K Punk: classic or dud?

really i have no problem with his going pseudo-ott over stuff, the breadth of his discourse, his pretension if that's what you want to call it

it's the way he uses it as a cloak to disguise the dearth of ideas which gets me - i am only ever able to tell when he starts writing about stuff that i know about though

k-punk uses 'anti-intellectual' a lot and it's lol-y mainly because his scope of what constitutes the, uh, 'realm of the intellectual', is so narrow. i have never, ever got the sense that he likes r'n'b or girls aloud or any of the other new music he writes about. i can believe he likes the smiths though.

I like his big attempt at consistency and systemisation. In the archives there is some brilliant writing on glam, postpunk, politics etc.

This hauntology stuff is like the systemisation overreaching itself and making do with the boring, comfortable Ghostbox aesthetic because it's so convenient for musing over. The results of these musings are completely palty too, it's so repetitive and never gets anywhere close to what it says it's doing.

The thing is, I can see he might be an intellectual you disagree with, or find his critical tools offputting, but I think it's plainly absurd to say he's a pseudo-intellectual, a pretend intellectual. He plainly knows his stuff and thinks about stuff and talks about it within an intellectual framework. Yeah, talking about popular culture within a Marxist/Lacanian/Baudrillardian framework is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, I'm not sure it's even my cup of tea. But it's not a priori pseudo-intellectual. As for dearth of ideas, come on.

Oh aye, I did quote him there, but that was on teaching rather than on philosophy, per se.

So what you're saying is that because someone called Hitchens a pseudo-intellectual, the term is automatically an off-limits slur?

I don't think k-punk is a pseud(o-intellectual) in the sense of not actually having read or thought about this stuff at length and in depth; it's just that he seems to be endlessly staking out and elaborating a position that is, among its other shortcomings, no longer at all fashionable.

(but was about ten years ago, woe)

i like k punk but spizzazz was more thought provoking.

Not really. That Hannity used it against Hitchens just proves that it's all too often used as a random slur against "real" intellectuals (I don't think many would argue that Hitchens isn't one - whether you like him or not). I'm all for its being used, but there's a time and place for it.

Fair enough, I'd agree that Hitchens may be a lot of things, but a pseud he is not. I'd stick by my assertion about k-punk above, though.

hitchens is not a pseud exactly, but neither is he an intellectual; he's a saloon bar ranter and formerly entertaining journalist.

I don't think k-punk is a pseud(o-intellectual) in the sense of not actually having read or thought about this stuff at length and in depth; it's just that he seems to be endlessly staking out and elaborating a position that is, among its other shortcomings, no longer at all fashionable.

Well, if one definition of pseudo-intellectual is staking out positions that are no longer fashionable, I'll give it to you!

my problem with reading much k-punk is that i have spent three years studying analytic philosophy and whilst i sort of decides that stuff wasn't "right" it has left me with a liking for clear argumentation. with k-punk it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points. also i dunno how continental philosophy really works but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case. i don't read him that often tbh but his ideas seem kind of apocalyptic in a fashion i rather like but they lack urgency. it all seems rather remote compared to the fever of the likes of carmody and carlin but i guess they are doing something else altogether.

I like his big attempt at consistency and systemisation. In the archives there is some brilliant writing on glam, postpunk, politics etc.

i'd agree with this

also, this is as good a place as any to admit that while i don't reak kpunk much anymore, i'm well addicted to hyperstiti0n (highly highly toxic)

xpost : It's not MY def. of pseudo-i -- that's just why I think it's easy to call him that. Also, acrobat OTM re authority & apocalypticism.

i think 'pseud' usually *does* mean having done all the proper reading; in a way my problem with his corner of the blogosphere (and much of the academic world it's coming out of) is it's so relentlessly textual: everything is about connecting something some guy (badiou, zizek, baudrillard, whoever) said to certain cultural items other people have picked up on (grime, r'n'b, electropop). two fashions are being followed: blog music and philosophy. it's pseudy because it's a closed loop, nothing is produced, nothing is discovered; it's not specific ideas i disagree with necessarily, more the process itself. of course it's going to result in consistency and systemisation because the process is hermetic and won't allow any new or disruptive inputs: it all has to fit together. hence the overuse of the word 'precisely' (borrowed from zizek).

but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case.

A valid criticism I think, and kind of what I meant upthread when I said I let the Lacanian stuff wash over me. I think he does have some interesting things to say about a lot of stuff I'm interested in as well (Highsmith, Lynch, post-punk etc), but there's no need to appeal to Lacan or whoever to make the point. I guess I too find about 1 in 5 of his posts interesting (pretty good odds for a blog).

K-Punk hits:

Glam
The Fall
Junior Boys
Japan

it's pseudy because it's a closed loop ... the process is hermetic
OK, yeah, that's exactly it. Sometimes that kinda works for me, sometimes not. ...I can just about imagine a k-punk post on The Hermetic. Maybe there has been one.

OK, I probably wouldn't want to live and breathe the K Punk world. But I find it interesting to check in once in a while!

k-punk is the klaxons of cultstud.

(...)

carmody and carlin are quite good comparative refs to bring up. i've never had the foggiest about what carmody's been on about, but nevertheless (and it's something much more than simple zealot fever) he's always been exciting and original, and i've nothing but respect for him. even when he's covered 'herr westwood and dipset nazism' or something equally, blatantly wrongheaded

carlin less so; i guess he comes like the bleeding heart humanist opposition, but really he's much the same as k-punk, ying and yang. sub the 'discourse' for the 'fever' and you've got the same "wah wah robo-bjork is crying inside ;_;" predictable guff. composing 50,0000 page threnodies every time an album comes out just isn't difficult if you can really be bothered - ditto with whatever k-punk gets up to, to my mind.

it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points

This is kind of the problem with a lot of philosopher name-dropping writing I run into, in that it either awkwardly rewords some basic premises or is so self-consciously "deep" that I have trouble finding the point. Ideally, using a philosophical stance as a tangent to analyze pop culture (or culture at large) is a great idea, but often it seems like they're just two points thrown out and the blogging just kind of hints at the connecting line.

If people cared more about the ideas and communicating them, than they did about knowing philosophers and academic terminology, the whole world would be better.

If people cared more about the ideas FACTS and communicating them, than they did about knowing philosophers and academic terminology, the whole world would be better.

-- Scik Mouthy, Friday, June 29, 2007 10:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

are you suggesting some kind of objective writing about pop music enrique?

yes nrq when what's being discussed are entirely subjective opinions on pop music, the FACTS are exactly what we should concern ourselves with!

xp

to be fair, k-punk is usually talking about political theory, really -- but um hang on no, there has to be some fact-content to criticism. ie 'how is this effect achieved?' is a fairly basic requirement. 'entirely subjective opinions' are best kept to blogs.... oh, i see what you did there.

my problem with reading much k-punk is that i have spent three years studying analytic philosophy and whilst i sort of decides that stuff wasn't "right" it has left me with a liking for clear argumentation. with k-punk it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points. also i dunno how continental philosophy really works but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case. i don't read him that often tbh but his ideas seem kind of apocalyptic in a fashion i rather like but they lack urgency.

This is very otm for me, too. I studied a fair amount of continental philosophy during most of my university years as well some analytic, and without making substantive comments about either approach, I found the emphasis on clarity and precision in analytic/Anglo-American philosophy as something to really admire. Making your arguments as clear and transparent as possible is really a virtue in philosophy/criticism/anything, and the posts I've read of K-punk's seem so unnecessarily abstruse. I realize clarity can't always be expected in blog posts, but the points k-punk argues aren't so complex as to warrant such tangled prose.

It's a tough bit, though, because in philosophy you spend all day reading these mostly brilliant thinkers who happen to be completely terrible writers (Kant, Hegel, Marx most of the time, Lacan, Derrida, I mean these guys are truly awful writers. There are some exceptions of course -- Nietzsche is a great writer, I think, and so is Hume, Bertrand Russell, AJ Ayer. It's no coincidence that analytic philosophy takes so much influence from the last three I mentioned.)

It's fairly common, I think, for students of philosophy to think "well, this is just how philosophy/criticism is done -- the issues are so complex that you have to use complex language to describe them." Then these students grow up and become professors, and the tradition of bad writing continues.

with lacan it's supposed to be a deliberate tactic, the bad writing. must have been an odd translation gig: "make as inelegant as you can kthx".

I like him.

But that should be obvious. Cause I'm hoos and I like this kind of shit.

plus he's fostered this whole claque of similar bloggers that make it into even more of a parlour game shut-in

-- r|t|c, Friday, June 29, 2007 9:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2007/01/man-does-not-live-by-revolution.html

Is that one article supposed to stand in for *everything* on *both* that guy's blogs?

I mean so what if it's curatorial or hermetic, is it so obviously ridiculous that people want to make a case for a particular aesthetic?

I agree that they could do to engage more with the modern world in a less dismissive way, but humble pluralism on the other side is just as bad.

that one article is on a collective blog that k-punk's involved in and is tied up with a film show that k-punk is involved in. it's a fair sample. there may be a case for the riefenstahl aesthetic -- i doubt it, tbh -- but owen's case for it is terrible. i hate the word 'curate', but that aside, there's nothing curatorial about plucking old films out of an old canon. is there any discovery involved in the enterprise?

He wasn't arguing for the Riefenstahl aesthetic, he was arguing (not very thoroughly) that it differs from leftist modernism, and that the two can't be equated, like liberal critics tend to do.

Is there discovery? Sure, within a narrow field. If you are interested in how the legacy of modernism might fit in with modern left wing politics, then these art history posts are interesting.

He wasn't arguing for the Riefenstahl aesthetic, he was arguing (not very thoroughly) that it differs from leftist modernism, and that the two can't be equated, like liberal critics tend to do.

i am unconvinced that anyone is 'equating' them but, y'know, it's not exactly crazy to point out the manifest similarities. he never explains what his modernism entails anyway. i missed the part about modern left-wing politics in his post but here's how i read it:

There has always been a desperation among cultural conservatives to find the missing diabolical link that ties all their hatreds together.

REF PLZ

In cinema, this role tends to have been played by Leni Riefenstahl. In her work, we find the quickfire montage and sharp camera angles of the Soviet avant-garde, the shadowy chiaroscuro and fluid camera of the German expressionists, and the fixation on mass gatherings so beloved of the Socialist spartakiada public festivals.

ALSO, NAZIS

“A modernism from hell,” Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones called Triumph of the Will, comparing it to Battleship Potemkin in a long think-piece published last year, and thus the sneaking suspicion is quietly implanted, that, irrespective of Nazism, modernism itself was always-already from hell.

UH.

Jones himself puts it as follows, “to survey the cinema of modernism is to recognise its affinity for political extremes, and to realise that we are the lucky ones, enjoying the cinematic echoes of Metropolis in the architecture of Tate Modern's turbine hall before going into the museum cinema to savour those shadows - from a distance.”

OK, JONES IS A BIT WRONG TOO -- IT'S RIDIC TO CALL 'METROPOLIS' MODERNIST, UNLESS HG WELLS IS ALSO A MODERNIST... BUT MAYBE MONOLITHIC NOTIONS OF MODERNISM ARE MAD GAY WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

The point here is not just a matter of taste or opinion about different aesthetic styles, but rather embraces the very idea of the aesthetic as such.

AH.

None other than J.G. Ballard himself has put this point plainly. “I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton,” he wrote in the Guardian last year, riffing off the V&A's moneyspinning (“Utopia soap! Only five pounds!”) exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World, “but I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no-one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery... Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us... Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature’.

JG BALLARD IN OTM SHOCK?

In other words, dehumanizing, unromantic and brutal, modernism failed to respect the frailty of human nature, to the extent that a human disaster then naturally followed.

I DON'T THINK SANE PEOPLE THINK MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE 'CAUSED' THE GULAG... BUT THE EUPHEMIZED "HUMAN DISASTER" HAPPENED DURING THE FUCKEN RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR.

“Death always calls on the very best architects,” Ballard darkly concludes, adding a note of the sinister to this basically conservative schema. Architecture is best left to merely adorn, tradition best left to be venerated, thought best left to be hesitant, and utopia certainly left always to be deferred.

WHY, WHAT ON EARTH COULD HAVE GIVEN BALLARD THIS GRIM OUTLOOK ON LIFE...?

This, then, against the background of the continuuing, pressing social imperative, to fall in love, or to put it another way, to breed.

"SOCIAL"

Elsewhere in his piece, Ballard alludes to the profoundly modernist environs of London Zoo, where last year, a guilty conservationalism, deeply unnerved by the Constructivist legacy left to them by Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton architectural group, replaced the water of the penguin pool with woodchips, and moved the penguins to another location, in a desperate attempt to encourage them to produce more little baby penguins. So that now, under the impossible swoops and curves of the boards, a pair of porcupines sit disgruntled, contemplating their future, like a young professional, recently married couple, silently watching the news in their small ersatz cottage in some urban enclave somewhere, gingerly taking their first steps on the housing ladder.

PROJECTION MUCH

Dreary conformity, then or fascist death: such is the basic contemporary ideological ‘choice’.

OR DISINTERRING SOVIET AESTHETICS OF THE '20S, OBVIOUSLY

And yet, there are two telling moments in Triumph of the Will which resist the tedium of this trajectory, and suggest that the identification between fascism and modernism is not quite as clear as it is often suggested. These moments occur within minutes of each other, in the scenes shot inside Albert Speer’s vast, abstracted-classical Zeppelinfeld.

First, a distinguishing gesture: Hitler, alluding to rumours of disunity (specifically, the disunity that led to the murderous events of the Night of the Long Knives two months earlier) proclaims that the Nazi Party is, on the contrary, utterly solid. “It stands as firm,” he barks, slamming his fist down upon a stone, “as diese Block hier!” This apparent piece of pure political theatre in fact alludes to a deep ideological division. In response to “Der Ring”, the Bauhaus-centred, left-leaning German modernist architectural collective, the Nazi wing of the profession formed “Der Block”: fixed, where the modernists were dynamic, volkish where they were cosmopolitan, made for eternity rather than for a society in flux. Solid, immutable, fit to last to the end of the Thousand Year Reich. Riefenstahl’s lovingly shot stone incarnates this solidity.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

Second, an apparent blot on the copy: soon after Hitler reminds us of the Reich's firmness, the camera pitches up to gaze at the swastika-festooned tribune above him. Unmistakeably, running up and down it, is a lift with a cinematographer perched inside. Our attention isn’t exactly drawn to it, but it isn’t hidden either. What is happening here? Could it be that Riefenstahl is indulging in a kind of pseudo-Brechtian laying bare of the device? Are we being reminded of the construction of reality that lies behind all this?

OH MY FUCKING GOD

As it is unlikely that this was simply a mistake (it's all too meticulous for that) it can perhaps be seen as a signature, along the lines of Hitchcock popping up here and there in his films.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

After all, the construction isn’t really threatened by it: it doesn’t provoke thought in the sense of the modernist ‘making strange.’ Indeed, it doesn't really provoke thought at all, rather, seeming to serve instead an essentially narcissitic, parasitic, even idiotic function - like the’Hi Mom!’ of the US soldiers in the background of television news, undistracted by the destruction they’ve created.

OH MY FUCKING GOD. NB: EXACTLY HOW BORING IS THE NOTION OF "LAYING BARE THE DEVICE" AS MASTER-DEVICE OF "MODERNISM"?

The use of artificial light in this film is one of the elements that most disturbed Weimar avant gardists.

INTERESTING TO KNOW BACKSTORY HERE. I GUESS THEY WERE DISTURBED IN EXILE...

Riefenstahl's montage always takes care to emphasize electric lettering, ironically a technology pioneered in Germany by the Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn. He, of course, was horrified to see his creation used so powerfully by the Nazis, though, they did not, of course, use it on any buildings even remotely resembling his own. Notice the moment we see, lit up at night, the house where Hitler is staying: a shining swastika and a burning “HEIL HITLER,” beaming out from a kitsch set of tweedy Bavarian lodgings.

I'M MISSING THE POINT HERE

The asynchronic film sound advocated by Dziga Vertov and Hanns Eisler also finds a strange correspondent here.

EVERYBODY WAS ADVOCATING THIS BY THE EARLY THIRTIES, NOT JUST EISLER AND VERTOV.

The first quarter of Triumph of the Will is silent, with a tacked-on soundtrack, a glutinous melange of music and cheering, overdubbed onto it.

BIT LIKE IN HITCHCOCK'S EARLY SOUND FILMS THEN, ONLY MORE NAZI

What we hear is not what we see. No one speaks in synch until we reach the conference room: thus, we are given to understand the Nazi hierarchy of power amounts to an essentially natural one, with Nazi leaders in effect identified as the men possessing the most fundamental temporal fidelity.

"THUS" DOING A LOT OF WORK

The lovingly shot boys of the first quarter, gaily wrestling, showering, cutting each others’ hair, evoke the body culture of Weimar, a social trend also foregrounded in the only Communist film of the Republic, Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht's 1932 masterpiece Kuhle Wampe. And yet, again, despite this apparent similarity, a vital distinction pertains here as well. For all her jollity, with Riefenstahl, everything is much more stiff, sexless, ritualized, wholesome, and crucially, male, in marked contrast to the explicit feminist undercurrents in the earlier film.

OK

This last point draws attention to a wider historical division between fascist and communist bodies. As curious as it may seem, in the pre-1933 period even nudists were politically polarised, with Adolf Koch’s socialist naturists pitted against both the Free Sunland movement and propagandists for the “nordic nude” like Hans Suren.

WHY IS THAT "CURIOUS"?

Photographs of Suren and his beautiful boys immediately evoke Riefenstahl with their hard, glossy, tensed bodies. Think also of the sequence late on where, intercut with the speeches, we see a succession of gloriously cheekboned Aryan youths, staring forwards, shadowed via stunning chiaroscuro into angular abstracts.

For all her formal daring, the true relationship of Riefenstahl to the avant-garde, can be summed up quite succintly, in the seemingly endless parade of marchers that takes up much of the last third of Triumph of the Will. Germany, it seems, is on the move again, and the effect is either hypnotic, or utterly interminable, depending on your boredom threshold, or perhaps, your politics. In either case, the crucial point is this: here, whatever else we see, the cross-cutting always takes us back to Hitler, who salutes each new flank.

At one point it is broken up by percussive cannon blasts. At a similar moment in Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin, each blast leads to a chain of association, outside of the immediate subject along lines of thought and development. Here, each blast only returns us to Hitler.

OH SNAP, THAT'S COMFORTING

At another point we see a row of tanks, immediately followed by Chariots, carried along by galloping horses. Thus the mechanised warfare of Nazism, aligns itself ethically with the outmoded forms of the past. The technical properties of the State and the Director may be sometimes innovative, but in the end, the ideas they carry herald something far more atavistic.

JESUS CHRIST

1st I wasn't trying to defend that article.

It doesn't even try to say why constructivism is better politically (just thin refs to Brecht and montage). The anti-liberal bit is kind of lifted from Zizek, and he does that better.

There is much better stuff on 'The Measures Taken' blog, but if you are looking at it from a position completely hostile to the Soviet avant-garde etc. then I wouldn't bother.

in what sense was it an 'avant-garde', within soviet art? i am interested in it in terms of how it was interpreted as such in the west. the main theoretical problem so far as i see it is that the more you play the "avant-garde meets masscult" thing, ie "zomg eisenstein + disney1!!1!!", the more you admit that the two categories are severely wanting. or you would do if you didn't have an axe to grind... to me 'avant-garde' implies some kind of resistance, and not necessarily a leftist one. by definition, soviet state employees were not any kind of resistance. but generally that scene gives me the creeps, big time.

The constructivists were already against the categories 'avant-garde / masscult' all the way back then.

You can say they were disingenuous about it, but it was part of the rhetoric.

he's OK

i like k-punk a lot

k-punk is the klaxons of cultstud.

So, good then?

I think it's like anything else. If you understand what the person is saying it at the level intended then there is quite a lot to be gained from it. If you don't, then you might choose to find ways to assail it.

I'm sure there are people who would think that even the most pedestrian ILM thread is overly "intellectual". Even "classic or dud" is too much for some people's brains to handle.

BAN SAXBY D. ELDER

Ban the wisecrackers who think the "ban ———" prank is the height of ROFLness.

I sometimes read K-Punk. He has some interesting things to say, and talks about lots of music/lit/books/film that I like, but, more often than not, I disagree with his general point of view.

His whole political outlook seems to come from a very rarefied academic world that has little connection to what some of us might call "real life". He continually implies that the world right now is about as bad as it ever has been, and he seems to pine for the late 70s.

I find this to be very perverse and nonsensical, but then I live in middle class Austin, TX and everything here is peachy keen, so WTF do I know...

strung out on jargon/perverted by language/doesn't make a lick of sense

saxby's post was retarded, i'm not going to respond to that shit reasonably.

dude, you might have a real problem...

No shock to not get a reasonable response from you. I guess we can all look forward to a caps-riddled rant though.

I was actually keeping it pretty light. I don't really see what the big controversy might be (although some people might not realize that i was just kidding about the klaxons being "good").

Harsh is ok, though.

Just listened to the record. It wasn't off putting - it was rather special to hear Mark's voice in this way - but as a spoken word album, well, it is what it is, and nothing more: you hear it once, enjoy it, but probably will never listen to it again. I hate that this is how it goes, but it is how it goes.

I've been really enjoying On Vanishing Land and have listened to it repeatedly. It reminded me a bit of Patrick Keiller's films, Robinson in Space particularly.

RIP Mark Fisher on the anniversary of his death. I taught Capitalist Realism this fall, and was pleasantly surprised how much students connected with Fisher's ability to connect the ongoing crisis of capitalism with depression and anxiety. He saw something.https://t.co/vONLSBLuSA

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 13, 2020

I liked him as a lecturer.

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/mark-fisher-blogosphere/

:(

man, really feels like these trajectories have sped right up pic.twitter.com/j2ZV0G2ESf

— michael (@Sisyphusa) July 6, 2020

nina power is now writing in the telegraph about cancel culture

lol, didn't click yr link before posting

honestly fisher would have been on her side

this isnt a big development, nina has been on youtube with some very dodgy people over the last couple of years, she always has that look on her face where she's just said something a bit naughty,

only a finite amount of books you can read in a lifetime, and an infinite amount of tedious and horrible writers!

^^^ truth.

Still working my way through “Capitalist Realism,” so grateful for his provocations. https://t.co/N19DxsR7Dp

— Zoé (@ztsamudzi) July 12, 2020

https://crackmagazine.net/2023/01/kode9-releases-previously-unheard-conversation-with-mark-fisher/

Kode9 has shared a previously unheard recording of a conversation between himself and the late Mark Fisher, 6 years after his passing. The recording is from a conversation between the producer and theorist from 1998.

According to a note shared on Kode9’s Instagram, the conversation “was the first of a series of recorded conversations whose aim was to explicate/clarify/transmit the embryonic mythos.”

He continued: “Due to the mnemonic fade and/or nonrecovery of other minidiscs, it is unclear whether subsequent recordings existed”.

https://thequietus.com/news/tariq-goddard-repeater-zero-books-mark-fisher-statement/

Tariq Goddard the co-founder and publisher of Zero & Repeater books is stepping down from both titles today, it has been announced.

Goddard, an author and tQ contributor, founded Zero in 2009 with Mark Fisher to combat “anti-intellectualism” in modern culture and went on to publish key works by Eugene Thacker and Owen Hatherly, as well as the groundbreaking Capitalist Realism by Fisher himself.

The pair left Zero in 2014 to co-found Repeater with Watkins Media alongside Al Niven and Tam Shlaim, where they published more notable work by the likes of Dawn Foster, Robert Barry and David Stubbs. In 2021 Watkins bought Zero, bringing it back under the same ownership as Repeater.

In a statement released via Watkins this morning, Goddard says: “Repeater and Zero Books are publishing imprints that have become a culture. That culture will endure longer than the individuals that helped bring it about, and although I will be leaving the imprints, it is impossible to leave what they have created. Success in business is easily measured in sales and exposure, but influencing a block of time, registers in a more general and less personal way. The strength and influence of Repeater and Zero Books is felt as much in the publishing ether, and in the creation of our own community and niche, as it is in market share or famous names. Both imprints followed the simple brief of trying to discover what was happening, and create it if it could not be found. After seventeen years I go with the deepest gratitude to the friends that contributed to that process, who worked for us and with me, and to all of you that supported our titles in numbers we hardly dreamed of in 2007/8.

“As a writer I have never thought of our, or any authors, as exalted beings, despite sharing the motivation to try and and attain such heights in print, but I believe I have understood them better than I do other people, and I will miss them all, certainly more than some of them I have crossed swords with might suppose. It is always surprising when different types of author have recourse to use exactly the same phrase, especially when it is not a particularly writerly one, and in the last few weeks that has been to thank me for ‘taking a chance on’ them.

“I want to thank them all for taking a chance on me, and to you, our readership, for taking a chance on us. Goodnight and joy be with you all.”