The Fight for the Future:

Speed, Inertia, and Politics

i.m. Mark Fisher and Sean Bonney

Benjamin Noys (2020)

Introduction: Two Questions and Two Answers

I want to thank Tom Bunyard for inviting me to speak in this public lecture series

organised by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics. If you will

forgive me the Derridean move – the French philosopher Jacques Derrida would often

begin by questioning the title of the event when speaking, and this became something

of a tic among Derrideans, of which I was once one – I’d like to start with the two

questions organising this lecture series:

The first, Has the future been cancelled?

And the second,

What is to be done?

The first question is that of Mark Fisher, who argued that neoliberal capitalism had

produced the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (borrowing the phrase from Franco

‘Bifo’ Berardi).1 According to Fisher, the cultural forms of high capitalism no longer

displayed dynamism or innovation, but instead a ‘retro’ and static repetition of the

past. In fact, Fisher argued: ‘the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’

infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense

of being caught in a time-trap’.2 In my own analogy, we live within the static forms

1
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2014), p.2.
2
Mark Fisher, K-Punk, ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater, 2018), p.404.

1
characteristic of late-imperial Senecan drama or the Stuart courtly masque. We will,

as I will argue, need to be careful in accepting this diagnosis of cultural stagnation.3

Before continuing, however, I would like to dedicate this lecture to Mark and

also to the poet Sean Bonney, both my exact contemporaries and both are gone from

us. I only knew both in passing, but the work of both will resonate through this

lecture. If Mark was one of those who most resonantly characterised our time, Sean

was one who most resonantly denounced our time.

The second question, what is to be done?, was that of Lenin, in the context of

the argument with ‘economism’ in Russian Social Democracy. This was a ‘gradualist’

belief that capitalism itself would deliver us to communism without the need for

revolution (to caricature, but only just). In contrast, notoriously, Lenin would insist

not only on the need for rigorous theoretical critique of this tendency but also on the

party form as the mode for achieving a proletarian politics. 4 I feel it safe to assume

that the question framing this lecture series was not asked out of the certainty of a

Leninist answer. That is not to say we shouldn’t read Lenin or consider his work or

legacy, something, again, we have seen fragmentary signs of.5 Lenin’s question is by

no means exhausted and we should not assume the answers Lenin gave are exhausted,

while we should also note Lenin saw those answers as particular and precise

interventions. Before proceeding, however, I think it only fair I answer both

questions, admittedly briefly and telegraphically.

3
See Edmund Berger, ‘Stagnation Consciousness’, Reciprocal Contradiction Blog, 15
February 2020: https://reciprocalcontradiction.home.blog/2020/02/15/stagnation-
conscious/
4
See Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016) for a restatement of the necessity of
the party form.
5
Salvoj Žižek (ed. and intro.), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin
from 1917 (Verso, 2011); Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek
(eds.), Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (Duke University Press, 2007);
Toni Negri, Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin (Columbia University
Press, 2014); Lars T. Lih, Lenin (Critical Lives) (Reaktion Books, 2011).

2
Has the future been cancelled? No, but the future is not our future, if by that we

mean those on the left (I will assume this identification throughout. If you do not, if

you are on the right, then congratulations, you are winning). The future is,

foreseeably, a capitalist future and a uniquely disastrous future thanks to climate

crisis, which is also a result of capitalism. 6 We can reply that what Fisher meant was

that a future of dynamic cultural development had been cancelled. I am not even sure

we can say that future has been cancelled, as Fisher’s image of cultural dynamics

depends on a number of problematic assumptions. Certainly, we can suggest that the

‘dynamics’ of the future, cultural and otherwise, will currently probably be malign.

Either way, it will not be our future, unless we witness a significant shift in the

balance of forces.

What is to be done? A more difficult question. Very telegraphically I want to suggest

the need for a long process of education and work on re-reforming (not reforming

existing institutions, simply, but reforming them) notions of the left, socialism and

communism.7 A work that has to be carried out in the absence or deterioration of past

forms (parties, unions, etc), but also in a lack of certainty about future forms and their

sustainability. A precarious, fragile and necessary work that is also a work of

mourning. As I suggested, after the recent election, in reply to the propagation of the

quote ‘Don’t mourn, organise!’, that we invert it to ‘don’t organise, mourn!’.8 I’m

6
On climate crisis and capitalism, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (Verso, 2016)
and Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015).
7
For a sketch of this project, in light of Mark Fisher’s works, see Benjamin Noys,
‘The Breakdown of Capitalist Realism’, Mediations (forthcoming 2020).
8
For one instance of this mourning, see Dale Holmes and Sharon Kivland (eds.) The
Graveside Orations of Carl Einstein (MA Bibliothèque, 2019).

3
certain this was not an original suggestion. What should be added is that what I mean

‘organisation’ might itself be a process of mourning and precisely not melancholia.9

Un-inventing the Future

That’s the introduction and preamble. I want to try and bring into focus the ‘present

moment’ through the struggle for the future.10 The politics of the present have often

been cast as a struggle for the future, a struggle given more urgency and poignancy,

even and especially desperation, by climate crisis. The contention is that it is

necessary to create a plausible and engaging vision of the future to resolve the

political impasses of the present. The alternative, it is argued, is a ‘folk politics’ that

concedes to the local and to despair (a ‘transcendental miserabilism’11) by its failure to

imagine a post-capitalist future. This description, which some of you may recognise,

is, I think, a fair account of the contentions of those who call (or called) themselves

‘accelerationists’. It is an aim given a useful summary in the title of Nick Srnicek’s

and Alex Williams’s book Inventing the Future.12 If you have been following this

lecture series you will have seen the more populist version with Aaron Bastani’s

Fully Automated Luxury Communism.13 There is also a wider ‘structure of feeling’, to

9
On the criticisms of ‘left-wing melancholia’, see Walter Benjamin, ‘Left-wing
Melancholy’; Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholia’,
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3092-resisting-left-melancholia; Slavoj Žižek,
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (Verso, 2002), pp.141-189. For a qualified
defence, see Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia (Columbia University Press,
2017).
10
The ‘present moment’ is a neat formulation associated with the current of
communisation theory, to be discussed later.
11
Nick Land, ‘Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism’, Fanged Noumena
(Urbanomic, 2011), pp.623-28.
12
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World
without Work (Verso, 2016).
13
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019).

4
use Raymond Williams’ concept,14 which encompasses thinkers like Ray Brassier,

artists like Holly Herndon, and a range of positions across the political spectrum.15

I don’t want to repeat my criticisms of what we can call, for convenience sake,

‘accelerationism’. If I were to give a brief definition, this would name currents of

thought that aim to engage with (or accelerate) forces of capitalist abstraction and

technology to post-capitalist ends. Certainly, while using that word I have always

tried to be careful to nuance and engage with the differences between accelerationist

positions and, now, the various ‘post-accelerationisms’, but at the same time give

attention to the unifying concerns as well. Here I want to make a relatively simple

point. This is that the call to ‘invent the future’ and the aim to make a politically

attractive vision of the future occludes the present and aestheticises the future. It is not

so much that we lack images of a desirable future, as mappings of how we might get

there. In this sense the various utopias and dystopias that surround us are symptoms of

the difficulty of imagining the present, instead of imaging the future.

[Certainly, Inventing the Future is a patient book that makes much reference

to current trends and extrapolations. Compared to the excited tone of their previous

‘accelerationist manifesto’ and other briefer works from this current I would not want

to deny this patience.16 My concern is that the project of accelerationism becomes an

aesthetic project, in the bad sense. Politics is aestheticized into images of the future

that are then required to be convincing or to be used to galvanise people, in a vision of

hegemony that seems strikingly Sorelian – the anarcho-vitalist use of myth as

‘weapon’ promoted by Georges Sorel. What we need, we are told, are ‘myths of the

near future’, as J. G. Ballard put it, that provide convincing visions. Certainly, a step
14
See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (Penguin, 1958).
15
For a sympathetic sampling see Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds.),
#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic, 2014).
16
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist
Politics’, in Mackay and Avanessian, #Accelerate, pp.347-362.

5
back from this into policy is notable by some accelerationists, but there is still a

reliance on a top-down vision, in which getting the image right is seen as key.17 The

future becomes a matter of competing visions, rather than rational need and

argument.]

This is why I have selected the image from The Terminator, James Cameron’s

1984 film as the signature image for this talk. If you are not familiar with the film, it

concerns the return of a time-travelling assassin, the terminator (played by Arnold

Schwarzenegger), a cybernetic organism sent from the future to kill the mother of the

leader of the future human resistance, Sarah Connor. In the future the automated

defence system Skynet achieves sentience and decides to annihilate humanity by

triggering a nuclear war in what the survivors referred to as ‘Judgement Day’. The

future human resistance is led by John Connor, son of Sarah, and he sent back a

soldier to save his mother, a soldier who will become his father. The terminator is the

image of cybernetic terror. As the future soldier sent back to save Sarah Connor tells

her

The terminator is out there. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be

bargained with … it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear … and it

absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.18

While certainly Donna Haraway recognised the military origin of the cyborg in her

contemporaneous ‘cyborg manifesto’,19 The Terminator was a darker vision of

enjoyment of our own extermination: the apocalyptic vision of human extinction in

the Terminator, as a machine crushes a human skull beneath its treads forever (a

17
For my more detailed criticism of accelerationism as an aesthetic, see Benjamin
Noys, ‘Accelerationism as Will and Representation’, in The Future of the New:
Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration, ed. Thijs Lijster (Antennae Arts in
Society, Valiz Amsterdam, 2018), pp.83-97.
18
https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Terminator.html
19
Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

6
cybernetic adaptation of Orwell’s 1984). We were, to quote Walter Benjamin, to

experience our own destruction as an aesthetic spectacle.20 We were also to enjoy it.

The terminator was also crucial to the 1990s accelerationist imaginary,

developed by Nick Land and his allies in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

(CCRU) at Warwick. This enjoyment of extermination and the return from the future

of the cybernetic organism was seen as an anti-humanist image of integration that

took us beyond the limits of the human. The reference to the terminator was also

supported by Jungle/drum and bass, the accelerated bpm UK dance music that

provided the aesthetic backbone for the accelerationist articulations of that time. This

was evident in the track by Rufige Kru, ‘Terminator’ (1992), which sampled the film

(the sample I previously discussed, amongst others), and in the use of the Terminator

image in rave culture. In a Land text, telling titled ‘No Future’, Land announced:

‘impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dance-floor’.21 The anti-

humanism of The Terminator was to be welcomed and not refused, and even

Haraway’s cyborg still had too much of the goddess about it (the essay would

famously contrast and prefer the cyborg to the goddess of the radical feminist

theologians).

This fusion with the machine, to the point of extermination, is still, I think, the

core libidinal fantasy of original accelerationism. While obviously diluted and

heavily-modified, traces of it still remain in various articulations today. What also

remains is the emphasis on the ‘hyperstitional’, the other key element of

accelerationism. This is the notion of performative myths that produce the future they

describe. William Gibson’s description of cyberspace in his cyberpunk sci-fi novel

Neuromancer (also of 1984), would be one example. The weird fiction of H. P.

20
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Schocken Books, 1968), p.242.
21
Land, Fanged Noumena, p.398.

7
Lovecraft, with the ‘Great Old Ones’ who will return to destroy the earth, is another.

Here the text, in the form of occult texts, like the fictional Necronomicon, start to take

on a ‘real’ existence. So, the imagination of technology outpaces its realisation and

the role of the accelerationist is to encourage us to catch up. They do so by producing

myths of the future that accelerate development toward their realisation.

Instead, and in contrast, I want to suggest we un-invent the future and trace the

lines of struggle in the present. What I take from The Terminator are these lines:

THE FINAL BATTLE WOULD NOT BE FOUGHT IN THE FUTURE.

IT WOULD BE FOUGHT HERE, IN OUR PRESENT.

TONIGHT...

While the films constantly offer and retract the apocalyptic moment of ‘judgement

day’, the nuclear destruction caused by Skynet achieving sentience, these lines

resonate with the sense of urgency about the final battle being fought out in our

present. Instead of the image of the future, what I regard as more important is the

delineation of the struggles of the present.

There is an often-quoted line by Fredric Jameson (sometimes attributed to

Slavoj Žižek or Mark Fisher, itself a symptomatic act):

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing

deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late

capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.22

I want to suggest that we might find it easier to experience ‘the thoroughgoing

deterioration of the earth and of nature’ as a result of high capitalism (late is too

consolatory). It is not a question of imagination. Also, the weakness lies not in our

imaginations, but in the very forms of struggle located in the present moment. We

22
Jameson, Fredric (1994) The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University
Press), p.xii.

8
cannot imagine the ‘breakdown’ of capitalism as that seems unlikely or to lead to a

more likely barbarism. Therefore, while not as consolatory and exciting as the various

accelerationist images of the future, I want instead to try and trace the faint lines of

struggles in the present.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night Time: Dislocated Class Struggle

What then of the forms of struggle in the present moment? Last year a book was

translated and published that had long been promised: Mario Tronti’s Workers and

Capital (originally published in Italian in 1966).23 It is a strange book to read now:

dense, difficult, closely engaged with the text of Marx, and written in that ‘high’ style

of ‘chiselled, lucid, [and] confrontational’ prose that Tronti sees as the signature of

Italian operaismo.24 I could say a lot more about the book, but I want to turn to it for

its discussion of class struggle. Tronti argued that capitalist development was driven

by working-class struggles. As the working class struggled against labour discipline

and the violence of capitalist production it forced capitalism to respond by developing

new technological forms to replace workers or to minimise or mitigate their

struggles.25 Hence factories arose as tools of discipline and organisation that aimed to

subsume the worker to value production as a mere ‘hand’ on the line. The

technological ‘inventiveness’ of attributed to capitalism is a result of its constantly

having to displace and disperse working class struggle. In turn, however, working

class struggles against the factory were also generated by the factory – which created

a compact form of struggle that could ‘explode’ at the point of production. In turn,

capitalism was forced to new social and technological fixes, such as dispersing labour,
23
Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital (Verso, 2019).
24
Tronti, Workers and Capital, p.328.
25
‘Every technological change in the mechanisms of industry thus turns out to be
determined by the specific moments of the class struggle’, Tronti, Workers and
Capital, p.243.

9
relocating the factory form, further replacing workers by machinery, and new forms

of precarity.

In a twist on this argument, Tronti also argued that working class passivity and

lack of struggle could have effects on capitalism. Discussing America in the 1920s, a

decade of relative quiescence in terms of workers’ struggles, Tronti writes: ‘Working-

class struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of capital’s own self-consciousness:

without them, it does not recognize its own adversary and thus does not know itself’. 26

Tronti suggest that the crash of 1929 was in part a result of this lack of struggles,

which robbed capitalists and capital of the ability and knowledge it gained from the

struggle by workers. Without workers’ struggles no innovation and no development

and no knowledge. Tronti’s argument implies that the ruling class gains its

‘intelligence’ or capacity in response to working-class struggle. This ‘general

intellect’, to borrow and adapt Marx’s phrase, is a result of struggle and the intensity

of struggle. Hence, we could say that great inventiveness of bourgeois forms, say the

1920s and 1960s, is not unrelated to the great intensity of struggles in those periods.

Therefore, I wish to make a speculative extension of this argument, from an

argument that it itself speculative. As Tronti admits, in a sense lack of evidence being

the evidence, as it is lack of struggles that ‘causes’ crisis. This is a veritable ‘curious

incident of the dog in night time’, in which Sherlock Holmes deduces from the fact

the dog did not bark that the dog knew who was committing the crime. The ‘curious

incident’ is the lack of struggle and this peculiar lack and negativity is a symptom of

capitalism. It will be this lack that induces capitalist crisis. Even after the crisis the

lack of class struggle indicates, for Tronti, the lucidity of the workers in the

knowledge there is nothing to gain.

26
Tronti, Workers and Capital, p.297.

10
 In our moment we seem also to experience crisis and a lack of struggles. The

struggles that do appear in the present often appear inchoate and fail to form into the

‘sharp’ mass antagonistic forms of the past. Some, associated with the communisation

current, see these inchoate struggles as the new forms of struggle, especially in the

‘riot form’.27 What I want to suggest is that these inchoate or fragmented or minimal

forms of struggle, at least in the capitalist heartlands, sap capitalist ‘intelligence’. The

class struggles of the present do seem to take particular ‘destructive’ or unstable

forms, such as what communisation thinkers refer to as ‘suicidal struggles’ – struggles

for pay-offs from work, rather than to keep a job, or other realisations of the

emptiness of the wage form.28 These forms can be signs of weakness (from a classical

workers’ position), a new militancy and strength in the mass (communisation), or

perhaps a new ‘recomposition’. Myself, I oscillate, but perhaps tend to pessimism,

although we should also register the persistence of forms like the classical strike as

well. The situation is, unsurprisingly, complex. But what if the formlessness of these

struggles, their dislocation and temporal instability, led to a crisis of capitalist sense?

This is, in part, my wager. In our context something of Baudrillard’s

controversial point about the ‘masses’, in In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,

might gain a certain truth (although since when did Baudrillard not make a

controversial point?). In these essays of the late 1970s, reprinted in a Semiotext(e)

little black book, Baudrillard argued that we needed to return to the pejorative concept

of the ‘masses’ against the ‘sophistication’ of sociological analysis.29 The notion of

the inertia of the ‘masses’ referred, Baudrillard argued, to a stubborn resistance to

sense, a Nietszchean ‘black hole’ in which the masses, bombarded by media, refused
27
See Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot. (Verso, 2016); Sean Bonney, Letter Against
the Firmament (Enitharmon, 2015).
28
Theorié Communiste, ‘Communization in the Present Tense, in Benjamin Noys
(ed.) Communization and Its Discontents (Minor Compositions, 2013), pp.41-58.
29
Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (Semiotext(e), 1983), p.4.

11
to make choices or engage.30 In the age of the stream and streaming this inertial effect

(and affect) seems intensified. The ‘masses’, more and more quantified in the forms

of big data, also refuse this ‘meaning’: ‘Everything flows through them, everything

magnetises them, but diffuses throughout them without leaving a trace’.31 The notions

of the neuter and the neutral are not simply theoretical concepts, associated with

Maurice Blanchot,32 but the lived experiences of the ‘masses’.

Of course, this remains a patronising and ‘classist’ argument. To valorise

inertia and neutrality is hardly to escape the hostility to the masses that courses

through the culture of modernity (and not only within modernism either). Raymond

Williams noted: ‘There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as

masses’.33 And yet, and yet… what if we read a kind of struggle here. A refusal to be

named, measured, evaluated, to ‘discern’ as we are supposed to? Williams had noted,

in the 1950s, a ‘general sullenness and withdrawal of interest’ as the ‘quietest but

most alarming’ form of protest.34 Obviously, as I will discuss later, this ‘refusal’ can

be profoundly ambiguous and take itself in directions hostile to left-wing thought and

radical action. I don’t want to flatten out the risks at this point. I do want to suggest

that the ‘inertia’ of the ‘masses’, the pummelling effects of aggressive capitalist

counter-attack, crisis, austerity and the forms of contemporary ideological dominance,

also pose a crisis to capitalist capacity and knowledge.

This is why what Peter Osborne has acutely called ‘high capitalism’ (not late

capitalism, ‘late for what?’) can appear so profoundly stupid. 35 It is both difficult to
30
‘They don’t express themselves, they are surveyed.’, Baudrillard, In the Shadow,
p.20.
31
Baudrillard, In the Shadow, p.2.
32
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (The University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
33
Williams, Culture and Society, p.289.
34
Williams, Culture and Society, p.303.
35
Peter Osborne, ‘The postconceptual condition Or, the cultural logic of high
capitalism today’, Radical Philosophy 184 (2014): 19-27.

12
resist and problematic to deploy metaphors of illness,36 problematic not least for those

who suffer from those illnesses. So, I will refuse that temptation and only say if class

struggle is inchoate, intermittent, confused, our own ruling class is hardly less so. I

don’t also need to resort to proper names either, we can all fill-in the blanks. This is

not exactly a hopeful thesis, but I do think it outlines, for me at least, some of the

peculiarities of the present. Not the least of which is the inability to grasp historical

temporality. A gap has appeared in time in which the twenty-first century is strangely

amorphous and ‘timeless’ thanks, according to Simon Reynolds, to the overload of

streaming.37 I think it might be more than that. Guy Debord, in Comments on the

Society of the Spectacle, noted that: ‘once the running of a state involves a permanent

and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led

strategically’.38 People of my parent’s generation seem to imagine they fought in

World War Two, which they did not. Scriptwriters of film and TV paint thirty years

ago as if it were the 1950s and not the late 1980s or 1990s. My even more speculative

thesis is that 1989 and the end of historically existing ‘socialism’ ruptured time, not

quite in the way Francis Fukuyama imagined, but in the sense of a caesura of time.

This manifests in the occlusion of generations (including my own); strange combats

across and within time that take on a fantasmatic form between ‘generations’

(millennials and boomers); and repetitions and parodies that lack their own referents,

thinking of the ‘overload’ of vaporwave, the world’s most proliferate musical genre.39

36
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (Penguin, 1983).
37
Simon Reynolds, ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke
popular culture’, The Guardian, 28 December 2019:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/dec/28/overload-ambush-and-isolation-
the-decade-that-warped-popular-culture-simon-reynolds
38
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso, 1990), VII, p.20.
39
Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts
(Zero Books, 2016).

13
These effects are not simply ‘cultural’ and not simply those of stagnation, but signs of

a particular situation of struggle and resistance.

To take a strange example of the situation I am trying to sketch I want to refer

to the David Fincher film Gone Girl (2014), from the novel by Gillian Flynn. I am

afraid this will involve spoilers, as the book and film both work on a major ‘twist’ in

the plot. Certainly, I should already remark that the film is not that good (imo) and is

episodic and long (149 minutes). In fact (as my partner said), the experience of

viewing is less like that of a film and more like that of a box set TV series. That said,

there are some interesting things about the film. It is a film of the financial crisis, as it

begins with the central married couple, Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund

Pike) Dunne, both adversely affected by the crisis and then forced to move back to

Nick’s hometown. Here is the spoiler. Nick is accused of the murder of his wife, but

her body is missing. Amy, it turns out, has faked all the evidence and disappeared to

punish Nick for having an affair with a younger woman. This is revealed and then the

film switches and Nick tries to escape the plot and clear his name. What interests me

is when Amy flees.

Amy takes refuge in what Phil Neel calls the ‘hinterland’ – the new landscape

of the working class, which is the landscape of the semi-rural, the trailer park, outside

of the hubs and corridors that make-up the landscape of dominant capitalism (at least

in the United States).40 Amy tries to blend in by changing her appearance and her

voice. She is carrying a lot of cash to fund her escape and remain out of sight long

enough for her husband to be tried, sent to prison, and eventually executed.

Befriending a woman belonging to what we could call the disorganised working class

what is funny (to me) is how rapidly this woman and her boyfriend see through Amy.

40
Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict
(University of Chicago Press, 2018).

14
They realise she is not what she appears, attack her and take her money. This is the

first failure in her ‘flawless’ plan. What is interesting me to is how this casts the rest

of the film as a middle- or upper-class dream. Amy, who as a child was turned into

fiction by her parents (a character called ‘Amazing Amy’ in a series of children’s

books), is adept at fooling people of her own class and the media. In those locations

her dreams shape reality. Stepping into the hinterland, however, everything collapses.

Her lack of experience of real violence and conflict is evident. This has the effect, for

me, of rendering the rest of the film as a kind of fairy tale (a rendering that would also

inflect the necessary analysis of gender in this dynamic).

In my reading then, the middle class or upper class ‘bubble’ pops in contact

with a working class that no longer struggles against it but struggles to live after

having been abandoned by it. The very strength of this form of high capitalism leads

to a certain weakness. It is, of course, ‘only a film’. But, I would say the film does

give something of a strange sense of the isolation and disintegration of social forms at

the present moment. In gives us a sense of the capitalist fairy tale, one haunted by

monsters but at the same time a fantastic form of its own, which slowly enacts its own

detachment from ‘reality’. I have remarked before on the resonance of fantasy for

contemporary capitalism, not in the sense of escapism but of a peculiar realism.

Fantasy quests stage the quest for work and success in times of precarity, in which the

landscape of high capitalism turns allegorical and violent. To call Gone Girl a fairy

tale is, precisely, not a criticism, but to signal the strange ‘reality’ of its own turn to

the hinterland beyond the hubs and channels, which must in turn be escaped from to

return to the dream.

The Peculiarities of the English

15
I want to move to my concluding remarks and start by noting that what I have said

can seem very English or British,41 in the sense of very closely related to this context

and over-determined by this site of articulation. Of course, the ‘cost’ of articulating

something from this peculiar capitalist heartland could also entail some benefits.

Where once ‘laboratory Italy’ become the phrase for Italy as site of political

experimentation in struggles, England or Britain is a ‘laboratory’, I think, of particular

and peculiar forms of reaction (and also resistance, which should not be forgotten).42

It is also important, in a related sense, to stress that the ‘passive’ struggles I have

suggested as marking the present should not be enchanted into hope. They indicate

struggles, certainly, but in an experience of weakness that makes them vulnerable to

re-articulations and disruptive forms that do not align with our usual political

compass. The right-wing strike has, for example, been a feature of struggles since at

least Chile under Allende, but other such ‘perversions’ (in the sense of ‘turning’) are

certainly present and possible.

Brexit, as I have previously discussed,43 is a project for and of a future, just

one I assume we probably won’t like (almost certainly in the form driven by Tory

modernization). While often portrayed as nostalgic and inward-looking, which is true

to an extent, it is also aggressively post-imperial and a continuation of an orientation

to a US-style model. In this it speaks to the desire for the modern and modernization

that also drove many forms of accelerationism. This peculiarly English project, to

become even more so shortly with the long predicted ‘break-up of Britain’ seemingly

on the cards, is also another sign of the determination of the future from within a

project of modernisation, which has obsessed the English ruling class. Its appeal,

41
On this confusion of naming see Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass (Verso, 1988).
42
See Perry Anderson, English Questions (Verso, 1992).
43
Benjamin Noys, ‘Arguments within English Theory: Accelerationism, Brexit and
the Problem of ‘Englishness’’, Third Text 32.6 (2018): 586–592.

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which is real, also forms around an inchoate resistance to ‘experts’ and ‘control’, a

desire to inhabit a destructive urge that is also self-destructive rather than continue

with the wearying repetitions of the present. It motivates desires and passions that

work within the forms of ‘passive’ struggle. These passions are, I think, acutely post-

imperial passions, and perhaps there very excess might, hopefully, be a sign of their

death throes.

The difficulties are not new. The following remark from Benjamin Disraeli’s

novel Sybil (1845), quoted by Raymond Williams, might resonate today:

The people she found was not that pure embodiment of unity of feeling,

of interest, and of purpose which she had pictured in her abstractions.

The people had enemies among the people: their own passions; which

made them often sympathize, often combine, with the privileged.44

While the data around voting in the last election seems remarkably opaque to clear

interpretation we might still agree that at least some of the people did ‘often

sympathize, often combine, with the privileged’ as a result of their passions. It is not

wise or sensible to assume that the ‘passive’ signs of class struggle I have tried to

trace necessarily indicate a radicalism that remains to be tapped or canalized into a

new ‘project’.

Raymond Williams noted ‘it does not come as news to any one born into a

poor family that the poor are not beautiful, or that a number of them are lying,

shiftless and their own worst enemies’.45 This, as Williams goes on to note, it itself

part of the reason and demand for change ‘we are dealing with actual people under

severe pressure’.46 Williams noted also that this is not all there is to working class

44
In Williams, Culture and Society, p.110.
45
Williams, Culture and Society, p.179.
46
Ibid.

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life.47 These tensions, however, should not be forgotten and are core to that process of

education I briefly sketched at the start, which is a mutual education. It is easy to use

the idealised proletariat as a way of dismissing the empirical working-class, or the

malevolent forms of social abstraction as a way of saying we are all subjects of capital

(which is true) in such a way as to diminish the combined and uneven experience of

that subjection. In these ways, however, class becomes a fairy tale, a floating

abstraction of its own, one detached from experience and the struggles and

possibilities that lie in that experience.48

Certainly, we can also see why we might want to flee into the future and

images of a future dynamism. In everything I have said and written I have tried to

give due to the appeal of accelerationism, even as I regard that as largely fantasmatic.

There would be little point exploring something one saw as worthless. Yet, to

reiterate, I regard this focus on the future as a way of further occluding the present.

That is why I have suggested we un-invent the future to imagine the present. This is a

return to questions and struggles and a return to collective work. First, I do not expect

to provide all the answers, and I think if we thought that this would be a problem. To

work-through the possibilities and impasses of the moment should be collective.

Second, it is also a philosophical and intellectual matter. The endless demand for

practice, or praxis, is not wrong, but should not be at the expense of the intellectual

demand as well. We have enough anti-intellectualism already. Also, to ignore the

intellectual is often to fail to respect the intellectuality of the working class and the

need for philosophical articulation that respects that intellect. That is why I have

47
‘it is rather, in such a life, the suffering and the giving of comfort, the common want
and the common remedy, the open row and the open making-up, are all part of a
continuous life which, in good and bad, makes for a whole attachment.’ Williams,
Culture and Society, p.205.
48
For an attempt to probe this area see Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims (Penguin,
2009).

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stressed the sense of mutual education and this should echo the point made by Marx

in the ‘These on Feuerbach’, that ‘it is essential to educate the educator’.49

49
Karl Marx, Early Writings (Penguin, 1975), p.422.

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