A Primer On Utopian Philosophy

An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch

From a situation in which nothing is possible, suddenly anything is possible again
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative

This Easter weekend marks the publication of my new book, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch, out now with Zer0 Books. The book — more of a pamphlet really — is not an attempt to try and provide the definitive explanation of Bloch’s philosophy but to try and make the argument that Bloch’s work is an under-appreciated and invaluable resource for a renewing and continuation of the project of utopian philosophy. Indeed, the whole Zer0 Utopia series seeks to serve this aim. Despite the fact that Bloch, throughout his work, particularly The Principle of Hope (published in three volumes in 1954, 1955, and 1959) built a philosophical corpus devoted to the utopian idea, his own reception in Anglophone political discourse has been somewhat marginal. In contrast to figures like Lukacs, Benjamin and Adorno all of whom were writing in response to Bloch and have found large readerships in Anglophone leftist circles, Bloch’s reception has been far more narrow. There’s a famous quote from Jameson that unintentionally describes Bloch’s reception quite well:

One finds everywhere today… something like an unacknowledged “party of Utopia”: an underground party whose numbers are difficult to determine, whose program remains unannounced and perhaps even unformulated, whose existence is unknown to the citizenry at large and to the authorities, but whose members seem to recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals

In the lead-up to writing this book, I’ve met people who have told me they know nothing about Bloch, or have never heard of him, but there have always been some — not many, but some — who have responded with delight, members of that underground party committed to the unannounced program of which Bloch’s philosophy is one of the heralds. Jameson, in one of if not the earliest English introductions to Bloch’s work in Marxism and Form, compares his philosophy to a great satellite — something which has crashed into Earth from some other time, and some other place. Bloch is a philosopher of the future tense, creating concepts for a world which does not yet exist.

It is this element of his philosophy that I think is most useful and perhaps goes some way to explaining the relative lack of popular interest in his work over the past few years. In the wake of Mark Fisher’s work, which has shaped an entire generation of writers, there is perhaps a tendency to valorise the necessary negativity of critique. In this kind of environment it’s easy to see the great passages of Bloch-Musik (as Adorno would put it) as being dangerously close to a kind of religious enthusiasm, looking past the present problems for an easy Utopian dream. Yet, I think this misses the utopianism of thinkers like Fisher and those like him. The thing that was so transformative about reading Capitalist Realism is the insistence that this world for all of its nightmarish qualities was something constructed and both should and could be changed. Philosophical negativity is a stand against the present and thus, even if it’s never stated explicitly, a call for a radically different future. The end of Capitalist Realism is a call for an understanding of the present that recognises the audacity of our demand and the extent of our capacities. A Primer on Utopian Philosophy is an attempt to show the ways in which Bloch’s historical situation and his intellectual work still has much to teach us and is entirely compatible with a philosophical commitment to the ruthless criticism of all that exists (something Bloch’s contemporary Theodor Adorno knew all too well). Tom Moylan, in Becoming Utopian, talks of the dialectical and dialogic movement of “denunciation and annunciation” that makes up Utopian philosophy. For all Bloch’s reputation might be dismissed as simple annunciations of a world which is not-yet, his work is the very model of exactly this double movement, philosophy that is done in and against the world of capitalism. This is one of the best reasons to try and read Bloch if you never have, as a philosopher whose work directly speaks into the blockages and contradictions of the present.

A second or minor reason would be the sheer joy of it — Bloch’s writing is like nothing else. The translators of The Principle of Hope (Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight) point out in their introduction that it is a proudly literary work, which explains why Marxists didn’t really like it. Bloch is both poet and philosopher and his work is never abstract or overly scholastic. Rather, he believes that the Utopian impulse has been found within philosophy but cannot be isolated to just that field, as this quote from the opening of The Principle of Hope shows quite beautifully.

The good New is never that completely new. It acts far beyond the daydreams by which life is pervaded and of which the figurative arts are full. All freedom movements are guided by utopian aspirations, and all Christians know them after their own fashion too, with sleeping conscience or with consternation, from the exodus and messianic parts of the Bible. In addition, the merging of have and have-not constituted by longing and hope, and by the drive to reach home again, has in any case been burrowing in great philosophy. Not only in Plato’s Eros, but also in the far-reaching Aristotelian concept of matter as that of possibility towards essence, and in Leibniz’s concept of tendency. Hope acts unmediatedly in the Kantian postulates of moral consciousness, it acts in a world-based, mediated way in Hegel’s historical dialectic. However, despite all these Enlightenment patrols and even expeditions into terram utopicam, there is something broken off about them all, broken off by contemplation.

All of our explorations into the terrain of utopia are broken off by contemplation — it’s why I wouldn’t want to have written a properly “philosophical” book — this is not that, it is a primer, something for you to take and do with as you need.

If the book does what I hope it will, then for people who would like to spend more time with Bloch then start with his archive here. It includes his introduction to the first volume of The Principle of Hope, his commentary on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and his short, superbly accessible book on Karl Marx.

You can order my book from Zer0 Books here:

Mourning and Love

On Sufjan Stevens and Javeline (2023)

Love is, in a way, easily dismissed as a kind of tragedy. To love is to open oneself outward, to forsake the atomized anonymity of the capitalist monad and become something new, a new thing that finds itself only in relation to that which it loves. Love is, as Richard Gilman-Opalsky pointed out, entirety inimical to capitalist relations, a communized subjectivity that only makes any kind of sense in a collective. Those beautiful lines from Barthes's A Lovers Discourse: “I love you. —So do I . . . So-do-I inaugurates a mutation: the old rules fall away, everything is possible—even, then, this: that I give up possessing you. A revolution, in short—not so far, perhaps, from the political kind.” And yet, revolutions can fail. To love is to live out the most profound truth of human finitude, and to -- willingly -- take on the possibility of the most grievous loss. I love you, so-do-I has an almost mathematical rhythm to it, a balanced equation that makes something coherent. Yet, the Barthes who wrote the Lovers Discourse on the revolution of love was also the author of a mourning Diary, written after their beloved mother died. That piece is a series of short fragments written in the middle of trying to make sense of loss. The entry from November 3rd:

On the one hand, she wants everything, total mourning, its absolute (but then it’s not her, it’s I who is investing her with the demand for such a thing). And on the other (being then truly herself), she offers me lightness, life, as if she were still saying: “but go on, go out, have a good time . . .”

I think the truth of the communized subject of love is in both its astounding particularity and the universality of it. I love the line from Simone Weil that “belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.” Not in the perfected ideal -- the imaginary person -- do we find love, but in people as they are -- humanity as such, in all their specificity and contingency, that we find love. Love is always already that acknowledgment of both our capacity for something far beyond the petty arithmetic of capital and at the same time, an expression of our own finitude. It’s this that comes to mind when listening to Javelin, the tenth album from Sufjan Stevens, written in the wake of a devastating illness and the grueling recovery from it, and also the death of his partner, Evans Richardson.

As Stevens wrote on his Tumblr as the album launched:

I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love, with gratitude and joy. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

How does one rejoice in the face of love’s loss? The album begins on an inward breath, with perhaps the saddest song on the album, “Goodbye Evergreen” -- “everything heaven sent/must burn out in the end…deliver me from the poisoned pain” sings Stevens before the breakdown with an arrangement that sounds like the sound of sobbing -- wracked with grief and yet so cathartic as to be almost joyful. “Goodbye evergreen/You Know I love you” as the final lyrics.

Barthes again:

“Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love?”

The next song on the album conjures this well in a simple love song, all plucked guitars and gentle arrangements as Stevens sings

“I know, I know the time has come to ask you for a kiss

Don't go, my lovely pantomime, receivе of me my only wish”

In contrast to the emotionality of the opening number, there’s something a little easier here in the sonic affect with the additional Ooh, oohs in the background vocals making the whole thing both elegiac and romantic. Do you remember? It’s always in the specificity of memories and perhaps only in retrospect that we see the new person that we became come into Being. Following that comes “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” a song that explores that moment of Becoming New from within -- it’s full of imagery of endings, even a kind of apocalypse: “Tie me to the final wooden stake/Burn my body, celebrate the afterglow.” There’s a call to a kind of witnessing here too -- once again love only makes sense in a collectivity:

Watch me drift and watch me struggle,

'Cause I really wanna know

Will anybody ever love me?

For good reasons

Without grievance, not for sport

There’s a single line in the lyrics, that connects this song to Stevens's wider explorations of faith. As the second verse runs in its entirety, “Hello, wildness, please forgive me now/For the heartache and the misery I create/Take my suffering as I take my vow/Wash me now, anoint me with that golden blade.” Can one write about love without straying into the theological -- for much of the writing on love the answer is “not really”, yet this doesn’t require a belief in some abstract divinity. Again, Weil’s point is important -- that to believe in humans as they are is love. As Marx would put it, the true Gemeinwesen (usually translated community) is the human being, not some transcendent other. Or, as Bloch would put it in Atheism In Christianity only an atheist can be a good Christian and vice versa -- only a materialist can believe in humans as they are and so realize the prophetic possibility of a gospel of love. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” takes it title from a Flannery O’Conner collection of stories. O’Conner’s work is usually taken as being relatively grim but she argued always that they were about moments of grace -- or, to put it another way, moments in which the exploitative logic of capitalist relations is suspended and in which we glimpse as Utopian possibility. “Can you lift me up to a higher place? asks Stevens on this track, “forget everything that was before.” Grace and love, far from being ineffable abstractions are the material embodiment of what allows us to be different, to move through the world changed.

Yet, again, we have to accept that change as something so fragile. “Genuflecting Ghost” opens with lyrics that once again blend the theological with the human

“Give myself as a sacrifice

Genuflecting ghost I kiss the floor

Rise, my love, show me paradise

Nothing seems so simple anymore”

There’s another expression of a paradox here that so much of the album circulates around -- the painful particularity of love against the background of its universal possibility. The videos for the songs are made up of kaleidoscopic portraits, shifting faces overlaid again and again, driving home the point that to talk of love is not to talk of some private matter, but perhaps the foundational material stuff of existence itself. As “My Little Red Fox” puts it, in a waltz time signature, “kiss me like the wind/that flows within your veins.” Then comes “Shit Talk” the longest and -- I think -- my favorite song on the whole album which directly addresses the themes I’ve mentioned so far. Again it’s done on the canvas of Stevens's beautiful, gently folk melody lines.

No more fighting

No more talking shit

Do as I say, not as I give up

Not as I've failed to live

In the future there will be a terrible cost

For all that we've left undone

The opposite of hope is memory and perhaps regret is simply the recognition that the memories that we have didn’t have to be what they were. If each moment is full of possibility, how terrible to look back at memories and see not what was but what could have been instead had we done something differently? “I will always love you, but I cannot live with you” as Stevens sings. Yet, the song ends with Stevens gently singing “I don’t wanna fight at all” -- a shift away from that which could have been otherwise, away from the memories that should have unfolded a different way and toward something more redemptive. The build in the back half of the song is this beautifully layered act of repetition, “I don’t wanna fight at all/I will always love you” Barthes again here forms the darker counterpoint to Stevens's catharsis:

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought . . . ?

For Stevens, the answer to that is no. The end of the album is a cover and new arrangement of a deep-cut Neil Young song from the 70s -- in Sufjan’s hands, it becomes something that pivots back to the universalism of love -- which I think you can put again into the materialist and atheist terms of a mode of being that doesn’t depend on the instrumentalization and utility of other people.

There's a world you’re livin' in

No one else has your part

All God's children in the wind

Take it in and blow real hard

The world is shot through with what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the deep-down freshness of things -- “a righteous dream” as this song puts it, that you can see in the mountains and the cities. The song -- and so the album too, ends with a question and an invitation to the listener: “Look around you/has it found you/is it what it really seems?” To close, again from Barthes's mourning diary:

Since Maman’s death, no desire to “construct” anything—except in writing. Why? Literature = the only region of Nobility (as Maman was noble).

Or, to rephrase this in the light of Javelin, poetry, and song (the only region of Nobility, as we all are noble).

LISTEN HERE: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nyQ0jBtArK4pd9GrgLGGcnRSBXz0WkHis

Mogwai, Rock Action (2001)

On The Spaceships Above Us

I love Mogwai’s album titles -- how can you not? They promise not just action, but ROCK action. It’s a reminder once again that Mogwai for all their noise and drama also have a sense of humor about them, which makes the pyrotechnics of the actual record a little less self-serious. In a way the title also brings us back to the contested question of what it means to call something post-rock -- we’re promised some rock action, so can we get past the problem of what rock means in the first place?

On one level, this is noticeably different from the first two albums -- it’s much shorter, coming in at thirty-eight minutes and the longest song doesn’t even break ten minutes. The opening track. “Sine Wave,” contrasts nicely with the semantics of the album title, all symmetrical geometry versus the straightforward bluntness of ROCK ACTION. The track itself has some fuzz and hiss to it in the production and a gorgeous slow build as the textures gradually thicken over the opening two minutes. The plucked melody and the drums pulse in counterposing patterns and there’s a vocoder buzzing away in the mix here too. What’s immediately noticeable about the band is the sheer joy in fucking with your expectations -- the established quiet/LOUD/quiet dynamics that people were expecting and this is what you get instead. In the context of this project as a whole, what’s interesting is that Mogwai seem poised here between the more traditional band structures of Explosions In The Sky -- guys with guitars -- and the orchestration and wide array of instruments perfected by Godspeed You! Mogwai are, in a sense, a pretty straightforward band but the addition of synths, extra instruments and, as the album unfolds, even new languages show them on the cusp of Becoming something else. I think what has helped Mogwait last over 25 years of making music together is exactly this sense of musical restlessness, the endless re-expression of the drive to get out to somewhere new.

After Sine Wave the album moves on to “Take Me Somewhere Nice” -- easily one of Mogwai’s most well-known songs and one which has gotten countless listeners into the band. It starts off relatively straightforward, with a beautiful string section as background to a guitar line and slow drum build. Lyrics arrive after a couple of minutes -- and Mogwai have always been somewhat prone to more introspective, serious, and even mournful lyrics in contrast to the excitement and restlessness of the music. “Ghosts in the photograph, never lied to me” sings Stuart Braithwaite in a mournful whisper. Yet at the same time, the very next lines undercut this: “I'd be all of that/A false memory/Would be everything.” There is something uncomfortable in the double meanings here -- the psst image seems to be truthful, the photographs or memories of what is no longer present with us have never lied, but the memories are false. Listening to the song made me think of Sontag’s essay “On Photography” and her warning that ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world — that feels like knowledge, and therefore, like power.” To photograph something, or someone is not just to hold on to them but to try and maintain a level of control — it’s what Sontag calls the “selective transparency of the image.” The lyrics echo something Fredric Jameson writes in Marxism and Form, that in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch, the true antithesis of hope is not fear, but memory -- that which casts the subject back into itself. How can there be anything new if all we allow ourselves are false memories -- of images that hold a single moment perpetually in stasis for us? Then comes some of Mogwai’s most famous lyrics: “What would you do? If you saw spaceships, over Glasgow/Would you fear them?/Every aircraft/Every camera/Is a wish that/wasn't granted”

What would you do if something radically different broke into day-to-day consciousness? Would there be a break, a suspension of what we laughingly refer to as normal? Sometimes the New creeps in almost unnoticed, and every so often you look outside the window and there are spaceships in the sky -- would you fear them? The final section of the lines I think adds a great deal of interesting ambiguity here too: “every aircraft and camera, a wish that wasn’t granted.” For me, the line reads as sardonic -- the hyper-militarised, carceral world in which we exist is -- so we are endlessly told -- the best one available. There is no alternative. I think reading the song hauntologically makes sense of the cryptic lines about broken promises in the context of the flashes of memories of the image mentioned earlier. The promise of the past -- the idea that things might be different in the future is both a truthful one, and a false memory, for look at the world that we have. Is this it? Haven’t the promises of modernism, of progress, all been broken? The following track is almost a coda, a short (very short) piano-led piece called “O, I Sleep.” It adds a further layer of emotional complexity as Braithwaite sings that

I wanted to see

If fire would burn me

I thought I would know

If four walls could hold me

When taken with the previous song’s lyrics there is a through line here of a desperate searching for a way out that can almost bleed into the annihilationist. From there, the album introduces Gruff Rhys, frontman of Super Furry Animals who sings “Dial” -- or, in English, Revenge. The melody and instrumentation are, by the band’s standards, relatively light, and I think using Rhys’ vocals as another kind of instrument makes the song come together in an interesting way. Lyrically it’s about just what the title suggests but there's such a deep meloncholia at work here that you would never mistake it for a straightforward power fantasy. As Rhys sings (I’ve translated from the Welsh) “And every time I pick up the phone/ It says 'Revenge'/ Indecent revenge/Not the fearful power of /Gold, frankincense and myrrh.” As a result, it’s well within the tradition of the anti-love song that Mogwai are so adept at constructing, such as “R U Still In 2 it” from their first album. In this case, Rhys and Mogwai manage to marry the lyrics with a musical style that suits the introspective and bleak themes. In a way, it is the band writing its own version of a pop single, but this is immediately undercut by the very next track -- a slice of classic Mogwai, the phenomenally titled “You Don’t Know Jesus”

Starting with some more excellent drum work and the classic Mogwai guitar sound, the build in the opening couple of minutes is superb, with a sinister synth cutting through the mix to add a real sense of excitement. The feedback and fuzz are layered in expertly so by three minutes in the guitars are all but screaming at you -- it doesn’t quite have the same seismic impact as something like “Mogwai Fear Satan” or “Like Herod” but that doesn’t really matter when the technique and the sound is this GOOD. It’s the feeling of listening to experts be what they are -- phenomenal musicians. By six minutes the noise dies away a little before building back up, held together by the drumming which is the track’s pulse, and when the music eventually fades out, and “Robot Chant” starts, all fuzz and feedback it feels like you are hearing the echo of “You Don’t Know Jesus” from the other side as it were. The final long track on the album is “Two Rights Make One Wrong” (another sly joke and a great song title) that reintroduces what sounds like voices right in the back of the mix, almost hidden behind the jangly clean guitar work and (again) some genuinely phenomenal drumming. On a level of emotion, the build is expectant, a mood reinforced when the organ starts. The strings drop in after four minutes, with some electronic bleeps and bloops backing up some vocoded vocals. It is calm, and joyful, not striving towards something or haunted by the past as earlier songs have been, but rather perfectly present.

At around six minutes the track almost feels like it’s going to glitch out -- a good reminder that those moments of simply being are never entirely outside of the flow of time -- but it is instead a well-constructed sonic move towards an ending. Things drop out, just as they entered at the beginning, leaving just a simple guitar melody -- then, right at the end, there are ethereal voices layered and floating through the mix before cutting short in a moment of glitch. What’s so interesting about Mogwai -- and this album in particular -- is the consistent effort to reckon with haunting, to push against the same familiarity that led Sigur Ros into emotionalism. There is -- as always -- immense technique on show, but never routine. What you hear is the sound of searching -- for a way out, for a truth beyond the honest lies of the images of the past, and for something that would allow us to respond with hope when and if spaceships appear in the skies above Glasgow

Hope In Hopeless Times

Sigur Ros, ÁTTA (2023)

There is something about this album that is a little surprising — after all, the previous album had felt like a natural stopping point — an artistic project reaching its tonal, thematic, and philosophical completion, and in many ways, the music sounded increasingly anachronistic. How can the full-on emotionalism of Sigur Ros even work in this modern world? There is so little that has changed about their sound over the years, and in many ways, fidelity to what they are, and what they do has left the band sounding a little out of time. Yet, as this album starts, I wonder to myself if I haven't been too harsh -- the absolute rush of hearing something so familiar and yet so distant creates this kind of hauntological echo that cannot help but reach out and grab the listener by the throat. Kjartan Sveinsson has returned as the keyboardist and the opening track to this album, “Glóð”, is so painfully familiar that a listener finds themself jolted through time, back to the first moment you heard something from Takk…  for the very first time. There are the strings, and Jonsi’s as-ever-ethereal vocals, but the mixing is odd, with the Hopelandic noise being slightly choppy and textural in a way that their earlier work often neglected. The opening track is shockingly short by their standards too, coming in at just under four minutes.

Do you remember? Do you remember what this life used to sound like? 

In an era of climate catastrophe, this band runs the risk of a saccharine lack of seriousness, but my God, what a shock to the system “Blóðberg” is -- the naturalism of the band’s compositions, and the ways in which Sigur Ros have always been such a geological sound have been retooled here for the era of the capitalocene. The track is named for a species of thyme native to Iceland but it translates as the far more metal-sounding “blood stone.” In a sense this is deeply traditional Sigur Ros -- but the sound is one of the most desolate arrangements that the band has ever released. Jonsi all but howls as the string section pulses and keens in the background.  The video that accompanies the song is made up of these long tracking drone shots of desolate landscapes, where at the base of trees in the desert you might see what could be bodies, entwined into piles -- all you can hear is the sound of the wind over sun-bleached bone and the requiem of s string section. It is the sound of the disaster of man-made climate change, and there is something so fitting and perfect about the band working with Johan Renck, a director best known for his work on the Chernobyl miniseries.

Listen to this on youtube and you won't find what you will hear on so many of the band’s other songs -- no one comments that this is what they want to hear when looking up at the stars at night. It is the closest the band has come to a kind of sonic negativity -- an elegy of sorts, or the score to a world that is -- inevitably -- ending. 

Sit with this track for a while, and watch the video that goes with it, and then go and read Andreas Malm’s polemic, How To Blow Up A Pipeline -- private property will cost us the Earth, as Malm puts it, and her the band prove themselves equal to the challenge of writing us all an elegy for that simple, an incontrovertible truth. The album art shows a rainbow on fire, that carries with it the visual echo of burning oil fields -- do you know how much you have lost, how much of the world has simply bloomed and sweated and died without you ever even seeing it? Look at the world and see the oil companies and energy companies which report record profits -- your own phenomenological experience of the world has been stolen from you and this is what that sounds like. 

“Skel” or, in English, “Divide”, builds on and iterates what the preceding track had developed with its melancholic string section that weaves Jonsi’s vocals into the mix as additional texture before the record moves on to the pulsing rhythm of “Klettur”. The entire record prominently features the London Symphony Orchestra but it’s the moments at which the music admits the rhythm section (here and on the later track “Gold” is the standout examples) that you hear a band struggle in the friction of a rock band trying to be something greater than just that -- what could this group be if they allowed themselves to be something other than SIGUR ROS?  

“Andrá”, the only other track on the record to get a video, is a fascinating piece of media. It opens with a series of candid shots of people sitting in a studio, talking about how long they’ve listened to Sigur Ros: “over ten years” “since I was in college” “about twenty-five years” -- even if you’ve just listened alongside reading these reflections on the band, you’ve been through a similar temporal experience. One of the stories, I found deeply emotionally impactful -- it’s the story of a man who was hit by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury, and ended up in intense physical therapy. Every Friday the therapist would let patients play the music they wanted and this person listened to Sigur Ros as they (re)learned how to walk. Other stories discuss their children and Sigur Ros being the first song that played as new life came into the world, or the cost and grief of familial suicide and abuse and pain and the ways in which for so many people this band’s music has been cathartic.

I have been so critical of what the band does -- and I think, rightly so, but watching the video was a reminder of the space this band provides -- wherein you can allow yourself to feel something that we keep blocked off or removed from ourselves in day-to-day life. The people in the video were the first to hear the song -- a meditative track that doesn’t start till almost five minutes into the video. It layers beautifully, with a soaring vocal line there in the mix, and whilst you could cynically see this as an exercise in marketing, the overwhelming sense of the track is of a deep-seated and genuine sincerity. Utopian thought is no mere intellectual exercise — the stakes are so high and all of us have lost and endured so much. Our own struggles are so personal and raw and tough to bear, but the very fact of the struggle — of our shared finitude and contingency is a powerful corrective to capitalist individuality. Socialism or barbarism is the choice, as Rosa Luxemburg reminded us, and for all the denigrations of a better world, of the idea that the world can be made anew, the sense of Andrá (and maybe the album as a whole) is that no matter how bleak the world might be, the choice is still there. If you can watch the video for Andrá and not find a tear in your eye you are a far colder soul than I — watch, listen. Cry if you need to. The world can be so dark and so bleak and for all the familiarity, for all the unabashed emotionalism, here is the sound of hope in a hopeless age.