“A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities” Giles Deleuze in Essays Critical and Clinical

Hello world.

It has taken me a long time to arrive at the point in which I feel both confident and able to start the following venture. Throughout this short post, I will initially discuss a number of my anxieties that have previously prevented me from creating a blog and the mechanisms through which I intend to overcome them followed by an exploration of the ‘purpose’ of this blog.  I have previously  contemplated the following question:

‘How many writers, talented or otherwise, have stifled their creativity out of either fear or apathy?’ 

Irrespective of my anxiety induced attempts to the contrary, I have decided to start a blog titled After the eerie: some reflections on Year Omega. I don’t and never have proclaimed to be a particularly talented writer – in fact, as you’ll see, – I have a tendency to over complicate my writing by using a range of complex and compound sentences and selecting a vocabulary that is not always appropriate for the purpose or tone of the piece. In A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari suggest “Forming grammatically correct sentences for any normal individual is the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. The unity of language is fundamentally political” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: p101).Linguistically considered, my writing may be found lacking, however,  a radical vocabulary and sentence structure dissolves and disintegrates the fundamentally political ‘major’ language of the majority. “We must distinguish between: a majoritarian as a constant and homogenous system; minorities as subsystems; and the minortarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari. 2000: pp105-106). Thereby, a ‘minor language’ of ‘becoming’ creates new possibilities for the reader to challenge social, economic, political and philosophical institutions. My desire to create and ‘become’ overwhelms my historical anxiety of being too talentless at writing  for such an endeavour. As Deleuze and Guattari teach us “history is opposed to becoming and is associated with the actual as opposed to the virtual, history concerns states of affairs that capture the creative becoming of events” (Lundy, 2012: p182) History aligns my anxiety in a “linear and chronological order which obeys a standard account of causality” (ibid). This is not about history or historical anxiety, this is about becoming. 

I have debated the need to include a short biography in this post and have concluded, at the expense of the reader, that it may help to personalise me to those who are not already familiar with me. 

My name is Robbie Almond and at the time of creating this blog I am twenty-four years old. I live and work in rural England. I was educated at the University of York and subsequently graduated with a B.A in Politics in 2019. My personal life is divided, in unequal portions, between my wonderful girlfriend – who has taught that it is still possible to believe (however futile that belief may be) in love and hope – my dog, my passion for football, my parents and my sibling. I’m employed as a Vehicle Damage Coordinator for a Credit-Hire Organisation (essentially, an insurance company for those unfamiliar with the aforementioned) and the majority of my time is engaged with fulfilling the duties and expectations of this role.

My capacity to ‘become something incomprehensible’ is unfortunately incomparable to that of the Austro-Hungarian novelist Franz Kafka aside from we have both undertook employment in insurance for which we are both “steadily well remunerated” (Friedlander, 2013: p20) and allowed “to rise over the years to a position of major responsibility” (ibid). However , both Kafka and I are relegated to writing in our spare time. In my opinion, this provided us with the advantageous position of not requiring our writing to be commercially successful to survive and allowing the momenteimity of 9-5 working life to fuel our creative passions.

To conclude this brief section, I have made enough mistakes throughout my life thus far to not warrant a developed account of my life, therefore, I shall make every attempt to not share details of my life. I may fall into occasional personal soliloquy, please rest assured that these allusions are merely used to illustrate wider and more important concepts and are in no way intended to absolve me from previous mistakes. 

The purpose of this blog is currently unclear. Therefore, I will begin by stating that in which I hope it does not become:

This blog should not be considered to be either an academic journal or a personal journal. Firstly, the articles contained within may not reach a standard – though I will strive to make them as theoretically and practically consistent as possible – that can be defined as either ‘academic’ or ‘academically noteworthy’. If you encounter any theoretical transgressions whilst reading this blog, I actively encourage my readers to highlight these transgressions. As Deleuze and Guattari note “Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: pp374-375) Therefore, it is my hope that my reader can help my escape ‘academic tranquillity’ by showing the courage to educate me on any transgressions and assist me in breaking through the thresholds of false refuges. In order to maintain the academic integrity of this blog, I will employ the ‘Harvard’ system of referencing throughout. For those who are not familiar with this system of referencing, I will copy a link to a helpful guide below. 

Secondly, as I have previously mentioned, I do not intend for this blog to function as a personal journal. Any account of my day-to-day life would be thoroughly uninteresting and I have done little to merit any biographical efforts. 

Furthermore, I do not intend for this blog to be considered as a guide or manual for how an individual can lead an ethically, commercially, socially or politically successful life. It is my hope that this blog will not come to resemble anything similar to the content created by a creator that ‘affirms to the positive’ by recommending that you wake up at 4AM and exercise for three hours, quit social media entirely or eat exclusively red meat. Please note that the aforementioned does not seek to criticise any individual specifically. On the contrary, itis merely a critique of a system of informal education which, rather than providing the individual with a mechanism through which they can escape the grasp of a increasingly homogenising culture, results in:

“the various forms of education or ‘normalisation’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: p129).

Rather than freeing the subject, ‘influencer culture’ merely re-arranges the point of subjectification from one homogenising culture to another. At some point, I may further develop this critique into an extended and rigorous post. 

Finally, I do not intend for this blog to focus upon a single issue, areas of study or ideology. It is my hope that this forum does not become a sounding board for the repetition of previously defined ideologies or ‘politically correct’ (in the Soviet sense of the term) pseudo-institution in which contrasting ideas are not discussed and are  unduly dismissed. In The Castle, Kafka wrote, “Is there a Control Authority? There are only control authorities” (Kafka, 2019: p503). I intend for no internal, to the extent in which it is possible for an external force to regulate an internal subjectivity,  or external ‘Control Authority’ to develop in this forum. 

Now that we have identified a number of functions that I hope that this blog does not fulfil, I feel far more equipped to begin to define what I hope that this blog will become:

I hope that this blog will allow me to explore my plethora of academic interests and introduce the reader to alternative (and potentially) new ways of interpreting literature, philosophical concepts, economic principles, culture and sport. In a number of years time, this blog may evolve into an interconnected discursive archive that eludes description as “it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak” (Foucualt, 2002: p146). Challenging the archive through the language in which we experienced it initially is reductive as the archive can only be viewed from a historical distance. Viewing the archive from a historical distance ruptures it into visibility, and reveals the limits and extents of discursive relationship to that archive. An archaeology of the archive reveals the limits and extents of our subjective relationship to that archive.  The fields of this blog may not exist within the same discursive archive, yet they will reveal an interrelated genealogy of ‘hyper-modernity’ that could equally reveal facist tendencies in unrelated fields such as  football and medicine.  However, for some, this blog may be a solely academic exercise that reaffirms the extent of their subjectivity or, alternatively, an exercise in which “there is pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge” (Russell, 1934: p46). As a consequence of the above, posts on this blog will adopt a wide-range of philosophical, political, economic and social perspectives to trace the archive of modernity, and for some, reveal their limits as subjects of discourse without adopting a firmly positivist agenda whose aim is to change people and the world. It is my hope that this blog will reveal to myself, and potentially for others,  my own facist tendencies. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: p4). 

The title and sub-title of this blog both reveal the expected content and stylistic formation of this blog. The title, After the eerie,  is a reflection on the vampiric nature of ‘hyper-modernity’ in which “runaway capitalism has broken through all social control mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations” (Land and Plant, 2014: p305). The convergence of horror and the contemporary is evidenced in the eerie nature of time and space in cyberspace, the cult status socially bestowed upon serial killers and emergence of quasi-political horror movies such as Midsommar and The Purge. Stylistically considered, this blog may come to resemble something similar to ‘hyper-modern’ aesthetic. If cursed images, non-fungible tokens (NFT’s)  and techno-minimalist are the style of the future, I have elected for a more traditional depiction of the subject in ‘hyper-modernity’ in Richard Linder’s Woman. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous analysis of Boy with Machine, Woman depicts a subject dissected and artificially re-constructed by artificial lines and segments alongside a commercialised pet whose dissections resemble that of centrepiece.

The sub-title of this blog reflects on and references the P.D James novella The Children of Men in which the demise of the human race due to female infertility in Year 2000 (Year Omega) is greeted with both state repression and disciplinary facist apathy. The last generation of children born, commonly referred to as Omegas, are treated by their elders as “our hope, our promise of salvation” (James, 2018: p8) and as James further adds “ they were – they still are exceptionally beautiful. It sometimes seems that nature in her ultimate unkindness wished to emphasise what we have lost” (ibid). As one can expect, children treated as Gods and the last-hope of humanity are likely to mutate into devils in their adulthood. In post-Omega England, it is suggested that “The dreaded gangs of the Painted Faces who drive around the countryside at night to ambush and terrorise unwary travellers are rumored to be Omegas” (ibid). As we are today, the Omegas are the most economically, socially and politically ‘spoiled’ society in the history of mankind. We both face an uncertain utopia in which history appears as nothing more than a reflection of a pastoral past, and both ‘hyper-modern’ realities  experience violent expressions of uncertainty. As we observed in The Children of Men, the Omegas wander the English countryside randomly inflicting themselves upon unsuspecting travellers, whilst contemporary English society observes violence that is quickly quelled by apathy. For example, the 2021 ‘Kill the Bill’ protests observed a demonstration “turn violent after about 500 protestors descended on Bridewell police station in the city centre after an earlier peaceful march against the government Police and Crime bill” (BBC, 2021) The ‘outburst’ of violence was soon quelled and the population en masse returned to apathy over the matter. Violence in James’ conception of ‘hyper-modern’ England and contemporary ‘hyper-modern’ England is mirrored: outbursts at protests and by ‘roaming Omegas’ is soon met by a return to apathy. 

To conclude, the reader may have mistaken the above as a radical agenda or a manifesto for a more radical politics. However it should be considered that the effects of this blog will vary by group: for some, the dissection of the lines and archives of ‘hyper-modernity’ may prove radical. For others, this blog may be a solely academic exercise that functions merely as a spectacle of interest or a subject of ridicule. I advocate, at the time of writing, no manifesto for a radical politics beyond a call for the delineation of the facist subjectivity and a call to both create and become individual. Finally, I hope you enjoy reading and engaging with the subject matter here!

I will strive to make this blog as accessible as possible. If, at any time, you have any suggestions on how I can improve the accessibility of this blog, please don’t hesitate to contact me. 

As mentioned above, please find the following link to a suitable introduction to the Harvard method of referencing – https://guides.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/harvard_citation 

All correspondence to robbiealmond@live.com. 

Bibliography

BBC., (2021)., ‘Bristol Kill the Bill protests: Police release more images’., BBC News., Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-57340745. 

Deleuze, G and Guattari, F., (2000) ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’., Continuum., pp101, 106, 129.

Deleuze, G and Guattari, F., (2004) ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’., Continuum., pp374-375.

Foucualt, M ., (2002)., ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’., Routledge., p146

Friedlander, S., (2013)., ‘Franz Kafka: the poet of shame and guilt’., Yale University Press., p20.

James, P.D., (2018).,  ‘The Children of Men’., Faber & Faber., p8

Kafka, F., (2019)., ‘The Castle’ in ‘K: The Complete Novels’., Penguin Random House., p503

Land, N and Plant, S., ‘Cyberpositive’ in Mackay, R., (2014)  ‘#Accelerate: the accelerationist reader’., Urbanonmic Media., p305

Lundy, C., (2012).,  ‘History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity’., Edinburgh University Press., p182.

Russell, B., ‘In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays’., (1934)., Internet Archive., Available at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222090., p46