An artist can evoke psychedelia as becoming rather than as backward-looking iteration

Evidence

Psychedelia had explicitly emerged as a reference point on Systems of Romance (1978) – particularly on tracks such as ‘When You Walk Through Me’ and ‘Maximum Acceleration’, with their imagery of liquifying cities and melting time (‘locations change/ the angles change/ even the streets get re-arranged’). There might have been the occasional nod to the psychedelia of the past – ‘When You Walk Through Me’ stole the drum pattern from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for instance – but Systems of Romance was remarkable for its attempt to repeat psychedelia ‘in–becoming’ rather than through plodding re-iteration. Foxx’s psychedelia was sober, clean-shaven, dressed in smartly anonymous Magritte suits; its locale, elegantly overgrown cities from the dreams of Wells, Delvaux and Ernst. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 354

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the distinction between repeating a cultural mode ‘in-becoming’ versus through plodding re-iteration — a refined way of framing appropriation that echoes Fisher’s hauntological thinking.
• STORYSTEM: The image of a ‘sober, clean-shaven psychedelia’ set in ‘elegantly overgrown cities from the dreams of Wells, Delvaux and Ernst’ is a vivid aesthetic seed that could spawn descriptions of a retro-futurist world.
• XREF: connects to: Jungle redefined machinism as delirious rhythmic psychedelia rather than rigid techno lines — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1330

Broader Connections

• Jungle redefined machinism as delirious rhythmic psychedelia rather than rigid techno lines #exemplifies (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1330