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Hermitix #1: The Work of Mark Fisher
on September 29, 2018 September 29, 2018 By xenogothic 2 Comments
1. The Work of Mark Fisher with Matt Colquhoun
Listen now: https://t.co/TuflQcXNlS pic.twitter.com/AWwDdKkjOt
— 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐗 (@Hermitixpodcast) September 29, 2018
Meta-Nomad has just launched his new philosophy podcast and Episode #1 is a chat that we had about the work of Mark Fisher.
Hermitix is a completely new podcast focusing on one-on-one interviews relating to fringe philosophy, obscure theory, esotericism, underappreciated thinkers and movements, and that which historically finds itself 'outside' the academic canon.
The aim of the podcast is to allow autodidactic thinkers, amateur philosophers and the generally curious an insight into the work of thinkers and movements who/which are often impenetrable to those outside of the academy. With the discussions at Hermitix aiming to be informal idea barrages which attempt to retain the excitement of fringe theory without falling into the structural 'niche' pitfalls of the academy.
I really enjoyed doing this and I hope you enjoy listening to it.
Make sure to follow the podcast on Twitter and Podiant. The upcoming sessions with John Cussans, Nick Land and Simon Sellars are not to be missed.
You can listen to Episode #1 here.
A Quick Note on Patchwork Subjectivities
A new post from Arran Crawford over at Synthetic Zero:
…if fractal polarization (or reality forking) proves anything it's that the world no longer exists. The shattering of the assumptive world presages the shattering of the geoclimatic planetary normal. When we read about assumptive world we need to read this in its full Lovecraftian dimensions as the world we thought we inhabited is stripped away by a resurgent real that defies our capacity to domesticate it in thought, that deforms and perverts thought, introducing new logics and new geometries, a total phenomenological and temporal instability, accelerated by inhuman arctic awakenings. This is the familiar in and as its own breakdown, a process of xenoforming.
I love this, obviously, and from there Arran goes on to address the following passage from my #WyrdPatchwork talk given last weekend. I said, after quoting Mark Fisher's definition of "the weird" from the introduction to The Weird and the Eerie:
Perhaps, then, we can say that the "weird" is a word for the dissent of the Real. It is reality dissenting against our sense of itself, alluding to the existence of alternative realities and other possible existences in the moments where that which is does not coincide with itself.
To which Arran adds:
From a Buddhist perspective we could say that this weird is simply the real as it intrudes on our neurotic world-simulations, manifesting in the present context as the abrupt insistence of impermanence within and upon our essentially confused perception that there is a world and that that world is permanent. The weird isn't really the dissent of the real because the real can only ever seem to dissent from within the fundamentally delusional coordinates of our projective reality. The real doesn't dissent from us, we dissent from the real.
To this I will only echo Fisher again: "The inside is a folding of the outside."
I agree with Arran — my mistake was perhaps not insisting this recursion goes without saying. Fisher's weird is, along with the eerie, a "mode of perception" and both terms are associated with the inside and outside. What Arran is describing here is, I'd argue, more in line with the eerie but the two are only subtly and circumstantially differentiated, in part based on a certain subjective reorientation.
The rest of Arran's post is primarily concerned with climate change and if I don't address his analyses in the detail it obviously deserves here it's because I want to spend more time with his sources, related to an area of study I know little about, but also because I think there is overlap here with a post I currently have in the oven — to be titled: "Fanged Noumena: Or, We Don't Know What Death Can Do" — so I'll probably reference his post again there because I think the path he's pursuing at the moment is really interesting and important.
"Fanged noumena" is obviously Nick Land's most famous but least discussed concept and I want to unpack this properly in future, particularly because the ways he describes it — via Kant (of course) — in The Thirst for Annihilation, seems like a far more rigorous description of the agency behind what Fisher calls "the eerie". For now, what's worth noting is that "fanged noumena" is initially described via a report on Bangladesh's typhoon season — it is epitomised, it seems, by the way that "everything which had seemed solid is dissolved into the vortex of the storm."
In his post, Arran notes an interview with social scientist Mayer Hillman who suggests, bluntly, that the "outcome" of our climate crisis is "death". No doubt, but I'm particularly interested in the ways that many already consider the process itself to be death — climate change as a planetary death drive that we have accelerated and exacerbated. For many, these noumenal threats have always been a part of life. It's only just become an issue for many of us Westerners to be concerned about in our seemingly previously predictable and temperate climates.
This is likewise similar to how Eugene Thacker talks about a violent Outside in his book In The Dust of Our Planet, in which he writes about how "we are increasingly more and more aware of the world in which we live as a non-human world, a world outside, one that is manifest [in] the effects of global climate change, natural disasters, the energy crisis, the progressive extinction of species world-wide."
Echoing Land's "fanged noumena", Thacker continues:
Tragically, we are most reminded of the world-in-itself when the world-in-itself is manifest in the form of natural disasters. … [W]hile we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings.
Individual death is made somewhat redundant when faced with the challenges ahead and many accelerationist writers have considered these implications — of particularly relevance here, I think is Mark's discussion of "hyper-death" in his essay "Practical Eliminativism" in Speculative Aesthetics, as well as many books in the current sphere of writings on the Anthropocene, in particular Thom Van Dooren's book Flight Ways here in particular — which address the ontopolitical demands of species-death on our anthropocentric conception of death and grief.
I'm finishing off a little book at the minute which I'm going to self-publish, extending out my "Egress" post. (I'll announce this properly when I'm good and ready but here's a placeholder.) In the third chapter of the book — "Necropolitics" (not an intentional nod to Achille Mbembe, although in thematic orbit of his use of that term for sure) — deals with these issues of geopolitical and climate collapse explicitly, particularly how they've been expressed and invoked in pop culture and in analyses of Trump's election. I'm expecting a proof imminently so this will hopefully be out soon.
Also, my very first essays on patchwork focused on this dynamic of the subjective and geopolitical explicitly — returned to in "Wyrd Sisters…" but by no means a new argument for me to make — that is, the ways that patchwork is an exterior reflection of a repressed (which is to say, consolidated) psyche.
There was a poignant tweet I saw recently which spoke to this:
"Landscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies, both crystallized in each other, geometrized, mineralized."
-Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image
{Indian Canyons, Palm Springs} pic.twitter.com/8Xzy8f5RpP
— ya ya yanina (@schweben_weben) September 28, 2018
For me, patchwork is an attempt to rethink the geopolitical in light of our shifting subjectivities. This was the original jumping off point for my original patchwork essay, "State Decay", which seemed to be the start this year's general patchwork fever (sorry!) and it's follow-up "State Decay: Collapse" in which I responded to criticisms of my apparent encouragement of state dissolution.
So, I think Arran is right that these dynamics are central to patchwork and I'm looking forward to seeing where else he takes it. I'm looking forward to a moment where we might nicely coalesce!
Arran has posted a follow-up response to this post featuring material from his original post ended up on the cutting room floor, including notes on Thacker's world/earth/planet schema in his book, In The Dust of Our Planet:
…these paradoxes resemble the structure of the ko'an. The ko'an is a device used in Rinzai Zen that is a problem that lacks a solution that is given to the student. The novice must come before the master in ritual context to present his solution to the insoluble. The point is to demonstrate the deep inadequacy of conceptual thinking in an embodied experiential way. In Thacker's language, it's to show how the world fails to solve the planet. What's striking in the ko'an is that it uses logic to show the inadequacies of logic and deploys language to gesture allusively beyond language. In this sense then, global weirding is the earth that refuses containment in either world or planet.
At this point where are we but in mysticism? Haven't we been there for some time? The paradoxes that mount around us. The deepening mystery of the world that Thacker reads as tragic. There is undoubtedly tragedy in natural disasters and climatic breakdown but that derives from the suffering they cause and the threat of extinctions, human and nonhuman, and our apparent powerlessness in the face of them. The other side of the equation, the humiliation of thought, has another aspect, one less bathed in pathos. It's this turn towards mysticism understood as an attentive immersion in the mystery of experience. To put it another way, it's to awaken our participation in the mystery of the world.
That could sound dismissive. It could come over that I'm minimising the realities of climatic breakdown and its various horrors. Yet I'm very alive to those grim scenarios and my thinking about patchwork is entirely oriented by them. The deeply adaptive ecotechnic community is one seeking to mitigate and prevent whatever harm it can. Looming always in the darkness, behind every particular jolt or laceration we could endure, is death, and, exceeding that, the "existential risk" of human extinction.
"The only way to exit is piece by piece…"
on September 28, 2018 April 21, 2019 By xenogothic
The point of a mosh pit is to dissolve all barriers between the Self and the Other…
Nyx' new post, "Whiplash: The Trauma of Acceleration", might be my favourite chunk of recent blogosphere. I've read it three times now. Extremely blessed content.
The whole premise of Whiplash, and of thrash metal, heavy metal, or rock n' roll in general, is really that there is no future. The response to this varies depending on who is approaching the idea, from pure hedonism in the case of much of early rock and 80s glam metal, to the increasingly hate-filled and/or despairing death metal and black metal.
Thrash, however, sits somewhere right in the middle. "Whiplash" says it all in the name: Thrash metal was about pure intensity, where the nihilism of the 80s reached its most pure form of burning oneself up gloriously in the moment.
I feel like Nyx is articulating some unknown feeling I've been having recently, getting more and more into various metal subgenres (and extreme guitar music more generally) after spending most of the year gorging myself on Autechre.
That's enough of a shift for whiplash in itself.
This week I've been in a Slayer mood and I haven't been able to get the song "Piece By Piece" out of my head — something I'm blaming Nyx for entirely.
I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm on this kick whilst so much time online in these spaces I really care about feels like it's orbiting around a lot more drama than usual, just as Nyx says.
Her advice on what to do couldn't be more pertinent:
Affirm the headbanger, "the Dionysus of our time."
In a vortex of pure intensity, the headbanger affirms life and moves in rhythm to the storm.
The Blind Woman
on September 27, 2018 September 27, 2018 By xenogothic 1 Comment
There is a blind woman who wanders about on the road outside our flat in the middle of the night. She staggers around, looking frail, tapping a cane, shouting for help.
She flags down cars — or at least tries to. She does this by getting in their way. It's heart-wrenching to watch as joyriders turn down their music, usually convinced by a girlfriend in the passenger seat that they must to do something to help her. But most ignore her.
Those who do stop try their best to help her but she always refuses what they have to offer. She's desperate until they stop and then it becomes a negotiation.
She wants one outcome. The one no one is willing or able to give.
She's from Croydon, she says. We're in Deptford. I wouldn't walk that far. You can't expect a blind woman to. You wouldn't expect a blind woman to be hanging out in the middle of the road at 3am in the first place but there she is. She says she has nowhere to go. She just needs money for a taxi.
We can give you a lift?
We can call a taxi for you? Or anyone?
No. I need the money.
I'm sorry. We don't have that kind of cash.
Fuck off and die then, you selfish cunts!
The first time this happened it was distressing to watch, if darkly humorous. I watched this scenario unfold again and again for about half an hour from the window of our flat on the third floor.
I wasn't just rubbernecking. I kept trying to call 101 — the non-emergency number for the police or an ambulance or anyone — but I couldn't get through. I suppose it's emergencies only at 3am. It felt like it could turn into an emergency at any moment but it never did.
And that's right: I said "the first time".
She woke us up for the third time in as many months last night. Traipsing up and down our street, around the block, tapping her cane, hurling the kind of abuse at cars that makes your eyes water.
At first I couldn't be sure if she was blind or not. By now I'm almost certain it's a farce.
Like, 90% certain…
The Importance of the Unavowable in Community
Communism remains the best conceivable form of human organization, and it can work, but the major catch is that it requires something that smells intolerably fishy to those who are most likely to want communism (left-wing activists). I will try to show that a workable and highly desirable communism is possible on the condition of accurate social valuation of individual characters. Some people are better or worse at different things, including ethical conduct. To the degree a group calibrates itself to these differences, it can have true communism; to the degree it denies or inaccurately assesses these differences, it cannot have communism.
Justin Murphy's post "Aristocracy and Communism" — his more in-depth summary of his idea for a kind of aristocrommunist patch, expressed at a recent #WyrdPatchwork conference — has caused quite a furore recently; a furore I addressed quickly here.
I wanted to take a more careful look at this sense of a communism, positioning it against my own. My communism is primarily conceived as being defined by a collectivised ontology of difference — something I've tentatively been piecing together on the blog here and here.
A discussion of this sense of communism underpinned my first conversation about patchwork with Justin on his YouTube channel. We seemed to be in agreement then, but what he has suggested more recently seems antithetical to that… I want to figure how and why with a little more certainty.
The difference between us, as I see it, is that Murphy is led by his data into all the usual traps of communism, applying statistical solutions to ontological questions rather than building purposefully around the impossibility of their resolution.
My immediate reaction to Murphy's thought experiment is that, as Mike Crumplar called it on his blog, it is a form of "microfascism". As Sam Kriss (of all people) notes, in an old blogpost, it's a DeleuzoGuattarian coinage. Kriss writes:
Deleuze draws a line between historical Fascism (of the type that came to power in Germany, Italy, Romania, etc) and microfascism: a field of destructive, authoritarian impulses that permeates capitalist society. In 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' microfascism is the result of a blocked line of flight, a molarisation of repressed desire…
We know this already. Patchwork, as a thought experiment, produces lines of flight indefinitely (in principle) but, paradoxically, this is likely to include a spectrum of possibility from overtly consolidated dead-ends to never-ending chaos. The gambit is: surely the proliferation of alternatives is better than our dull existences amongst consolidated nation-states, each increasingly infected with capitalism and neoliberalism.
How this is remotely compatible with a classically understood communism is a tricky point to make and, in this way, I've previously been sympathetic to Justin's often expressed "imposter syndrome" when talking about communism, in which he acknowledges that just because he thinks he's a communist, he's aware many "real" communists might reject him as one of their own. I can appreciate this. I think I might be a similar sort of communist, because my communism, rather than being purely Marxist and adhering to contemporary left-wing expectations, is rather built on foundational texts from Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy.
In many ways, Justin and I are beginning from the same position. The interpersonal differences that tend towards fragmentation are based on the inherently fraught nature of friendship and communication which Georges Bataille, in his essay "The Labyrinth", reduces to a "principle of insufficiency"; an inability to account for the inner experience of the other as that primal wound at the heart of all of human civilisation and existence.
For me, this is not something to get rid of or solve. This is not something to attempt to rectify. It's the productive engine of community that is often curtailed and stunted by politics of the state. Instead, it's a condition of subjectivity that is to be exacerbated and held within thought so that all action and politics can begin from its acknowledgement.
Blanchot takes up this principle explicitly in his communism, making it central to his philosophy of community. I think it's worth turning to Blanchot's The Unavowable Community at length here. He writes:
I am reading the following lines by Edgar Morin which many of us could make our own: "Communism is the major question and the principal experience of my life. I have never stopped recognizing myself in the aspirations it expresses and I still believe in the possibility of another society and another humanity."
This simple statement may sound naive, but, in its straightfor wardness, it expresses exactly what we cannot escape: Why? What about this possibility which, one way or another, is always caught in its own impossibility?
This is likewise a communism that Justin has explored in his essay "Atomization and Liberation" in the Vast Abrupt, but which he ends up taking in a direction already forewarned by Blanchot himself, who continues:
Communism, by saying that equality is its foundation and that there can be no community until the needs of all men are equally fulfilled (this in itself but a minimal requirement), presupposes not a petfect society but the principle of a transparent humanity essentially produced by itself alone, an "immanent" humanity (says Jean-Luc Nancy) . This immanence of man to man also points to man as the absolutely immanent being because he is or has to become such that he might entirely be a work, his work, and, in the end, the work of everything. As Herder says, there is nothing that must not be fashioned by him, from humanity to nature (and all the way to God). Nothing is left out, in the final analysis. Here lies the seemingly healthy origin of the sickest totalitarianism.
This is likewise how Murphy's communism, as most recently enunciated, appears to us: as that sickest totalitarianism, built around a foundation of technologically instantiated and absolute equality.
So, what then of "community"? What is it in relation to this communism? Perhaps a small-c communism that is not enforced by the infrastructures of the state into consolidated groups but rather a social infrastructure that is modelled on its own casual and already existing dynamics.
Whilst the state tries to enforce its model of itself on the subject, this communism instead calls for a sociality that is uninhibited and attentive to the already existent flows of human life, as fragmentary and fluid, and which does not get in their way. As I recently said on Twitter: a patchwork has always been, for me, a Frankenstate that reflects the makeup of the modern subject. In this way, patchwork inverts the processes of subjection. It is to eradicate the political (as we know it) through the forces of the extrapolitical, not — as Murphy seems to be suggesting — to neuter the extrapolitical through pervasive state control and administration.
Blanchot again:
We are grappling here with difficulties not easily mastered. The community, be it numerous or not … seems to propose itself as a tendency towards a communion, even a fusion, that is to say an effervescence assembling the elements only to give rise to a unity (a supra-individuality) that would expose itself to the same objections arising from the simple consideration of the single individual, locked in his immanence.
That the community may lay itself open to its own communion (which is of course symbolized by all eucharistic communions) is shown by a variety of examples: the group under fascination, as attested by the sinister collective suicide in Guyana; the group in fusion, as named and analyzed by Sartre in his 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' …; the military or fascist group where each member of the group relinquishes his freedom or even his consciousness to a Head incarnating it without running the risk of being decapitated because it is, by definition, beyond reach.
I could go on quoting passages at length but surely it is already clear by now that Murphy's communism is a version of that already familiar fascistic variety, built on technologies but ignoring any questions raised about the logistics of a communism since the mid-19th century.
If it's still not clear enough: read more Blanchot.
The Spectre of Patchwork
A spectre is haunting #CaveTwitter — the spectre of patchwork.
At an Acid Communist reading group on Monday, someone had this wonderful spiel about the nature of the spectre of communism. It was like an add-on to the previous session's discussion about "hobgoblins".
We were talking about the idea of a "leisure society" — that once popular and quasi-utopian prediction for our future lives in which leisure would replace labour absolutely. It was described as "a spectre once circulating in the fever dreams of liberal economists" and, at one point, it was a possibility that seemed to warrant real preparation and planning.
Someone else went on to explain how communism was a spectre for Marx in a very similar way, because it was the idea itself that haunted the imagination of the liberal classes. The spectre which haunts Europe in the Communism Manifesto is likewise a fever dream of the bourgeois imagination. It was precisely what they most feared. It was their "hobgoblin", their political boogieman, even before Marx and Engels committed it to paper.
And so — as this person marvellously put it — it was Marx's plan to "give the fuckers what they're terrified of." Marx's masterstroke was to draw the outline of that which haunted the minds of the capitalist class; to resurrect that which they had purposefully tried to repress.
Patchwork is a similar sort of idea for me. It is an idea that must linger in the mind of any unconditional accelerationist, as that which haunts the bourgeois class. Where it differs, perhaps, from the Communism of 1848, is that, today, everyone seems to fear fragmentation, on both the left and the right.
The right love their corporate monopolies. The left love their globalism — that diamond in the rough of the legacy of imperialism. The idea that both might be washed away is an idea that haunts both. It's a project which, at this stage, necessitates a rethinking of our imposed realities at levels currently under-explored.
And that's the crux of my interest in patchwork. That's it.
If you decide to trawl back through this blog's archive, you won't find yourself reading a single patch pitch. I'm not here to offer you salvation on my little plot of land. I have no interest in any one patch in particular. What interests me is, rather, the process: patchwork as an image of a "proper" post-modernity — which is to say, a view of the world after the process of modernity has burnt out on itself, rather than pomo as a stand-in for "late modernity".
I want to make this clear. Why? Because Justin Murphy put the fear in me.
Patchwork has always been two-fold for me: offering a Gothic Frankenstate to compliment the image of a Frankenstein of the modern subject. Murph has recently, in horrifying ways, succeeded in embodying this dynamic absolutely, and it's making me question everything. https://t.co/9cOPd54en8
— 🦇 ⤵🕳 (@xenogothic) September 26, 2018
I'll be honest, after nine months of writing about and thinking about patchwork on this blog, last weekend's #WyrdPatchwork conference in Prague got me questioning everything. It's made me realise that the patchwork talk on this blog has become so tangled and messy that half the time I don't know what I'm arguing for anymore so why should I expect anyone else to know?
It's probably not that clear from this blog alone, since most of you aren't in my head, but I've been increasingly and quite decisively shifting away from defending a speculative position on patchwork as a geopolitical model and moving instead towards a more focused investigation of its antecedents which are found so often in the parochial Gothic of England's dissenting counties. (This was largely happening because I was gearing up for a PhD on precisely this topic but that's probably not happening anymore until I sort out some funding…)
What is it that connects Wuthering Heights to a Yorkshire independence movement? What is it that connects Daphne du Maurier to Cornish nationalism? Why has the break-up of the UK shifted from being a radical left-wing suggestion to one associated with right-wing populism?
I haven't done much work towards answering these questions on the blog. If you haven't already noticed, most patchwork posts here over the past few months have been reactive — that is, written in explicit response to critiques rather than stating new suggestions and ideas — and this is something I've grown really tired of. All I end up doing, whether it is here or on Twitter, is repeating myself over and over and it's making me develop a kind of internal dogmatism that none of this was ever about for me. I feel forced into consolidating my viewpoint in a way that I hoped patchwork, as an object of thought, would free me from.
It's not about the result for me. I'm not interested in pitching you my idea for a patch. I'm interested in the process — why it's more visible now; how it's always been there; why it's yet to be exorcised from our collective subconscious.
My essays on Wuthering Heights remains my favourite thing that I've written on this topic and my talk last Saturday was a way to get back to this good stuff. I must admit that I've had a tendency to get bogged down in arguing about patchwork realities despite the fictions being my main point of interest.
Why is that? I don't know. My head's been in a weird place these past few months. Looking back on 2018 already feels like looking back on some weird angry stranger.
Does that mean I take it all back? Not at all.
I think the potentials for patchwork remain interesting. But this is a PSA to say I'm not going to bother arguing about that anymore. I want to focus on what really interests me about patchwork and philosophy more generally: the role of the Gothic and the futures it might help us glimpse.
This post was initially going to be a point-by-point analysis of Justin's talk from Saturday and an articulation of exactly what I don't like about his patch proposal. I didn't do that adequately in the YouTube chat at the time or in the Q&A that followed but, even now, I don't think I want to get into it.
I discover a genius way to have rich people pay us for doing nothing, on the minor condition that we maintain good character, and I get called a Nazi. This is why the rich hide their money from you joke ass Liar Communists: you have no gratitude.
— Justin Murphy (@jmrphy) September 24, 2018
In brief: Murphy's patch does not seem like some sort of connection to a new geopolitical 'outside' but rather a patch based on the holistic distillation of Market Stalinism and Randianism, powered by an unprecedented intensification of neoliberal interiority. It's what we already have, but worse. So much worse.
I already know Justin disagrees with this summary and that's okay. I don't particularly want to argue about it. As usual, others are doing a far better job of this than I — Ed's tweeting and mcrumps has written a hilarious and scathing blogpost which, I think, says it all:
Murphy is a true Petersonian at the core in that he deploys a series of symbolic-mythological masks to conceal what is fundamentally an unspectacular retreat into assumed hierarchies that undercuts radical opposition (in other words, the SJWs) to those hierarchies. For Murphy especially, these hierarchies are distinctly fascist, rather than simply conservative, in that rather than referring to an organic body of tradition, the political project unscrupulously attaches to any viral movement without any attention to internal logical coherence. There is no interiority to the signs it takes up, other than that unspeakable tyrannical center, which is not so much an interior as it is a void, an absence.
The question that remains is how to find an adequate ground for a critique of the ideology that saturates this authoritarian rhizomatic assemblage. How does one contradict a system of seemingly total non-contradiction?
I'll be watching with trepidation to see what else comes out of these discussions and see how much longer I can resist the temptation to jump in…
The Wyrd Sisters Bring Death to Leviathan
on September 22, 2018 September 27, 2018 By xenogothic 11 Comments
This is a transcription of a presentation given at #WyrdPatchwork, an event which took place at Punctum in Prague on Saturday 22nd September 2018. The text is interspersed with a series of images, chosen by myself, which were projected within the venue throughout the talk. I was phoned in via Skype, joining Justin Murphy's livestream of the event which you can watch back here. A report on the rest of the day and its discussions will follow soon maybe.
First of all, I just want to say thank you for inviting me to be with you today. This sounds like a fascinating project and it's an area of particular interest to me. Dustin has done an amazing job of sketching out all the discussions within patchwork, which is definitely not an easy task, so thanks for that.
Patchwork is a very broad church, that is no doubt clear by now, with seemingly infinite implications for our contemporary moment. Rather than go into these implications in depth, I want to take a broader view of patchwork and its aesthetic and philosophical precedents, particularly related to your use of the word "wyrd". I think I gave working title of this talk as being "aesthetics of exit" or something along those lines. I'd like to introduce here instead by the title: "The Wyrd Sisters Bring Death to the Leviathan".
To introduce myself briefly: I blog under the name Xenogothic and I've been writing frequently about patchwork under that name since January of this year. It's been astounding to watch this idea take off and fragment in so many different directions over the last nine months, having been mired in unfortunate and reductive controversies for so long. And now, after all of that, it seems like patchwork evolves into something new every other week — this event being a case in point — and this, in itself, is why I find patchwork so fascinating.
What interests me about patchwork at the moment is the way that it offers a speculative system on which we might begin to imagine and proliferate alternatives — subjective, ideological and geopolitical alternatives; alternatives to that which is imposed upon us, but also those alternatives which we can already see sprouting up all around us.
It's an attempt to imagine a whole new world — a "panarchic" world — in which change is placed on a par with stability, so that we might escape the "frenzied stasis" of our present era.
The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in writing his most famous book, 2009's Capitalist Realism, asked the question: "Is there no alternative?" And, depending on how you look at things, it may seem like now, ten years on, this question has become somewhat redundant. Alternatives are everywhere, being championed by both the political right and left.
A dozen variants of socialism and communism. Alt-this and alt-that. Whether you take this to be the proliferation of wolves in sheep's clothing or earnest attempts at innovation, it seems to me like patchwork, as a catch-all term for a fragmentary geopolitics, offers us a way to consider this proliferation of ideological positions, in the context of their own production, as a porous and potentially radical process.
Patchwork is — fittingly, considering the context in which we're discussing it today — referred to by many as an "operating system" on which to run disparate models of the future. The way I see it, it is an operating system to be installed for the production of difference, in explicit opposition to the consolidating nature of the modern state form and its various mythologies that have long powered the ever-resilient nationalisms which we can see finding new strength across Europe and the rest of the world in 2018.
Like the common diagnosis of the tragedy of capitalism, the State cannot help but block, for the sake of its own survival, the dissenting desires that it is nonetheless responsible for producing within itself. The trials and tribulations of crypto and the blockchain remain the most promising contemporary examples of this today but, geopolitically, we might also consider the entangled and much debated causes of terrorism and the restlessness of contemporary Europe.
More broadly, we can see this in the diminishing returns of a nationalism which breeds regionalism which breeds localism. It is consolidation itself which powers fragmentation. These positions needn't take the form of the stereotypically small-minded parochialism of our rural racists, however. They can likewise be seen in the independence movements of Catalonia and Scotland or in the insular metropolitanism of our largely liberal urban centres.
This fragmentation is exemplary of the processes of positive feedback that are central to our experiences of modernity, which Nick Land has most famously written about in orbit of patchwork and capitalism, but the problem of imagining a diverse array of outcomes for this process remains difficult.
This is not to suggest, however, that patchwork is some kind of brand-spanking-new proposition but rather that it is an attempt to reinvigorate a tendency our civilisation has had at its heart for centuries — if not longer — but which has largely been forgotten thanks to the consolidatory and largely imperial projects of our ancestors which are sustained under tactically innocuous names by the political leaders of today.
Outside of its controversies, this is the allure of patchwork for me and I get the impression that Wyrd Patchwork has been imagined to exacerbate this tendency further. So, what I'd like to do today is consider this "wyrdness" in more detail, particularly the ways in which that it might further exacerbate patchwork's relationship to semiotics and aesthetics. Because patchwork, as its name suggests, is not cleanly geopolitical — it is an amalgamation, in true DeleuzoGuattarian style, of a range of different disciplines and perspectives — craft and art practices amongst them.
Before I go any further, I should probably confess to my ignorance: I'm ashamed to say that I'm not that technically minded.
The idea of a proof of place bluetooth sharing augmented reality game for rethinking communal relations, as well as experiences of place and the state, sounds bloody brilliant to me but I won't pretend that, at the time of writing, I have any idea what on earth that might mean, look like or involve. (Thanks to Dustin [Breitling] for his presentation clarifying this somewhat!) Rather than this being an obstacle to what I plan to say today, however, I'm hoping I can provide you all with some examples from my own research into a kind of "speculative aesthetics" of the Gothic.
I'm going to explore some of the less tangible but nonetheless prevalent cultural tendencies — associated with the Gothic in particular — that this use of AR technology may be able to materialise (for lack of a better word) for the first time, introducing a different but nonetheless contemporary and technologically relevant approach to a long-dormant sensibility and cultural spirit of dissent and fragmentation.
My personal view of Patchwork is, perhaps like yours, also "wyrd" — that's W-Y-R-D — but it's also weird — W-E-I-R-D.
Both of these words are to be found in The Weird and the Eerie, the 2017 book by Mark Fisher which has been hugely influential on my thinking about this topic, and so I'd like to start by drawing on Fisher's definitions of the weird and the wyrd, before going on to explore their relevance to the fragmentary geopolitics of our pasts, presents and futures.
Fisher's primary "weird" — that's W-E-I-R-D — is his word for that which shouldn't exist or appear but nonetheless does. He writes,
the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the "homely" (even in negation) [— that is, as opposed to Freud's unheimlich or the "unhomely"]. The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage — the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.
This is a weird to be found in much science fiction but also — as Fisher seems to suggest — in the capitalist realities that we know and love today…
The weird highlights potentially new parapolitical happenings in a world of mundane neoliberal bureaucracy; a world of dull rules and regulations. It reveals to us the reality of our "boring dystopia": the ways in which the present does not even coincide with itself, never mind our once vibrant visions of the future.
This is arguably the original allure of Donald Trump as the "weirdest" American president we've yet seen and the same can be said for many other right-wing oddities around the world. The left likewise has examples of weird personalities but not quite so many successful ones, giving some credence to the suggestion that the left, despite what it may think of itself, retains its hold on hegemonic social thought and practice, likewise eschewing those on its fringes who are nonetheless, broadly speaking, on its side.
But these things are not so simply diagnosed. There are key points on praxis which both sides have long forgotten. One of the most telling examples of this is perhaps the way that right-wing voters across the West, in dissenting against a liberal hegemony, have perceived themselves to be exemplary of a "New Punk", much to the chagrin of the popular left. I can't remember who first made this claim but I have a feeling it was Milo Yiannopoulos, symptomatic of a typically British cultural amnesia — punk, in Britain at least, has been dogged by Tory twats for over forty years by now…
The weird — and patchwork in itself — work well as an aesthetic and political response to this.
Patchwork is not punk: it's post-punk.
Sticking with the work of Mark Fisher, this is what Fisher had to say on the legacy and now notable absence of a cultural and political post-punk mentality in the book Post-Punk Then And Now, published by Repeater Books in 2016 and edited by Fisher in collaboration with his colleagues Gavin Butt and Kodwo Eshun. Fisher explains in a transcript of a discussion between the three:
The principle behind post-punk was the popular-modernist idea that you couldn't repeat things, you couldn't use forms that had become kitsch — and yesterday's innovation was today's kitsch. So post-punk was driven by a principle of difference and self-cancellation; a constant orientation towards the new, and a hostility towards the outmoded, the already-existent, the familiar. That's why Simon Reynolds called his book on post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again. I guess that what I'm saying is that that hostility towards the already-familiar has weakened to the point that it has disappeared. We can't be hostile to the past in the way that post-punk was because we don't now have a sense of the present or the future anymore.
Here we see that the weird — still with an "E-I" — is not enough to address our present realities alone. We need something else in order to address the problem of time that comes with them, which brings us to the Wyrd — that is, the wyrd with a "Y".
As Fisher also points out in The Weird and the Eerie, the "wyrd-with-a-Y" is that Old English word for fate and it is a concept inseparable from personal destiny and our sense of the future more generally. He writes: "The concept of fate is weird in that it implies twisted forms of time and causality that are alien to ordinary perception."
The fateful (and often fatal) Wyrd, as such, often refers to that which is predetermined but which also — paradoxically — exacerbates, amplifies and empowers that which was always meant to be. This sense of the "wyrd" is integral to many analyses of late capitalism, particularly Mark Fisher's, but also Nick Land's, who refers to these paradoxes through his use of the word "templexity".
It is a slippery and complex concept which remains best encapsulated by its most famous cultural instantiation in the image of the Wyrd Sisters as found in William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Right at the start of the play, Macbeth meets the Wyrd Sisters and sees his future laid out before him. He is to be king, they say, before later instilling him with a false confidence that is to be his downfall. This flawed knowledge of his own fate intensifies his actions as he hurtles towards that which has been predicted. Are the actions he takes in light of this new knowledge the same actions which were always already necessary in order to confirm the foreseen? Or have they been influenced and exacerbated by his knowledge of his own actions? How can we possibly know any different?
This is the classic empirical problem of templexity as we continue to find it in many a time-travel drama today. It is likewise the accusation levelled at late capitalist society by many of its cynics and a perspective so often ascribed to many a pseudo-nihilistic Twitter personality: all of our actions, even those taken against capitalism, can be seen as being responsible for amplifying its stronghold on the world as we know it. It's just an over-complicated way of advocating that we do nothing.
But this says nothing of the "wyrd" in itself. This is only to respond to what we might perceive as the effects of the wyrd.
It is worth remembering here that the Wyrd Sisters are a nefarious and multiplicitous being — like capital but also like the collective form of subjectivity that Fisher explicitly calls for in his Capitalist Realism — and they are able to see, we might presume, multiple futures. They share a subjectivity between them, collectively choosing a path ahead for those they encounter and, in their conniving and mischievous ways, shaping the future for their own ends, notably against the apparatuses of the State.
Lest we forget that Shakespeare's Wyrd Sisters were directly inspired by King James' pamphlet dissertation: the Daemonologie. Published in 1597, it was a philosophical and theological guide to the practices of witches for concerned citizens and the prospective witch-hunters amongst them — which is to say, it's primary purpose was to instil paranoia amongst King James' more unruly subjects in England and Scotland.
James was the first joint king of both countries and it is telling that his own paranoia, with regards to his tenuous political position, took on the image of an endemic witchcraft amongst the peasantry. Like a sort of proto-Lovecraftian scholar, what he feared more than anything was a collective subject unbound from the nascent infrastructure of his newly consolidated state.
It is this inherently dissident nature that makes Macbeth, for me, the ur-text for many an online discussion of patchwork, praxis and unconditional accelerationism.
As a very brief introduction, "unconditional accelerationism" — or the guttural-sounding "U/Acc" — is an accelerationism opposed to the squabbles over praxis routinely enacted by the political left and right, both internally and amongst themselves. Each perceives accelerationism as a political philosophy of action but U/Acc, instead, views it fundamentally as a theory of time.
But this is not to say that such a theory cannot be of any practical use…
I've previously written about how Gilles Deleuze's writings on the sign and the event are key here. Both on his own and with Felix Guattari, Deleuze wrote often of an entwined understanding of signs — that is, semiotics, understood as the administration of the sensible — and the event — that is, becoming; or, being and time, being within time.
It is out of Deleuze's descriptions of this process that we get, from Deleuze and Guattari in collaboration, that widely-acknowledged founding statement of accelerationism — although the pair were certainly not the first to express the sentiment. Together they advise that we must "accelerate the process" of deterritorialisation, rather than withdraw from it. Accelerate the lines of flight, the moments of escape, the "wyrdness" of our circumstances.
For all their talk of deterritorialisation, we often forget how important our situatedness remains to their analyses. Theirs is a philosophy of immanence as opposed to transcendence. There is no outside to reach but rather only a becoming that you must make yourself worthy of. There is no chance of the atomised individual getting beyond the material circumstances in which we all currently live, at least without going mad alone and without consequence. There is no chance of real, productive success in isolation, and so rather than pushing for a naive utopianism, we have to first acknowledge and account for the very propulsiveness of the teleologies of which we are all inherently a part. We have to know our fate.
In doing so, we affirm our immanence, and what we find within this immanence is difference and the dynamics of multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari write:
There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages.
This is how they describe a plane of immanence "which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities". It is a "plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development)."
It is in this way that there can be no such thing as an accelerationist praxis. As Ed Berger has suggested in a number of blogposts — which I cannot recommend you read enough — for the unconditional accelerationist, there is only anti-praxis, in the sense that she must acknowledge the fact that any praxis which begins from a normative political position is doomed the fail.
Since no normative political positions, along the present axes of left and right, account for the process in which they are always already embedded, any normative conception of praxis is impotent. And the fragmentation that we might desire from the process is already occurring within its flows. We simply have to acclimatise ourselves to the possibility and not do the work of reterritorialisation that capitalism and the state need for us in order to survive.
Deleuze and Guattari seem to be saying much the same thing when they call upon us to enter into the process. They call for a becoming-immanent to the deterritorialising processes of immanentisation in themselves. We must view ourselves from "within the depths of things", Deleuze writes alone, in order to fully recognise the flows that flow through, with and around us. Our task is only ever to make ourselves worthy of the process.
In this way, theirs — and Ed's — is a consideration of the event of acceleration, of modernity, rather than a consideration of acceleration in and of itself as an "object" of study. Ed has written a lot more on this point and I want to quote him here to bring us back into the explicit realm of geopolitics. He writes:
[W]hile left-accelerationism (L/ACC) and right-accelerationism (R/ACC) seek to recompose or reterritorialize Leviathan in accordance with each of their own political theologies, [unconditional accelerationism] charts a course outwards: the structures of Oedipus, the Cathedral, Leviathan, what have you, will be ripped apart and decimated by forces rushing up from within and around the system, which in turn mobilize the entirety of the system towards its own dissolution point.
The figure of Leviathan, as Ed invokes it here, and as its likewise been invoked by Vincent Garton in his still brilliant essay for Urbanomic, Leviathan Rots, is that classic Hobbesian vision of the sovereign state as a kind of Cthulthic god-king. It is the inherent multiplicity of the state reduced to the image of a singular benevolent entity.
Macbeth's witches, the Wyrd Sisters, in stark contrast to this, can be seen as the antithesis to this Hobbesian monstrosity: they're feminine, or at least waywardly so (described, as they are, as ugly bearded women); they're not imposing Goliaths, but rather unassuming wizened peasants loitering on the heath; they are subalterns; and, most importantly of all, they are many.
The witches are the dissenting subject in the shadow of the totalitarian godhead. They are creatures of fate, meddling with but also caught up in the destiny of that which rules over them. They are the thinking subject as opposed to the loyal citizen. (As Deleuze himself has been frequently quoted as saying: "To think is always to follow the witches' flight.")
Unconditional accelerationism argues for the affirmation of this form of "wyrdness". It seeks to affirm the possibility that, as Deleuze writes in his book The Logic of Sense, we might become "the quasi-cause of what is produced within us".
What is this if not a call towards an affirmation of fate, of the wyrd — an amor fati as Nietzsche would say…
Since the event and the sign are inseparable in Deleuze's analyses, we might likewise interpret that that which is produced within us is a semiotics — or, more specifically, an aesthetics of the self: the schizophrenic self, the multiplicitous self. The minoritarian becoming of the diffused multiple must always account for the regime of signs struggling to suppress it — it must resist the state's tentacular attempts to consolidate its subjects in its image — but there are likewise signs of something other everywhere we look.
As Fisher explores in The Weird and the Eerie, we are consistently fascinated by that which does not belong, that which does not coincide with itself — in our fictions and in our waking lives. From the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia to the sunglasses in John Carpenter's They Live, we love the technologies in our stories which allow us to become newly attentive to that which lives beneath the familiar and the everyday.
So, with this in mind, it might be worth us asking: where, exactly, does a speculative aesthetics of the weird and the eerie come from? From outside or from within us? Fisher suggests that each is folded within its other. If we are to understand the weird and the eerie, in this way, as Mark writes, to be "modes of perception", then what exactly is it that we are trying to perceive?
What is it that is stalling the processes of sensory administration? That which is outside ourselves and our present existences? Or rather that which is produced within us which a capitalist regime of signs cannot account for?
Perhaps it possible for us to view Wyrd Patchwork along very similar lines. It certainly seems to share this function, as a multiplicitous techne that may exacerbate the conservative telos of the State and its inability to fully coincide with itself. But, in its wyrdness, might it likewise reveal the state's own consolidating mission to be its own downfall?
This was arguably the same technological problem tackled and reinvigorated by the Ccru in the 1990s, of which Mark Fisher and Nick Land were both a part, but it is also a problem that has routinely fallen back into disrepute again and again. As we've already seen, we are no longer punk, we are no longer post-punk. To be cyberpunk, to be k-punk. was only ever a goal for a future beyond the now.
Wyrd Patchwork, in light of all this, might make such futures more accessible again. It begins to resemble a tool for consciousness raising; a tool for reimagining both the sign and the event within the midst of a century that is continuing to pick up speed and shows no sign of slowing down for our benefit.
Wyrd Patchwork may assist us in catching up to this sense of difference, this sense of the weird/wyrd that is inherent to but repressed within our realities, by augmenting reality in order to exacerbate that which has, for us, for far too long, been said to be predetermined — that is, our lives as subjects, as products of the states in which we live in.
It might allow us to affirm the wyrdness of our fate and act accordingly.
on September 21, 2018 September 27, 2018 By xenogothic
the only gothic is xenogothic https://t.co/FZwebRUiCW
— ||| (@brightabyss) September 21, 2018
Yes, as you may have noticed, I've got a new look.
I'm planning a big visual overhaul of the blog over the coming weeks so it looks smart in some nice new clothes for its first birthday. A massive shout-out to Matthew Fall McKenzie who has designed this logo for me. The man's a genius. Hire him for all your aesthetic needs. You can find him here, here and here.
I'm hoping that I'll soon be rolling out some limited amounts of merchandise using Matt's designs and some of my own photographs (yet to be taken). I haven't put any money into this blogging venture so far, but this is becoming harder and harder as I get bigger and bigger ideas. For example, the feedback for Xenogothic Radio has so far been amazing and I've got four new episodes baking in the oven, but I'm already quite embarrassed by the quality of my vocal recording on the first two.
So, for the sake of not-for-profit transparency, this new look and first sidestep into merchandising is so that I might be able to pay for some new equipment without stressing myself out too much. I don't have a whole lot of disposable income.
I won't be doing merch often, but whenever I do unleash something for buying, rest assured that it's to make this blog a bigger and better place to hang out.
Wyrd Patchwork @ Punctum
I'm going to be phoning it in to Prague on Saturday afternoon, talking about the wyrd and the weird in relation to patchwork; the gothic as a speculative aesthetics that is central to the history of thought surrounding transcendental geopolitics.
UPDATE: Head over to Justin's blog for more tentative details. Justin will also be livestreaming the event from his YouTube channel:
Boring Dystopia
It was understood from the start to be a consciousness-raising exercise, encouraging people to perceive the actual state of Britain rather than the PR state … Which is surprisingly hard, because there's this mixture of Silicon Valley ideology, PR and advertising which distracts us from our own aesthetic poverty, and the reality of what we have. Which is just all these crap robots…
It's Californian ideology without Californian sunshine, isn't it?…
The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say 'You might not like it, but it works.' But Britain is not efficient. Instead it's stuck in a form of frenzied stasis.
I was revisiting this article on one of Mark's lesser known online projects the other day: the 'Boring Dystopia' Facebook group.
This is something to ruminate on, I think: a consciousness-raising exercise which exacerbates the weird, widening gaps in late capitalism towards its outside; egresses towards an understanding of the "eerie" nature of capital that would be teased in The Weird and the Eerie.
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Jun 24 Media Story Coverage With A Slant: A Commentary on Liberal Bias in the News Media
Cecil Caulkins
LBN's Bob Donley opines that the news media are changing the way they cover the news. He cites some examples:
During the past year, there were many news stories about white police officers killing black men. But there was no mention of race in the story about three men who gunned down two police officers in Mississippi. The alleged assailants were all African-Americans.
Earlier this year, Freddie Gray, a black man, died in police custody. There was much anger, Donley says, against white privilege. As it turned out, the officer who got the most serious charges is an African-American. As are Baltimore's police leaders, the mayor, the city council, a congressman, the U.S. attorney, a senator (and, of course, President Obama).
The news media have extensively covered Bruce Jenner's gender transformation. In fact, ESPN is about to award Jenner its Courage Award. Donley notes that Jenner hasn't been involved in sports in forty years but was chosen over a current athlete who lost limbs fighting for his country.
Donley also notes that, in the coverage of the presidential candidates we see all the time, the news media have a particular way of covering Republican candidates, noting that Governor Rick Perry is running "again." The same tag is applied to Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. As if to say, "Here's an old, tired story."
"I say this," Donley adds, "because there is no such word being bandied about in regard to Hillary Clinton." Clinton, of course, is running "again." Journalism, Donley says, has always had some advocacy that blended into the story line.
It's time, Donley suggests, for journalists to write news rather than advancing an agenda.
The Legal Broadcast Network is a featured network of the Sequence Media Group.
public policy, Public Interest, policy journal
Jun 24 Arizona's 'Abortion Reversal' Law Has Been Put On Hold; Bob Donley Explains
Jun 24 Arizona Coyotes vs. City of Glendale: Attorney Thomas Salerno Tells You What the Fight Is About

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In addition to the conversations recorded between the two parties, Sontheimer also features images of the materials used to make the drawings, juxtaposed with visual references to popular culture, everyday objects, and art history. Within the winding, maze-like planes of discussion, the artist includes his own editorial comments about the formal elements within the work, often as ways to highlight his own decisions and to correct the misspellings and errors that take place. Revisions and helpful comments are dutifully marked in red to assist the viewer in his/her act of deciphering the conversation, and numbers mark the passage from one topic to the next.
Despite the artist's attempts to decodify and present the basic parts of each conversation, the viewer soon learns how Sontheimer's drawings represent the complexity underlying the very acts of communication and the making of meaning. These new drawings also show the artist's (both Sontheimer's and every artist's) internal dialogue, namely the process of constant decision-making and evaluating that take place during the making of a work of art. With equal parts humor and sarcasm, Sontheimer winds the viewer through his conversations, revealing how meaning is a complex, ongoing interplay not only between the artist and the viewer, but within the artist himself/herself.


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University of Maryland, Eastern Shore
Boiling Springs, NC
Lawrence Technological University
Vegan College Report Card: Schools Receiving an "A"!
Colleges With No Undergraduate Application Fee!
Attendance at Men's Hockey Games by the Numbers: Top 20 in Division I
Colleges with Strength in Men's Cross-Country: Division II
Tennessee College of Applied Technology -- McKenzie
McKenzie, TN
Tennessee College of Applied Technology--McKenzie, founded in 1965, is a public, two-year, technical/professional institution. Its campus is located in McKenzie, TN.
COE (Council on Occupational Education)
Tennessee College of Applied Technology — McKenzie
McKenzie, TN 38201
https://tcatmckenzie.edu
Campus in McKenzie (population: 5,375).


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Home FOOD & DRINK Food News & Trends 'We're All in This Together'
'We're All in This Together'
Ardent Craft Ales uses its closed taproom to launch a popup food bank for restaurant industry workers
by Eileen Mellon
(From left) Ardent Craft Ales co-owner Tom Sullivan, Taproom Manager Lincoln Smith and Head Brewer William Poole. The brewery has launched Ardent Helps, a food bank for restaurant industry workers. (Photo courtesy Ardent Helps)
On March 30, Ardent Craft Ales in Scott's Addition launched Ardent Helps, a food bank aimed at aiding restaurant industry workers affected by business closures due to the growing coronavirus pandemic.
"We're all in this together," says Ryan Kelly, digital and social media coordinator for the decade-old brewery.
Once one of Richmond's most bustling neighborhoods, considered the unofficial beer mecca of the city, Scott's Addition is quiet. Some of Ardent's neighboring restaurants, including nationally recognized Longoven, have shut their doors until further notice, while others from ZZQ to Brenner Pass and Perch have transitioned into strictly to-go operations. Ardent has closed its taproom for on-premises consumption and is offering pickup and delivery service currently.
"The restaurant and brewery industries really complement each other well, and the Richmond restaurant scene is full of amazing people," Kelly says. "We're in a position now where we have the space, equipment and time to help out, so we want to do everything we can to support all our friends across the region."
With a 9,100-square-foot taproom, pivoting Ardent's space into an operation that could serve as a resource for the service industry made sense, Kelly says, adding that since the food bank went live at 4 p.m. Monday, there have been over 70 orders placed.
To publicize Ardent Helps and connect those in need with resources, the brewery is partnering with food distributor Sysco; the Holli Fund, a nonprofit that assists restaurant workers during financial hardships; and Harrisonburg-based marketing agency Digital Minerva.
The team at Ardent got the idea for the food bank from their fellow brewers in Harrisonburg, Pale Fire Brewing, who developed a similar concept in their area. When Pale Fire reached out to ask if they would like to initiate the program in Richmond, Ardent jumped at the opportunity.
"The restaurant industry has been decimated by the COVID-19 virus and the country's need to close or restrict public gathering spaces," says Ardent co-founder Tom Sullivan in a news release. "We want to do our part to help the thousands of restaurant workers in Richmond and the surrounding area who have been laid off, furloughed or are suffering from reduced hours."
Online, industry workers can find an ordering platform that allows them to view the current inventory such as yogurt, bananas, chicken and bread. The orders are available for pickup the following day between 2 and 8 p.m., with the exception of Mondays.
While the food bank is strictly for restaurant industry workers, Kelly says Ardent Helps serves workers in surrounding counties and areas outside the city such as Henrico, Chesterfield, Midlothian and Petersburg. Recipients are asked to show their most recent pay stub upon pickup at the brewery.
Ardent Helps will be run by a combination of Ardent employees and friends of the brewery who have volunteered to lend a hand. Kelly says they will be following strict sanitation guidelines and social distancing measures.
The goal is for the program to last as long as it can safely operate and donations are available. Along with the online platform, Ardent is also accepting shelf-stable food donations that they can store in the brewery, as well as monetary donations that will be disbursed in the form of grants through the Holli Fund.
"We're honored to be able to help the Richmond service industry," Sullivan says.
Tom Sullivan Ryan Kelly Ardent Craft Ales Scott's Addition The Holli Fund Coronavirus Richmond restaurants Ardent Helps Charity & Fundraisers
From food trucks to white-tablecloth destinations, craft cocktails to craft beer, farm to table to fork, we serve up the latest in Richmond dining and drinking. Feedback? Suggestions? They are always appreciated. Contact Food Editor Eileen Mellon at eileenm [at] richmag [dot] com.


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Q: Get confused by the scope in angularJS I'm learning angulaJS by the video Introduction to Angular.js in 50 Examples , it's awesome but I'm confused since #46. We, say, want to get some nation's information from json file and display it, and we have a directive definition:
countryApp.directive('country', function () {
    return {
        scope: {
            country: '=country'
        },
        restrict: 'A',
        templateUrl: 'country.html'
    };
});

and we invoke the directive country in some html:

My question is: what the exact meaning of 4 different nouns "country" is?
the first two in directive scope(country: '=country' ), the last two in html(country="country"). I understand the first one is just a variable definition in directive,  so it should be change to another name such as dir_country, but it can't work !

A: Here's an example where they are all different:

.directive("countryDir", function(){
  return {
    scope: {
      countryObj: "=countryDir"
    },
    template: "{{countryObj.name}}",
    link: function(scope){
      console.log(scope.countryObj); // is the bound country object
    }
  };
});

Here:

*

*country is an inner scope variable of an item in array of countries

*country-dir is the directive (which has a normalized form of countryDir).

*"=countryDir" is a two-way binding to the country-dir attribute (which happens to be the directive itself, but doesn't have to be)

*countryObj is the internal isolate scope property that is bound to the country object, in case you want the internal name to be different than the attribute. Otherwise, it could have been shortened to countryDir: "=".

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Rotarians working hard at today's Rise Against Hunger project.
This morning our club joined the other Area 1 of Rotary District 7570 Rotary and Interact Clubs to pack over 17,000 meals with Rise Against Hunger . Over the past 14 years Area 1 clubs have packed over 300,000 meals.
The Rotary Club of Front Royal distributed 120 boxes of food to needy families through its Doc Smith Christmas Basket Program. On Friday, December 21, 2018 volunteers from the Rotary Club helped pack up donated food items into gift boxes that were either picked up or delivered on Saturday, December 22, 2018.
Front Royal – The Rotary Club of Front Royal announced this week that it is partnering with the Warren County Department of Social Services again in 2018 to purchase coats for kids through Operation Warm. Last year, as part of the Club's annual Doc Smith Christmas Basket Program, which provided 145 boxes of food to needy families in the Front Royal-Warren County community, the Club gave out 134 coats to children in need identified by the Department of Social Services.
Front Royal – At its meeting on Friday, September 7th, the Rotary Club of Front Royal celebrated a history of giving back to the Front Royal-Warren County community. Past President Doug Stanley (2007-2008) presented a history of the Club's efforts in building community and, in the words of current Rotary International President Barry Rassin, Being the Inspiration.
Front Royal – The Front Royal Rotary Club presented the 10th Annual Robert E. L. "Bob" Miller Community Service Award at its meeting on August 24, 2018 to Pamela M. "Pam" McInnis. Pam has been a life-long resident of Front Royal, Virginia and has been an active public servant in the community, serving as Superintendent of the Warren County Public School System from 2001-2015.
It is the objective of the Rotary Club of Front Royal to recognize individuals within the Front Royal-Warren County community for contributions that improve the quality of life of its citizens. The award is named after Robert E. "Bob" Miller in recognition of his 75 years of membership in the Rotary Club of Front Royal, and his Service to the Front Royal-Warren County community.
Front Royal – The Rotary Club of Front Royal and the Warren County Department of Social Services provided 134 coats for kids through Operation Warm. The coats were distributed as part of the Rotary Club's annual Doc Smith Christmas Basket Program, which provided 145 boxes of food to needy families in the Front Royal-Warren County Community and to children identified by the Department of Social Services.
The Rotary Club of Front Royal delivered 145 boxes of food to needy families through its Doc Smith Christmas Basket Program. On Friday, December 22nd volunteers from the Rotary Club helped pack up donated food items into gift boxes that were either picked up or delivered on Saturday, December 23rd.
Front Royal – The Rotary Club of Front Royal announced this week that it is partnering with the Warren County Department of Social Services to purchase up to 150 coats for kids through Operation Warm. As part of the Club's annual Doc Smith Christmas Basket Program, which last year provided 120 boxes of food to needy families in the Front Royal-Warren County Community, the Club will also be providing coats to children in need identified by the Department of Social Services.
The Rotary Club of Front Royal is proud to announce that they have distributed a total of 425 Webster's Student Dictionaries to 3rd grade students in Warren County this year. The Rotary Dictionary Project delivered to the following schools: AS Rhodes, Dynamic Life Christian, E Wilson Morrison, Front Royal Christian, Hilda J Barbour, Leslie Fox Keyser, Mountain Laurel Montessori and Ressie Jeffries.
The Rotary Club of Front Royal held its 6th Annual Half-Lit Classic Golf Tournament at Bowling Green South Golf Course. According to Tournament Director and Rotary Club President Rick Novak, the tournament was a huge success with 23 teams and 92 golfers participating.
The tournament was used by the Club as a "Pints for Polio" fundraiser with $25 from each golfer being applied to the Rotary Foundation's PolioPlus campaign drive that is being matched 2×1 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition to the $2,300 raised, the Club also received over $400 in additional donations. Golfers received a pint glass and sampled Virginia Craft Beers.
The Rotary Club of Front Royal announced this week that it contributed a total of $80,267 to the local Front Royal-Warren County community as well as the global community served by Rotary International during the 2016-2017 Fiscal Year.
At the May 19th meeting of the Front Royal Rotary Club, nine Warren County teachers were awarded "The Rotarian Award for Excellence in Educating Youth". The awards were presented by Melody Sheppard, Chairman of the club's Career Information & Educational Excellence Committee, Greg Drescher, Superintendent of Warren County Public Schools, and C. Douglas Rosen, School Board Member of Warren County Public Schools. Criteria for selection of the teachers included setting high expectations for student achievement and supporting students in positive and esteem building ways.
Front Royal – The Rotary Club of Front Royal is proud to announce that they have distributed a total of 423 Webster's Student Dictionaries to 3rd grade students in Warren County this year. The Rotary Dictionary Project delivered to the following schools: AS Rhodes, Dynamic Life Christian, E Wilson Morrison, Front Royal Christian, Hilda J Barbour, Leslie Fox Keyser, Mountain Laurel Montessori and Ressie Jeffries. Warren County High School Interact Club, a level of Rotary for high-school age students, and 36 Rotarians assisted with distribution of dictionaries.
Front Royal – The Front Royal Rotary Club presented the 8th Annual Robert E. "Bob" Miller Community Service Award at its meeting on August 26, 2016 to Mrs. Patricia S. "Patty" Wines. Patty has been a life-long resident of Front Royal, Virginia and has been an active public servant in the community.
Rotary Club of Front Royal Member Roy Boyles and his wife Sharon along with Rotarians from District 7550, visited areas in West Virginia damaged by the floods and helped the flood victims. Towns that were damaged and visited by the Rotarians were White Sulfur Springs, Rainiller, Summerville, and Chadwell. Roy and Sharon were working with District 7550 Governor John "Robbie" Powell; a native of Front Royal and lifelong friend of Roy.
The Rotary Club of Front Royal presented the Warren County Educational Endowment (WCEE) a check for $1,500 on Friday, July 22nd. The check represents the Club's annual $1,000 donation to WCEE and $500 which represents a $10 donation each week made in honor of weekly Club speakers. Past President Jim Eastham started the practice when he took office last year.
FRONT ROYAL – Students and teachers at Warren County Public Schools received scholarships and awards from the Rotary Club of Front Royal Friday afternoon.
Senior Emma Ruby receives a Virginia Tech flag and her Rotary Club of Front Royal scholarship for $6,000 from Rotary President Jim Eastham at a Friday meeting.
Warren County High School seniors Jayme Goode (middle left) and Joseph Rutherford (middle right) display the Student Athlete awards given to them by the Front Royal Rotary Club on Friday, standing by County Administrator Doug Stanley (far left) and Rotary President Jim Eastham (far right).
Winners of Rotarian Awards for Excellence in Educating Youth, one teacher from each school in Warren County, stand with their plaques and respective principals at a Friday meeting of the Front Royal Rotary Club.
Congratulations Alan Wimer on a Great Partnership with the Front Royal United Way's "Day of Caring" May 20, 2016! We had great weather (Thanks for the previous postponement)!! Great Fellowship with our co-volunteers on the many projects this day!! There was a wonderful cross section of volunteers …..from High School students to small and large business support!! You all made us Proud!
Warren County is proud to announce the completion of the Eastham Park Playground project.
Warren County is proud to announce the completion of the Eastham Park Playground project. The project was completed in partnership with the Rotary Club of Front Royal.
The playground equipment was purchased at a cost of $15,321 and was installed by Warren County Parks and Recreation Department. The project was completed with the installation of mulch by members of the Rotary Club and County Parks and Recreation Maintenance staff.
Join us for an evening of friendly competition with your coworkers and friends under the stars for the Front Royal Rotary Club's Half Lit Classic.
This event starts of with 9 holes of conventional "Lit" (daylight) golf, then take a break to enjoy an Italian Dinner, Craft Beer Tasting, and a Silent Auction. Next comes 9 holes of "unconventional" Glow Golf! This is a lot of fun. If you have never tried it, this is your chance!
The Front Royal Rotary Club presented the 7th Annual Robert E. "Bob" Miller Community Service Award at its meeting on August 21, 2015 to Mr. Roy K. Boyles. Roy has been an active member of the Rotary Club of Front Royal since 1986.
At the May 15th meeting of the Front Royal Rotary Club, nine Warren County teachers were awarded "The Rotarian Award for Excellence in Educating Youth".
Front Royal – October 14, 2014 at the meeting of the Rotary Club of Front Royal, VA, Ron Llewellyn named Kelley Miller and Aneita Bryant, as the Rotarians of the Month for October. For the honor, Kelley and Aneita both received a certificate, a Rotary business card holder, a $30 Houlihan's gift certificate, and recognition on a Club plaque.


Heading to an inpatient rehab facility for treatment can be an intimidating experience. Outside of what you've seen on television or in movies, you probably aren't sure what to expect.
What will you do there? Where will you sleep? Is it going to be difficult?
In this article, we'll try to answer your questions and ease your nerves. Here's what to expect during your first week of rehab.
Unless your treatment center has a medical detox center in-house, you'll need to detox prior to arriving. All substances must be out of your system, which may take days or weeks. Medication and other therapies will help you through the discomfort or pain associated with withdrawal.
Your first day of rehab is mostly devoted to intake. It should be a fairly easy day, allowing you to take in your surroundings, learn what's expected of you, and get settled in.
When you first arrive, you'll meet with a counselor or admissions specialist. They'll ask you questions about how you're feeling, your drug history, and what you want to accomplish in rehab. You'll need to discuss how you started using, any underlying issues that caused you to use, and any other physical or mental health issues you have.
Your health may also be evaluated with a quick check of your blood pressure and temperature, and you'll need to answer questions about any medication you're currently taking. You'll also be given a detox test to ensure that all substances are out of your system.
All of this information will be used to develop an individualized treatment plan for your stay in rehab. Even if you feel uncomfortable, it's vital to be honest during this conversation so you can receive the best possible care.
Once you're done answering questions, you'll most likely be given a tour of the facility. During the tour, expect to be introduced to staff members and other patients.
You may be surprised to find that rehab is a welcoming environment. Your fellow patients are in a similar situation, and many members of the staff are probably recovering addicts as well, so the atmosphere is one of support and solidarity.
Once you're taken to your room, your belongings will be searched. This is to ensure that you don't have any drugs, alcohol, weapons, or other prohibited items.
During Detox and PHP, communication devices like cell phones or computers will also be removed and locked in a safe. You will be able to use the phones at the house for about 10 minutes each night during detox and PHP. Once you have finished PHP your electronics will be returned to you.
You'll then be given a chance to relax and possibly eat a meal. If group meetings are in progress, you may be invited to join the proceedings.
Speaking of your room, what should you expect your sleeping quarters to look like? To see what our houses look like click here.
This will vary depending on the house, but most rooms are dormitory style and separated by gender. You should expect about 1 other person in your room.
Nutrition is key to lasting recovery from addiction, therefore we emphasize a healthy and balanced diet.
During the day you will receive 2 meals at the treatment facility with an abundance of snacks that is available throughout the day. At night, you will be able to prepare your own food at house, eating in a common area with other patients.
The information you provide during intake will be used to develop your daily schedule, which you'll likely begin the day after you check in.
Your schedule will include some combination of individual therapy, group therapy, meals, free time, alternative therapy, fitness, and group discussions. In the evening, you may reflect on your therapy, complete personalized assignments, or work on "wrap-up activities" with your counselor.
You should expect to get an early start to your day while in rehab, likely rising by 7 or 8 in the morning. Lights out will be fairly early as well, probably around 10 p.m.
In order to help you focus on treatment, communication is restricted while you're in a rehab.
During the first week, you may not be allowed to communicate with your family as you settle into rehab and form bonds with the community. However, you'll eventually be able to call your family using a phone at the facility, and e-mail may or may not be restricted.
Your family will also be encouraged to take an active part in your recovery, so you can expect letters from your family members. There may be a day or days on which your family is encouraged to visit and participate in therapy or other activities.
Your first week at a residential treatment center won't be easy. It's a new experience, and recovery is hard work.
But focusing on your hopes for life after recovery, building relationships with the supportive community, and knowing what to expect will make the adjustment easier. If you have any further questions please call one of our specialists at 1-888-249-2590 or click here.


Diana is simply gorgeous, and sounds terrific! Somewhere between a spring rain and a mountain stream. If you like water, falling water, and irises and lily pads you will love Diana. She�s virtually maintenance free, and as easy to install as planting a small rosebush. Size: 63 inches by 36 inches by 12 inches deep.


text:
Space standards adopted in radical shake-up for homes
30 March, 2015 By Laura Mark
More Homes, Better Homes
The long-awaited national space standards, dubbed the 'biggest change in housing standards in a generation', have been given the go-ahead
More from: Space standards adopted in radical shake-up for homes
The space standards which are intended to streamline technical requirements into a single housing standard, as championed by The AJ's More Homes Better Homes Campaign, were given Royal Assent on Friday (27 March).
The introduction of the first national space standard will see the rest of the UK adopting similar standards to those already in place in London.
The new rules apply to every new home, from one-off houses to the entire private-rental sector, and enforce a minimum size dependant on the number of bedrooms and occupants (see table below).
The standards are similar to those recommended by the expert 'challenge panel' headed up by PRP Architects' Andy von Bradsky, and have not changed since the draft gross internal areas were released after a public consultation in October last year despite initial concerns that the standards could still be too small.
Requirements contained within the standards
Minimum gross internal floor areas:
Minimum area (m2)
Number of bedrooms Number of people One-storey dwellings Two-storey dwellings Three-storey dwellings
6 95 102 108
4 5 90 97 103
5 6 103 110 116
Two-bedroom homes must have at least one double bedroom
Single bedrooms should have a minimum floor area of 7.5m2
A double bedroom should have minimum floor area of 11.5m2
Areas with less than 1.5m headroom will not be counted in the gross internal area unless used solely for storage
Minimum floor to ceiling height is 2.3m
The government has also failed to make changes to a 'loophole' which would allow local councils to opt-out of the standards. The requirements can only be applied where there is a local plan in place and where the viability of the development would not be compromised by adopting the standards. This optional element initially prompted concern that the changes would not be taken up.
Communities minister Stephen Williams, said: 'Under the old system of housing standards, builders faced a confusing and contradictory mass of measures.
'The coalition government is introducing a simple, easy to understand set of requirements. These will help housebuilders and councils to work together to build more of the high quality and sustainable homes for people right across the country.'
Communities secretary Eric Pickles, added: 'This rationalises the many differing existing standards into a simpler, streamlined system which will reduce burdens and help bring forward much needed new homes.'
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Chris Roche30 March, 2015 10:08 am
A fantastic achievement - congratulations and well done to all those involved in bringing about this much needed change.
Chris Roche / 11.04
Bill Edgar30 March, 2015 10:08 am
These standards are nearly identical to the Scottish buildings standards that were in force during the sixties and seventies
Paul Lewis30 March, 2015 10:19 am
This is the worst concept ever. What architects should be promoting is good design not minimum space standards. Any good architect should be capable of designing a 35sqm dwelling for 2 people. What is the point of 50sqm? Houses and apartments are already too expensive and dwellings are sold by the sq.ft. 50sqm / 540 sqft at £800 (current average Balham / Highbury prices) is £432,000. Anyone can make a 1 bed flat with 50sqm work, with clever design this can easily be reduced to 35 sqm by just eliminating a corridor. This would bring prices down to £301,000. Why should we be FORCED by these space standards to pay an additional £131,000 for a corridor? In addition mortgage companies typically charge 4x the purchase amount meaning the corridor you have been FORCED to purchase will have cost you £524,000 over 25 years. Lets promote good design, Alec Issigonis radically changed car design with the Mini and architects should be doing the same. We have limited space and resources and the minimum space standards are a step backwards towards the gas guzzling American V8 cars, not forwards.
David Mitchell30 March, 2015 11:24 am
'The government has also failed to make changes to a 'loophole' which would allow local councils to opt-out of the standards.'
So I suspect no real change at all then. How many Local Authorities will actually enforce these optional standards in place of their own existing requirements or against arguments that they make schemes unviable?
simon norris30 March, 2015 11:48 am
Q1 will the new space standards to enhance flexibility in the plans of house builders? I doubt it, probably lead to even more utterly boring developments..
Q2 what we need is less housebuilding and more apartments. Apartments are arguably better at employing flexibility, so that over time the buildings can accommodate more people.
Q3 Apartments can be built taller - say 5 stories - and have a roof terrace for the benefit of the occupants of the flats.
etc etc etc.
simon norris30 March, 2015 12:01 pm
1. Are we to understand that there will be no stndards required for Flats?
2. Are the providers of the standards not aware of the benefit of apartments in respect numbers of people housed?
3. And of the consequent reduction in road traffic and and health of the occupants?
4. And that the flats/apartments can well be built to 5 stories which will allow of flexibiliy in the layout of apartments.
5 and that the roofs will become gardens for the pleasure of all the apartment dwellers. Simon Norris RIBA
Ian Goulty30 March, 2015 12:54 pm
Imagine if we combine good design with plenty of space.
I doubt there are many who buy a car the size of a mini that don't then move to something bigger, unless they already have something bigger and its a second car. Nobody I know has ever happily reduced the size of their car.
Small houses and apartments (and cars) are generally ok for certain situations and periods of peoples lives, but generally, most people want a house, with a bit of private garden, and plenty of space.
I have lived in houses and apartments and for quality of life and contentment the house wins every time. As indeed I suspect it does for most people. Perhaps as Architects we should be mindful of our past of telling other people how they should live their lives. It is not our place to do so.
Industry Professional30 March, 2015 1:18 pm
Well written Ian.
Not one respondent refers to children in their response. Whilst internal space standards are important so is private (and public) outside space for growing playing children. Apartments / flats are not places for growing children either for themselves, their parents or their neighbours.
Will the 7.5sqm standard stop estate agents from referring to large cupboards as bedrooms ?
brendan geraghty30 March, 2015 1:19 pm
These standards are very welcome for dwellings designed for permanent, long term occupation. But this one size fits all approach does not address the needs of those who are looking for something different - for shorter or flexible occupation terms or for a way to transition into long term housing.
The UK needs to diversify the design and supply of housing types and develop products that are better suited to specific lifestyles, demographics or occupation timescales e.g. early working career or downsize housing that is location and shared amenities, not just size, sensitive.
This new type of housing will be smaller, smarter and more community focused. It will be for those that do not require, or cannot afford, the familiar solutions that will come out of these new space standards.
Oliver Spicer30 March, 2015 1:46 pm
The viability loophole renders this pretty much ineffective; all medium/high density development will be unviable if the land is purchased on the basis of current non-standards, as land value is always calculated as a fraction of the gross development value. Large developers will already have years' worth of land banks, the development of which will be unviable for this reason. This means, for the first 5 years or so of the regulation being in place, a precedent will be set of non-compliance. Councils will become fatigued (if they've even adopted the policy), and newer developments will easily argue unviability.
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Like London, Hong Kong has a vibrant dining scene which, combined with its eating-out culture, makes it an appealing destination for international celebrity chefs. Some of those championing great British cuisine here are Jason Atherton, Gordon Ramsay and Tom Aikens – all with Michelin-starred restaurants – plus protégés of these chefs, such as Nate Green. Read what they think is "great" about British cuisine. Originally published in South China Morning Post.


Taizé Prayer, a simple service of scripture, singing, prayers, and silence, is held the first Wednesday of the month from 7:00-7:30pm in the Historic Chapel. All are welcome! Come rest in the quiet beauty during this simple form of contemplative prayer.
For more information contact Beth Fisher at ljfisher57@verizon.net.


"Art," despite what most artists are rebelling against, is a commodity. While it may be a product that is life altering and earth shattering and truly brilliant….once that piece of brilliance is for sale it becomes a commodity. Dear artists, this does not mean the world has gone to hell… it only means there is money to be made from your inner turmoil. You certainly don't have to turn your art into money if it bothers you. How you've grappled with the reality of this is your own business.
Jason Polan is experimenting with the idea that he as an artist is the product and that his time can be profitable. He is selling two packages of his free time: one day and one hour time slots where, if you so choose to purchase them, he will devote to making art for you. You then receive in the mail whatever doodles and such he made within that hour/day.
Huh. So is it the art, the artist, the time, or the creativity packed into that time that is for sale? Is buying an artist's time worth the money? Is there a guarentee of a product? What do you think?