Trotsky once spoke of a raincoat that had holes in it. It was a perfect raincoat, he said - as long as it doesn’t rain. With the far left’s confused non-response to Trump’s fascism (when they aren’t simply congratulating him on pwning the liberals, and after spending a lot of energy denying he was a fascist to start with), hasn’t the revolutionary left as a whole turned out to be such a raincoat?

Topics discussed: Introductions; The SWP (Socialist Workers Party) and SWSS (Socialist Workers Student Society) in 1984; the miners’ strike; the revolutionary left in the 70s and 80s; a busted flush; the end of ouverism / workerism after the miners’ strike; East London IS (International Socialists), stewards and activists; York University; the social basis of Libertarian Communism in the postwar militancy; Mark Fisher vs the last generation to get a whiff of workers organisation; anarchists against the miners; state capitalism and Polish builders; Solidarnosc; Leninism vs the counterculture; Castoriadis (Socialisme ou Barbarie), Mike Kidron, Nigel Harris and Alasdair Macintyre (Socialist Review Group and International Socialists), Italian Autonomism breaking out of the ideology of Trotskyism; social justice in sectarian Ireland, segregated US, the Vietnam war; the Communist Historians Group and the utopianism of the countercultural left; Trotskyist disappointment after 1989 and the Colour Revolutions; How the SWP decided to become Trotskyist; conspiratorial, underground Marxism vs. Marxist (and post-Marxist!) rethinking; ‘Shock Doctrine’ Marxism, ‘No Logo’ and the rise of ‘anti-imperialist’ campism; defending the center / in defense of liberal modernity.

A new book from Phil Smith offers a chance to consider Mark Fisher's hauntological legacy and the politics of life lived without a future, among the remains of the past.

Phil Smith, Albion’s Eco-Eerie: TV and Movies of the Haunted Generation, Shrewsbury: Temporal Boundary Press, 2024.

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) founded Zero Books, Repeater Books and the k-punk blog. He was the author of Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life, and taught at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Culture has lost the ability to grasp the presentMark Fisher

If we gift them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently, we can control them better.Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner.

Perhaps a better hour may at some time strike even for the clever fellows: one in which they may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things.Adorno

Podcast Discussion Summary »

TLDR: A discussion about the details of Phil’s book quickly turns into a reappraisal of the work of Mark Fisher and his kin (Zero Books, Repeater Books, Nina Power, Nick Land, Simon Reynolds, David Stubbs, et al.) and their ideas about hauntology and the Ghost of Marx.

Films reviewed in the book include: Night of the Demon, The Company of Wolves, Fireball XL5, Quatermass and the Pit, O Lucky Man!, Children of the Stones, Whistle and I'll Come to You, Hellraiser, Hellbound.

It is a bold book that takes the weaving path of blood, trauma and sensuality away from Folk Horror and fashionable 'hauntology' into new, enchanted spaces. Digging up and doubling down on messy ideas and demon lovers that exist not to elevate us to transcendence but to immerse us in the mud of grotty instinct.Stephen Volk, author of The Dark Masters Trilogy and Ghostwatch

It is acceptable these days to describe Blake as a Taoist, a Pagan, a Buddhist or an atheist... anything but a Christian. The Traveller and his guest, Mark Vernon argue that this is a big mistake: "Blake... did not claim to be a mystic, and did not use the word. He claimed to be a visionary, an enthusiast, and a Christian, and defined the terms carefully. I have read, and now am reading in newspapers, statements of literary critics and those who call themselves "atheistic theologians" to the effect that Blake had no god but man. People who are not atheists are usually willing to leave to God such important judgments about others. On this subject, as on other statements about himself, Blake seems clear enough. He said always and passionately that he was a Christian, and I know only One who has a better right to an opinion on that subject." Bo Lindberg

Planned as a long Q&A session between Andy and long-time Traveller podcast co-host, Conor Kostick, that discussion raised so many questions and went on for so long that it seemed best to postpone airing the issues on the podcast. For this episode we excerpted Andy’s intro to the discussion, touching on his own experience listening to and making electronic music.

Starting with Wendy Carlos and Popcorn, (yes, it’s Hot Butter by Popcorn, not Popcorn by Hot Butter… Andy got that wrong throughout) passing through Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound, Andy argues that the technology is generally used lazily and to little effect, compared to the enormity of, eg., the work of Iancu Dumitrescu.

The gist of Andy’s argument is that all the things he found interesting in the distorted timbres and extremities of electronic rock and industrial music are used with overwhelming effect in the music of the Romanian Spectral composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, whose music runs throughout the show, along with samples from David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, the Tim Hodgkinson / Ken Hyder collaboration, KSpace, and Andy Wilson’s own recorded archives.

Along the way, Andy discusses the combined and uneven development of electronic music, with huge increases in the expressive power of the tools available to musicians still lagrely unexplored by most musicians. Yes, Andy is complaining about the music young people make today. Conor thought so, and he might be right.

Andy also tells stories about visiting abandoned quarries on a military base to record foxes with Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire, Cod that burp (off the Galapagos Islands, not Japan) at hissing cockroaches, Chris Carter’s Gristleizer, Bourbonese Qualk’s Simon Crab buying Throbbing Gristle’s Korg MS20, comparisons between buying tickets for Oasis and dumping grain in the Pacific, seagull reverb, the Nagra tape recorder, BBC Radiophonics, ‘Dada, Futurism, Industrial Music’, Wendy Carlos, hand-cranked ring modulators, The Aphex Twin and the Supercollider user group, Steve Stapleton bunking off at Faust’s Wumme and Kurt Graupner’s Faust Machines, computerised shamanic improv, John Lennon’s tape experiments, SoundRaider, time division multiplexing, nature recording with David Attenborough, the pleasures of dentistry under general anaesthetics, and more besides.

Criminally, I didn’t get around to talking about how the sound of King Iwah and the Upsetters’ Give Me Power, produced by Lee Perry in 1972, set the scene for everything that followed. I can only apologise and drop this video here.

Traveller Music Tech

Blake saw imagination as the ‘body of Christ’, as divine: imagination is what will build Golgonooza, his New Jerusalem. Some readers of Blake interpret this imagination as merely the power that drives the artist to make inspired art. It is far more than this in Blake. The imagination is tasked with building God’s Kingdom itself. But what can this mean?

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was a child of the post-war revolutionary movement. He led the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), which split to the left of French Trotskyism and was active from 1948-1966. Castoriadis eventually rejected Marxism, based on his belief in the power of the collective social imaginary to create social forms (languages, institutions, social relations), symbolic artefacts and entire societies. Could this social imaginary, able to create ex nihilo and overturn all categories, be the divine body of the imagination Blake envisioned?

In this podcast, Andy Wilson talks to Joe Ruffell about Castoriadis and the imagination, taking in topics including;

* Castoriadis’s political history and his development beyond Marxismthe role of imagination in Blake

* Castoriadis’s account of the history of the concept of the radical (esemplastic) imagination from Aristotle to Heidegger and beyond

* Castoriadis and Primary Narcissism

* State Capitalist groups to the left of Trotskyism in the New Left

* worker’s power against Lenin and Taylorism

* the later Castoriadis’s idea of the interregnum, and of the power of the imagination to entrap and beguile

* Castoriadis’s ecological and anti-oppression politics

* Castoriadis and imagination against Marxism

* the debate between Castoriadis and Alasdair MacIntyre (the latter speaking for the International Socialists before becoming a Catholic Aristotelian)

* democracy in the Greek polis and elsewhere

* the curse of the imagination

Does the radical duality of Castoriadis’s imagination – its power both to liberate and enslave, and the slippery dialectics between those states – resemble in any way the arrangements in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell?

The Traveller in the Evening talks to Timothy Morton about Tim's new book Hell, their personal journeys towards Christianity; the role of aesthetics in theory; the war against The Holy Spirit and Žižek's blindness to the latter; charisma; Speculative Realism as an attack on theory; ‘French feminism’; the impact of music on their lives; the trouble with Marxists pirouetting like Jerry Falwell… and Falwell’s demonic level of aggression toward Desmond Tutu; doing peyote with your mum; The Sex Pistols tearing a hole in the curtain of reality on the Bill Grundy Show; transpersonal boundary-violating sensations of extreme benevolence; Bjork as a 'soul-opener'; René Girard channelling Alice Through the Looking Glass; Marx's meanness, the role of wonderment in theory; Terry Eagleton giving Marx a leg up; being a happy scapegoat and cheerful assassin; Luce Irigaray and the Sokal hoax; and the influence of childhood trauma on their views.

“Aggressively expressed contempt is absolutely the wonderment killer.”

"I've been calling them Right Club recently, like Fight Club. The first rule of Right Club is you never mention Right Club... and the second rule of Right Club is that you never mention Right Club. And as soon as you call them out, like we actually were in a church, this is a church with some Hegel, with a sort of stained glass window of Marx, and you are all like crusading inquisition people. They get so mad, you know? And the first time I ever said I'm not quite sure anymore about the concept of critique, I got killed in public for three days by people who had to perform a ritual sacrifice on me. And incidentally, by the way, I love Theodore Adorno."

“The sense of beauty that even beetles and perhaps flowers… share has nothing to do with being a 'biologically female' body: this is a trans theory of beauty, as a matter of fact. I'm going to say that again: the default theory of sexual selection consists of a trans theory of beauty. Far from 'essentializing' or 'biologizing' art, what this means is that beetles and flowers also make art: 'art history' can't possibly stop at human beings or even primates. And that art is profoundly queer and indeed trans. Think about it. Those female ducks and butterflies simply can't be the only lifeforms with a sense of beauty. The non-cloning part of our biosphere, the way it appears, from flowers to wallpaper to disco balls to iridescent beetles, is a reflection of queer desire without a goal.

Thel created Earth.

So Thel is a figure for theory, throwing a wrench of 'what the f**k?' into the machinery. And therefore Thel is a figure for 'life,' but not the procreative, goal-directed life of parents and daughters. Wonderment is the 'feel' of theory, and wonderment is without a goal. The fact that consciousness can wonder is perhaps another flower, another 'meaningless' life, meaningless in the sense of not having a telos or point. And what is esoteric religion aside from asserting what Kant asserts about beauty, a meaningful lack of meaning?”

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of Ecology without Nature (2007), The Ecological Thought (2010), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Being Ecological (2018), ten other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.

Watch now | An introduction to Blake given by Andy Wilson at St Luke’s Community Centre, Islington, London, on 24th Nov 2021, for the residents around Bunhill Fields, where Blake is buried.