Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru
White Tears | Knopf | 2017 | 271 pages
Red Pill | Knopf | 2020 | 304 pages
Blue Ruin | Knopf | 2024 | 272 pages
“I was present—in myself, in the world. I was alive.”
– Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin
With the publication of Blue Ruin, Hari Kunzru has rounded off a loose trilogy about the cultural and political constitution of our present, stretching from 2017’s White Tears and continuing in 2020’s Red Pill. All are Künstlerromane—novels of the artist—a form the philosopher Ernst Bloch identifies as involving “recognition of and interest in the creative person who brings out something new instead of something past.” Blue Ruin’s focus on the production and circulation of visual art makes it the most concerned of the three to broadcast its participation in this genre. Indeed, it’s the operative counterposing of novelty to the past in Bloch’s definition that motivates the book’s central device. With its principal action set during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Blue Ruin is interspersed with long retrospective passages detailing the central characters’ involvement with the artworld of the mid-to-late nineties and early aughts. From the very first pages, it’s apparent that much of Kunzru’s interest lies in constructing a specific narrative from very recent history and calling it to explanatory account.
We first meet Blue Ruin’s protagonist, Jay, as an essential worker (“driving, in the time of no time, pandemic time, formless and without direction”) delivering groceries to an expensive though tastefully-sized home on a remote tract of private land in upstate New York. The place is owned by an absent business magnate and currently being house-sat by his art dealer, but it’s Alice whom Jay encounters at the front door. In the kind of stagey coincidence that even some of Kunzru’s characters suspect as too neat, Jay and Alice have a past: they dated and took many drugs together more than twenty years ago in London, at a time when Jay was an on-the-make conceptual artist and Alice entertained aspirations of becoming a curator. Jay meanwhile is living in his car following an eviction and now suffers from long COVID, while Alice enjoys an apparent affluence sharing life with her husband Rob. The final complication of Blue Ruin’s conceit is made clear with Jay’s recognition of this Rob as the same man he met in art school, formerly his closest friend, with whom he has acrimoniously fallen out of touch, and who has since found success in the United States as a painter. Their meeting has all the eerie necessity of fate. Jealous Rob and others at times smell a rat in Jay’s story. In either case, it’s a realization that will occasion the recollections comprising nearly half the novel.
The rivalry between Jay and Rob remains propulsive and fun throughout, and as a verbal comedy of more or less sublimated homosocial competition catalyzed by an impressive woman, Blue Ruin works partly as a Challengers for the Gen-X art scene. Here also the male claimants illustrate a dramatic encounter between intellect and intuition. As Jay has it: “There are really only two kinds of artist. You’re either an intellectual or a savage, and you don’t really have a choice about which. Rob was a savage, of course… For me, making art was inescapably cerebral.” With this archetypal condensation, Kunzru also manages to capture two functional poles of the moment in art history he’s eager to chart: that of the Young British Artists.
Blue Ruin is at its strongest when Kunzru writes about culture he clearly loves. It helps that the United Kingdom of the nineties found itself in a state of photogenic uneven development that would yield such cultural fruit as Cool Britannia, advances in electronic music from trip hop to increasingly harder forms of techno, and a revitalization of London’s commercial galleries. Palpable in the air of the novel’s first act is the period’s initial burst of post-Thatcher exuberance, with an aesthetic brashness to match.
Jay’s practice as a conceptual artist in this milieu also affords Kunzru a lot of opportunity for the intermedia commentary at which he excels. With one particularly memorable piece, Jay rigs himself to a system of weights and pulleys while sitting behind a drum set, trying to keep time with a metronome that “gradually got faster and faster, until it became inhuman, impossible to match.” In this is recognizable a kind of analog realization of the rapid breakbeat—the practice of audio sampling on which jungle music is based, where drum solos are sped up and stretched beyond human capability to play, at last yielding digitized sounds of twitchy abstraction. Insinuating himself between the drum and machine, Kunzru’s artist narrator then achieves a suggestive and future-oriented failure in the same mode as jungle’s technological pessimism.
However, there seems simultaneously to be optimism baked into the very premise of a cultural or technical vanguard—that art should be progressive in a linear and additive sense, or even continuous with the modernist injunction to make it new. In Kunzru’s hands, the Young British Artists and their scenester hangers-on help to narrate a change in sensibility that occurred somewhere in the elapse between twentieth and twenty-first century. The contradictions inherent in an artistic movement predicated on the insider-outsider play of celebrity and shock are illustrated with capable economy, as Kunzru invents in the margins of art history to both exemplify and add to the period’s ideas. If there’s a thesis here, one crucial component is Blue Ruin’s attendance to the problematical attachment of artworks to the commodity form. Jay comes to wonder whether effective institutional critique is at all compatible with an art career, while everywhere around him the visual culture stales in too-clever abstraction on the one hand or a rush to push painting in the direction of increasingly weighty industrial materials on the other. At last these tensions all come to be comprehended and expressed in the brand name YBA.
In Kunzru’s account, the commercial world runs on creative energies as a too-consumable resource. The Hackney squat in a former factory building that Jay and Rob have worked to convert into a gallery space is viewed by theory-head Alice as a “a kind of utopian laboratory,” in which new modes of collective living and creative practice can be experimentally adopted. This play is tolerated well enough until the artists are unceremoniously kicked out when the building gets redeveloped. The turn of the century too is anticipated in terms of its utopian charge: amid political developments ranging from the Zapatistas to the counter-globalization movement, “it seemed possible we were on the cusp of a change.” In actual fact, the year 2000 marks an inflection point in Blue Ruin’s story of disappointment. Alice and Jay ring in a “miserable millennium” on New Year’s Eve. And more:
A famous Chinese artist was to send some kind of pyrotechnic dragon down the Thames, or over it, no one really knew, but in any case there had been a technical error and it hadn’t worked. There was no dragon, just throngs of drunk people, seething and surging on the narrow roadway…
For Kunzru, the image of an anticipated artwork collapsing under the weight of its own ambition is felicitous. Eventually it seems the new kinds of connective subjectivity heralded by nineties artmaking and cyberculture have failed to arrive in their promised liberatory form. One narrative at work in Blue Ruin is a postmortem investigation of an era which endeavored to imagine the future. In these early, rosy accounts of information technology’s compensatory potential, it’s by turns difficult and effortless to recognize the embryonic makings of our own moment.
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Blue Ruin’s forays into the nature and organization of cultural time share much with the concerns of the trilogy’s other two volumes—fitting the sturdy facts of material history with a far more mercurial history of structures of feeling that Kunzru undertakes to capture in literary form. Where this most recent entry deals with visual art, White Tears begins from an interest in the disjointed temporality of American music. Appropriately, it’s a ghost story.
The sophistication of Kunzru’s account of contemporary pop music is evident in his choice to focus largely on musical production rather than the performance of musical instruments or composition (à la Doctor Faustus). With the evolution of the album form alongside the technical development of multitrack recording, an increasing share of musical authorship comes to be attributed to the figure of the producer, whose practice is the manipulation of recorded sound. Kunzru’s contribution to the Künstlerroman is then partly to narrate the creative time and decision making specific to the digital audio workstation. White Tears’s focus on production also enables the novel to forefront music’s tricky division of labor, helpfully crystallizing a question that returns with insistence throughout the whole trilogy: to whom does culture belong?
White Tears’s principal action importantly begins at the tail end of last decade’s vaporous post-racial consensus. Narrator Seth is one half of a production team alongside his friend Carter, who bankrolls their expensive creative necessities of equipment and rent for a New York City recording studio through family money, the origins of which are shrouded in polite discretion. Of the pair, Seth is obviously the more gifted technician and audiophile, spending his days drifting through the city with a pair of in-ear binaural microphones and listening to these field recordings back home on their state-of-the-craft setup. For his own part, Carter has become a producer through the path of conspicuous consumption, exhausting his appetite to collect first dub records, then hip hop (“scouring the internet for twelve-inches by regional producers from the eighties and nineties”), ethnographic recordings, and doo-wop, until finally his taste isn’t satisfied by anything except music entirely free of digital sound. In Carter’s moneyed glide through recherché record bins, a recognizably hipster valorization of authenticity is displayed—familiar relic from a moment when bands were alternately selling their guitars to buy turntables and their turntables to buy guitars, in anxious uncertainty as to which was more “real.”
The mediatory role of the internet in Carter’s dogged pursuit of reality’s grain is telling too. Indeed, the production style that he and Seth have hit on—sending musicians back decades through the pastiche addition of reverb, “surface noise, a hint of needle plowing through static”—is possible thanks only to the computer’s technological intervention, the analog restored through digital means, just as the fetishistic trade in rare folk recordings relies on the infrastructure of eBay. The appeal of such a constructed and easily retrievable past ultimately proves narcotizing: “The present is dry, but add reverb and you can hear time reverse its flow, slipping on into the past, into echo and disaster.” This is the sound of history submitted to commercial style, made treacly, now one genre in market competition with others, reversing time’s flow so as to project timelessness.
“When did I lose touch with the future?” Seth asks himself. Carter’s “melancholy attachment to the crackle and hiss” is cited as one contributing factor, though ultimately Seth cannot escape his own aching complicity in nostalgia alongside an attendant foreclosure of progress. “I remember how imminent it used to feel, how exciting,” Seth continues, speaking of his erstwhile interest in electronic music. “Now I would say that the future is behind me.”
With his introduction of “crackle,” Kunzru also avails himself of a term—developed in the British music press by critics Ian Penman, Simon Reynolds, and perhaps most decisively by the late Mark Fisher—which engages exactly this dynamic of paradoxical temporality in mass culture, and which later helpfully gathers a genre of producer-musicians under the name “hauntology.”
“Crackle unsettles the very distinction between surface and depth, between background and foreground,” Fisher writes in his 2013 essay “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology.” Laid over a track like room tone, crackle all at once imparts the gravity and authority of physical media precisely where there is none, collapsing the dimensionality of music with these faux retouches. Here Fisher is writing about similar musical techniques to the ones Kunzru’s Seth and Carter employ—though Fisher’s appraisal of crackle overall proves more ambiguously positive. In either case, throughout his music criticism Fisher is concerned to highlight the complex, Janus-faced potential at work in the citational and crackle-laden output of such figures as Massive Attack’s Tricky, Burial, The Caretaker, and other purveyors of electronic esoterica mostly releasing music through the Ghost Box label.
Hauntology in its philosophical sense is a concept of Derridean provenance, affixing an “h” to “ontology” (the addition is punning and silent in French, in the mode of différance’s secreted “a”). Appropriately, it works to name the effectivity of the absent, the spectral being of that which haunts, coupling a ghostly historical resonance with deconstruction’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. Applying this word to music, Fisher diagnoses one aesthetic response to the erosion of future-facing music within exceedingly living memory, through which the consequences of commercialization and austerity in the Anglosphere are registered in cultural form. As Fisher introduces the essays collected in Ghosts of My Life:
In hauntological music there is an implicit acknowledgment that the hopes created by postwar electronics or by the euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated—not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible. Yet at the same time, the music constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future. This refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.
In hauntological music’s obstinate attendance to the future, there is an exceeding interest in the latent potentials of the past. Its techniques represent a bid to salvage possible paths for a music stopped by historical disaster and to exhibit them in revenant form.
The music of White Tears’s Seth and Carter acknowledges no such political basis, and the consequences are far different when Carter takes a few bars of a blues song—sung by an anonymous Black man in Washington Square Park, stealthily captured by Seth—and then adds guitar before uploading it to the internet as one side of an “authentic” phonograph recorded under the name of Charlie Shaw. With the introduction of this premise, White Tears tips strongly into the mode of horror, as Seth and Carter are first messaged by a hermetic hobby collector who is insistent that Charlie Shaw is a real blues singer and “Graveyard Blues” his single extant pressing. The remainder of the novel then unspools at a nightmare clip. Carter is beaten into a coma while attempting to find the singer of the “original” vocal track late at night in the Bronx. Seth meanwhile pursues the historical traces of a record he knows to be unreal with fugue-like insistence. White Tears’s narration finally comes to be overtaken by a polyphony of voices not Seth’s own, excavating a history of the recording and transmission of American blues, which can’t but simultaneously be a story about the expropriation of wealth and cultural production from Black communities. That the pair of white boys who number among the book’s decentered organizational foci are not interested in this past does not protect them from being symptomatized by it in the present.
“The one who is possessed,” Fisher writes elsewhere (of Tricky’s 1995 solo debut Maxinquaye), “is also dispossessed—of their own identity and voice.” Kunzru plays masterfully with this reversibility of possession, and the erasure of Seth’s narratorial identity achieves much the same effect in literature as hauntological music’s abstraction of the singing voice realizes through the ersatz degradation of physical media. Finally, Kunzru issues a historical correction with his insistence that there’s strictly nothing new about the future’s failure to arrive. Where hauntological music of the kind Fisher describes channels one spirit of popular modernism that has stalled with the end of history, White Tears’s Charlie Shaw as the living-dead, simultaneously real and unreal “singer” of “Graveyard Blues” never got to record in the first place because he was arrested for vagrancy on his way to the studio in Jackson. His death finally comes at the hands of a pair of cruel overseer brothers who will eventually amass Carter’s family fortune through the enterprise that by the time of White Tears’s present day has snowballed into a globally-leading provider of private prisons.
Charlie Shaw as a ghostly present absence then reaches paranormally through the digital static like an electronic voice phenomenon. Both culture and revenge are accomplished through this never-finished play of virtual displacements. Historical trauma is compelled to repeat at massive and microscopic scales, too, when Seth finds himself dispossessed of the music that he and Carter made together—a lock has been placed on the studio with all Seth’s equipment and files inside. As a lawyer for the family tells him: “I understand that Carter Wallace was primarily responsible for the creative content of your musical productions, and you acted in a technical capacity.” It’s fitting that Seth’s final retaliation should also be Charlie Shaw’s, as the narrator comes to be possessed by the spirit of a history well beyond his understanding or control, living out the contradictions of American music in his very nerve endings, until at last such terms as listener or author or point of view are dissolved in White Tears’s sonic field of suprapersonal forces.
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In sourcing the concepts that Kunzru plays with to greater or lesser degrees of explicitness throughout his trilogy of novels, it’s tempting to read a biographical disclosure. Kunzru shared elbow space with Fisher alongside a host of other bleeding edge thinkers and cultural producers while a philosophy graduate student in the mid-nineties at the University of Warwick. And just as in Blue Ruin, these proved banner years for the English-language reception of French poststructuralism, exploration of the early internet, and close heed to the precursory potential of electronic music. All those threads (and many more) would eventually coalesce in the activities and output of a collective of junior academics as well as graduate students in literature and philosophy—their licensed affiliation with Warwick dubious at best—who by 1995 were calling themselves the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.
The writing and research agenda into which Kunzru was impressed as a young student centered around a broad range of related concerns: feedback systems, nonlinear causality, emergent properties, punkish aesthetics, a William S. Burroughs-beholden “positive unbelief” in the magickal effectivity of language, and an operatively inexhaustible list of further futurological ideas and multihyphenate neologisms. Much of the CCRU’s writing is collaboratively attributed, in imitation of the four-handed writing technique by which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari produced the two volumes of their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The ideas in currency all share a strong post-humanist commitment too, as the material and social processes which the CCRU undertook to theorize come to exceed the capacities of human agents. Literary authorship can’t but look particularly outmoded according to such an approach, and the collective nature of the CCRU’s at times willfully opaque writing realizes this idea in practice.
2020’s Red Pill treats less of what Bloch calls the artist-novel’s “adventure of the breakthrough” than it does the programmatic breakdown of its narrator, an unnamed writer who arrives in Germany on an artistic grant to complete a loosely defined research project about “the lyric I.” At moments the diffuse nature of this question is papered over by a litany of abstruse jargon: “lyric poetry, a textual technology for the organization of affective experience, a container in which modern selfhood had come to be formulated, and so on and so forth.” Part of this awkwardness in definition can be attributed to the humanist’s difficult task of justifying a research agenda in the same terms as other, more empirically-oriented disciplines. One of the narrator’s interlocutors, an Endowed Chair pedant in neurophilosophy, will however have none of it: “My ‘lyric I’ or whatever I wanted to call it, might, he granted, have value in the realm of intellectual history, but only as a poignant artifact of a period that was drawing to a close.”
Red Pill can at such points be seen to share with White Tears and Blue Ruin an emphasis on identity formation through culture. The “I” invoked by lyric poetry—and in which the narrator has invested a significance that is at times more personal than methodological—comes to be undermined throughout the novel, to the extent that its existence in the first place at last seems dubious. “As a child I experienced myself as a ghostly event in the world,” Kunzru’s protagonist writes. “It came first, this ‘self,’ before everything, before thought or action. It was the place where I was, my present moment.” The self at the center of Red Pill, set in the momentous U.S. election year of 2016, is subject to a battery of threats all the way from neurophilosophy’s functional critique of selfhood as a cognitive fiction to such invasions of privacy as the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and further kinds of digital surveillance.
What seems the most serious interruption of the narrator’s would-be solitary investigations into the “lyric I” is broached with the title’s red pill. Just as White Tears’s account of music is based on a productive tension between performer and producer, Red Pill plays on the awkwardness with which our use of the word “writer” belies a huge professional and practical distinction between literature and television. The narrator’s eventual red pilling—that is, his initiatory descent into the world of fringe right-wing extremism in his bouts of torpor and anxiety abroad—arrives in the form of a police procedural, the creator and showrunner of which he becomes obsessed with and into whom he chances to run at an arts charity event in Berlin. With Anton Bridgeman, Kunzru finds another rivalrous foil and object for his main character’s mimetic desire. Like White Tears’s Seth and Carter or Blue Ruin’s Jay and Rob, Red Pill’s left-liberal narrator and Anton seem locked in a confusing admixture of love and hate. Meanwhile the social vision that Bridgeman surreptitiously pushes through his TV show’s coded, dog whistle script is bleak:
Whatever the substrate, carbon-based or not, he thought the future belonged to those who could separate themselves out from the herd, intelligence-wise. In fifty years’ time, many humans would be surplus, just so much unproductive biomass warehoused on some form of universal basic income. Everything important would be done by a small cognitive elite of humans and AIs, working together to self-optimize.
Indeed, in this ultra-rightist politics oriented around a futuristic optimizable self, there is a recognizable portrait of the figure whose druggy charisma would eventually crystalize into quasi cult leadership of the CCRU: Nick Land.
The accelerationism emerging out of the CCRU’s work has been a great many things to many people. At the time, its invitation to heterodoxy attracted some of Warwick’s most committed opponents to capitalism as well as Land, so staunch a partisan of capitalism as to believe that it has never been tried in its most rarefied, essential form. Indeed, markets left in human hands are never free enough according to Land’s position, and one tendency in his philosophical project is towards a misanthropic liberation of the means of production themselves, technological revolution in the strictest sense, and certainly at catastrophizing expense for the majority of people globally. Cyberculture’s vision of an integration and positive coaction between man and machine becomes under Land’s treatment a call for cruelty in the construction of our future nightmare.
Red Pill’s narrative is then interested in the experiential component of the kind of meme warfare in which Land has been engaged since the beginning of his work—combining a penchant for Lovecraftian aesthetics, a rhetoric of programming and “deprogramming,” the gleeful syncretism of an esoteric code, and a frisson of transgression in assaulting the known verities of what he names “the human security system.” Finally, Land’s philosophical focus on the efficacy of the virtual motivates Kunzru’s device of having Bridgeman live rent free in the narrator’s head: “I don’t believe in possession, though the language of possession is the best I have to describe it,” he tells us. “Some part of my own personality had broken away and dressed itself up in Anton’s clothes.” It’s not incidental that CCRU spoke from the beginning of codes going viral, and the semi-autonomy of an imaginary Anton Bridgeman able to contribute a running racist chatter from his own corner in the narrator’s mind is an effective rendering of information’s elaboration and reproduction beyond the remit of human intention. Red Pill’s picture of the internet of 2016 in this way works to square the conjunctural details of (for instance) the first Trump election and Germany’s migrant crisis with a deep examination of what within thought is not our own.
It’s a tenet of CCRU’s theory-fiction that ideas have retroactive consequences on their antecedents in time. Where Kunzru’s narrator once believed in a self existing before thought or action, following the events of the novel he reports that this has come to an end. “Now, what I think of when I think of my ‘self’ is the atrocious waste of my years.” In holding theory and fiction together on the same plane, Kunzru is able to thoroughly examine the composite nature of his narrator’s patchwork self and organize these cross-sections of the past thanks to the convenience of narratorial occasion. At the zenith of his partly self-induced paranoiac break, the narrator pens an apology letter (tilting stylistically towards a suicide note) addressed to his long-suffering wife left back in the States, borrowing a phrase from the troubled Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist in vague description of his planned “escape into the present.” A ticket home to the reality of family life ultimately proves more curative—just in time for the familiar political depression of Red Pill’s election night final note.
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Blue Ruin’s jump into the narrative present ultimately spans nearly twenty years. When Jay first arrives at the property, still weak from his months-ago brush with COVID, Alice stows him away in an outbuilding in an attempt to let him recover while avoiding complications with her husband Rob. The play with revelation and concealment as well as Blue Ruin’s effective broadness of characterization add much to the book’s feeling of being a fable, as though the connection between past and present soon to be staged can only take place in a fairytale register. When at last Jay is discovered (and dangerously harassed by Rob’s armed gallerist; Jay, relevantly, is Black) he encounters a testy pod of four people, between them exhibiting the gamut of early-pandemic responses from listlessness to paranoia to hobby attempts at domesticity. In the suspended non-time of the lockdown, the two couples have nothing to fill their time apart from listening to Jay’s account of how he fell away not only from these artworld friends, but from anything that might be recognizably construed as artmaking at all.
After losing Alice to Rob some time after the turn of the millennium—we’re told—Jay’s relationship to art in general became increasingly problematical, with the pieces he describes (destroying paintings, his possessions) at last proving hard to distinguish from personal asceticism, concerned to trouble the distinction between life and art. Anonymity numbered among his aughts motifs as well, in ways that flouted any cultural institutions interested in his project: “I caused problems for the prize administrators by refusing to be photographed, eventually compromising by wearing a mask of the face of one of the famous Young British Artists who courted that kind of publicity.” Ultimately Jay’s end is to assert an artistic gesture that will both acknowledge and annul reified conceptions of aesthetic possibility. Practices tending towards total disappearance begin to look like a more and more promising strategy:
It just seemed to me that being absent was more interesting than being present. Everyone I knew was obsessed with staying at the center of things, having attention drawn towards them, but there are objects—black holes, certain kinds of particle—that we can’t see directly. We know they’re there, because they bend light. We experience their effects, their traces. That’s how I wanted to be, to deform the artworld by my invisibility, the knowledge that I was elsewhere.
Here Kunzru’s Jay is present through his absence, thinking both terms together in their suggestive and dimensional interplay. Jay’s seemingly final project and consummation of this idea comes in the form of Fugue, a piece in which he strips naked in front of a gallery audience and never returns. Finally we’re to understand that Jay’s two decades of itinerancy and undocumented work in both high-risk and mundane menial capacities is the accomplishment of his artistic intention to leave art behind him, perhaps forever—though much in the novel’s third act hangs on whether Jay’s serendipitous contact with these artworld stalwarts represents an end to the piece.
Like Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Blue Ruin finds a model for disappearance in conceptual art—as erasing the distinction between art and life enables both Jay and DeLillo’s protagonist Bill Gray to wander off into the globalized crowds that have become for both artists their great subject. Such erasure also enables Kunzru to engage in his own measure of self-portraiture in this book about painting, as the twenty years of Jay’s Fugue and interrogation of his early-days approach to art map suggestively onto roughly the same length of time since Kunzru’s debut The Impressionist. The paradoxical author-object that Jay has made himself into provides this leverage point, as the bleeding together of art with non-art allows Kunzru to insinuate himself into this text just as Jay seeks an exit.
In so doing, Kunzru brings a fittingly ambiguous end to his trilogy’s project to treat art in its present and absent aspects—realizing both the positive and negative spaces of art’s creation, distribution, and valorization. At last these terms are so troubled as to burst wide open. In the absence of narrative overlap, it’s the conceptual concerns shared between all three books that hold them together. The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in conditions of stalled futurity is another.
The old accelerationist paeans to deterritorialization, vectors, virtual overlays of the physical, and instantaneous intensity have become unglamorously part of Jay’s present-day working life driving Uber. Meanwhile Silicon Valley’s real-world gentrification of these concepts in the form of “effective accelerationism” (venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto bizarrely cites Nick Land as a patron saint) has turned ideas so fringe as to once approach the occult into the most insipid and predictable ideological production imaginable. Kunzru navigates a syncretic world as someone who knows where things come from.
All these temporal loose ends lead us to a determinate nowhere. Kunzru’s present is built on an always-renewed appropriation of the past, and our expectations for the future finally come to exhibit their own age. Substance emerges as the most philosophically clarified of Kunzru’s terms. In a centrifugal era without the license of official cultural time or shared consensus about the nature of reality, what persists? At a minimum, the country home forming the occasion for Jay’s narration will dissolve at the end of Blue Ruin like so much froth— “insubstantial, a vision, a bubble”—while in the interstice literature has somehow been made to happen.