of showboating. Initially, the plan was simply to post a list of what I’d read this year, as some kind of achievement – but it quickly became apparent that this would be of no use to anyone, least of all me. A list such as that is like the initial material extracted from a mine, or the raw data collected by some online marketing platform: crude, incoherent, quite simply not ready. It is an uninviting mass that, far from being galvanised by some kind of connective or inspirational principle, simply lies there as sheer magnitude. A big, mangled rock of readings of philosophy, music criticism, literary modernism, SF and gothic horror, that no one wants to touch. (And even if, perversely, they wanted to, they wouldn’t know where to begin.)

When heaved and lugged onto the platforms of social media, those digital mirrors that provide the contemporary self with the reflected image that it mistakenly identifies itself with, this big mangled rock can only be self-serving and exhibitionist; a pseudo-intellectual form of dick-swinging. And lest it not be obvious, this is precisely what this blog stands against: the transmogrification of intellectual practice – quite simply, the practice of staying true to the Truth – into a putrid careerist ego-fiction. Intellectual practice cares little for what books are ostensibly “about”; it does not read blurbs. Instead it seeks to channel the real conceptual movements that weave through texts, extending and intensifying them into new, unknown zones. It operates in the underscore.

The below, then, has nothing to do with me. I can only predictably concur with k-punk when he wrote in 2004 that “writing, far from being about self-expression, emerges in spite of the subject.” And so it is with reading: when accumulated under the subjective frame of being “things I read”, the readings below can only appear as crude material, a mass of undifferentiated junk characterised only by its magnitude. But when the raw material is felt, held, and cradled, one begins to notice patterns; protruding excesses are transformed into murder mystery clues, ambivalent signs of something far stranger – and far beyond – any personal subject. (Adorno: “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.”)1

What follows is therefore “my 2020 reading” as it deserves to be presented and acknowledged2. Not an individual ego-fiction, but various plateaus or planes of consistency, impersonal threads of connection. Not tightly policed “schools” of interiorised thought, but the open fields of the Outside. (Deleuze-Guattari: “A book itself is a little machine… [it] exists only through the outside and on the outside.”)3

Inherently defined by such an openness to the outside, such threads of commonality naturally bleed into and cross over each other – where does one field “end” and other “begin”? – and I will likely end up repeating myself. This is no problem, though: in fact it is precisely what allows us to see the works in their true form: flaming sites of multi-vehicle pile-up, the singular points of collision and intersection of the various planes of consistency that cut through them.

Or to put it more classically, we can say that this messy excess of cross-bleed is what allows us to stop seeing books as self-contained parts, and instead as particular instances of the Universal.

When one knows this, one knows how to read.

  1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, part 72, “Second harvest”. 

  2. Editorial notes: The below includes a mixture of books and shorter length pieces including articles, essays, interviews, blogposts, etc. A few things – some of them exceptional – have been left out, for one of two reasons: (1) because they did not seem to belong to any of the common threads that were at work in my reading this year (which is fine); and (2) because I either thought they were just not very good, or I still do not “get” them, or how to put them to use. 

  3. A Thousand Plateaus, p.2. 

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The Fisher-Function has routed itself so thoroughly in my neural circuitry that I am no longer just echoing and citing k-punk (at an almost embarrassingly high frequency) but anticipating its thoughts accurately. Upon reading some posts on Nietzsche in an attempt to help me get some bearings on the notorious philosopher, I came across this passage from a 2006 post that spectacularly wires together Nietzsche and Celebrity Big Brother:

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Amidst resurgent fascisms and cut-throat neoliberal reforms across the globe, one would not be blamed for giving up on satire. ICE detention centres, spiralling homelessness, migrant slave labour: what use is laughter, parody and irony here? One can’t help but watch shows like Last Week TonightHave I Got News For You, or The Daily Show and feel they are completely toothless: an embarrassing and transparent charade of opposition which in actuality shore up the dominant powers1.

Chris Morris’ Channel 4 interview last month, promoting his new film The Day Shall Come, however, has breathed new life into this debate. In a widely shared clip, Morris poured scorn on “a kind of satire which essentially placates the court”, authoritatively advocating for a comedy with “a purpose” that actively tries to change something. With a refreshing moral seriousness and clarity of ambition, Morris affirmed that he did not feel outflanked by the perpetual outlandishness of world politics today and the likes of Trump, asserting that “yeah, you need to take notes pretty fast right now, but I don’t think [Trump’s] escaped ridicule … you’re always going to be able to ridicule someone like that”. Satire’s not dead, for Morris; it’s just being done wrong. A firm commitment to satire as a weapon undergirds Morris’ interview; he doesn’t care that Trump is outlandish, because he knows that reality has always been outlandish, and that comedy intervenes in that (rather than operating separately as the work of the individual author’s imagination). “It’s about the thrust, and it’s really about whether the people you’re lancing can get off your spike”, he declares. “And I’m saying the FBI really cannot get out of the tractor beam of this comedy.”

The question is: is Morris’ faith misplaced? Does The Day Shall Come embody a revived and weaponised satire for our current times? Or does the lance dissolve upon contact? Is the lancer always-already themselves lanced? Do those in power want to be lanced? Do resurgent fascisms, neoliberal exploitation and state authoritarianism demand other modes of politico-aesthetic resistance?

*

The Day Shall Come is based on, and meticulously satirises, a particularly pernicious – and postmodern – operation of power. The short of it is this: the FBI concocts “fake” terrorist plots using real, unwitting targets, providing money, weapons and other resources for them via undercover informants in order to nudge them into detonating a fake bomb. This then acts as their catalyst to arrest the unwitting target on grounds of intending to commit terrorist violence, resulting in kudos (and other more material resources) for the FBI and generating the impression that the authorities are “on top of” terrorism in the anxious climate under the War on Terror. These stings aren’t rare, either – while exact numbers are hard to get, there have at least been multiple hundreds of these kind of fake plots, with Morris estimating at least 300 in his Channel 4 interview.

But “fake” is the wrong word for these schemes, because as their victims will attest to, and as The Day Shall Come painstakingly portrays, their impact on those targeted is very, very real. Such stings have an almost 100% conviction rate according to Morris, with prison sentences of 25+ years which break apart innocent families. The FBI’s retort here would be that these people would have been terrorists anyway; these stings are just a form of pre-emptive policing that catch criminals before the crime. But from the moment the authorities “pre-emptively” engage with those they have identified as possible terrorists, and modulate their behaviour based on pre-existing plans for entrapment, any declaration that “they would have been terrorists anyway” becomes literally impossible to confirm or deny. The authorities never gain any grip on what these suspects are “really” like because as soon as they have been flagged as a target, and as soon as an undercover informant approaches them, the suspect has been coaxed into an elaborate simulation of reality. A non-simulated, or authentically “real”, response from the suspect can’t be attained; they’re always-already in the game of the simulation for the FBI, always-already being tested, nudged and probed, and any response can only be understood in relation to this. Here the distance and ontological hierarchisation between fiction and reality disappears as the racist and classist models of “radicalisation” and what a “terrorist” looks and/or acts like pass into, perforate and affect the Real, rather than simply “reflect” or “model” it from a distance. As cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard prophesised in 1976:

The old slogan ‘reality is stranger than fiction’ … has been outrun, since there is no longer any fiction that life can possibly confront, even as its conqueror. Reality has passed completely into the game of reality. Radical disaffection, the cool and cybernetic stage, replaces the hot, phantasmatic phase2.

These terrorist plots, then, aren’t “fake” or “false”; but they’re also not simplistically “real”, either. Instead, they’re simulations, a strange kind of “game” of reality3. The powers that be such as the FBI will always officially efface this, needing the firm ontological terrain of the Real in order to ground and legitimate themselves, but the fact is no such terrain exists.

If this all sounds like a stretch, or needlessly abstract and “postmodern”, I’d recommend watching The Day Shall Come, which brilliantly depicts the sheer absurdity, unreality and weightlessness stalking underneath these terror stings. The film follows Moses (Merchánt Davis), an impoverished leader of a small religious commune, the “Star of Six”, in Miami. Worshipping an eclectic mix of six deities (Allah, Melchizedek, Jesus, “Black Santa”, Mohammed and General Toussaint), Moses preaches a black revolution against the white man, but strictly without the use of firearms. “We trust only the weapons of tradition”, Moses declares in a sermon. “The sword, the sling… and the crossbow.”

Following the failure of a previous sting, the FBI seek out new suspects who can be the centre of their simulated terror plots. Moses, preaching to “overthrow the injustice of the white European” and declaring that “the cranes of the gentrificators shall fall”, seems just the fit for them, and soon enough informants are in contact with Moses, with one promising him money and firearms while posing as a sheikh affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

After this initial point of contact everything spirals out of control as each side tries to play and deceive the other in an escalating game of reality (sometimes without even realising it, in Moses’ case). The result is the fabulously absurd climax of the film, which starts when Moses agrees to purchase uranium from the FBI informant. Unkeen to actually use the nuclear weapons, however, the Star of Six fill the empty nuclear cannisters with piss and beans (the actual uranium being given to them the next week), in order to sell them for $100,000 to a neo-Nazi group and thus get some much needed cash for their farm. The neo-Nazis, however, are undercover Miami police officers, and having been promised supposedly real nuclear weapons, prompt the police department to declare a nuclear emergency. A team of police officers are on their way to arrest Moses and the Star of Six for supplying nuclear weapons that are in reality piss and beans inside cannisters supplied by the FBI. Having compromised their simulated nuclear terror plot and taken it as a real threat, the police and FBI soon butt heads, and the latter rush to diffuse the situation and regain control of “their” simulation. Hurriedly, they find the phone numbers for the “neo-Nazis” and get them to call off the arrest, letting Moses and the Star of Six go.

The FBI think they’ve solved the problem, but soon find out their efforts have been futile: word of the situation has reached the Oval Office, causing the Department of Homeland Security to declare a federal nuclear emergency on the fake piss-nukes. Dozens of police cars and armed police officers are now following Moses, unbeknownst to him, as he travels to his daughter’s birthday party. The fiction, once again, has outpaced reality. Faced with this farcical scenario, the FBI agents find themselves conforming to a twisted, backwards logic. They know the emergency is groundless, but it’s out there and believed, so in order to control it they have to act as if it were genuine. The bemused FBI agent Kendra (Anna Kendrick) summarises the quandary as follows: “So… to stop a nuclear emergency I have to declare a nuclear emergency?” “Yes”, her boss replies. “The logic only works if you say the sentence slowly. Keep the contradictory elements apart.”

Image result for the day shall come

As the cybernetic feedback loop(s) between Moses, the FBI and the police in The Day Shall Come accelerates, then, any firm ontological grounding or hierarchisation crumbles. What was simply designed as a fictitious threat to fool a supposed “would be” terrorist becomes taken as a real threat by a paranoid agency of social control that, operating under pre-emptive and anticipative models of terrorist behaviour, understands and respects no difference between signifier and signified and takes any sign of a real threat as a real threat in itself. The code, the programme, the model, the operation, is coldly literal; it seeks pure operativity and functionality, not symbolism and metaphors. The results here are dark and disturbing: the Star of Six are all sentenced to 25-35 years in prison, the same outcome as if they had actually committed a terrorist plot without any external intervention.

Try and start on any firm division between reality and fiction here, and you’ll end up precisely where everyone in The Day Shall Come ends up: in a strange blend of reality and fiction – in other words, a play of simulations; Baudrillard’s hyperreality. Dig for any firm reality principle and you’ll come up short, inevitably finding the absurd circuitry behind the screen, as the FBI agents in the film find themselves enmeshed in. It’s all like that Baudrillard passage from Simulacra and Simulation:

Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger […] You won’t be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack […]), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real - that is, to the established order itself…4

But we don’t really “find ourselves back in the real” after these encounters, as the Star of Six at the end of The Day Shall Come would attest to. The absurd circuitry, the weightlessness, the simulation, has been exposed, and things aren’t quite the same afterwards. As the film ends and the credits roll, it haunts us. This shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and it does. We never find the “truth” in The Day Shall Come, we never return to any stable ontological ground, what “actually” happened never gets its comeuppance. The simulation just keeps on going as (if) real; we never get back to the “real” side of the mirror, and to be honest we were never there to begin with. Instead, we encounter what Mark Fisher in his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs, borrowing from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, terms the “black mirror”:

But what then does the black mirror show us, if not out own reflections? In part, the black mirror is another image of cyberspace black out – the catatonic “neuro-electronic void” or cut-out of conscious signal we have already discussed […] The black mirror, then, is the image of the noumenal event horizon beyond which we cannot go: what we “always” are “in the other world” we are “already” in.5

The black mirror haunts the arrest and severe sentencing of Moses and the Star of Six at the end of The Day Shall Come; it’s right there, in that uncomfortable feeling in our stomachs. The image was never a mirror(ing); it was always a simulation, the workings of a code… sure, this is probably something to embrace ultimately rather than deny – more on this in part 2 – but who can deny the unease one gets when one looks in the mirror and just sees black, when one thinks they can trust what they see before them, only to end up with 35 years in prison on cooked-up terrorism charges for it…

*

The Day Shall Come is a good satire of this weightless yet pernicious form of power – interesting, funny, morally serious. And yet, considering how deeply director Chris Morris understands this operation of power (spending years researching the film, interviewing FBI agents and victims), one wonders why he opted for satire as a politico-aesthetic mode to combat it. For doesn’t satire fall prey to the simulation, just as Moses does in The Day Shall Come? Ultimately, isn’t a satire on “fake” FBI terror strings just a simulation of them that will all too quickly be absorbed into the real, absorbed into the FBI (and other state agencies’) very functioning? If so, what does resistance look like? I’ll be discussing this more in part 2, which should be up at least within a few weeks or so.


  1. Mark Fisher’s “The strange death of British satire” is an excellent and succinct documentary of this trend. Available at: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4919/the-strange-death-of-british-satire 

  2. Jean Baudrillard,Symbolic Exchange and Death, p.75, emphasis added. (SAGE, 1993) 

  3. It’s important to underscore that this doesn’t mean the racist and classist violence inflicted in these simulations is fake or “not real”, and thus unimportant. It’s not that reality is now fake, but that reality is increasingly fictional and fiction is increasingly real. The status of both “reality” and “fiction” have changed, blurring into one another. Reality is no longer what we think it is; same with fiction. But that doesn’t mean the real has disappeared and that everything is fake – this would be a crucial misreading of Baudrillard’s arguments. 

  4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (no page numbers as I have a shitty pdf version) (emphasis added) 

  5. Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, p.142. (Exmilitary Press edition) 

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