In the camps death has a novel horror; since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death.—Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. Ashton
This post has been inevitable for over two decades. . . . Kodwo recognized that ‘moving on’ from Joy Division involved disavowal, in the strongest sense.—Mark Fisher, 9 January 2005
At the very end of the session she had a moment of intense feeling associated with the idea that there had been no one (from her point of view) in her childhood who had understood that she had to begin in formlessness. As she reached recognition of this she became very angry indeed. If any therapeutic result came from this session it would be chiefly derived from her having arrived at this intense anger, anger that was about something, not mad, but with logical motivation.—Winnicott
The closer is itself getting closer . . .
When you watch Ian Curtis dance, in 1979, on the BBC, to the song ‘She’s Lost Control’, an index seems to take place, an interruption of the order of the sign itself. A suicide rush marks definitively the subscripts of Anglo consciousness at that time, at that time of night, in the September of the year. It is sometimes tempting to find this rush magnetic, as if an ahistorical sadness spreads across and won’t be denied away, and is unbeatable not because it wants to be but because it lends testamentary murmur to something unbearable: Curtis (I.C.) is here overloaded by social forces that go beyond him and peak as ‘pop’ inscriptive vectors that won’t be controlled. This is what happened to us, we can say, what happened on the switchboards of the internet (broadcast, transmission, and so on) before it existed, when we all lost control; this is the invisible switch between death and extinction before and as it happened; this is Ciara Horan decades later dancing to death on TikTok; this is many, too many, dancing e-girls whose theory will never fully have been, should never have to have been, written and developed. In 1979 an internal shakiness of language and its relation to rhythm takes hold, a fragility of relation which art itself doesn’t seem able to transmit or, worse still, is constitutively called up to occlude. The signscape is still trying to catch up with I.C.. We had to close our eyes.
So, watch him dance again. And feel just how ancient it is in the present, on what we used to call ‘television’. The hyper-obsolete-ness of all technics (meta-extinction) now also comes through—which is to say, comes online. The holy anger of his dancing and sound is almost impossible to film; again and again the colonial feed cuts away as if what I. C. remarks is the unbearableness of explication. Slicing through the social etiquette of form (his beautiful Elvis voice is as coarse as doomsday), a kind of pornographic bios is marked, as if understanding couldn’t get more explicit than this, a marking of the body with the social difference of something worse than death. Sheer falling, with only the relapse of a ‘band’ to back him up on no real archive at all (anthropos is gone, this guy is gone; ‘she’s lost control’), what guts here is autocide as the almost most inevitable nudity of sound recording: historical eavesdrop of the proleptic anterior (it is difficult to remember a face more denuded and scratched with silent infinity than this; is his face a whitened stone? or an index?).
However much Curtis is contained and endorsed by ‘the band’, whose rhythmic hold is regular and formal, as is his singing and movement, the shakiness of language and precision is somehow turned into what Beckett’s Three Dialogues calls an ‘estheticized automatism’, but also into an occasion and momentum of fragility (it’s as if Curtis falls straight through the song and out of the bottom, only held up by the trauma of form for a while, and then allowed to go).1 Whilst the dancing is ecstatically robotic even as it is humanely arrhythmic, it is also beyond automated by dint of this: however mediated the performance is today by YouTube or Vevo, originally it had no screen and so manages to penetrate what now archives it: the flesh does not have a screen, we are reminded too late, in the same way a work of art does.
We’re locating a particular moment of ancestral static and torque in the performance, brief but not a punctum, which also moves through that, as if the screen that now records it were shaken by some mnemonic bump on the local archive of the English as haunted and now limited import and export.2 When Tom Cohen writes later on (but still more than two decades ago) of a grand mal d’archive hosting and guiding the cultural scene from without, he not only malgrammaticizes a reference (to Jacques Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) but with ‘grand mal’ names as if consciously Curtis’ feeling draft, his so-called ‘epilepsy’ (it may be interesting to note that Tony Soprano has the same condition, not to mention a lineage of other sensitive souls). At this crest in English consciousness something is about to happen to suicide. Suicide is about to become exchange. When Curtis shakes and judders and loses control, and it happens to happen here at the crucial moment off camera, it is not just that language shakes (so much is familiar) but that the relation to language shakes, as if it will break off, and it does so, deeply inscribing the archive of an era with an out-of-control; arrhythmia and heartfreak that cannot be socketed back in.
*
The screen itself clinches it. In a text called ‘The Writing Screen’, Bernard Stiegler writes of the closeness to the point of identity of inscription and the screen, and of the ‘neganthropos, that is, this being that, as Heidegger said, we ourselves are, and a being that, as we ourselves, as the gathering of the beings that we are, as being-together, is caught within entropy, in such a way that we ourselves, as the real projectors of all these screens and on all these screens, as was said and shown by Jean-Luc Godard, this neganthropic being that we ourselves are has become a threat to itself, like the deinotaton referred to at the heart of Antigone’.3 Stiegler’s reference to Sophocles’ Antigone is key here, traced as it is through Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s own rendition of Sophocles. The deinon or the deinotation, the human being as that being which is most uncanny, most strange, most violent, is launched as if through a series of vibrating screens and in-folded tensions. The human is a toy of immense digital violence, the deinotation made automatism in flesh. Curtis doesn’t sing with the band, who he is with as a friend, but he does record a historical rendition and litigation over it, a soul graffiti made out of invisible tears and torn at the edge, with exorbitant distress (life). The voice has at least three stages of accompaniment: furrowing in with unseen tears towards the end, hopefully grating over at the start, and giving up in tantric laughable despair at the end. At least three voices and at least three silences, as if you were also listening to something that can’t and won’t hear or be heard, an elemental danced autochresis that falls straight through the adjusted tenderness of an auscultation. This relation to rhythm and words (numbed down, inaudible, drowned out by the resonance of the voice itself) is not critical or just softly pliable (he is giving in) but totally of the order of an anthropographemic bump-series, like the mini black stratographic mountains on the Unknown Pleasures sleeve. (The bumps on the lined black stave erupt and bubble, earth yearning itself out into the coarseness of a scream too exact to be rendered by anything more than sound-surround. The band carry if you like the sociability of the song, the song as social set that can be replayed and survive, and Curtis as eye of rain cloud develops a kind of divinely asocial and unclear spasm; it’s scary, and the camera keeps blanking it for our sake and then coming back quickly for more.)
(What dawns too quickly is it’s not just the death drive anymore. Something else is happening. Something worse.)
(The closer itself is getting closer.)
The fit and dance of Curtis—the seizure tilting—is a sort of transcendentally white epilepsy or transcendentally white seizure that takes place not quite on the death drive, but on the other drive, the other drive we name and struggle to name here.4 One can note that Ferenczi, who wrote a great deal about the typology of the epilepsy that killed Curtis, has an account of the death drive in terms of a fitting (in the strong sense) that seems almost to go completely beyond the will to live, which is to say in the alogic of extinction, almost completely beyond the drivenness of the death drive itself:
On one single occasion Freud also mentioned the derivation of a pathological manifestation from the almost complete defusion of these two main instincts; he surmised that the symptoms of epilepsy express the frenzy of a tendency to self-destruction that is almost free from the inhibitions of the wish to live. Psycho-analytic investigations of my own have since in my opinion corroborated the plausibility of this interpretation. I know of cases in which epileptic attack followed upon painful experiences which made the patient feel that life was hardly any longer worth living. [ . . . ] I also had to interpret the retrospective analysis in two of my cases of infantile glottal spasms as attempts at suicide by self-strangulation. [ . . . ] As registrar in a hospital for incurables, the Budapest Salpetricre, I had in my time to observe hundreds of epileptic fits. [ . . . ] From this point of view epileptic fits can be regarded as more or less serious attempts at suicide by suffocation; in mild cases the suicide is indicated only symbolically, but in extreme cases it is carried out in reality. (Ferenczi, Final Contributions, pp. 102-103, 197, and 202.)
Even the most sophisticated product of aesthetic intelligence in the world now is a screen which a human being dancing in this way is not quite. Let’s say that Curtis is to some extent a ragdoll Antigone, this name that means nothing and everything in the ongoing context. Curtis is, like Antigone, and like Justine in Melancholia, just a person. He was one of the guys. Nobody saw it coming because of this, say the lads from New Order later on. Fisher has this whole moment down, including the very Anglo-schism that takes place in the Joy Division-New Order transition itself. The new order of New Order was always the lurch towards a contemporary land of universal relapse:
New Order, more than anyone else, were in flight from the mausoleum edifice of Joy Division, and they had finally achieved severance by 1990. . . . It was clear, in the best interviews the band ever gave—to Jon Savage, a decade and a half after Curtis’s death—that they had no idea what they were doing, and no desire to learn. Of Curtis’ disturbing-compelling hyper-charged stage trance spasms and of his disturbing-compelling catatonic downer words, they said nothing and asked nothing, for fear of destroying the magic. They were unwitting necromancers who had stumbled on a formula for channeling voices, apprentices without a sorcerer. They saw themselves as mindless golems animated by Curtis’ vision(s). (Thus, when he died, they said that they felt they had lost their eyes . . . ) (my emphasis, 01)
Lost control, lost their eyes: what Curtis had seen was too much, for them, for him, for us, for the later more folded-up place of ‘the internet’; he had seen us not seeing ourselves and he had seen what was about to come; the split between feeling, spirit, and meaning; death and extinction . . . too much for England’s dreaming of script and place. The Northern boys of New Order could not have anticipated the suicide of their friend because they were only, as Fisher indicated, ‘unwitting necromancers’, a role of utter passivity that now becomes everyone online (but let’s think about what this phrase really means), taken on by us all with a deranged extent of sadistic glee, a bizarre mythic act of Armageddon roleplay. Nobody could have seen any of what was coming as it came without at least folding into it as in what Harmony Holiday more recently tracks as Justin Bieber’s ‘fentanyl fold’. When we fentanyl fold, when we all come online as daily insane pittance to a near-absolute loss of control, we hang down as if already more than dead, the computer slump, the iPhone till dawn, the entropy pain swoon of this century.
The band had lost their eyes, but by now it’s as if everybody has lost their ears. One can listen out for the unlistenable pathos perhaps when one listens to those Avital Ronell calls, with some degree of submerged irony, ‘the poets’ (often English), to hear what is nearly announced, to hear what is sheltered by the convenience of a dismissal or a defense or even a xeno-poetico-defence-formation as psychotic projection.5 It is difficult to overestimate the neo-colonial imprint (Begriff on the concept itself, as if at some kind of root) that the Anglo continues to attempt to impress on what is available to thought and in complicity with what it doesn’t know and hear: the infinite unconscious complicity of and with the white noise(s) of extinction. What is it we won’t listen to and for, right now? A mutual blinding or dis(order) of closer and closer grand mal d’archive. One listens perhaps and one doesn’t hear, one listens and doesn’t hear what one needs to hear. One hears nothing and everything in what gets sanctioned by the official doldrums of even radical culture in what Adam Tooze calls the anglocene.6 One listens and is convinced that disappointment is not allowed or irreal . . .
But nobody saw it coming is also a socially ominous phrase. Everytime a member of New Order said in that era something to the effect of ‘nobody saw it coming’, what are they actually not seeing coming? What was it that nobody saw coming in the resistance to form, the virtual signing off on form and rhythm, that Ian Curtis dancing and not dancing was and is? Nobody saw it coming: The phrase is insanely colloquial. Nobody saw it coming and nobody knew what was happening. Something which is socially unbearable and beyond any social co-opting in is seen coming here and colloquialized as what ‘nobody saw coming’. If the transition from Joy Division to New Order, from suicide to suicide-exchange, from punk to disco, is a key, it’s because it leaves a scar that won’t be healed over. In all touched on cases someone will try. In Melancholia she is called Claire; in Antigone she is called Ismene; in Manchester he is called Bernard Sumner. All three (Claire, Ismene, Sumner) attempt to socialize the being who is, more accurately, not beyond the social at all but so far gone into it that they act like the denotaton referred to at the heart of Antigone, the strangest of all, the more uncanny than the uncanny, and the most monstrous. One can perhaps only truly see this denotaton in the performance of ‘Transmission’ on the same night, where there is a glitch-asterisk and baroque-abyss at the moment where Curtis allows his body to mark a kind of pre-hieroglyphic interruption with the first drum break. This dancing—and perhaps nobody saw it (coming) at the time—was heartfreak; an absolute realism of extinction’s breaking out from death.
At this moment I.C. is telluric perhaps in the way only Benjamin describes in his essay on Goethe, or in the way the poeticized acts in Benjamin’s account of Hölderlin, the Gedichtete which dislocates and precedes any prosodic screening and performance, loosening it away from itself.7 A new order kicks in; not, for all its impossibility, any determinate rhythm (disco) but something else: a live transmission. This is the nursery rhyme of the immanent extinction drive installed in colonized televisual memory, the night terror (pavor nocturnes) of the local surging through into the chaos of contemporary London-online:
Radio, live transmission
Radio, live transmission
Listen to the silence, let it ring on
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun
We would have a fine time living in the night
Left to blind destruction
Waiting for our sight
And we would go on as though nothing was wrong
Someone will try to bring you back. Someone will try to bring you round. Someone will always try to bring it back but it cannot come back because it is already deep into the dark ‘lenses’ of the earth.8 Ismene and Claire will go to their sisters and offer the continuance of company even in the very worst, for example in Melancholia where there is a cutting out of the conditions of life of the species-being for good but abridged strangely in a magic cave, Plato’s cave transferred to the brutal and civil outdoors. This too can be socialized, they seem to say, and life is not worth the name if this absolute tragedy cannot. Absolute extinction, even so, can be shared out. But the irony is that the denotaton is closer than we think (Closer, the name of the last album) and more monstrous, socially channeled as basic breath, and any amount of joy that still exceeds it also now plummets through the space left over as its eviscerated condition. In Melancholia it is Justine and not Claire who eventually builds the last known trace of the oikos, the little wigwam of branches for Claire and her son. It is not that Curtis-Antigone-Justine-Horan-Bieber- . . . are beyond the social or even asocial, but that they are so terribly gone inside the historical wave that they can now choose to be either tenderly in it or not. If anything, they will front as tender and come back to center stage. But what that means, as index, in order for anything now to perhaps survive at all, is something worse than than life and death.
*
*
That an epilepsy dance can take in all the signs of an ongoing century still bears thinking about. Not Jennifer Malfi (Soprano’s shrink), but Ferenczi was one of the few analysts to actually work with epilepsy sufferers and to work up in their presence a theory around the signs given by them, the onslaught of drive that they entail and feel. Ferenczi notated what is perhaps most obvious, at least once said, which is that these seizures seem transcendentally banded to interrupt the life and death drives both, introducing into biological and cognitive schemas a blind, an ominous excess, and one can add that it is perhaps only from this vantage that one can begin to understand the dancing of Ian Curtis. Cohen is evoking with his more serious diagnosis of archive-fever the worse-than-death and how it folds us. His phrase names the broad seizing and tilting of technoregimes we must describe now. From Freud Ferenczi takes the idea that the fit expresses a type of rage or wrath, ‘the frenzy of a tendency to self-destruction that is almost free from the inhibitions of the wish to live’. Where the death-rage of this drive may be more normatively expressed in a slow drip way, causing damage across a life or a century, in the case of the fit the body simply folds itself up into a kind of dot of attenuation, blacked out. To some extent the death instinct presents itself early on, or even before itself, as the atypical absence seizure that explodes through and in the case of the Sopranos broadcast will eventually interrupt—absolutely—the seriality of the transmission and the addictogenesis of the screen (the season finale, no alternative endings, as a kind of chastisement). The attack is presented by Ferenszi, almost in synch with Freud, as a form of auto-aspyhization, the sufferer or even agent—for we do not know quite what is happening—not so much refusing the principle of life but being refused in it, by it, having its absence and blackout expressed through them as their own inorganic failure and lack of arrogation. Some years earlier than the Sopranos pilot, this is what I.C. dancing must be seen to have expressed, acting out his own epilepsy through dancing on the nighttime stage of the BBC. The seizure tilt, in the case of both Soprano and Curtis, feels not only epochal but televisual, transmissive, radioactive, more than prophetic of the grand slam moment of the internet. ‘I know of cases in which epileptic attack followed upon painful experiences which made the patient feel that life was hardly any longer worth living’, says Ferenczi, as if he knew that precise feeling. The famous title sequence of The Sopranos, which shows a car journey from New York into New Jersey, partly through a combination of side and rear view mirrors, and includes early century footage of the the intact Twin Towers, becomes interesting here insofar as it these same Towers that are subject to another kind of attack during the broadcast period of the program. Many American TV programs had to deal with the ‘post-9/11 first episode’ problem in those years and when the Sopranos came back on air there was a special problem in that the Twin Towers were already featured in the opening credits shot of Tony Soprano’s rearview mirror. The shots were removed, and so the reteroactivity of this rear-viewhood was smoothed over to make way for worse blackouts to come. Tony Soprano’s rearview mirror had become part of the fit, part of the tonality and totality and rhythm of what then seems a mal de rhythm archive, barely out of the shadow of the twentieth century, even going further out of sync. One might say, shifting terrain slightly, but really we are clearly already in this all-the-way-prophetic life stage, that another attack took place on, a different type of clonic visual spasm of a whole city, soon after the beginning of the show.
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Can anyone still dance as Curtis did? Is there a fit for the general sense of now? Can one dance at all, with one’s soul or its aversion, in the accelerating twenty first century? The generational sense of an oversized plight, will it be let in, go? The ‘still’ itself is perhaps the problem, a century-torque that got too much and made all stillness impossible for us. Without stillness we can’t see or feel a thing. If suicide had been removed from us as real possibility, bartered away into pure exchange (a real Blue Monday), then life became mere entrapment without outside appeal. In recent work Harmony Holiday, an expert on the unconscious drives of contemporary sounds, bears in mind this lacking of stillness and the various forms of the entrapment, the ways that even Ye could be made into a robot dancing in a cage of unforced provocation. Even Ye, we can say, was made to make a fool of himself—and by the drives? Can we still see that? Can we still do this, can we even so be still? Holiday asks something like this question in ‘Guiltless Stillness’. In fact, that essay begins as a flowering of difficult questions in the positive plural:
You cannot pander standing still. Can you pander while standing still? Pandering is fawn response requisite of rapid frenzied movement, clapping, yessing—it cannot survive in stillness, in elegance. If you cannot pander, if you can stand still without the slightest feint of a lunge or fidget, can you sing, still? Can you swing low yet riotous, and be still?
What concerns Holiday amid the shipwreck of what she calls the ‘monolithic ideological hegemony of Western aesthetics’—is the refusal to stand still, a refusal that also synchs with the ignorance or refusal of wanting to still be at all—to still be, still. You cannot pander standing still, which is as much to say all dancing is some form of automated adherence and becoming-helpless-as-a-plaything of out-of-control drives. Take Ciara Horan’s last TikTok dance and lay it over footage of the arabesques of Curtis or over Ye dancing in the studio in Spain to the controlfree experiments of WW3 and one sees the same thing: a complete inability to stay still. The manufactured decentralized hyperpublicized bloodsport polymarket grifter passive terrorism epistemology prohibits one thing and one thing only: the still.9
On the notion of ‘the band’, see Lawrence Rickels, The Case of California, p. 239.
See also, for example, David Peace’s GB84 (2004) on the ‘end of the fucking world’ (p. 136) and the ‘Third English Civil War (p. 137); also pp. 282, 320, 420, 424, 442, 445, 447, 462. For Peace the ‘end of the fucking world’ marks total political failure, the sense in the fictional universe of Britain in 1984 that ‘the Left achieved nothing’ (p. 447) and that the ‘Day of Judgement’ brings ‘only winter’ (p. 462).
Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, p. 172. He goes on: ‘This is so, to the point that this neganthropic being, in this being-among-screens so characteristic of our epoch, should now become the subject of what, during a seminar dedicated to the critique of anthropology, I began to call “neganthropology.”’ As much as to say that we are hooked up here, since forever, to the heroin screens of the earliest internet. This is how we all died—went extinct—online in the early and then later 21st century. This is the basic form of the transcendental gossip this newsletter will have necessarily failed to impart, no doubt due to the thickness of the screens themselves.
We will name it, and we will have failed to name it. Even when we keep on, pressing the repeat button down, it seems impossible to have known anything (enough) about the extinction drive.
See Avital Ronell, Stupidity, p. 5 ff.: ‘We go first to the poets, and then to war.’
Tooze is keen to draw the veil away between us, Gaza, and the unconscious and material continuance of the effects of a certain deadly ‘Anglo’, for example: ‘It was, therefore, also, and at the same time, the quintessential example of what Bonneuil and Fressoz call the Anglocene—i.e. the epochal role played by the British Empire and then American hegemony in shaping a global system of power based first on coal and then on hydrocarbons.’ And then: ‘Do Thanatocene (energy-death) and Anglocene (energy-western hegemony) go together? Is there such a thing as the Anglo-Thanatocene?’ We only want to add that there is, offsite, still more than unseen, an Anglo-Extinctocene that broadcasts all the way to . . . . Gaza and beyond. Where now, we can ask, at depth, does the extinction drive land? And we with it . . .
‘All the more clearly does the magnetic power of the interior of the earth speak.’—See Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, Selected Writing, Volume 1, p. 303.
For a notion of ‘the earth’ that relates to material inscription, see Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription, pp. 53, 54, 117, 119, 123, 124, 207, 210, 232, 243, 245 and ff.. Earth = inscription.
For Cohen on the ‘still’, Capa and Faulkner and Hitchcock (and oil), see Ecocide and Inscription, Volume 1, for example: ‘What would a still photo of the cinanthropocene era tout court, with all its marking systems and destroying backloops, even be?’
'I feel it closing in'...
koolaid is the new black milk, i've never seen them sit still