Capitalism A Horror Story will be published in July of this year. Thinking back, I think I can spot the very first seeds of the book in my mind as far back as around 2015 when, as a lonely and somewhat intellectually insecure Ph.D. student (how little has changed) I stumbled across China Mieville’s talk on Marxism and Halloween, given at the 2013 Socialism conference. So, in a way, the book has taken nine years to come to fruition and I wrote two other books and edited another at the same time. During the same time I crashed out of academia, as well as out of a job in spectacular and somewhat traumatic fashion. For the first time in almost a decade, I don’t have this book in my own head anymore. One of the issues of working on something for so long is that it often becomes impossible to stand outside oneself to see what it is with any degree of accuracy, though happily now the book has been externalized I think I am starting to get there. It is, I think like every book, the concretization of thought — thought that I’ve worked out in countless conversations at conferences, on podcasts, and more often within my mind.
While it is limited and flawed in some respects I have recently been able to read it through without feeling overwhelmed by the recognition of those flaws. I think there’s so much about writing as it’s been taught to me that is tied up in shame — perhaps this is the thing that academia best teaches. It reminds me of one of the reasons Mark Fisher originally started his own blog, because it allows for a kind of freedom of expression and intellectual experimentation that academic writing doesn’t permit. You can’t say anything until you’ve read everything, and that impacts what and how one writes, but with blogging, there is more scope for something with lower stakes and greater freedom.
Writing is, I think, the process by which you encounter (in an often very destabilizing way) the realities of your own limitations — or, to put this in perhaps more positive terms, it is the process of turning infinite potentiality into mundane actuality. And so, the book is done, or rather, my role in the process is mostly done — what remains is for the book to find its readers and — I hope — to gather dialogue partners. I think increasingly of writing as a kind of offering or extended handout to someone invisible, and so an act of faith that the other is there and recognised.
In keeping with the habits inculcated by the protestant ethic and the ingrained expectations of the academic inside my head, the obvious question is, what’s next? There’s a dizzying emptiness beyond a few concrete projects underway and a couple of speculative dreams, which I will get to, but this is the first time in years I’ve returned to this space. So much of my writing has been over on Patreon or for outlets that pay, driven by crude facts of necessity, but I think to answer that question of “next” this is a space I need to re-engage with, especially as the space of possibility once represented by twitter increasingly contracts (not just for me, but it seems like that for lots of writers I know and follow).
Some of those concrete projects that are underway are as follows — and should, I hope, offer some guidance as to what this space might be used for moving forward.
- We Drift Like Worried Fire — continuing my writing about utopian philosophy from the Primer on Bloch, this is a book-length engagement with both crescendo-core post-rock and the history of Utopian thought. It is part of the reason I’m trying to return to both Bloch and Adorno’s writing on music this year
- Les Rougon-Macquart — at the encouragement of some and after I saw the novelist Brandon Taylor post about it, I’ve decided to read all 20 novels in Zola’s cycle over the coming year. I’ve recently finished an essay on Melville for an academic publication and have been reminded of how much I enjoy writing about nineteenth-century literature and my stubborn fondness for long novels. So, considering the whole cycle as a single novel, I think this will be an enjoyable way of spending some of this year. I’ve been reading György Lukács on realism again, as well as Jameson’s book on the subject and I think there is much there to engage with
- Debt A Horror Story — Something of a hangover from Capitalism A Horror Story is a concept I don’t spend enough time on in that book that I termed financial spectrality — or how debt functions as a mechanism by which individuals are made into a kind of haunting specter. Debt turns humans into ghosts and I think it’s worth trying to unpick how deeply the language of debt has become entangled with contemporary culture.
That aside, I think after finishing the Ph.D. and four books, I want to develop a better relationship with writing — one less driven by the urgencies and expectations of deadlines, and one more driven by the desire to explore aloud. Obviously, those economic facts haven’t vanished and much of what I write first will almost certainly go up on Patreon or Substack first but I am increasingly curious about what this space might become, and aware of how much I have missed it. Additionally, Patreon will be the home for ALL THE DEVILS, a week-by-week and canto-by-canto exploration of the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If you’ve never read Dante, I hope you might sign up for that journey too.
More here very soon, I hope.
thelitcritguy 