Notes From Psychick Albion
I’ve decided to share below my introduction from the forthcoming issue of Undefined Boundary because it has a bearing on current events. It’s a first draft so may be subject to revision.
“Spring, Summer ‘26
When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it
Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell
Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film”
Charli xcx ‘SS26’
At the time of writing it feels as though the world is going to hell in a handcart. To be fair, this is a trajectory we have been following for some time but in the UK right now it looks like we are heading for another summer of riots and pogroms. Since last summer, many towns and cities have been targeted by a politically motivated campaign which displays Union Flags and St George’s Cross flags tied to lampposts and other public structures in an attempt to define and confine the meaning of being British. Whether by accident or design it is actually quite a clever form of protest because anyone who objects is always asked why they have a problem with their own national flag. After all, it is a symbol of unity, the argument goes, so surely those who object to its proliferation are the ones who are really causing division. It’s a clever ploy because it presents the projection and amplification of right wing political viewpoints as being synonymous with the national interest and therefore naturally benign. These flags are a visual manifestation of the broader ideological landscape which presents capitalist intrusions and violations as being natural, and resistance to them as being weird, isolated perversions. This is why, in the words of Mark Fisher, “emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
For Fisher, one way of waking ourselves up from this ideological fugue state is to revisit past moments of radical potential and to recapture exactly what it was that made them so exciting and liberatory. He points out that reactionary politics will always seek to suppress the more radical moments of our history so that their potential will remain forever dormant. This can be seen in the 90s phenomenon of Britpop which completely purged the 60s counterculture of its psychedelic potency in favour of a reactionary reassertion of its merely stylistic elements. Britpop itself was a conscious step back from the queerness of much alternative culture that had emerged in the 80s, and its swaggering machismo has fed into present day philistinism where flags are prominent once more in a still more debased way. It is our task to revisit those moments of lost potential, to revitalise their radicalism, and to reject more reactionary readings of their history.
For most of Gen X who grew up in Britain, there was a feeling of progression into a new world that we can now sum up with the image of Bowie: the posthuman, gender magician whose death seemed to mark the beginning of the enshittification of everything. Back then, it felt like we were a country moving from black and white into colour. At the moment we are moving from colour into sepia tinted AI images. Many of those who support the flag campaign share nostalgia fuelled AI generated photos that depict the ‘real’ Britain that has now been lost: a Britain of happy, white faces living in an Edenic contentment. The irony of this supposed authenticity being validated through artificial intelligence is lost on its supporters who themselves are lost in a reverie of a halcyon England, but the shallowness of this mythic structure is no measure of its efficacy. The second world war was the last moment of greatness in the official British autohagiography and its shadow still looms large even as our global power and influence shrink.
But one area where we do still retain a disproportionately large influence is in art and culture. British film, music, and TV have a global reach and a multiplicity of voice that belies the insularity and narrow mindedness of the so-called patriots. So, although Charli is right that “we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell” she is wrong to say that “Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film”. She has made her unique glam-Ballardian aesthetic globally popular, demonstrating that she is a true daughter of Bowie. This is itself proof that countercultural moments might still be possible.