on interregna

What’s the word for that tendency to initially dismiss forecasts of great calamity, followed by a gradual, quiet, and generalized acceptance of their conclusions, such that it undercuts the impact for which a sudden dramatic revelation might once have held the potential? We disbelieve the signs of the approaching cataclysm until its certain presence has become such common knowledge that there’s almost no point even speaking its name: we forfeit our big moment of truth. And now all those think-pieces about whether or not Trump can properly be called a fascist seem to have given way to near daily assertions that the great beast has indeed already arrived, no longer embryonic or latent. And though the most immediate valence of such pronouncements is one of dread and doom, they also still seem to hold some inflection of hope that such a statement of fact may yet trigger some kind of contrary mobilization: that finally, now that it’s undeniable, the masses will be stirred to action.

I hope it works. Whatever we’re going to call it, it’s here now and it’s uniquely terrifying. May the bravery of those comrades staring down mobs of brownshirts in ICE vests scale up to what we’ll need to muster when they’re behind the wheels of Panzers. But that thirst for the definitive moment of rupture and confrontation, for that mythic drawing of line in sand, betrays what I think is a misunderstanding of how substantive change actually happens. Social systems don’t drop out of the sky fully-formed, declaring what they are and ready for us to form ranks against their advance. Before it can happen all at once, it happens slowly, surreptitiously, and insidiously, and that’s how they beat us to the punch. Because of course it’s right and good to punch a Nazi, but the more fraught and pressing question is about how to decide what exactly makes a bona fide Nazi. The muscle-bound mouth-breather with a swastika tattoo is easy enough to recognize, but you’ve got to make sure you’re not mistaking the immediate symptom for the systemic disease.

In 2016, many liberals seemed more shocked by Trump’s boorish failure to act sufficiently “presidential” than by the material consequences his rule would have on America and the rest of the world, and thankfully, by now most of us have moved past all that blather about “norms.” It’s certainly still important to clock the deep contempt for basic principles of democratic accountability signalled by his bulldozing of the political procedures meant to constitute a system of checks and balances. His thirst for ever greater quantities of discretionary and arbitrary power, his constant attacks on the independence of the courts, the monetary system, the administrative state bureaucracy, and so on – these things should indeed frighten us. But at the same time, as economic historian Adam Tooze pointed out in his newsletter a few weeks ago, the relationship between the rule of law and the exercise of executive power has always been unsettled and unstable. Commenting on Columbia university’s recent agreement with the administration and its suggestion of “deal-making” as a new modus operandi for state functioning under this regime, he noted that Trump only looks like such a fascist if you take for granted an idealized notion of “liberal reality” as the status quo that preceded him – itself, in fact, an illusion. “Modern power,” he writes, “both the capitalist and other kinds, have never had a straight-forward relationship with the rule of law. They may imagine otherwise and invest in arguing that ‘market economies’ and ‘the rule of law’ are natural bed fellows. But this is ideology. The exception, the emergency, the crisis, the ad hoc are not bugs – they are features of our reality.”

For his part, Tooze maintains on the basis of this observation that equating Trump with fascism is “absurd,” and though I disagree with that conclusion, I think his broader point is worth holding in mind. It rings especially true if one (re)considers the contemporary rise of right-wing authoritarianism in light of the colonialist and white supremacist violence on which the whole liberal era has been predicated. Alberto Toscano draws on decades of work by Black radical thinkers to point out the “everyday fascism that marks the interaction of people of colour with the state,” asking, “What might happen to our conceptions of fascism and authoritarianism if we took our bearings not from putative analogies with the European interwar scene, but, for instance, from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the ‘concrete and steel,’ from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression?” Does the increasing generalization of such violence indicate a shift in kind or in degree?

Power is always telling a story about itself, and it rarely corresponds accurately to the reality over which it lays discursive claim – whether we’re talking about incipient fascism or the liberal democracy that is its ostensible opposite, or indeed the neoliberal order that many say it’s currently in the process of displacing.

Now, the story we tend to hear about neoliberalism – often even from some of its opponents – is about small government and free markets, the death of the nation along with the rolling back of the welfare state, post-racial technocrats presiding over the end of history. So it’s tempting to read the thuggish ethno-nationalism so beloved of the contemporary right as a break with, if not a repudiation of, the neoliberal logic that’s been so instrumental in shaping the world since the 1970s. And indeed, there’s plenty of truth to that perspective. In Richard Seymour’s recent account, the historical cycle of neoliberal globalization has been drawing to a close since the financial crash of 2008, and we’re now entering a new one marked by “nationalist revanchism.” Stopping just short of calling it outright fascism, he describes this “disaster nationalism” as marked by a kind of apocalyptic, nihilistic thirst for violent revenge, emerging from “the existential void concomitant upon the countless calamities of recent decades, their assault on the fabric of trust and meaning, and their legacy in a subterranean, unspoken depression and anxiety to which disaster nationalism offers a unique and highly addictive remedy.” That would constitute a break with neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial utopia, to be sure. But Seymour is also quick to note “a strong overlap between aspects of neoliberalism and fascist political economy,” something which becomes clearer the harder you look at the former in terms of its real historical imprint rather than simply its narrative projections.

As I wrote about here a couple of months ago, in its early days neoliberalism itself was nothing if not a “revanchist” movement against the social structures and redistributive functions of the postwar welfare state; massive expansions of the state’s military and carceral powers went hand in glove with the destruction of social safety nets, which handily gives the lie to the mythology of “small government.” This is neoliberalism’s “authoritarian underside,” as Toscano puts it, one of its many “fascist potentials.” As Quinn Slobodian has it, neoliberalism is best understood not as an attempt to free markets from state encroachment by reducing the power of the latter, but rather an attempt to use said power to protect markets from the demands of democratic politics: “The normative neoliberal world is not a borderless market without states but a doubled world kept safe from mass demands for social justice and redistributive equality by the guardians of the [global] economic constitution,” he wrote in 2020. “When we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism,” he wrote more recently, “then its supposed opposition to the populism of the Right begins to dissolve.”

What are we seeing now, in the looming shadow of climate catastrophe and unprecedented levels of inequality, if not another kind of “retooling of the state to save capitalism”? Back in March, Melinda Cooper wrote, “As Musk’s raid on the Treasury and Trump’s attempts to interfere with the Federal Reserve make clear, libertarians don’t actually want to abolish the state, much less the massive fiscal and monetary powers embodied in the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve. Instead, they want to drastically narrow the scope of beneficiaries to a small group of ultrawealthy private capitalists (company founders or controlling owners) and private fund managers in the world of crypto, security, real estate, and fossil fuels…Musk has clarified something once and for all: libertarianism doesn’t actually liberate anyone from the state. It simply destroys the last remnants of the social state, installing in its place an intensely autocratic, patrimonial form of state rule, in which personal subordination is enforced at every level of society.”

The point is simply that, though of course they’re useful analytically, the lines we draw between particular ideological formations or specific political-economic historical eras can give an impression of boundedness and cohesion, of stability and coherence, which obscures the slimy malleability of how these things actually function in practice – how they have been, and can be, articulated alongside and in concert each other. I’m interested in how power works systematically in our present, in grasping its precedents and its novelties and the blurry spaces between the two. We need to understand these specificities if we hope to mount anything like a meaningful response to the currently-escalating catastrophe.

In the spirit of slowing the fkk down to get a better look at things (if only for a moment), the mix this time is mostly in the ponderous ambient mode: it's not meant to be a passive listen, but it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate to drift off to.

First it's the latest from Philip Sherburne's Balmat label, an excerpt from Danish duo Ida Urd and Ingri Hoyland's forthcoming Duvet LP. "Melting Cubes" is all clouds of synth rolling in over the hills, gesturing towards some melodic form that never quite materializes. Next it's "TOTSUKAWA" from Hiroshima's Daisuke Fujita, whose work as Meitei seeks to sample and remediate signifiers of fading traditional Japanese cultures into delicate ambient soundscapes that are spectral and pensive while also bubbling with restive energy and life. Then it's Monogoto – a trio that includes one Porya Hatami, an Iranian experimental composer of whom I've been a listener for some time now – with "Komorebi," from the second volume of their Partial Deletion of Everything series of albums, followed by an excerpt of "For A Moment, We Stopped To Listen" from Beirut's Joy Moughanni. Moughanni's debut LP, A Separation From Habit, released by Ruptured in April, is a stunning suite of experimental pieces worked up from sampled recordings made by Lebanese musician Georges Tarazi in the 1970s and 80s, an extended meditation on "cycles of conflict and emotional survival."

Then it's Brooklyn-based Kranky stalwart Benoit Pioulard, who for many years now has been honing his practice at the intersection of ambient field recordings and experimental pop songcraft (see 2010's Lasted for a highlight); excerpted here is "Xiape," drawn from his recent Stanza IV LP, a collection of hazy and immersive long-form drone loops. That's followed up with the stuttering cello and electronics of "By Snail on its Slick of Light," from British composers Simon McCorry and Wodwo (Ray Robinson), whose Every Creeping Thing EP is billed as "a celebration of mud and moss and slugs and bugs and roots and damp – songs of the forgotten, the small, the overlooked" and, to my ears, succeeds gloriously. Next it's New York cellist and composer Clarice Jensen, whose fourth LP as a solo artist, In holiday clothing out of the great darkness, releases in October; "From A to B" showcases a more austere approach than has often been the case with her previous work, eschewing titanic drones in favour of a re-centring of the acoustic voice of the instrument itself.

From there it's "Stone Piece I," a collaborative work from Chicagoan composers Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart, a thrilling collage of voice and strings, with tape manipulations bending sounds around and backwards onto each other. The trio's brief BODY SOUND cassette, which came out earlier this month, acts as a preview for a full-length work to be released by the great International Anthem label next year, which I really can't wait to hear. Next it's "Mosaic," from The Second Chamber, the latest from British post-classical hero Richard Skelton, who has been making earthy, fragile, quietly rapturous drone music for more than two decades under various monikers. This most recent outing hits all his familiar tonal marks, but here the compositions are given a little more room to breathe, allowing instrumental textures to emerge in sharper detail. Finally, it closes with "Madison," a melodic drone classic from the mighty Stars of the Lid's debut LP, Music for Nitrous Oxide, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary this year with a well-deserved remaster. And that's it!

• Mixcloud: on interregna (september 2025)

• MP3s: 25/09 - on interregna.zip

NB: The zip file linked above contains the individual MP3s as well as a single hour-long track of the whole mix.

Okay, thanks for reading, everyone, and many thanks to KP for editorial support.

xo, graham