apologies for lack of post on saturday morn; was feeling pretty burnt out and uninspired. also just depressed about the state of the country and the world. i went for a walk to blackheath again (which for those who don’t know is one of london’s many weird mega-bourgeois suburban enclaves with massive victorian houses, yet only ~5 minutes walk away from places of dire poverty), and there were massive union jacks everywhere, bunting, someone had put a marquee up in their front garden… which i all later found out was, of course, for fuckin VE day.
laced within all the sunshine, bunting, patriotism and mandatory positivity right now is an inescapable darkness. 600+ people a day are still dying from covid, and the people fighting it sure aren’t those clueless rich pricks in blackheath. (and it sure wasn’t people like them that died in vast quantities in the fight against fascism, either.)
far from extinguishing it, the mandatory patriotic positivity of the current moment is only accentuating this sense of negativity and doom, which thrives in the state of silenced refusal that has been foisted upon it. for every rainbow nhs poster lovingly put up in front windows, there is the fact that the nhs’ capacity to fight covid has been significantly impinged by austerity’s class warfare. for every gorgeous victorian house in blackheath, there is the fact that the vast majority of people in this country would never be able to afford and live in it, for ultimately absolutely arbitrary reasons. it’s always been the case, but particularly right now, everything positive seems to express something negative. nothing is sacrosanct.
it’s for this reason that today i’m recommending theodor adorno’s classic, minima moralia: reflections from a damaged life (available from verso for £5 - a bargain). minima moralia was written during 1944-47 while adorno was in exile in america, having had to flee his native germany for being jewish. and this fact is more than just an interesting contextual tidbit — the darkness of the war hangs over every word of the book. faced with the horror of modernity, negativity drips off the pages in search of something better. in this sense, it’s a rather useful guide to the current moment.
i haven’t finished minima moralia, so i can’t give a complete assessment of it. but in that it seriously affirms the existence of that objective darkness, it feels like a remarkably honest work. this is heightened by the book’s structure, which takes the form of a series of aphorisms (short, pithy statements that express a general truth). adorno makes his argument as compressed and lucid as possible, bouncing between various topics, and the effect of this is that every aphorism is like the injection of some incredibly concentrated substance, that immediately lifts you above the clouds, beyond the murkiness, into clear air. an example, from aphorism #48:
Things commonly called expressions of life, from burgeoning fertility and the boisterous activity of children to the industry of those who achieve something worthwhile, and the impulsiveness of woman, who is idolized because appetite shows in her so unalloyed; all this, understood absolutely, takes away the light from the other possibility in blind self-assertion. Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself.
however, it would be wrong to see minima moralia as wallowing in its own sorrow, or as a nagging voice that only serves to limit, rather than enable you. instead, the book is about finding positivity through negativity — something which ends up being neither “positive” or “negative” in the initial senses. as someone pointed out on twitter the other day, adorno wasn’t saying “you shouldn’t like anything” — after all, he enjoyed going to the beach (pic above)! he was instead saying (in my highly preliminary reading, so pinch of salt etc) that any truthful or proper judgement of something must affirm that negativity rather than deny it.
this is reminiscent of mark fisher’s “cold rationalism”, inspired by spinoza, which basically says: you only become free by knowing you’re not. as the great “mark fisher’s haunt” account tweeted earlier today, from one of his 2004 blog posts on cold rationalism:
The great Cold Rationalist lesson is that everything in the so-called personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect which, in principle if not in fact, could be delineated very precisely. And this act of delineation, this stepping outside the character armour that we have confused with ourselves, is what freedom is.
on a lighter note: what’s good?
i really enjoyed this NTS mix by brain dead radio, described by them as “ruminations in gutter punk, old psych, experimental noise and all other records with attitude.” there’s actually a sense this sort of gives sonic form to the “positivity-through-negativity” i discussed above, a kind of fragile contemplation.
this penguin classics cover generator is fun
balam acab’s wander/wonder is a really beautiful record; hauntological, witch house vibes. (read the pithfork review of this and was reminded of salem hahaha, queens of witch house, who i haven’t listened to since i was what, 15?)
recycling my own content but this specific one in the jungle mix by goldie is stunning
so we’ve all seen the VR skehans pub made by tristan ross by now — but what may have been missed is this VR conversation he made with his friends discussing the pleasures of the pub experience. it’s actually a genuinely insightful and amusing conversation, if you’ve got a spare 8 minutes, and missing having a sweet, sweet pint. they go quite in depth about the ritualistic pleasure of the “rounds” system, which is funny.
hope all is well with all of you. special shout out to dani who read my spiel on the sopranos from #18 to her family (who had just finished the show). apparently they were “loving it”.
take care and send recs! i’m at the point where i’m running out of things to rec again (lol), i can’t do it alone! send me things that are special to you, i don’t care how old they are.
and remember to share if you’re enjoying etc etc
jake x