Here’s an interview I did a while ago with Dominic Fox about his work, philosophical blogging and François Laruelle.
- Dominic Fox is a writer, musician and programmer. He is the author of Cold World – the Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria, and a book of poetry, Half Cocks.
Milan Marković: In the time when specialization is becoming the order of the day, you seem to be on the path of a Renaissance man. You are a writer, poet, musician, programmer, and avid user of social networks without which I wouldn’t know about your work. How would you describe what you do and in what way is it conditioned by the medium of the internet?
Dominic Fox: I’m not always certain that much of it isn’t, if not exactly a total waste of time, then at least a kind of displacement activity keeping me from other things I ought to be doing. We often worry that our involvement in social media has a kind of hollowness or wastefulness about it, that it feeds others – in the last instance, the owners and advertisers for whose ultimate benefit the show is run – but not ourselves. Think of the books I could have written, if I hadn’t spent so much time in ephemeral communication! But books one “could” have written are not books one necessarily would have written; and the two books I have written owe their existence substantially to online social networks.
The story of Zer0 Books, who published Cold World back in 2009, is I think quite well known, thanks especially to the central involvement of the late Mark Fisher (who blogged as k-punk). A section of the blogosphere coalesced, for what in retrospect seems a terribly short time, into an exhilaratingly productive real-world nexus of friends and comrades. What happened offline and what happened online were never entirely separate for me. I remember that on one occasion when some of us were meeting in a cafe in central London I referred to Nina Power as “IT” – short for “Infinite Thought”, the name of her now-deleted blog – and then hurriedly corrected myself to using her real name. It felt a bit ridiculous, but it was also true that “IT” was in some sense a participant in the scene just as much as Nina herself was, an avatar which had taken on something of a life of its own. This was certainly always true of k-punk, whose online voice was so distinctive and powerful. Mark both was and was not k-punk – indeed, he was always very explicit about using k-punk as a way to become not-himself, to conduct experiments in thinking (and indeed *being*) beyond the stabilising reference point of his socially-assigned identity. I think that sense of doubleness was very important in how we thought of ourselves as writers, at least at the time. We weren’t writing in a straightforwardly confessional mode, we weren’t doing publicity for ourselves as marketable personalities, we claimed the right to be a bit contrary and contradictory, in some ways that might now be seen as self-sabotaging. The “order of the day” is very much to be consistently identifiable with a specific value proposition, to position yourself as a representative of something, to stay on-brand.
To be “a writer, poet, musician, programmer” oughtn’t to be that unusual, and in fact I’m not convinced that it’s anything all that special in itself. My colleagues at work (I do the programming part for a living) are variously poets, musicians, amateur philosophers and so on in their spare time; if you take an interest in these sides of people, they will never stop surprising you. What’s more peculiar perhaps is to be this combination of things in public, to put poetry and music and programming simultaneously into public practice, even if only before a very small audience. It isn’t, as I sometimes worry it might appear, a matter of having boundless confidence in one’s own brilliance at everything. It’s more that online social networks make it possible to find brilliant people to have every kind of conversation with simultaneously. The internet is in this sense every bit as democratising, as deterritorialising, as liberatory as its most hyperbolic, starry-eyed early boosters made it out to be. It’s also terrible in all kinds of other ways at once. I recently found myself saying one day on Twitter that, at its best, it was still a superb forum for the rapid, unpredictable transmission and amplification of general intelligence – and then within a fortnight of that declaring that it was an environment so toxic that nothing worthwhile could survive in it. Somehow both of these things are true at the same time.
MM: Do you have any advice to young people who wish to emancipate themselves from, as you nicely put it, “stay on-brand” position which often presents itself as a rational choice in the current market environment?
DF: I think that young people likely know better than I do what the stakes are here, and will already have been developing strategies of their own. Of these, I have observed two ways of negotiating the marketplace of identities which seem promising, in separate ways.
The first is Natalie Wynn’s perfectly self-conscious engagement, as “Contrapoints” with the mechanisms of self-branding. Under the “Contrapoints” label Wynn has developed a panoply of personae, none of which is strictly identifiable with their creator, and through which she enacts an ongoing of drama of reason which both exposes the stereotypes at play within culture-war skirmishes, and offers points of identification across multiple positions which enable the spectator to move beyond their manufactured stand-off.
The second is the hyperstitional convocation of obscure conspiracies, for example through networks of pseudonymous twitter accounts, fabricated so as to create the impression of a highly active intellectual scene of unknown origin, with its own internal jargon and running jokes. The networks around “cave twitter”, “rhett twitter”, “U/ACC” and, lately, “G/ACC” were mostly the work of a small number of people, but they drew in outside participants, and took on at least a temporary life of their own. Here, the dynamics of in-group belonging and brand identity are manipulated in the absence of a de facto “group”, or any kind of stable referent for the putative “brand”, in order to play a kind of game with the platform itself.
Wynn is fairly unambiguously a figure of the left, although ultimately I think a liberal in her sense of what the public sphere should be; she has managed the tensions between these two positions very admirably, for the time being. The political affiliation of “cave twitter” is much harder to pin down: it might always be a devilish right-wing conspiracy, and its dubious overtones, never explicitly disavowed, are evidently at least part of the appeal. It exists at least in part to troll that part of the left which sees crypto-fascism lurking behind every manifestation of the cryptic, and which mistakes its clarity fetish for resoluteness of moral purpose. But there is a risk in all this of providing cover, and recruitment opportunities, for actual fascists, as the history of occult music scenes (power electronics, black metal, neo-folk and so on) abundantly illustrates. When Wynn dresses up as a Nazi, there is never any risk that she will be understood as inviting sympathy for the position she articulates in costume.
MM: Before discovering your poetry and music I was familiar with Dominic Fox, a philosopher-blogger. For me back then, in the late years of the previous decade, when I used to be a philosophy undergraduate disappointed in the way it was practised academically, blogging seemed like the only alternative that can bring some life into the discipline. Apart from many devotees to philosophizing that shared my enthusiasm, who saw blogs as their chance to share their ideas and become visible on the emerging world philosophical scene, we could see the reaction to this trend from people like Ray Brassier who expressed his disbelief in appropriateness of the internet for serious philosophical activity. As an experienced philosophy blogger what is your opinion about the specific use of the medium and what has changed in the approach blogs are used since you first started writing them? Also, would you say that the age of blogs has come to an end when it comes to philosophy?
DF: Philosophy blogging was for me an activity of glossing philosophy, of active reading, making notes in the margin. Is that the same as “doing philosophy”? I think it can be a part of doing philosophy, a way of carrying on the conversation about philosophy that philosophy partly is. But there is also a part of philosophy that withdraws from conversation, from “circulation” (as Badiou would have it), that needs a different sort of time and space to prepare itself in. Ray Brassier’s famously disgusted objection to the “online orgy of stupidity” that he saw accompanying the explosion of interest in “speculative realism” was I think prompted by a sense that people were rushing in unprepared, that reaction and innovation (in the sense of an urgent need to “say something new”) were driving the discourse without either the guiding hand of critique, or the patience needed to develop ideas towards their extreme forms (I’m thinking of a line of Geoffrey Hill’s: “the poem moves grudgingly to its extreme form” – a process quite different from that of coining a fresh neologism and riffing on it for a few paragraphs).
There were exceptions of course; honourable mention would have to go to Pete Wolfendale’s long posts interrogating the conceptual architecture of Object-Oriented Philosophy, which became his very forceful and remarkable book on the subject. But Pete’s critical posts were already – perhaps by virtue of their length alone – working according to a different rhythm than that of “regular” blogging. It’s telling that they were virtually ignored at the time of writing; I think this was at least in part because they weren’t at all amenable to the quick-fire response everyone was becoming so practised in delivering, but called for much more demanding engagement. You can’t bring down a colossus by shooting from the hip.
I still think that there is honour in glossing, and have been encouraged in this by the work of Nicola Masciandaro (founder of Glossator, a publication dedicated to the “practice and theory of the commentary”, on topics as varied as black metal and the medieval poem of the Pearl) and Edia Connole, who with Nicola and Gary Shipley has curated and edited some fine collections of glosses, published by Schism Press, a couple of which I’ve had the pleasure of being included in. There has been a general shift away from the blog post as a medium of communication, however. A long critical article such as Sophie Lewis’s “Cthulhu Plays No Role For Me”, a serious and scintillating retort to Donna Haraway’s recent work, finds a more natural home in an online magazine (Viewpoint, in this case). At the opposite end of the spectrum, I am as likely to make off-the-cuff remarks about Laruelle on Facebook as anywhere else, since that is seemingly where the audience for such things now resides.
Is the age of the philosophy blogs at an end? It feels that way to me, but I also secretly hope that somewhere I am completely unaware of a new nexus of bloggers is quietly forming, finding each other, developing a collective practice. For a short while I had a quotation from an interview Mark Fisher had done with the electronic musician Burial on the masthead of my blog: “it lets randoms in” (Burial was speaking of the internet in general, and his preference for remaining anonymous, withdrawing from circulation). With blogging, someone might find what you had written by traversing a network of links from across the archipelago of blogs, and might even leave a comment on it (back in the days when we were unguarded enough to leave the comments open). That could be wonderfully serendipitous, even if later on it felt like subjecting oneself to continual ad hoc hazing. I think the quality of “randoms”, and of random encounters, is likely to be much better when you are hardly known by anybody, when what you are choosing to making public is still a kind of open secret.
MM: Recently, you’ve spent some time extensively glossing about the thought of François Laruelle. What made his non-philosophical position compelling to write about?
DF: Laruelle remains a source of much vexation. My first response to the suggestion, recently discussed by viewers of Marie Kondo’s television show about the pleasures of getting rid of household objects you no longer need, that the books you retain should be the ones that “spark joy”, was immediately to think of the several texts of Laruelle’s I have on my shelves, which I am not ready to dispose of just yet. What do they spark? Something like irritation, the irritation of an unscratchable itch or an unrealised urge to sneeze. His writing – I won’t say his thought, because I remain fundamentally uncertain whether his writing constitutes a thought, properly speaking, or not – flickers on the edge of sense for me. I’m continually impressed by people who are able to quote passages of Laruelle and confidently gloss them, as if he were doing the kind of theoretical work that naturally lends itself to that sort of explication. My glosses are more attempts to repair a kind of hole in my own understanding. It isn’t that Laruelle’s writing is simply vacuous, an empty performance, although sometimes I think it verges on a kind of automatism, a writing machine whose underlying mode of operation is permutative, driven by obscure rules of syntax. Inanity would be easier to cope with, in a way. One could just donate the books to charity and move on.
There are at least three Laruelles; perhaps more. One is a polemicist of some talent, who demands – in the face of human suffering, weakness and oppression – that there be something other than more philosophy. He refines to the highest point the accusation that knowledge is the perpetuation of epistemic injustice, that the strength of a thought is a measure of its power of domination, a power it invariably places in the hands of the princes of this world. For this Laruelle, it is necessary and just to weaken thought to the point where it no longer functions as thought at all, precisely in order that thinking can once again be practiced as the common human labour of bringing what is lived to language, rather than as an elite conspiracy against humans. This is the great theme of dethroning philosophical sufficiency, to which he constantly returns.
A second Laruelle is the propounder of non-philosophy as a rival mode of thought: the Laruelle who says “philosophy does this, but non-philosophy does not”, and who seeks new figures of language to illuminate what non-philosophy’s not-doing entails as a concrete symbolic practice. There is a kind of furtive, harried inventiveness about this Laruelle, who is always at pains to prevent his language from becoming, once again, a weapon of the strong against the weak. The fractal! But not, perforce, the strongly-formulated fractal of mathematical geometry. Or, the quantum matrix! But not the quantum of quantum mechanics, whose theoretical kernel is one of the most solid accomplishments of modern physics. In the sharpest possible distinction to Badiou, for whom such things are firm points of departure for the renovation of powerful conceptual articulations, Laruelle seeks to deprive philosophy of all opportunity to make use of art, mathematics, politics or love as “conditions”. He leaves behind no system.
Thirdly, there is the Laruelle who practices non-philosophy, simply as a kind of writing, especially in his well-loved book about non-photography. This Laruelle I think of as a kind of psychedelic investigator, one who subjects the means of representation of experience to a kind of expansive blurring in order that what we really experience might become more variously imaginable. What he is doing does not seem to me to be so very far from what J. H. Prynne is doing: it does not destroy representation, but de-authorises it, returning authority to the primary field of experience within which all representations inhere. Like Prynne, this Laruelle is perhaps best understood as a particular kind of paradoxical figure from the 1960s, all but forgotten in the present landscape: the militant hippy.
MM: I wasn’t surprised at all after seeing your poems in a journal dedicated to publishing theoretical work such is Angelaki. For a long time I perceived your poetical endeavours closely related to theory and its language, especially if one takes into account classicisity of your poetical production in a radically “unclassicist” time such is ours. (In my opinion, it could be said the way you relate to poetry is analogous to Badiou’s relationship to philosophy). So, how would you reflect upon the relation between your poetical and theoretical output?
DF: The purpose for me of writing poems which follow some kind of self-imposed formal structure is not so much to produce beautiful or pleasing forms, as to generate obstacles “at the level of the signifier” which then act as prompts for invention, for thinking and saying something different from what one might ordinarily have been going to think and say. It’s a way of interrupting oneself, of pulling the “outside” in, which plugs you into the alien matrix of language, its vast tangle of connections and associations which simultaneously reflect an entire diachronic history of social utterance, and seem initially arbitrary and impersonal from the point of view of the individual speaker. There’s a line of Valéry’s, “a difficulty is a light, an impossibility is a sun”, which I think expresses well the modernist ambition to force matters to a crux from which it is only possible to go on by inventing something that wouldn’t previously have had any reason to exist.
Badiou likes to quote Lacan, saying “the real only comes to pass as the impasse of formalisation”. What does that mean? I think it means that the only way we can make the real – in this case, the social and material reality of language – signify (or “come to pass”) in our conventional utterances, is to look for circumstances in which those conventions grind against themselves, or are otherwise forced into visibility as conventions. If poetry is language which is somehow “aware” of itself as language, this awareness has to be produced somehow “in” language. So rather than a model of poetry as heightened eloquence or fluency, a kind of “elevated” language which says things better – more enjoyably, more resonantly, more relatably – this is a model of poetry as “the termination of eloquence” (as Badiou says of Paul Celan). It belongs to the late modernist poetry of the 20th century, and my “classicism” here is really an adherence to this model.
The danger here is that one ends up making a virtue of making poetry look difficult, whereas in fact some of the greatest formal accomplishments of poetry consist in making it look easy. That’s the Romantic path, from Blake’s Songs of Innocence to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads: trying to win a sense of lyrical freedom, of liberated utterance, from a technically very constrained and complicated domain. So this is an additional constraint I try to place myself under, although it’s not a formally specifiable constraint: it can’t all be gnarly entanglement, there have to be at least a few phrases which sing, which have a feeling of spontaneous rightness about them.
In some poems there can be a deliberate dramatisation, within the poem itself, of this kind of emergence of lyrical freedom from a seemingly intractable material imbroglio: things start out fuliginous and prickly, and something works its way upwards towards the light. I think you can see this in the elegy poems for Mark Fisher, in fact: there are parts which are very obscure, intense wrangles with systems of private reference, drawn from my reading of Mark’s blog and related texts, but there are also phrases which I would hope would resonate outside of that context, where the ambition at least is to spark recognition and a feeling of rightness. It’s a poem “about” the public/private split, as I suppose every elegy must be to some extent.
MM: Few years ago Urbanomic had published a volume titled “Cold War/Cold World” with the clear reference to your book. In this age dominated by hyperproduction, and as funny as it sounds it also pertains to the domain of theory, it is impressive to see a “new concept” aging well. How would you describe its continuing relevance?
DF: It’s tempting to go on a rampage of corrections, citing all the places where I’ve seen the term misused or wrongly understood (according to me) and telling everybody off for not reading me more carefully. But actually if one’s been lucky enough to come up with a few striking phrases, and they achieve a wider circulation, then it’s unreasonable to expect absolute fidelity. If the phrase “cold world”, and the associated reference to “a world voided of both human warmth and metaphysical comfort”, now belong to a discourse I no longer control, well, that’s success!
I haven’t had the opportunity yet to read the new book from Urbanomic, but Christine Wertheim’s chapter on “the affective frame of dystopian fiction” looks very promising. Cold World equivocated somewhat, in some ways quite deliberately, between “dysphoria” (a condition of the embodied subject) and “dystopia” (a presumed actual state of things), because it was about the way the “affective frame” of dejection comes into play both in aesthetic world-making and in political convictions about the state of the world and what is to be done about it. You could say that affective framing is what aesthetics and politics have in common, or that it’s through an affective frame that, for example, ontological notions pass back and forth between the aesthetic and the political. A gate through bloodstained mirrors, indeed! By “ontological notions” here I mean notions about what makes the world cohere, or not cohere; the significance of dysphoria here is that it’s an experience of non-coherence, of non-synthesis, which profoundly affects the way the world is seen and felt and experienced to be.
Nowadays if someone is speaking about dysphoria they’re almost always speaking about gender dysphoria, which is never really acknowledged anywhere in Cold World. If you go back, however, to my trilogy of blog posts on “militant dysphoria” which were really the origin of the book, the first is about the struggle against compulsory heterosexuality in Ursula le Guin’s A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, and the second is about Patricia Highsmith and begins with an analysis of a passage from Andrew Wilson’s biography of Highsmith that discusses her nerve-jangling experience of trying and failing to enjoy heterosexual intercourse. So the sexed body, in its sensations and relations, is right at the centre of how I first started to think about dysphoria: in a sense, it’s an accident of personal history that I fell into a depression and ended up focussing more on that instead. (Narrator’s voiceover: this was not an accident).
In the research and writing I’m currently doing, which is focussed on autism and “the autistic moment”, the “dysphoria” under examination is that of the “sensory processing” difficulties associated with autistic-spectrum disorders. Autists are sometimes stereotyped as inhabiting, or creating around themselves, a cold world of emotional isolation and flattened affect. The implication is usually that they should be rescued from their imprisonment in this world, and socially retrained to project the demanded “human warmth” towards others. This stereotype is really generated by neurotypical assumptions about what “human warmth” ought to look like: I don’t think the autistic world is really “cold” at all, in the sense of being frozen, delibidinised or desolate. But I do think it poses a challenge to the neurotypical affective frame, because it coheres differently, and cohering differently looks like incoherence to people who lack the moral imagination to see that other framings than their own are possible. Autism is at least as much about “weird euphoria” – pleasure taken in stimming, in intense absorption in special interests, in finding patterns within the buzzing, blooming confusion of things – as it is about the often dysphoric experience of rubbing up against a neurotypical world that demands you sit still, fractures your concentration with constant demands for social interaction, and treats your cognitive habits as either quirky rigidity or sinister obsessiveness.
If I succeed in completing the book I want to write about all this, it will be a sort of continuation of the underlying project behind Cold World – and hence, a retroactive reframing of Cold World itself as something behind which there was an underlying project, which was not at all clear at the time. I think that project ultimately has to do with finding ways of making claims on behalf of a radical, inexorable, embodied unease, and of broadening the moral imagination with which we approach that unease, so that instead of simply pathologising and dismissing it we can see it as a locus of creativity and the source of a legitimate challenge to the world as we find it.
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