#41
Online
Post rating: ~
someone is shooting people at capitol hill. prob has something to do with the shutdown or maybe just another schizoid i dunno
#42
political car tune
Post rating: ~
some lady with a baby, rammed the white house gates and led the cops on a merry chase, cops gunned her down.
#43
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~

ilmdge posted:

someone is shooting people at capitol hill. prob has something to do with the shutdown or maybe just another schizoid i dunno

Reuters' David Lawder reports: Whit Dabney, 13, visiting from Louisville, Kentucky heard the shots a couple blocks away. He was standing around 1st and Constitution. "I was just eating a hot dog over here and I heard about four or five gunshots, and then a swarm of police cars came in wailing their sirens."

#44
Post rating: ~

swampman posted:

ilmdge posted:

someone is shooting people at capitol hill. prob has something to do with the shutdown or maybe just another schizoid i dunno

Reuters' David Lawder reports: Whit Dabney, 13, visiting from Louisville, Kentucky heard the shots a couple blocks away. He was standing around 1st and Constitution. "I was just eating a hot dog over here and I heard about four or five gunshots, and then a swarm of police cars came in wailing their sirens."



Unfortunately, according to the available published date, the majority of shots fired in the field by U.S. LE officers miss their intended target. According to published NYPD SOP-9 data, the NYPD hit ratio by officers against perpetrators in 2000 was 12.3% of shots fired and in 2001 13.5% of shots fired.

#45
Online
Post rating: ~
The chase began when the woman driving a black sedan got involved in some kind of verbal altercation with officers at a security checkpoint a block from the White House, the intelligence source said.

As police cars arrived at the scene, the vehicle sped away and led police on a wild chase that included running red lights, according to the source. When the vehicle approached the area of the Capitol building more than a mile away, several squad cars stopped it and officers "came out with their guns drawn," said Frank Schwing, a D.C. resident who witnessed what happened.

The armed officers tried to open the passenger side door, he said. "At that point, the driver slammed into reverse, slammed into a cruiser, did a 180 (degree turn), took off, and at that point, there were a half dozen or so shots fired," Schwing told CNN, apparently all by small arms from police. The black vehicle then crashed into security barriers closer to the Capitol building, said police and witnesses.

Two people, including a police officer, were transported to a local hospital.

"The timing on this was really kind of scary," said Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold of Texas. "Capitol Hill police are at a lower personnel level because of the shutdown."
#46
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +
why arent more terrorists taking advantage of the government's reduced security presence? has the shutdown really hit the FBI's bomb making budget that hard?
#47
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
people are calling her unarmed. yeah, unarmed, except the huge piece of metal she was throwing around. this isn't gtaV, this is real life, don't fuck with the police, lady.
#48
political car tune
Post rating: +++++
The initial altercation began after a heavyset floridian man yelled at the vehicle from his rascal scooter, "hey take it easy, lady!"
#49
Post rating: +++++
A second mother-and-child car has hit the White House Barricade
#50
Online
Post rating: +
"Cornered, the woman came out of the car and was cut down by gunfire, officials said."
#51
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~
hmm... checkpoints stretched thin... not enough police in our cities to handle threats like this... are you shitting me... this is all part of the game plan... obama will order the military on to the streets... you heard it here first... stock up on guns and food.
#52
political car tune
Post rating: +
All male police force guns down women as "gay fascism" continues to spread
#53
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~
what does libertarian theory have to say about this? personally, i think your right to smash your sedan into a police checkpoint ends where the police's right not to get crushed like a rag doll begins... but that's just 3 years of liberty university law school talking, ignore at your peril.
#54
Post rating: +
It's cool how the police spokespeople always use that weird third person passive tense when the cops do something. "At which point, shots were fired" and leave it up to the newspaper to explain that the cops were shooting at the lady and her kid or whatever.
#55
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +++++
it's funny you say that because everyone always freaks out when police shoot a child, as if there's not such a thing as a child soldier. remember that every single person has a theoretical number of two year olds they can defeat at a time. police wake up to the possibility that each day will be the one when they get overwhelmed by a bunch of two year olds.
#56
Post rating: ~

Meursault posted:

It's cool how the police spokespeople always use that weird third person passive tense when the cops do something. "At which point, shots were fired" and leave it up to the newspaper to explain that the cops were shooting at the lady and her kid or whatever.


"The shots were contacted for comments, but at the time of writing this report, no response has been received"

#57
Post rating: +
"shots were licked"
#58
[account deactivated]
#59
Post rating: +
id say germany does more than that; i get $850 a month from the government for going to school and can still work too.
#60
Kurdt
Post rating: +
the german government gives money to israel for no reason
#61
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
a few months working for the labour aristocracy and you're already demanding that america become "more like germany".... sieg heil i guess... the cracker settler state consumes another soul.
#62
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
also like america isn't just uniformly poor or something. about half of households own a house, have cars, have pretty good health insurance, etc., probably consume too much. if you want to make global socialism then most americans would probably be worse off in a material sense. please read more at my blog monkey smashes heaven.
#63
Back up in your ass
Post rating: ~
it's so American that the government employees who get the most special treatment are the most useless and rapey
#64
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

Goatstein_Ascendant posted:

it's so American that the government employees who get the most special treatment are the most useless and rapey

speaking of useless and rapey, how's life goat? starting another year of school?

#65
Back up in your ass
Post rating: +
Nice rudeness.
#66
Post rating: ~
don't worry everyone, america, like nature, will always find a way :

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/9761603/army-black-knights-air-force-falcons-navy-midshipmen-play-weekend-source

#67
Post rating: +++++

getfiscal posted:

also like america isn't just uniformly poor or something. about half of households own a house, have cars, have pretty good health insurance, etc., probably consume too much. if you want to make global socialism then most americans would probably be worse off in a material sense. please read more at my blog monkey smashes heaven.



#68
Online
Post rating: +
the shutdown is really propelling some action around here

A man may have set himself on fire Friday afternoon on the National Mall in Washington, police and witnesses reported.

The unidentified man was taken to the hospital with "life threatening injuries," a D.C. Fire Department spokesman toldThe Washington Post.

The man was "conscious and breathing" when firefighters arrived, a D.C. police spokeswoman told the paper. She said police had not yet established the cause of the fire.

Witnesses told NBC Washington and the Post that the man poured gasoline on himself, then set himself on fire about 4:25 p.m. ET at Seventh Street and Jefferson Drive, near the Air and Space Museum.

Several joggers took off their shirts to extinguish the flames. A red gasoline canister and yellow tarp were next to the man.

#69
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
can yall say....INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS??
#70
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +


just a little humour
#71
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
my dad said that they had to shoot that woman in DC because her car might have been a bomb.
#72
Kurdt
Post rating: +
breainstorming: is there a way to make a socialism that would make most americans better off?

i think so, imo
#73
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~

getfiscal posted:

my dad said that they had to shoot that woman in DC because her car might have been a bomb.



every Ford Pinto in America was a potential bomb and it took multiple lawsuits, several dozen deaths, and an exposé Mother Jones magazine before government agents stepped in to do anything

#74
Post rating: +

gyrofry posted:

breainstorming: is there a way to make a socialism that would make most americans better off?

i think so, imo

perhaps if there was socialism in one country? but who would dare to dream of such a thing??

#75
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
Haha, well, MaxUltor, there's actually a picture of Stalin you can insert into your posts here on LF. Classic meme.
#76
Post rating: ~
this thread needs to be more first worldist


#77
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~


Anyone considering the contemporary state of left-wing thought in the Western world will have run across the trope of melancholia. Having seen perhaps its finest moments in the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, the post-war European left quickly found itself marginalised in the reconstruction phase and increasingly vilified as cultural consensus and American oversight replaced the Axis with the Soviet Union in the role of grand enemy. Faced with the unappealing choice between liberal, Western capitalist democracy and what was, by then, the undeniable totalitarianism of the nominally communist Eastern Bloc, the utopian impulse at the centre of the left-wing project found itself increasingly unsustainable over the course of the post-war era. The effects of this historical turn are wide-ranging, and not easily assimilated into a straightforward narrative of doleful resignation. Indeed, this erosion has been strongly contested both intellectually, as left-wing theorists have struggled to come to terms with the failures of these events to effect radical political change, and physically, in events such as the May 1968 student revolts in Paris, the resurgence of leftist terrorism in their aftermath and the protests, strikes and activist projects that continue to broadly define the left today. Nevertheless, the waning of consensus and direction accompanying this loss of utopian impulse, previously provided through a teleologically-oriented Marxist economic critique, looms large in post-war conceptions of the Western left.

More recently, such utopian considerations have arisen again, ironically alongside the very collapse of capitalist democracy's Soviet enemy, albeit in a quite different form: the promise of a tolerant, cosmopolitan multiculture where differences predicated on identity are accommodated without recourse to economic transformation. Yet here, too, a certain kind of 'post-ideological' utopianism has foundered, its celebration of the heterogeneity engendered by the global expansion of capitalism seemingly no match for the homogenizing global flow of capital itself. Diagnosing this conjuncture in the British context, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy relates the impasse to both previous left-wing losses and a nascent really existing globalism:

That lapse is closely associated with the defeat of the Left and
the retreat of the dissenting social movements with which its fate
was intertwined. Those movements pursued forms of internationalism
that went beyond any simple commitment to the interlocking system
of national states and markets ... That hope has faded away in the
era of actually existing internationalism which has perversely
created a political environment where cosmopolitan and translocal
affiliations become suspect and are now virtually unthinkable
outside of the limited codes of human-rights talk, medical
emergency, and environmental catastrophe. (1)
When considered in relation to earlier internationally-minded left-wing movements, particularly socialism and first-wave feminism, we can thus discern a trajectory, albeit one that, if still dialectical, is so only negatively, tracing the progressive defeat and loss of successive left-utopian visions. Gilroy does not align these failures with 'left-wing melancholy,' the formation first identified by Walter Benjamin in his review of Erich Kastner's poetry, (2) preferring instead to argue that the failures of cosmopolitanism in Britain lie in its inability to fully come to terms with both the loss of its imperial status and the implications of its colonial past. Nevertheless, for him too, the effects of this most recent lapse on the possibility of a new international left-wing movement are both wide-ranging and, as the title of his book, Postcolonial Melancholia, suggests, understandable through the trope of melancholy.



Gilroy locates the effects of this melancholia not only in a thwarted heterotopia that still bears the effects of institutionalised racism, but in the aggressively compensatory recourse taken by the white working class to the language of nationalism and xenophobia. Analysing the slogans chanted by supporters of the English national football team, he writes, 'In this light, the phrase "two world wars and one World Cup" becomes a means through which to consider the bewildering effects of England's postcolonial melancholia ... all the introjected class warfare articulated by defeated victors ... is coded here in a dynamic and still explosive form'. (3) Yet, by depicting the class struggle primarily as an ideal lost alongside the decline of empire rather than an ideologically-obscured locus of lasting contestation, Gilroy does not consider what the latent aspirations behind such disturbing manifestations might suggest about the unresolved contradictions of earlier left-wing defeats. By building on his analysis to reconceive a specifically left-wing, post-war melancholia, however, we can see that it, too, can also be located in a 'bewildering' variety of circumstances, not all of which correspond to either a straightforward acknowledgment of melancholia as such, or an understanding of it as simple resignation.

Furthermore, such a conception can be seen to be motivated by at least two different experiences of loss, illuminating a fracture within the left that presents an impediment to future action in a widely interconnected and rapidly changing political landscape on which the left and the right nevertheless remain at odds. That both failures--that of an economistic leftwing project and one predicated upon overcoming constructions of difference based upon identity--might give rise to a kind of melancholy should today hardly come as a surprise. More unexpected and suggestive are the ways in which certain contemporary European electronic musicians have addressed these conceptions of loss. The work of two such musicians in particular, the British dubstep producer Burial and the work of German artist Jan Jelinek under the name of his microhouse project, Farben, presents an unlikely context in which the tension between these two experiences can be seen to have been playing out. Viewed alongside the historical contexts and intellectual debates they inherit and evoke, these engagements offer important lessons for the present political conjuncture through the manifestations they put forward. Moreover, in the case of Farben, we might even identify the basis for a potentially productive relationship to prior losses.

Any attempt to theorise left-wing melancholy from the post-war period up to and including the present moment will necessarily have to address two engagements with the term that predate the war: the psychoanalytic conception of melancholia as set forth by Sigmund Freud in his 1917 'Mourning and Melancholia' and, as alluded to above, Walter Benjamin's 1931 evocation of it to characterise a particular political standpoint on the inter-war German left. For Freud, melancholia is the pathological flip side of mourning, which may include not only the death of another person, but 'a loss of a more ideal kind,' which 'would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love-object' (4) in which a significant amount of libidinal energy has been cathected. Whereas in mourning, such a loss is grieved for a period of time before, eventually, the subject moves on and a new love-object is found, in Freud's description of the melancholic process, 'he object-cathexis proved to have little power, and was abandoned; but the free libido was withdrawn into the ego and not directed to another object ... in this way the loss of the object became transformed into a loss in the ego'. (5) Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok go further, expanding on Freud's distinction as the difference between 'introjection' and 'incorporation,' where in the latter, 'in order not to have to "swallow" a loss, we fantasise swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost'. (6) The lost object, in these analyses, becomes not absorbed and digested but incorporated into the ego psychically intact, where it then becomes an impediment to true healing: 'The conflict in the ego, which in melancholia is substituted for the struggle surging round the object, must act like a painful wound which calls out unusually strong anti-cathexes'. (7)



For Benjamin, this kind of melancholic affectation could be understood in an explicitly political sense in Kastner's poetry, albeit one lacking in positive virtue. Furthermore, this 'left-wing melancholy' leads, through Kastner, to the entire work of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, in which Benjamin saw a pseudo-radical bourgeois intellectual fixation on desiccated affect at the expense of political praxis. As such, the so-called 'New Objectivity' becomes instead a monument to subjective sentimentality:

What then does the 'spiritual elite' discover as it begins to
take stock of its feelings? Those feelings themselves? They have
long since been remaindered. What is left is the empty spaces
where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings--nature and
love, enthusiasm and humanity--once rested. Now the hollow forms
are absentmindedly caressed ... For this is what is new about this
objectivity--it takes as much pride in the traces of former
spiritual goods as the bourgeois do in their material goods. (8)
Again, the image is one in which the subject, unwilling to fully abandon the dearly-valued but now-vanished love-object, in this case the ideals that Freud spoke of-such as humanity and love--rather than the more straightforward 'lost object,' internalises something like a hollow simulacrum of that object upon which to dwell indefinitely, 'precisely the attitude to which there is no longer any corresponding political action ... from the beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet'. (9) This refusal of action, as Abraham and Torok note, is not simply a function of the incorporation of the lost object into the ego, but an unwillingness to re-introject that part of the ego that lies, matryoshka-like, inside of that lost object itself: 'Incorporation is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost'. (10) This refusal, like the bourgeois refusal to acknowledge the exploitative relations of production which bring material commodity goods into existence, forestalls any genuine political action.

Gilroy's counterintuitive readings notwithstanding, more straightforward cases of political melancholia abound in the post-war left. One might think, for example, of the fictional but representative relationship between 'Nicky' Hutchinson and his father in the British television miniseries Our Friends in the North: (11) Nicky's father Felix, a veteran of the 1936 Jarrow March, internalises the march in the wake of the marchers' humiliating defeat, distancing himself from and discouraging his son's interest in leftist politics, but to no avail. Nicky, by contrast, tries on a number of post-war activist roles, (12) thereby seeking both the political transformation that eluded the previous generation, and, just as importantly, paternal approval. Although any kind of radical societal change eludes them both, there is a sense in which Nicky clearly mourns his losses, dusts himself off and tries again, while Felix is resolutely melancholy; the precise extent to which he has incorporated his lost object is revealed when, even in the throes of Alzheimer's, he clings to his recall of the details of the march.



The melancholia that Felix exhibits is representative of a certain kind of British leftism falling into anachronism: White, male, unionist, predominantly heterosexual and Northern. In short, what might be referred to today as 'Old Labour'. For Wendy Brown, building on Benjamin and Stuart Hall, this kind of melancholia results from not merely tactical defeats such as the Jarrow March, but from a failure to come to terms with the changing nature of postwar left-wing politics in the West, 'an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, and the problematic of language'. (13) For her, the lost object in this case is also an unacknowledged ideal, 'the promise that left analysis and left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right and the true'. (14) The refusal to acknowledge this loss, she argues, results in a left that 'literally renders itself a conservative force in history ... a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things'. (15) Traditional leftist melancholy, she writes, is essentially a knee jerk reaction to the changing political climate of thefin-de-siecle Western world, specifically 'the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich "revolutions," ... the development of cultural politics ... the disintegration of socialist regimes', (16) whose collapse destabilised a materialist economic critique. Its inability to cope with right-wing populism, questions of race, gender and sexual identity and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc leaves it isolated and adrift in a postmodern cultural and political landscape.

In a very real sense, however, the cleavage that Brown sees between this traditional leftism and new, postmodern formulations based on a poststructuralist critique of language and a radical privileging of subjectivity cuts both ways. The means by which, for her, these latter formulations become scapegoats for the failure of a traditional left-wing teleology and 'responsibility for the tattered condition of those promises and guarantees is distributed onto debased others' (17) is not exclusively the province of a traditionalist left. Instead, as Gilroy's insistence on ascribing the failures of the cosmopolitan left-wing project solely to a traumatized post-imperial Britain demonstrates, such valences can easily be reversed. In so doing, proponents of a certain postmodern conception of the left risk throwing the historical materialist baby out with the traditionalist, racist, heteronormative and patriarchal bathwater. Such a formulation, one which itself comes short of a radical social critique or a viable political alternative, can therefore also lead to a kind of poststructuralist, postmodern left-wing melancholy. To understand how this might be possible, it is necessary to conceive of an object or moment that might represent the idealised lost object for such a poststructuralist leftism. If, in Britain at least, the regression of this 'Old Labour' mentality into melancholia can be located as taking place somewhere along the period demarcated by the Jarrow March at one end and the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 at the other, we might situate the rise of this 'new left' in the cultural shifts, bubbling under the surface of post-war British life, that would come into their own both in the wake of the collapse of 'Old Labour' and alongside the trifecta of right-populism, identity politics and Soviet collapse identified by Brown. This period, roughly demarcated by two of the phenomena to which she alludes, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the 1994 congressional election in the United States that installed Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, is coterminous, in Britain at least, with a cultural epoch that we might understand as specifically gesturing towards a singularly post-materialist effort at political transformation: acid house and rave culture.

Far from being a melancholic moment for a left concerned less with economic materialism than subjectivity, style and the complicity of language systems in relations of power, rave culture offered the opportunity for these issues to come to the forefront. The music itself, an electronic amalgam of funk, dub reggae, disco and experimental electronic music, welcomed participation from a radical diversity of subject positions. As Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson write, 'Within post-war popular culture, dance cultures have been particularly associated with young women and gay men on the one hand, and with the cultures of the African diaspora and of dispossessed working-class young men on the other'. (18) Previously these two sides of dance music were relatively exclusive and non-overlapping, but both were represented in rave culture, alongside, of course, a smattering of the straight white middle class. Likewise, the explosion of musical subgenres and competing events and 'scenes' places rave culture at the apex of a certain political consideration of style pioneered in the late 1970s by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, (19) to which Gilroy also contributed. For its successors studying club culture, such as Sarah Thornton, this apex is one in which subcultural analysis is no longer 'about dominant ideologies and subversive subcultures, but about subcultural ideologies ... not simply researching the beliefs of a cluster of communities, but investigating the way they make "meaning in the service of power"'. (20) In other words, it arrives, culturally, at a moment in which cultural studies is no longer about examining either the perpetuation of the status quo or 'resistance through rituals', but instead about how new social hierarchies are formed within subcultures, hierarchies which may or may not reflect larger social structures. Finally, this creation of new meaning, of new hierarchies, directly engages with a poststructuralist left project of destabilizing linguistic categories, something made especially possible in rave culture by the largely instrumental nature of the music in question. As Gilbert and Pearson write, 'It could be argued that whatever their generic specificities, dance musics offer the most radical challenge available to the musical priorities of phallogocentric metaphysics ... Their deployment of rhythm and repetition, their eschewal of verbal meaning, are all problematic for the dominant discourses'. (21)

These aspects of dance music culture, so representative of the exact concerns that Brown identifies as lacking in the traditionalist, melancholy left, find something like a transcendental, utopian expression in rave culture, bound together as they are by perhaps its most unique element, the use of the drug Ecstasy. As Simon Reynolds writes in his crucial overview of rave culture, 'Thanks to Ecstasy, all the class and race and sex-preference barriers were getting fluxed up; all sorts of people who might never have exchanged words or glances were being swirled together in a promiscuous chaos'. (22) The effects of the drug, which include a diminishing of physical and sexual aggression as well as a perceived increase in empathy and understanding for those under its influence, contributed to a sense of a brave new world where these differences did not so much cease to exist as cease to matter. This utopianism also encouraged a kind of New Age wishful thinking, that openness to non-Western religions and philosophies and herbal 'smart drinks' would lead the way to a technological communion with nature, thus earning the 1988-9 rise of rave culture in the UK the nickname of 'the second summer of love'. Ecstasy was the anti-melancholy; before being designated as an illegal street drug, it had in fact accumulated a long history of use, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, as a therapeutic aid for those suffering psychological trauma. Undoubtedly some of the younger members of the traditionalist left discovered this for themselves by trying it out and, in so doing, overcame their melancholy and became rave converts. In addition, left-leaning intellectuals such as Gilbert, Pearson and Reynolds saw the potential for a way out of the teleological crisis on the left in the drug's effects and the culture surrounding it, what Richard Smith calls 'a sort of communism of the emotions'. (23)



The downside, of course, of this affective utopia is that it only holds together as long as the drugs keep working, a dubious proposition at best. Ecstasy, which floods the brain with serotonin to create the blissful state it takes its name after, operates somewhat differently when, after repeated use, the body's natural supply is depleted, paving the way for a descent into something like temporary psychosis. As Reynolds writes, 'Getting high degenerates into getting out of it. Suddenly the clubs are full of dead souls, zombie-eyed and prematurely haggard. Instead of outstretched arms and all-embracing extroversion, there's grimly fixated vacancy, automaton body-moves, autistic self-absorption'. (24) Here, too, there are parallels with the original summer of love; as Ronald Fraser et al. relate in their interview of a former Free Speech Movement activist, ' feels that he and most other LSD users of the Sixties didn't fully understand the effects of the drug ... Today he believes that LSD led him to overestimate how much could be changed, and how quickly'. (25) In short, then, utopian claims based around drug cultures are, almost by necessity, temporally limited; it is not so much that they do not effect some kind of 'real' transformation in their participants as it is that, engendered by biochemical reactions, they are not self-sustaining. It is as if a certain strain of post-war counterculturalism, so exemplary of French poststructuralist thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of immanence and rhizomatic flow, had finally responded to the question they posed in A Thousand Plateaus, 'There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of consistency?' (26) by demonstrating the answer: 'Yes, but not indefinitely.' At best, they offer a utopia that is transient rather than transcendent.

If the flip side of the Ecstatic experience is depleted serotonin and soulless automatism then it is only afterwards, as in the psychic model of object cathexis and loss, that melancholia sets in. (27) It is not in the experience of losing the drug's effects, that is, in continuing to take the drug past the point when the body's supply of serotonin is depleted, but only later when, after the drug has worn off, the body attempts to function 'normally' and finds itself lacking adequate levels of the neurotransmitter. Many users have reported something like melancholia as an after-effect of the drug; Matthew Collin and John Godfrey describe it as 'the hopeless grey mood of the midweek comedown', (28) a melancholia in which, indeed 'the patient ... cannot consciously perceive what it is he has lost'. (29) What is lost, however, is no longer psychical in nature but neurochemical. If, as Reynolds argues, 'the utopian/dystopian dialectic running through Ecstasy culture, the way the hunger for heaven-on-earth almost always leads on to a "darkside" place of drug excess and paranoia', (30) is reflected in the music through euphoric rave anthems like Rhythim is Rhythim's 'Strings of Life' and Shades of Rhythm's 'Extasy' on the one hand and dark side, 'panic' tracks such as 4 Hero's 'Mr Kirk's Nightmare' ('I'm sorry Mr Kirk, you'd better come down to the station house, your son is dead; he died of an overdose') and Subnation's 'Scottie' on the other, where might we locate this melancholic turn, and how might it line up with a kind of postmodern left-wing melancholy?

Aside from the 'utopian/dystopian dialectic' of rave culture, another important concept for understanding the intricate and often arcane world of dance music subcultures is what Reynolds refers to as the 'hardcore continuum', 'a continuum of hardcore that runs from the most machinic forms of house ... through British and European rave styles like bleep-and-bass, breakbeat house, jungle, gabba, big beat and speed garage ... the essence of rave resides with "hardcore pressure": the rave audience's demand for a soundtrack to going mental'. (31) The hardcore continuum, as its name suggests, denotes a certain lineage of electronic dance music with a shared concern that transcends the formal, stylistic boundaries that demarcate each subgenre and persists through and beyond the limited shelf life that any particular style may have in the popular consciousness. The hardcore continuum is continually in dialogue with itself, and, especially in London, where it might be defined as whatever style is currently being played on the majority of the city's numerous pirate radio stations, the glory days of UK acid house, rave and jungle in the late 1980s and early 1990s loom large despite the stylistic innovations that continue to drive dance music culture 'forward'. For Reynolds, the hardcore continuum is in some ways the result of the ongoing progression effected by the utopian/dystopian dialectic; as one genre cycles through it, shifting from Ecstasy to agony, a new genre springs up as if by synthesis, partially in order to 'rescue' rave culture as a whole from dystopian annihilation. As the continuum develops sonically, however, it also moves further and further away from the initial, utopian impulse that bolstered its efflorescence in the second summer of love, and, for some artists operating within dance music culture, that distance reinforces a sense of nostalgia and even melancholy.

While for Reynolds the hardcore continuum, due to its relentless quest for new hedonistic thrills, is a sort of privileged form of dance music culture that stands over and against a more intellectual, 'artistic' approach to electronic music perhaps best exemplified by the so-called 'Intelligent Dance Music' of the mid-to-late 1990s, what is most interesting about this introspective take on rave culture is that it originates in some ways from within the continuum itself. Nostalgia for the lost heyday of rave culture certainly persists in the UK, where at its peak outdoor raves with tens of thousands of participants were not uncommon, and musical recollections of this bygone era often look back at it wistfully but pragmatically. One such example, The Streets' 'Weak Become Heroes', recounts its narrator's descent into reverie upon hearing an old rave anthem in a cafe, leading him to reflect on his 'first E'. He describes the utopian/dystopian dialectic of Ecstasy culture in explicitly political terms: 'They could settle wars with this, if only they will / Imagine the world's leaders on pills / And imagine the morning after / Always causing disaster' before being roused from his nostalgic daydream: 'Then the girl in the cafe taps me on the shoulder / I realise five years went by, I'm older ... My life's been up and down since I walked from that crowd'. (32) For Gilroy, The Streets are exemplary of a potentially broader acceptance of Britain's contemporary national identity. He commends lyricist/producer Mike Skinner's 'poetic attempts to make the country more habitable by giving value to its ability to operate on a less-than-imperial scale', (33) and praises another song, 'Turn the Page', as reinterpreting British history in this light, as it 'recasts the formative traumatic memory of World War II as a rave'. (34) Yet this analysis seemingly disavows the more complicated relation to rave presented in 'Weak Become Heroes', where the heady experience of an initial, youthful encounter with a utopian subculture is recalled with the clarity of hindsight and thus recognised for what it is: euphoric, naive and, most importantly, relegated to the past. This is not merely Skinner's personal conception, however, but one found in British dance music culture at large, where the rave often figures not as a present-day example of contemporary multiculture, but rather a relic of the recent past, the victim of the forcible legislation of electronic dance music out of its original idyll and into corporate megaclubs. (35) Indeed, standing in contrast to The Streets' mere nostalgia is a much more extreme conception of rave history as something closer to traumatic loss, perhaps singularly exemplified in the work of another British artist known as Burial.

Both Burial and Original Pirate Material, The Streets' debut album from which 'Weak Become Heroes' is taken, speak from a position that is within but on the periphery of the hardcore continuum, and do so specifically in the argot of UK garage and, for Burial, dubstep, the descendent of speed garage which has, in one form or another, dominated the London-based hardcore continuum for most of the past decade. Neither The Streets nor Burial is really suitable for dancing to, but nor is either the work of a scene 'outsider'. Whereas Skinner's persistent need to sketch a narrative over the rhythmic backdrop of the largely instrumental genre sets him apart, however, Burial's peripheral status stems not so much from a flaunting of the genre's structural conventions as his ability to work within those conventions to achieve something entirely other than 'the rave audience's demand for a soundtrack to going mental'. It is not so much the structure, but the mood that is all wrong: pianos tinkle instead of vamping excitedly; beats shuffle more than swing; echoes and reverberations repeatedly appear out of nowhere; flashes of rave 'vacuum cleaner' bass riffs disappear as quickly as they appear. Most importantly, Burial's production values emphasise atmosphere over the bass-and-drums backbone of dancefloor-oriented music. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who blogs under the name K-Punk, describes Burial's sound as 'like walking into the abadoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot'. (36) Burial's music is, tautologically, an isolated, asocial club music, and it is clear that this is a self-imposed peripheral status.



Fisher accurately describes Burial's self-titled debut as 'an elegy for the hardcore continuum,' and, furthermore, directly speaks of his 'mourning and melancholy', (37) but it is clear that we are dealing here much more with the latter than the former. The name Burial itself situates him, as an artist, precisely at that interstitial moment that melancholia seeks to prolong, between the lost object's physical death and its interment in the ground, its relinquishment to oblivion. (38) Burial's own self-effacing obscurity-for over two years following the release of his debut album, he remained obstinately anonymous-certainly resonates with Freud's description of the melancholic's ego-debasement: 'The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort and morally despicable'. (39) Furthermore, and in addition to the solitary, moody, empty tone of Burial's music, many of his song titles are exemplary of either lost-object relations, depression and worthlessness (e.g., 'Wounder,' 'Gutted,' 'You Hurt Me,' 'Broken Home,' 'Homeless,' 'Dog Shelter,' 'Fostercare') or the remnants of rave culture ('Pirates,' 'Raver,' 'Endorphin'). Other titles, like 'Night Bus' and 'Nite Train', (40) gesture at something like the trip home from a night out clubbing, musically recreating the experience of nightlife at a remove, rattling through the windows of a passing vehicle, the club's reverberations bouncing off the nearly-empty seats. (41) If 'Intelligent Dance Music' made a virtue out of being undanceable, revelling in its status as 'dance music you can't dance to,' here we find precisely the inverse: Music that wants to be danced to, but cannot be. In all of Burial's music there lurks this intense desire to be a part of something that one is unable to be, to realise instead of elegise; a desire that, itself unrealisable, persists self-referentially, becomes incorporated.

Writers like Reynolds and Fisher, who straddle the divide between popular and academic discourses on culture, have coined a term to describe recent musical movements, not just those in rave and post-rave culture, that make use of 'half-erased or never-quite-attained songform': hauntology. (42) The term, of course, is borrowed from French philosopher Jacques Derrida, specifically from his late engagement with Marxist thought, Specters of Marx. For Derrida, hauntology refers to the unique temporal qualities of the revenant, the specter as that which returns, that which comes again: 'After the end of history, the spirit comes by coming back , it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again'. (43) For Derrida, writing in the early 1990s in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall (and, not co-incidentally, roughly at the tail end of the initial flourishing of rave culture), this specter is specifically Marxian, the 'spectre of Communism' (44) that (still/always/again) haunts Europe, a specter that free-market liberals, flush with victory, are eager to exorcise with 'the manic, jubilatory and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of the mourning work'. (45)

The specter will never be fully exorcised, however, because that is precisely the definition of a revenant, and it is here that these two definitions of hauntology connect back together, for isn't this 'euphoria of liberal democracy and of the market economy' (46) haunted by the same specter of its inevitable inadequacy that haunts the Ecstatic melancholia of Burial's sonic and psychic landscape? In other words, aren't both the visions of a free-market 'end of history' and the lost utopia of a tolerant and diverse stylistically individualised plane of consistency free from the shackles of deterministic language haunted, cursed even, by the absence of a historical, materialist grounding, by the specter of Marx? For Fisher, Burial's music is 'haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach'. (47) It is that future, never attainable, like the homogeneous socialist utopia foreclosed to a diversity of subject positions in traditionalist left-wing melancholia, that we might understand as the lost object for a poststructuralist left-wing melancholy. (48) It is not only that Burial's music represents a kind of melancholia for rave-culture-as-lost-object, but that it is literally haunted by the ghosts of hardcore. Or, rather, it is in Burial's music that the ghosts of hardcore, that is the ghosts that haunt hardcore, rattle the chains which they have only but to lose and, in so doing, make themselves audible.

This less-than-utopian trajectory of rave culture is not only evident in Burial, of course, but in the work of those who explicitly looked to it for political inspiration. Gilbert and Pearson conclude their examination of dance music culture by reflecting on its legacy and turning to Antonio Gramsci: 'The dissolution of old identities has not been terrifying but liberating. It is this openness to the democratic possibilities of the future, this "optimism of the will" which is so sorely lacking in much of contemporary political culture, and which may remain dance culture's lasting legacy to a generation which had almost lost hope'. (49) From Ecstatic subjectivity to imprisoned radicality, from Smith's 'communism of emotions' to Gramsci's 'optimism of the will' (50) in less than a decade, and past that optimism and into melancholy in just a few more years, it is clear that both sides of the divide that Brown sees within left-wing politics have their lost objects, their reasons to be melancholy. It is equally clear, however, that some sort of reconciliation between the two, beyond either mourning or melancholy, is both necessary and desirable in order to reinvigorate the left-wing project. A synthesis, in other words, which takes into account both an economic, historical materialist critique and a poststructuralist critique rooted in irreducible conceptions of subjectivity, identity and language.

Attempts at such a synthesis have recently been formulated theoretically, for example by political philosophers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. (51) In order to sustain such a synthesis through theory and into practice, however, a better psychical model than melancholy is undoubtedly necessary. In contrast to the countercultural utopian/dystopian dialectic that characterises both the first and second summers of love, we might look back to a different moment in 1960s radicalism, not so much the hippies of 1967 San Francisco as the student radicals of 1968. In her consideration of the legacy of the French uprising catalysed by student radicals in May 1968, Kristin Ross argues that the predominance of the entire concept of traumatic loss is in fact a cultural legacy inherited from the Second World War:

World War II has, in fact, 'produced' the memory industry in
contemporary scholarship, in France and elsewhere, and the
parameters of devastation--catastrophe, administrative massacre,
atrocity, collaboration, genocide have in turn made it easy for
certain pathological psychoanalytic categories--'trauma,' for
example, or 'repression'--to attain legitimacy as ever more
generalizable ways of understanding the excesses and deficiencies
of collective memory ... 'Masses,' in other words, have come to
mean masses of dead bodies, not masses of people working together
to take charge of their collective lives ... it seemed clear to
me that categories like 'trauma' and 'repression,' whether
collective or individual, would not be relevant to the story of
'68. (52)
As Gilroy's reading of 'Turn the Page' also suggests, some counterpositional narrative to this post-war account of traumatic loss is required; yet the figure of the rave Gilroy identifies is, as we have seen, itself haunted by its own losses. Where, then, might we locate one?

Such a counter-narrative might be found, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the same figure who also brought us the notion of a crippling left-wing melancholy, Walter Benjamin. It is, in short, the refusal to mourn. Martin Jay identifies this refusal in Benjamin's relationship with two young radicals, Friedrich Heinle and Frederika Seligson, who committed suicide in 1914 in opposition to the First World War:

ather than remaining a prisoner of his resentment, Benjamin
ultimately made a virtue out of that failure, or at least turned it
into a warning against the premature, purely aesthetic smoothing
over of real contradictions. It was this intransigence that saved
him, however close he may seemed to have come, from wallowing in
the self-pitying 'left-wing melancholy' of the homeless Weimar
intellectuals. (53)
This refusal to mourn is evident in some of the most profound legacies of les evenements de Mai 1968. Writing in the preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, a work commonly cited as an intellectual 'product' of the aftermath of that era, Michel Foucault specifically enumerates the forward-thinking nature of their relationship to May 1968: 'It is true that the old banners were raised, but the combat shifted and spread into new zones. Anti-Oedipus shows first of all how much ground has been covered. But it does much more than that ... it motivates us to go further'. (54) It is also this potentiality that Ross sees in the 1995 general strike in France, which 'transformed the event of '68 from a fact into a force ... It threw a wrench into the story of May as a great cultural reform, as a rendezvous with modernity, as a birth of the new individualism. It brought an end, that is, to the end of May'. (55) In the refusal to mourn, then, we hold open the possibility that our loss is not the end, is not in vain. It is precisely this sense, in opposition to a 'self-pitying "left-wing melancholy"', that we can locate in the work of another electronic musician operating not so much in the countercultural mode of the summers of love but in something closer to the continental post-1968 register, under the name of Farben.

Farben is one of the aliases used by German electronic musician Jan Jelinek, an artist who, while not exactly falling into the category of 'Intelligent Dance Music,' largely works in the more consciously experimental mode of electronic dance music than the hardcore continuum from which Burial comes. Farben, however, is his 'microhouse' project; (56) microhouse, later known as minimal techno, is a reductive, experimental and minimalist take on house and techno music, and Farben is thus perhaps the alias under which his most deliberately danceable work finds release. If Burial's music is music that wants to be danced to but cannot be, then Farben's is more like experimental music made danceable. Two aspects of Farben's work are particularly noteworthy for a discussion of the refusal to mourn: his sampling technique and choice of artwork. In an interview, Jelinek talks of his love of soul, funk and jazz music and its relation to his own sampling practices: 'When I listen to nice records, and they're begging to be sampled, I'm really motivated. Everybody knows the problem with songs which have a few seconds of brilliant arrangement, and you love the tracks just for those few seconds. I try to pick specifically those few seconds and expand them to minutes'. (57) This technique is perhaps most straightforwardly manifested in Farben's Featuring The Dramatics EP, (58) which makes reference to Detroit soul group The Dramatics (who are not, in fact, featured on the recording) and takes its song titles from live albums by Ornette Coleman ('At the Golden Circle Stockholm vol.1, 1965') and Isaac Hayes ('Live at the Sierra Tahoe 1973'), as well as on a record released under his own name at the same time as the bulk of the Farben material, Loop-finding-jazz-records. (59) This attempt to expand what, for Jelinek, are the best, fleeting moments of a song into a full-length piece go far beyond the typical use of sampling to loop or extend a funky beat or catchy melody and into something closer to a total transformation: through the use of digital processing and time-stretching it often becomes impossible to identify the original source material in Jelinek's redeployment. The essence of the technique, then, involves refusing to allow those fleeting 'few seconds' to expire, literally holding them open to allow something new to form.

The second notable aspect of Farben's work, or at least of the sequence of four 12" EPs beginning with Featuring The Dramatics released between 1999 and 2002, (60) is their choice of artwork. Each record features a monochrome photograph in a different colour (Farben being the German word for colours) according to the CMYK colour model for print separation: cyan, magenta, yellow and key black. (61) The photographs are no doubt digitally reproduced but appear halftone screened in the same way that each of the CMYK colours is when used in full-colour printing. In print, when all four colours are present together the image is smooth and uninterrupted; the effect when only a single colour is printed is akin to the Benday dots of old newsprint or a monochromatic Lichtensteinian Pop Art. The most striking aspect of the records' artwork, however, is not their technical composition but the content of the photography itself: each record features a different image of members of the German left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction.

In the historical register of post-1968 continental Europe, the weight of left-wing melancholy hangs heavy over the highly symbolic deaths of the most prominent members of the RAF in Stammheim prison in 1977. Even Guattari, writing about the film Deutschland im Herbst, (62) produced collectively by a number of influential German filmmakers (including Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlondorff) in the wake of the event, suggests in the title of his piece that it is 'Like the Echo of A Collective Melancholia.' This melancholia, he argues, stems from

the manipulation of events by the mass media ... The reference to
Sophocles' Antigone becomes a key to the film, the events in
Germany that autumn taking on the proportions of ancient drama. In
this light, the deaths of Hans-Martin Schleyer and of the RAF
prisoners would function as an outlet or an exorcism in two acts, a
double sacrifice meant to internalize a collective guilt that goes
back to Nazism and beyond that in a violence supposedly essential
to the German mentality. (63)
This 'exorcism in two acts' in the rapid burials of both Schleyer and the three RAF members (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe), footage of which bookends the film, serves not to accelerate the work of mourning but to deny it. Schlondorff's section of the film, co-written with Heinrich Boll, in which a director attempts to negotiate with television executives over the airing of his production of Antigone, becomes key precisely because it is the radical mourning of the fallen revolutionary that cannot be countenanced, that poses the true threat to the State. In such a reading, Stuttgart mayor Manfred Rommel's decision to allow the prisoners' bodies to be interred under the jurisdiction of his city becomes not, as Robert Storr sees it, 'one of the few genuinely noble moments of this otherwise dismal saga', (64) but instead clever, almost Machiavellian, statesmanship. It is the flip side, in some ways, of the categorical renunciation of violence that Guattari condemns in radicals (while at the same time also condemning the actions of the RAF) because it 'promotes the idea that the only means of social transformation are those sanctioned by the law'. (65) Rommel, in allowing what Creon's hamartia forbids him, ensures the smooth continuation of the State through the deradicalisation of the opposition--none are too radical to mourn and, by extension, no political mourning is necessary for the non-radical.

Thus, the scene is set for melancholy--or rather re-set, as the 'echo' in Guattari's essay suggests, for the 'collective guilt' that this 'double sacrifice' internalises is merely an expanded notion of the guilt that gave rise to the RAF itself as, to extend the psychoanalytic metaphor, the return of the repressed. This earlier guilt is, of course, post-war Germany's inability to fully face up to its not-so-distant Nazi past. For Eric Santner, building on Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's work on the German people's inability to mourn the loss of the Third Reich, (66) this inability is intimately related to the need for a safe social space in which to do the work of mourning: 'The self constitutes itself by homeopathically integrating the loss of its narcissistic fantasies of centrality and omnipotence ... takes place not in a vacuum but always in a particular social context ... ithout a social space in which this affect can be recuperated, the homeopathic operation becomes a sort of elegiac loop that must repeat itself endlessly'. (67) As a result of rapid reconstruction and the splitting of the German state along the ideological lines of the new, post-war political reality, that safe space was never cleared away, and the effect, as historical consensus has it, was the violent manifestation of the radical 'political choices made by the children whose parents cheered, or at least tolerated, Hitler'. (68)

It is this 'collective melancholia' twice over that informs another, more renowned, engagement with the legacy of the RAF, Gerhard Richter's 18 October 1977 series. Richter's paintings are monochromatic in an altogether different way from Farben's cover art: pallid, ashen, colourless. His strategy of letting the paintings speak for themselves--the question of why he painted them according to Storr 'one he never fully answered' (69)--is simultaneously disingenuous and painfully candid. Disingenuous because paintings such as these are in no way painted in a vacuum, candid because what is there that can be said, after all? The Youth Portrait of Ulrike Meinhof acts as a kind of counterpoint, 'a hypothetical innocent against which to gauge the ravages of' (70) the violence in the rest of the paintings: Confrontation, Arrest, Hanged, Man Shot Down, Dead, the Record Player in which the gun that killed Baader was hidden and, lastly, Funeral (here, too, the same kind of interstitial melancholia we find in the name Burial). (71) The paintings are deeply melancholic and profoundly unresolved: 'Underlying the despair that seems evenly spread across them, there is anger'. (72)

There are obvious similarities between the Farben record covers and the Richter paintings, but the impression conveyed by the photographs reproduced on the Farben EPs is not one of unresolved trauma but of a pregnant, even joyful sensation. The images show neither the polarizing figures of Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and Raspe (73) nor the RAF saga's violent and out-of-control denouement so blankly depicted by Richter, but rather the lives of the young and idealistic ancillary members of the group. In some way we have Richter to thank for these pictures, taken from former RAF member Astrid Proll's intimate collection of photographs, although even for her there is a stark difference between the photographs that would be chosen by Farben and those that were chosen by Richter:

When I look at these photos today I am both struck and delighted by
the youthful power, vitality and unmasked beauty which emanates
from several faces and bodies. Other photographs, however, the
pictures of dead people, I was unable to look at for many years.
Thanks to the painter Gerhard Richter, whose 'Cycle 18th October
1977' freed these pictures from their mass media context, I was
finally able to approach them. (74)
It is clearly the former category of pictures that, in contrast to Richter's cycle, are represented in the Farben covers (which can be viewed online at www.discogs.com/artist/farben): Thorwald Proll, Astrid's brother, with a cigar between his teeth, laughing during the arson trial while Horst Sohnlein looks sideways inquisitively; (75) Irene Goergens and Ingrid Schubert leaning over to ask questions at trial; (76) Goergens smoking a cigarette after her arrest; (77) and Holger Meins, whose eventual death by hunger strike Richter would initially paint only to subsequently paint over, (78) depicted here as a headphone-wearing audio engineer showing just a hint of a smile. (79) Instead of tragic melancholy, then, what we find in these pictures is the refusal to mourn.

For Jay, Benjamin's refusal to mourn is intricately related to melancholia; it is in some ways simply a sort of traumatic melancholy that is left-wing -without descending into 'left-wing melancholy,' as when he argues that 'there could be no guarantee that Benjamin's desperate wager on melancholic intransigence and resistance to commemorative healing would ultimately bring about the genuine redemption for which he so fervently yearned'. (80) Yet, he writes, in another, 'profoundly paradoxical sense, the catastrophe and the redemption were the same, and the infinite ritual repetition without closure not a means, but an end'. (81) This early act of psychic resistance resonates with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek's argument that Benjamin's later characterization of revolution as the emergency brake on the runaway train of civilization should be reconceived around the futur anterieur, the French grammatical tense designating that which will have been: 'instead of saying "the future is still open, we still have the time to act and prevent the worst", one should accept the catastrophe as inevitable, and then act to retroactively undo what is already "written in the stars" as our destiny'. (82) Here, Benjamin's positive use of his traumatic loss as inspiration for his own political project ultimately transcends both mourning and melancholy in its refusal to mourn.

It is precisely this positivistic conception, I would argue, that is the mechanism at work across the record covers and musical production techniques of these four extraordinary records. The recasting of these images, so often elided, forgotten, unexplained, unspeakable, through the mechanism of colour separation suggests that they in fact remain an invisible but constituent part of cultural life today and holds open the possibility for their future synthesis, their subjects' jubilant yet esurient expressions not so much haunting as hopeful. In so doing, it suggests that their future history will have been something other than what it is today. As Zizek suggests, such a retroactive view of these images' present utility requires a reconceptualization of temporality as well: 'we have to introduce a new notion of time'. (83) Viewed in this way, Jelinek's looping use of samples is a far cry from Santner's 'elegiac loop.' His technique is not narcissistic, but rather seeks to hold open what are, for him, the most compelling moments of an African-American musical tradition so often identified with a bittersweet combination of joy and sorrow in the hopes that, as with the record covers, something new, transformative and ultimately redemptive can be made out of them.

In short, then, there is something not Ecstatic but joyful about this refusal to mourn that distinguishes it from mourning and melancholy, from the predominant post-war model of traumatic loss. The difference between Benjamin's refusal to mourn and what the Mitscherlichs described as post-war Germany's inability to mourn, writes Jay, 'is the critical distinction between a refusal to mourn that knows all too well what its object is ... and is afraid that mourning will close the case prematurely on the cause for which they died, and a refusal to mourn based on a denial that there was anything lost in the first place'. (84) In Farben, we can see this positivistic refusal become joyous and, in so doing, offer a way out for the melancholy afflicting both the traditionalist, historical materialist left and the left of postmodern radical subjectivity. In concluding their initial attempt at theoretically effecting a synthesis between what Brown sees as these two opposing left-wing factions, Hardt and Negri write, 'Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves ... posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control--because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist'. (85) Despite its utopian failings and Burial's funereal elegy, electronic dance music remains a privileged indicator of precisely such a joy, not merely a 'communism of emotions', but the emotion of communism. For Hardt and Negri's exhortation is not all that dissimilar, ultimately, from the final sentence of a paragraph which Simon Reynolds claims transformed his entire conception of music, a paragraph in--of all things--a review of the darkly orgiastic Australian post-punk group The Birthday Party that would eventually lead him, and us, to rave culture and beyond: 'We must make of joy once more a crime against the State'. (86)

DOI: 10.3898/NEWF.75.07.2012

(1.) Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York, Columbia University Press, 2005, p5.

(2.) Walter Benjamin, 'Left-Wing Melancholy' in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, pp304-6.

(3.) Gilroy, op. cit., p107.

(4.) Sigmund Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia' trans. James Strachey in General Psychological Theory ed. Philip Rieff, New York, Touchstone, 1997, pp166.

(5.) Ibid., p170.

(6.) Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, 'Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation' in The Shell and the Kernel vol.1 Nicholas T. Rand (ed and trans), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p126.

(7.) Freud, op. cit., p179.

(8.) Benjamin, op. cit., p305.

(9.) Ibid.

(10.) Abraham and Torok, op. cit., p127.

(11.) Our Friends in the North, Peter Flannery (writer), Simon Cellan-Jones, Pedr James, Stuart Urban (dirs), BBC, 1996.

(12.) Freedom Rider, Labour Party apparatchik, left-wing terrorist, socially conscious photojournalist indeed, as one of the main story arcs of the series, which is told through nine year-long episodic instalments situated intermittently between 1964 and 1994, it aims precisely to narrativise the dramatic upheavals in post-war British left-wing political agency.

(13.) Wendy Brown, 'Resisting Left Melancholy', Boundary 2, 26,3 (1999): 24.

(14.) Ibid., p22.

(15.) Ibid., pp25-6.

(16.) Ibid.

(17.) Ibid., p23.

(18.) Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound, London, Routledge, 1999, pp83-4.

(19.) E.g., Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London, Methuen and Co., 1979.

(20.) Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Hanover, Wesleyan University Press, 1996, pp9-10.

(21.) Gilbert and Pearson, op. cit., p96.

(22.) Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (updated 20th anniversary edition), London, Picador, 2008, p44.

(23.) Richard Smith, 'Us Boys Together Clinging: One Night in a Gay Club' in Seduced and Abandoned: Essays on Gay Men and Popular Music, London, Cassell, 1995, p228.

(24.) Reynolds 2008, op. cit., p191.

(25.) Ronald Fraser, Daniel Bertaux, Bret Eynon, Ronald Grele, Beatrix Le Wita, Daniele Linhart, Luisa Passerini, Jochen Staadt and Annemarie Troger, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988, p118.

(26.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 'How do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?' in A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p165. Reynolds briefly alludes to this discussion of drug use and the Body without Organs, which he identifies as 'the Ecstatic body' (Reynolds 2008, op. cit., p190) in his discussion of Ecstasy burnout. In material added to the updated edition, he elaborates on the drug's relationship to various conceptions of flow, including the Body without Organs (ibid., 410-11).

(27.) Reynolds lists melancholia, albeit without elaboration, as one of the negative effects of the drug 'in the long run' (ibid., 190).

(28.) Matthew Collin with contributions by John Godfrey, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (2nd edition), London, Serpent's Tail, 1997, p295.

(29.) Freud, op. cit., p166.

(30.) Reynolds 2008, op. cit., pxxvi.

(31.) Ibid., pxxiv.

(32.) The Streets, 'Weak Become Heroes' on Original Pirate Material, 679 Recordings 679003CDLP.

(33.) Gilroy, op. cit., p95.

(34.) Ibid., p96.

(35.) Skinner makes reference to this history in the song's outro, saying, 'And to the government, I stick my middle finger up with regards to the Criminal Justice Bill', which effectively outlawed outdoor raves in 1994.

(36.) Mark Fisher, 'London After the Rave', http://k-punk. abstractdynamics. org/archives/007666. html.

(37.) Ibid.

(38.) By contrast, Reynolds highlights the name's affinity with the long trajectory of terminology borrowed from the highly competitive milieu of Jamaican sound systems that runs through the hardcore continuum. Nevertheless, finding this obsessive devotion to hardcore culture exemplary of the genre as a whole, he tentatively reaches a similar conclusion: 'dubstep as rave's afterlife, or even a form of mourning without letting go' (Reynolds 2008, op. cit., p515), i.e., melancholia.

(39.) Freud, op. cit., p167. Compare this description to Burial's revelation of his identity on his MySpace page, where he concludes by essentially apologizing to the hardcore continuum for not being worthy of it: 'for a while theres been some talk about who i am, but its not a big deal, i wanted to be unknown because i just want it to be all about the tunes ... im a lowkey person and i just want to make some tunes, nothing else. my names will bevan, im from south london, im keeping my head down and just going to finish my next album ... sorry for any rubbish tunes i made in the past, ill make up for it'. The message has since been largely redacted but can be found in its original form at http://www. beatportal.com/feed/ item/burials-identityfinally-revealed/.

(40.) Song titles are taken from Burial's two full-length albums, Burial, Hyperdub HDBCD001 and Untrue Hyperdub HDBCD002, as well as the South London Boroughs EP, Hyperdub HDB001 and the 5 Years oof Hyperdub compilation, Hyperdub HDBCD005.

(41.) Many critics have noted this connection between night transport and clubbing in Burial's music. In his fascinating recent book, published as this article was going to press, Reynolds goes even further, writing that 'Night Bus' 'evokes the loneliness of catching the late-night bus back to the outer zones of London after going to a club. But it is also a postmillennial nocturne for the loss of a collective sense of purpose: it says, "After the nineties, we're all on the Night Bus now"', Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past New York, Faber and Faber, 2011, pp393-4. See also his earlier discussion of Burial and 'Night Bus' in Reynolds 2008, op. cit., pp514-5.

(42.) See Simon Reynolds' blissblog, http:// blissout.blogspot. com/2006/01/mike powell-evocativeand-thought.html. While Reynolds' usage is the first in this context it has subsequently been expanded upon by Fisher at http://k-punk. abstractdynamics. org/archives/008535. html (where he specifically applies it to Burial), not to mention countless others in the musical 'blogosphere.'

(43.) Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx trans. Peggy Kamuf, London, Routledge, 1994, p10. Consider also the Freudian conception of Nachtrdglichkeit, in the sense of 'deferred action', which implies, as Haydee Faimberg argues, 'two inseparable phases, one of anticipation and another of retrospection ... this movement is complex and related in reciprocal causation, i.e. dialectical', Haydee Faimberg, Telescoping oof Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links between Generations, London, Routledge, 2005, p110.

(44.) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto Samuel Moore (trans), London, Penguin, 2002, p218.

(45.) Derrida, op. cit., p64.

(46.) Ibid., p69.

(47.) Fisher, op. cit.

(48.) Echoing Fisher and anticipating my own language to an extent, Reynolds characterizes Burial, in his most recent book (any similarities are purely accidental as, again, his work was published as this article was going to press; see note 41), as 'imagining that this music still is the future, somehow: a bridge to tomorrow that was never finished but just hangs there in space, poised pointing to something out-of-reach and unattainable', Reynolds 2011, op. cit., 394. While there is undoubtedly a kind of utopian yearning in this stance, as I argue below, a progressive relationship to such past traumas must take them as losses to be worked through, rather than merely recapitulated, in order to distinguish itself from melancholia.

(49.) Gilbert and Pearson, op. cit., p184.

(50.) Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (ed and trans), London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p175.

(51.) See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York, Penguin, 2004, p355: 'This new science of the multitude based on the common ... is composed of radical differences, singularities, that can never be synthesized in an identity. The radicality of gender difference, for example, can be included in the biopolitical organization of social life, the life renovated by the multitude, only when every discipline of labor, affect, and power that makes gender difference into an index or hierarchy is destroyed'.

(52.) Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp1-2.

(53.) Martin Jay, 'Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn' in Refractions of Violence, London, Routledge, 2003, p16.

(54.) Michel Foucault in the preface to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, pxii.

(55.) Ross, op. cit., p215.

(56.) A genre coined by music journalist Philip Sherburne to describe an emerging genre of electronic music, including Farben. See Philip Sherburne, 'MicroHouse: The Rules of Reduction,' in The Wire 209 (July 2001): 18-25.

(57.) Quoted in Michael Upton, 'An Interview with Jan Jelinek (Farben)' in Igloo Magazine, http://igloomag.com/ profiles/an-interview-with-jan-jelinekfarben.

(58.) Farben, Featuring The Dramatics, Klang Elektronik KLANG 32.

(59.) Jan Jelinek, Loop-finding-jazz-records, escape 007.

(60.) Farben, Featuring The Dramatics as well as Raw Macro Klang Elektronik KLANG 39, Beautone Klang Elektronik KLANG 48 and Farben. Says: Don't Fight Phrases Klang Elektronik KLANG 65. This last EP appears to take its title from Marx and Engels' critique of the Young Hegelians as 'in no way combating the real existing world when they are combating solely the phrases of this world', Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology Part One with Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts C.J. Arthur (ed), New York, International Publishers, 2007, p41.

(61.) In the CMYK colour model, the full spectrum of colours is created on paper by printing combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink.

(62.) Deutschland im Herbst, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlondorff, Alf Brustellin, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka, Peter Schubert, Bernhard Sinkel, Hans Peter Cloos, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupe (dirs), 1978.

(63.) Felix Guattari, 'Like the Echo of A Collective Melancholia' in Sylvere Lotringer (ed), Semiotext(e): The German Issue (2nd edition), Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2009: 103.

(64.) Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2000, p63.

(65.) Guattari, op. cit., p106. See also Slavoj Zizek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?, London, Verso, 2000, pp167-8: 'It is not enough to say that I decide to disobey the positive public law out of respect for a more fundamental law ... Antigone's gesture of civil disobedience is much more radically "performative": through her insistence on giving her dead brother a proper funeral, she defies the predominant notion of "Good"'.

(66.) Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior Beverly R. Placzek (trans), New York, Grove Press, 1975. Gilroy also draws on the Mitscherlichs for his conception of British postcolonial melancholia; see Gilroy, op. cit., pp96-7.

(67.) Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp23-5.

(68.) Storr, op. cit., p44.

(69.) Ibid., p97.

(70.) Ibid., p106.

(71.) Reproductions of the paintings can be found in ibid.

(72.) Ibid., p96.

(73.) In fact, Baader and Ensslin have been cropped out of the cover of Featuring The Dramatics.

(74.) Astrid Proll, Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67-77, Zurich, Scalo, 1998, p7.

(75.) Featuring The Dramatics, in cyan. Original photograph taken from ibid., p42.

(76.) Beautone, in magenta. Original photograph taken from ibid., p80.

(77.) Raw Macro, in yellow. Original photograph taken from ibid., p76-7.

(78.) Storr, op. cit., p96.

(79.) Farben. Says: Don't Fight Phrases, in black. Original photograph taken from Proll, op. cit., p27.

(80.) Jay, op. cit., p22.

(81.) Ibid., p24.

(82.) Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, London, Verso, 2008, p460. For Benjamin's formulation, see Walter Benjamin, 'Paralipomena to "On the Concept of History"', in Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p402.

(83.) Ibid., p459.

(84.) Jay, op. cit., p22.

(85.) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000, p413.

(86.) Barney Hoskyns, 'Sometimes Pleasure Heads Must Burn --A Manhattan Melodrama', New Musical Express, 17 October 1981 (archived at http:// www.rocksbackpages. com/article.html? ArticleID = 2882) quoted in Reynolds 2008, op. cit., pxxi.

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(87.) Matt Marriott, "We know now who were the End Times Prophets. There were only THREE," SomethingAwful Forums, http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2966895