Accentuate the Negative

I attended Mark Fisher’s Kafka 2000 talk at King’s with M. yesterday. Apart from anything else, we both enjoyed the feeling of being back at school, and I felt myself in the shoes of those engaged, questioning mature students at University that my listless, apathetic self (as it was at that time, for some more, and less, common reasons) had looked at askance – I’d actually read the book, for heaven’s sake! The material was familiar though it was nice to have it reactivated, but it opened up a bit more when it came to the questions afterwards. One question was about how art can respond to capitalist realism, and one answer was naturally the hauntological approach – but what tweaked my antennae was the idea that artists should reclaim ‘negativity’. It struck a chord as it’s something I’ve been trying to work through myself – what ‘negativity’ could mean when applied to music-making.

(I haven’t read Cold World yet, but I guess some of what follows might be creeping onto the same territory).

Initially, I think it’s possible to define the negativity by what it isn’t. The first point is that, in itself, this negativity runs counter to pervasive compulsory affirmationism. Also, it needs to be distinguished from the fossilised James Dean, rebel negativity of, say, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or The Kills or groups like that, which isn’t even “I wear black on the outside because that’s the way I feel on the inside” but “I wear black cos it’s, like, cool.”
On that note, it’s also a negativity that shouldn’t be so much ‘misery me’ as ‘misery us’ – the point of view presented should be depersonalised, de-self-ised (NB overheard as a response from one woman to another’s woes on the train: “You should be more selfish.”) In lyrical terms, for example, this wouldn’t have to mean not using ‘I’, but it’s important that the ‘I’ is not the Romantic one of the artists typically eulogised in Laura Barton’s reliably toe-curling ‘Hail Hail Rock n Roll’ Guardian columns, and more of a meta ‘I’.

Thinking more now about the positive properties of this negativism: the post-crisis moment can give artists of this generation a moment and a subject. What I suppose is a standard-issue existential-artistic dissatisfaction with what is sold to us as reality can take on an added resonance now that some people (including artists themselves, perhaps) are waking as if from a slumber. If there’s a small chink here, the work of anyone sensitive to it, in any walk of life whatever their aptitude, must be to keep it open in themselves and in others, and to – at the very least – contribute to and cultivate the ambiance of negative feeling towards neo-liberal realism as the psychic foundation for genuine social change. This ‘negativity’ must be, in K-Punky terms, ‘libidinised’, and music is an excellent medium for through which that can happen - This is not just an argument in favour of sonically impoverished sloganeering, though.

I noted with great pleasure that Poetix (aka Cold World author Dominic Fox) has a nicely detourned quote from Cathal Coughlan/The Fatima Mansions atop his blog at the moment (from The Door To Door Inspector “You made your choice when mocking the ways of true grown men.”) since, when I was a teenager, the Coughlan of The Fatima Mansions (and we can argue about the sonic shortcomings or otherwise of Coughlan’s various musical formations another time) was one of the first people to make attractive a certain negativity (as outlined above) and seriousness, one that was on speaking terms with musical surprise, absurdity, grotesque humour and invigorating language-mangling (Coughlan and Chris Morris are strangely twinned in my mind). At the time I perhaps didn’t even take Coughlan as seriously as I should have – after all, an album like Valhalla Avenue which then seemed thrillingly paranoid and bilious now reads, from ‘Evil Man’ to ‘Be Dead’, like a pretty sane and reasonable state of the world address. That is not to argue that The Fatima Mansions should be taken as the model (they just might not work in that way for you), or that words-in-music are the only way of expressing negativity (this would be a terrible, unmusical straightjacket). The expression of negativity vis-à-vis neo-lib realism perhaps doesn’t have to be as literal, as literary, as Coughlan’s.

The great thing about the Zero Books project is the manner in which it libidinises thinking against and around capitalist realism, or it has certainly had that impact on me (although the economic crisis itself also played a large part in that…). And one interesting aspect of the Michael Jackson tome was that it demonstrated how this kind of thinking can be the background hum, the bassline mood of a work even if it isn’t its ostensible subject. I think this is relevant to other forms of artistic/cultural production, including music.