K-Punk

poetix

we murder to dissect
I'm still trying to figure out what's really at stake in that discussion. When Owen passed me his copy of Egress, he remarked that Mark thought Blanchot was boring (I once got a chuckle out of him by referring to Blanchot as "Beckett for snobs") and Bataille was silly: the book seemed a bit quixotic, and obviously wasn't Owen's thing at all. I've read some way into it, and I don't really want to stomp all over someone else's way of memorialising someone very important to them, but I also think the theoretical reference points are disorientatingly inapposite. But that sort of mash-up of incongruous perspectives can sometimes produce real insight, and I don't want to delegitimise the entire project just because it doesn't very much appeal to me personally.
 

xenogoth

looking for an exit
Wordpress tells you about referrals elsewhere, you know...

Can you imagine writing a book about someone that strictly limits itself to their own tastes and interests rather than reflecting the author's own?

Mark also thought Owen was a backstabber, so I wonder at what point your logic negates itself.
 

catalog

Well-known member
What you gonna reply with? Is he right! Is it his personal politics and alignings and opinions that trouble you? And you don't want his 'authorised' view of mark to be tarnished cos it's come from him?

I do, fwiw, understand why you are concerned with those alignings, I guess people like kantbot could be considered alt right or whatever. But that's sort of a different argument no?
 

catalog

Well-known member
Bit late on this. Poetic, I reckon you should write yr own book about mark, clearly you've got enough material
 

xenogoth

looking for an exit
fwiw, i had genuine concerns about doing the podcast with kantbot and ummed and ahhed about it for months (literally) -- he invited me on before christmas. his reputation does precede him and i'm somewhat uncomfortable with some of the people he has platformed before. but then he read Egress and came back with some genuinely interesting questions about contemporary Marxism and philosophy -- more interesting than anyone else had offered up so far -- and so I threw caution to the wind and went on it. And, personally speaking, I found it to be the most productive conversation I've had about the book so far. so, for me, it was worth it.

if poetix is uncomfortable with it, that's fine. (he's certainly expressed a bizarre level of concern for my online alignments before -- whether that's for taking Land too seriously or arguing in defence of the xenofeminist crowd, which are related somehow, supposedly.) i expected some people would be uncomfortable with it, as they would be with some aspects of the book.

it's something i've been reflecting on a lot recently, as some reviews of the book have come out, and perhaps there's a case to be made for being far more explicit about where Mark's interests and ideas end and mine begin. that wasn't much of a concern for me when writing it, and it would have likely jarred proceedings if i anxiously drew lines around everything. i think that's obvious, though. regardless, most people who are disgruntled about it seem to only want the former and not the latter. others don't agree with the pictured painted of Mark and, of course, you can't please everyone -- although, so far, i've been emboldened by the fact that more of his friends recognise it than don't.
 
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xenogoth

looking for an exit
poetix being an irritant aside, i'm glad others have been enjoying what i've been doing lately.

i still try to lurk here sometimes but i'm somewhat out of the habit of forum lurking. twitter has plugged a hole in that old part of my brain, for worse more than for the better.
 

catalog

Well-known member
You've opened something up now. I think there's a few people on here who listen to podcasts and read stuff that's others consider a bit 'wrong', cos the authors have elsewhere said something genuinely racist or beyond the pale. I'm ambivalent about it myself and go different ways on different days. Would be good to have an honest discussion I suppose. I've listened to some other kanbot podcasts and found them interesting, and I also listen to red scare, who recently platformed Steve Bannon, and last year had bliss bloggers chatting about k punk. So it's all a bit loose. I appreciate you being honest about your hesitancy, maybe we just need more of that?
 

xenogoth

looking for an exit
that's partly the crux of what i find so irritating about poetix slipping into my comment box or making comments elsewhere, assuming i'm someone who postpones all judgement, simply because my judgements might not have been the same ones he would have made or mark would have made.

mark is someone who i liked and whose work i continue to enjoy. he's not been installed as my new superego. i am happy to make my own judgements and stand by them and do.

it *is* a complex landscape -- i'm thinking of this k-punk post right now, which still makes me a little dizzy: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003682.html -- and this is part of what the podcast and accompanying post is getting to. i've been on a really big Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier and DH Lawrence kick the last year or two because these are three authors i've always associated with my mum -- a social worker / wannabe english teacher who loved "the classics" -- and i always assumed they were boring and lame simply because she liked them. i don't have a very good relationship with my mum and we only really speak at christmas every year but finding what are quite radical positions, that are relevant to my own politics, within things i'm not supposed to like is a special kind of thrill.

so it goes two ways: we are all capable of making and reformulating our own judgements but there's also something to be said for rejecting the judgement of others. whereas poetix feels like he's pushing the boat out in disavowing my judgements, he doesn't seem to have grasped yet that i lost patience for his own a while ago.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
I'll read that k punk post later, and the Woolf refs are lost on me ( I gave up on 'the waves' after two or three pages) but something you were saying in those podcasts (I can't remember which, could've been both) was about affirmation. Could you explain this a bit more please, for someone who doesn't understand what you mean? Eg you said something like, Mrs dalloway and the bloke, can't remember his name, they never met, but she affirmed him, actually maybe you didn't. Or do you just mean that if there are differences of opinion, they must be publicly discussed, head on? Is that what you mean by affirmation. I think that's how I'm taking it.

And, if so, if poetix has a problem with what you've done, and is writing comments about it, surely that's ok??

Or do you want him to approach you privately, is that what you are saying?

Maybe I've misunderstood what you mean by 'affirm'
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I don't feel a need for there to be an "authorized" version of Mark, nor do I worry unduly that Egress will somehow become that version - it wears its idiosyncrasies enough on its sleeve to avoid canonisation of that kind. While I haven't been getting on with it all that well, I do think it's better than most of what the k-punk industrial complex has produced so far - it's at least not an attempt to slot him into one of about three extremely tiresome media/culture war narratives. As far as writing something of my own is concerned, I feel like I've had my say - a bit obliquely, in the case of the poem, and in a more direct way here.

As regards Kantbot, Xenofeminism and Nick Land, one of these things is not like the others: I'm very pro-XF, and always have been. I will happily, and if needs be belligerently, defend a historically accurate account of the development and conceptual diversity of "accelerationism" against stupefying attempts to telescope it into a bogus narrative in which Nick Land writing mad shit about Trakl in the 90s somehow feeds directly into 4chan white nationalist terrorism.

Land today is someone who bigs up race-science mavens like Steve Sailer and routinely promulgates racist conspiracy theories about "demographic replacement", and I think it's unduly euphemising to refer to him as "politically incorrect" (which implies a sort of naughty, non-compliant eccentricity of opinion, out of line with the Official Narrative of the Censorious Left) when "racist" would have done just as well. I don't think Land, today, being a racist means that nobody can ever read Fanged Noumena ever again. But I do think there's a sort of weird defensiveness about this from people who maintain an affiliation to Land. I honestly can't tell if they're saying "he's not racist though", which is patently false, or "yeah, he's a bit racist" (he's a lot racist) "but so what? What's a little bit of racism between friends?"

Kantbot I have some sympathies with, for reasons of sperg tribal loyalty, but he's still really in the enemy camp. There was a notion among friends of mine a couple of years ago that maybe people like him - wayward, thoughtful, obviously intelligent - might be won over if they were engaged rather than shunned and despised. I don't think that's worked out all that well, to be honest.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
I mean a lot of these problems probably do become worse cos of the nature of the discussion being mainly online and you don't tend to meet these people you disagree with in real life.

Thanks for that post, I'll have a read of your poem later
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Also, I do think that Matt has a tendency to go to a sort of meta- level when things like the issue of Land's racism come up: it's all about a certain ethic of discussion, of acknowledging that people aren't all one thing, etc, which in practice means that Land's racism isn't treated as a red line, a reason why someone should be firmly excluded from the conversation. I think that if someone is actively and perniciously racist, they kind of forfeit that consideration for all the other things they might contain within their complex and multiplicitous self.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Otherwise you get people defending abusers with "yes, but people aren't just defined by the bad things they've done", which is true but irrelevant when considering whether or not to afford them opportunities to do further bad things of the same kind.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Because most of Fanged Noumena was written by somebody who hadn't yet made the ideological shift into an overtly and paranoiacally racist position
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
(and the latter part, where it's all numerology and shit, is so generally deranged that it's really impossible to tell)
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
On a tangent: I was trying to think earlier of the most inapposite possible pairing of thinkers (one being written about, the other providing the theoretical vocabulary for doing so), and hit upon Simone Weil and Julius Evola...but then I found myself thinking actually, that could totally work...
 

catalog

Well-known member
Because most of Fanged Noumena was written by somebody who hadn't yet made the ideological shift into an overtly and paranoiacally racist position

ok right, i get you. you are saying fanged noumena is ok cos it was written before he went racist, but if he wrote another book now, it shouldn't be read, cos it's written after his racism? is that what you are saying. just trying to get a handle on your position
 
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